'Periscope' Shares U.S. House Sit-In With The World

Forget cable. Forget network news.

The information revolution has just subsumed it.

Today, the leadership of the House of Representatives, faced with a sit-in by Democrats demanding action on gun safety laws, turned the House cameras off. Normally, several video cameras feed the action in the House to CSPAN.  The House leadership is said to be hostage to the gun industry. They are not able to look a gun law in the eye. They don't want to risk damaging their cozy cash relationship to the NRA. The Dems, on the other hand, are appalled at the casual availability of almost every type of gun, and at the way, time after time, semi-automatic rifles are used to commit mass killings. They want guns only in the hands of the sane.

Where once this act of turning off the video might have been damaging to a demonstration, today it simply led to a re-routing around the blockage:

"In the absence of cameras, Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) broadcast clips on Twitter of members speaking. C-SPAN then broadcast Periscope and Facebook Live streams of the action."

"Up Periscope", Mr. Speaker.

Freedom To Kiss

As I gave my boyfriend a quick kiss before he hopped on the uptown bus yesterday, it shook me to realize that the sight of two guys kissing as we just did was what had lit the fuse of last night's broken-minded killer in Orlando.

I will still publicly kiss my friend good-bye every time he comes to visit. It is my freedom. Yours, too, if you ever need it. You don't have to use a freedom to have it. But sometimes you need to use a freedom in order to keep it. So we kiss.

"On March 29, 2016, Farrokh Sekaleshfar — a British-born medical doctor and Shi’a Muslim scholar — was invited to speak at the Husseini Islamic Center just outside Orlando, Florida.

During his sermon, “How to deal with the phenomenon of homosexuality,” at the Sanford-based center, the scholar and sheikh described in characteristically sotto voce what it meant to do the compassionate thing for gay people:

“Death is the sentence. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about this. Death is the sentence.”

He continued: “We have to have that compassion for people. With homosexuals, it’s the same. Out of compassion, let’s get rid of them now.”

He.Actually.Said.That.  That.

He gave God's permission to a maniac so that he could kill. It was surely not the first time Sekalishvar has said this, nor is he the only one among his crowd saying such things. The maniac was prepped to kill gay people.

This supposed wise man has certainly made a target of himself. There are crazy gay people, too. With guns. Inciting a killing can kill the inciter. A thought that must be on many people's minds today.

Does killing God's creation make you holy? If you think that gayness is not part of God's creation, then why do thousands of species have gay members? There are gay penguins, for heaven's sake. They kiss. Self-righteousness is not righteousness. Prudery is not propriety.

Islam is not the only religion with preachers who call for the killing of gays. Christian pastors do it, too.

Here are four of them. In the last video, one can see a pastor calling for the execution of gays and then introducing presidential candidate Ted Cruz.

Pastors put their sermons up on YouTube. Some of them must now be frantically combing their collections, making sure that every mention of killing gays is deleted before unfriendly forces discover them. The links above may not last forever.

Hindus and Buddhists seem a little less worried about variations in lifestyle. Their cultures are a little more mature.

So it is that gay people need to celebrate our own happiness, and to celebrate the advances in human rights that now allow us to be married and which protect us in some places from losing our jobs for being gay. The wisdom of Socrates, the plays of Shakespeare, the music of Tchaikovsky would not be ours if there were no gays.

We are, we always have been, we always will be.

We kiss.