1 million United Methodists exit in 1 day
Posted By: Beardo, 6/3/2024 2:31:54 PM
United Methodism’s largest overseas jurisdiction has voted to quit the denomination in response to the church’s divorcing sex from marriage at its governing General Conference earlier this month. The United Methodist Church in the Ivory Coast voted on May 28 to exit the denomination. In 2022, this conference reportedly had over 1.2 million members. So, its departure means over one tenth of United Methodism has in one day left the denomination. Oddly, United Methodist News Service reported the vote very briefly in an emailed news digest but as of today has no article on its website. Perhaps it will post a fuller account later.
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God and the Trump Shooting
9 replies
It seems like I’m constantly trying to come to an understanding or at least a settled position on how God involves himself in human affairs. The Trump shooting brought that to the surface again, simply because it couldn’t be scripted -- it felt beyond consequence. Also, many people of faith, including people that I see as nuanced and intelligent began claiming that it was almost beyond question, an act of God (Ben Shapiro, for instance).
I’ve been all over the board over the years from “there’s no understanding God’s involvement” to determinism (more early in my Christian life), to compatibility, meaning that paradoxically God’s sovereignty and free will aren’t mutually exclusive.
A military family who lost custody of their autistic son after they refused to transition his gender are suing a major DC hospital.
The family said their boy had never shown any desire to become a girl until, at 16, he was hospitalized for self-harming after a bitter breakup with his girlfriend in 2021.
Staff at Children's National Hospital informed the family that he wanted to be female and should be referred to using she/her pronouns going forward, the suit claims. (snip) The lawsuit says the child is currently living with the hospital's 'non-gendered' chaplain, Lavender Kelley, who regularly posts online about trans issues.
Some Episcopal priests with nontraditional views on sexuality and human relationships are beginning to assert what they see as their right to put those views into practice. (snip) This is not a previous era’s war over homosexuality, but rather a present-day struggle over polyamory — “many loves.” A broader term is “consensual nonmonogamy” — relationships where everyone involved knows about and consents to a lack of exclusivity in sexual or romantic expression.
Appeals court timeline suggests months
more of delay for Jack Smith’s documents
case against Trump 10 replies
more of delay for Jack Smith’s documents
case against Trump 10 replies
Special counsel Jack Smith’s bid to revive the classified documents case against Donald Trump appears unlikely to be resolved or even argued in court before Election Day.
Smith is appealing U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision last week to dismiss the case, (snip)
Barring an effort by Smith to demand an expedited schedule, the 11th Circuit’s timeline suggests the effort by prosecutors to resuscitate the case is likely to stretch past the 2024 election. A Trump victory in the election is seen as a likely death knell for the case, as Trump’s Justice Department leaders would be expected to unravel the prosecution.
Trump leads 50%-43%, no Harris bump
13 replies
So much for the expected polling bump for Vice President Kamala Harris.
In three surveys since she became the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Harris has failed to overtake former President Donald Trump as his campaign feared would happen.
Instead, the race remains where it has been for months, with Trump leading Harris both in new national head-to-head and battleground state surveys.
Just out is the latest Rasmussen Reports poll shared with Secrets and taken over the past three nights. It shows Trump leading Harris with likely voters 50%-43%, well outside the margin of error.
That is just a 1-point increase for Harris over Rasmussen’s last Biden-Trump head-to-head survey
Senator Josh Hawley revealed on Thursday that a whistleblower has come forward telling him that local law enforcement partners offered drones to the Secret Service ahead of the Butler, Pennsylvania rally where gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks attempted to assassinate Trump, but the Secret Service declined the offer.
"According to one whistleblower, the night before the rally, US Secret Service repeatedly denied offers from a local law enforcement partner to utilize drone technology to secure the rally," Hawley wrote in a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. "This means that the technology was both available to USSS and able to be deployed to secure the sight."
The House of Representatives voted along bipartisan lines to condemn Vice President Kamala Harris' handling of the U.S. southern border, the first piece of legislation targeting Harris since she became the Democrats' presumptive 2024 nominee.
Six Democrats joined all Republicans in voting for the measure, which passed 220-196.
