Australian Study of Child Health In Same-Sex Families

In the latest blow to anti-gay forces, a major study conducted at the University of Melbourne in Australia has found that children of same-sex parents do as well or better than children raised by heterosexual parents. The Australian Study of Child Health in Same-Sex Families collected data on 500 children up to the age of 17 who grew up in gay or lesbian households across the nation.

An interim report on the study released earlier this week noted no statistical difference between children of same-sex couples and the population at large on such indicators as self-esteem, emotional behavior, and time spent with parents. Children of same-sex parents, however, scored higher than the national average for overall health and family cohesion. ( continue to full post… )

Tennessee has been a hotbed of anti-Muslim activism for years, especially after plans were laid to build an Islamic center in Murfreesboro. There have been bomb threats and numerous conferences centered on the unfounded but widely hyped fear that Shariah law will somehow be imposed on Americans. The chapter of ACT! for America, an anti-Muslim extremist group, based in Nashville is the most active in the country.

So perhaps it was to be expected that a community forum intended to foster dialogue and a greater understanding of Muslims in America degenerated into a hate-filled free-for-all on Tuesday night. ( continue to full post… )

After watching a surveillance video of two white male police officers slam a black woman’s head into a countertop and yank her to the floor by her hair in the town lockup, the Jasper, Texas, City Council voted unanimously on Monday to fire the men, less than a month after the brief but violent encounter on a Sunday morning in May.

The incident has awakened the East Texas town’s ghosts. ( continue to full post… )

On May 13, Jason McCann’s nephew celebrated his first communion at the Saint Benedict Center (SBC) in Richmond, N.H.

McCann was not in attendance.

He wanted to be there. But Brother André Marie, Prior of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a religious order based at SBC, was firm in his refusal to allow McCann to worship at SBC’s chapel. In a May 9 letter explaining his decision to McCann, he wrote that McCann’s “sin ranks, along with willful murder, oppressing of the poor, and defrauding working men of their wages, as one of the ‘sins that cry to Heaven for vengeance.’”

McCann’s so-called “sin”? The 25-year-old Boston man is openly gay and has declared himself in love with his partner, Earlon Smith. ( continue to full post… )

The day after Barack Obama was inaugurated on a cold January day in 2009, becoming the nation’s first black president, a young, obese white supremacist named Keith Luke went on a racially motivated one-day rape and killing spree in Brockton, Mass.

Luke, who was 22 and had a history of mental illness, told authorities he decided to kill blacks, Latinos and Jews after reading about “the demise of the white race” on white supremacist websites. ( continue to full post… )

Even the steel doors and isolation of a federal prison can’t seem to stop some antigovernment “sovereign citizens” from continuing to file frivolous legal documents and liens against government officials and judges.

But, as a recent case in Seattle shows, a relatively new federal law is being used by prosecutors to punish inmates and other conspirators who believe they don’t answer to authority and continue to flood the legal system with spurious documents. ( continue to full post… )

The new issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, released today, contains an in-depth look at the decades-long war between white supremacists and “anti-fascists” – highlighted by the bloody battle that erupted last  year at suburban Chicago restaurant.

The May 19, 2012, incident in Tinley Park, Ill., involved as many as 18 anti-racists in a fast and furious attack that resulted in five men pleading guilty to armed violence and receiving prison sentences as long as six years. The long history of violence between white supremacists and self-described “anti-fascists” also includes the 1998 murder of two anti-racist skinheads in a neo-Nazi plot. The latest incident has some anti-racists asking how things could have been different. It also underscores the challenge law enforcement faces in preventing such violence.

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Mark Regnerus, the author of a widely discredited 2012 study purporting to show that same-sex parents are bad for children, will be speaking this weekend at a conference sponsored by the Ruth Institute, a project of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM). Geared toward college students, the annual It Takes a Family (ITAF) conference addresses issues like marriage (should be heterosexual), family (should also be heterosexual), and sex (heterosexual and should ideally not take place outside of marriage).

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A young research engineer at the U.S. Army’s elite chemical and biological research laboratory in Maryland has close ties to two racist groups espousing white nationalist views, one of which has called for a homeland for white people.

John Stortstrom, a mechanical engineer who works for the Army at its Edgewood Chemical Biological Center (ECBC), was among 150 white nationalists, many of them young, who attended the American Renaissance conference held in early April in Tennessee. American Renaissance is a journal dedicated to race and intelligence, with a heavy focus on the “psychopathology” of black people. Its editor has written that black people are incapable of sustaining any kind of civilization. ( continue to full post… )

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is the daughter of Indian immigrants and just the third person of color to be elected governor of a Southern state.

So, one might think she would want nothing to do with racists and anti-immigrant extremists. Not so, apparently.

In anticipation of her 2014 re-election campaign, the Tea Party darling has put together a 164-member steering committee comprising folks from all 46 of her state’s counties. And on that list is one “Republican leader” and Tea Party activist named Roan Garcia-Quintana of Greenville.

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