The House Democrats who voted for the resolution are Reps. Jared Golden, D-Maine, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Wash., Mary Peltola, D-Alaska, Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, Don Davis, D-N.C., and Yadira Caraveo, D-Colo.
For years, Republicans have accused Harris of failing her job as "border czar" after President Biden handed her the task of mitigating the "root causes" of illegal immigration in 2021.
The gunman who tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump appears to have used the controversial alt-right favored social media platform Gab to spread messages “in support of President Biden,” according to the platform’s founder.
Gab CEO Andrew Torba said he learned Wednesday that Thomas Matthew Crooks “may have had an account on our platform” after getting “an emergency disclosure request from a law enforcement agency.” (snip) “While the account made very few posts on the site, the majority of them were in support of President Biden,” said the CEO (snip)
“A number of posts in particular expressed support for President Biden’s COVID lockdowns, border policies and executive orders.”
Cosmic justice sometimes comes with a dose of irony.
Black Lives Matter, the insidious Marxist organization Democrats used to foment violence during the race-mongering madness of 2020, has issued a public objection to party leaders’ swift coronation of Vice President Kamala Harris as their 2024 presidential nominee. (snip) To its credit, BLM called out party leaders’ apparent coup against Biden.
“Now, Democratic Party elites and billionaire donors are attempting to manipulate black voters by anointing Kamala Harris and an unknown vice president as the new Democratic ticket without a primary vote by the public,” the statement continued.
Trump miracle widens Christian divide
18 replies
Imagine being painted as so divisive that some self-professed Christians won’t even say your name on Sunday morning. (snip)
In the church I visited with a friend, the pastor urged people to “pray for the country.” In the sermon that followed, he spoke of Moses’s “goodness and meekness,” saying the Old Testament’s greatest prophet “didn’t need a ‘Make Israel Great Again’ hat because he wasn’t “marketing his personality.” Much of the congregation laughed at the expense of a man who nearly gave his life for his country the day before. There were no prayers offered up for President Trump, the firefighter who valiantly died protecting his family,
Top officials at the U.S. Secret Service repeatedly denied requests for additional resources and personnel sought by Donald Trump’s security detail in the two years leading up to his attempted assassination at a rally in Pennsylvania last Saturday, according to four people familiar with the requests.
Agents charged with protecting the former president requested magnetometers and more agents to screen attendees at sporting events and other large public gatherings Trump attended, as well as additional snipers and specialty teams at other outdoor events, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive security discussions.
The Russian Digital Communications Ministry bragged on Friday that the worldwide information technology (IT) outage did not affect Russian airlines and banks, thanks to Russia’s countermeasures against Western sanctions.
“At the moment, the ministry has not received reports of system failures at Russian airports,” the ministry claimed.
“The situation with Microsoft once again shows the importance of import substitution of foreign software, primarily at critical information infrastructure facilities,” the ministry statement asserted.
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President Joe Biden is reportedly planning to unveil a dramatic Supreme Court reform next week in an attempt to overhaul the high court.
Two people familiar with the matter told Politico that the president is likely to endorse establishing term limits for justices, and bring in a code of ethics.
The 81-year-old is expected to push for an amendment that would limit immunity for presidents and other officeholders. His amendment would come directly after the court ruled that presidents are shielded from prosecution for officials acts, in a case brought by Donald Trump.
According to the outlet, the specifics remain unclear and could still change sources said.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) praised the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Paris, France, as being “imaginative, inventive and memorable.”
The opening ceremony featured an opening dance number that showed women being “flung around on poles,” while another dance number showed three dancers, two men and a woman, who had been dancing through the streets, going up the stairs of a building as they began kissing. The dancers then went into a room and began to kiss some more. Lady Gaga also sang French songs in a prerecorded opening, while Celine Dion sang from the Eiffel Tower.
When Vice President Kamala Harris became the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination following President Joe Biden’s dramatic exit from the race on Sunday, the next question was: Who will she select as her running mate? A Harris campaign official told USA TODAY on Thursday that the Vice President is searching for a running mate who has “shared values of fighting for the middle class, protecting democracy and freedoms, treating people with respect and dignity, and creating an America where everyone gets a fair shot,” as she prepares to square off against the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump and
Some Episcopal priests with nontraditional views on sexuality and human relationships are beginning to assert what they see as their right to put those views into practice. (snip) This is not a previous era’s war over homosexuality, but rather a present-day struggle over polyamory — “many loves.” A broader term is “consensual nonmonogamy” — relationships where everyone involved knows about and consents to a lack of exclusivity in sexual or romantic expression.
Apparent drag ‘parody of Last Supper’
at Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony
sparks controversy 27 replies
at Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony
sparks controversy 27 replies
A crew of drag queens and dancers performed an apparent “parody of the Last Supper” at the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony Friday, drawing intense criticism across social media.
“This is crazy. Opening your event by replacing Jesus and the disciples at the Last Supper with men in drag,” Clint Russel, the host of the Liberty Lockdown podcast, fumed on X.
“There are 2.4 billion Christians on earth and apparently the Olympics wanted to declare loudly to all of them, right out of the gate NOT WELCOME,” said Russel.
It's been a week since Joe Biden left the presidential race, and he's barely been seen in public. After a fumbling Oval Office address on Thursday in which he failed to offer any explanation for his sudden departure, the president headed off to Camp David. That would be the same Camp David he hid out at before the debate performance that exposed his worsening mental and physical condition. In other words, his heading back to hunker down there is a pretty big sign of how bad off he is. Biden just suffered the most embarrassing moment of his career, clearly due to worsening health.
Elon Musk retweeted a masterpiece on Kamala Harris created by Mr. Reagan.
The ad showcases Kamala Harris, her strengths and her record.
Here is the transcript:
“I, Kamal Harris, senior Democrat candidate for President because Joe Biden finally exposed his senility of debate. Thanks, Joe.
I was selected because I am the ultimate diversity hire. I’m both a woman and a person of color. So if you criticize anything I say, you’re both sexist and racist.
On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “All In,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) praised President Joe Biden as someone who “has put together the most progressive agenda and accomplishments of any president in modern history.”
While discussing his lack of a formal endorsement of 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris and what commitments he wants from her, Sanders said, “I’m going to do everything I can to defeat Donald Trump, clearly the most dangerous president in our history, somebody who doesn’t believe in democracy, the right of women to control their own bodies. We don’t talk about it enough, this guy thinks climate change is a hoax
Former White House Press Secretary and now MSNBC host Jen Psaki finally apologized Friday for saying in her book that Joe Biden didn’t look at his watch during a Dover Air Force Base ceremony in August 2021 honoring the 13 soldiers killed during the Afghanistan withdrawal.
During a transcribed interview, Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) asked Psaki about her comments that she wrote in her book, Say More, that stated President Joe Biden never looked at his watch during a ceremony in late August 2021 honoring soldiers killed in Afghanistan returning home.
“The chairman asked Ms. Psaki about her comments regarding President Biden looking at his watch
First, a lot of people want to talk about it, I do not.
As my grandmother would often shout when we experienced a dark outcome, “GET BEHIND ME SATAN!”
What was witnessed in the opening ceremony for the Olympics in Paris was beyond grotesque. Physical evil manifesting and parading in front of the world as if Baal was the organizer of the events. *snip)
What I will say is that a faceless demon riding a pale horse down the river Siene, to hand the Olympic flag to a team of demons who hoisted it “upside down” sounds exactly like the culture French President Emmanuel Macron has created for his nation.
WASHINGTON - Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump told Christians on Friday that if they vote for him this November, "in four years, you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good, you're not gonna have to vote." It was not clear what the former president meant by his remarks, [Snip] He added: "I love you Christians. I'm a Christian. I love you, get out, you gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don't have to vote again, we'll have it fixed so good you're not going to have to vote," Trump said.
Two main frontrunners emerge for Kamala
Harris’ VP pick — here’s who she’s
likely to choose 16 replies
Harris’ VP pick — here’s who she’s
likely to choose 16 replies
Two frontrunners have emerged in the race to be presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s second in command: Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly.
Shapiro, 51, and Kelly, 60, each represent 2024 swing states Democrats badly need to win in November.
“Shapiro is toward the top,” said one insider familiar with the back and forth. “Locking down Pennsylvania would change the entire trajectory of the race.” Another prominent Democrat on the Hill warned talks were still “fluid.”