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Combating Bigotry & Hate
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
A brief glance through the Renaissance reveals so many examples of art and architecture created in honor of and inspired by the artist’s faith. Grand churches made of massive stones have sprung up in every European city—a testament to the faith and love of the people who started building them, knowing they might never live to see them finished.
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
When he awoke the following morning, #JewishPrivilege was again trending on Twitter, but not because of the anti-Semites who spawned it, but rather from the targets of their hatred, Jews themselves, who shared their stories of discrimination and injustice.
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
It sometimes takes an extraordinary amount of courage and patience—and maybe even what some would call grace—to allow someone else to live and see and operate in the world based on a reality that you as an individual just might not understand.
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
The tweet, which fuels racial stereotypes, also exposes Ortega’s hypocrisy. The unemployed blogger—whose funding source is former call girl Karen de la Carriere—daily promotes anti-Scientology hate speech in his postings, in which he includes photos of Scientologist children as well as Church staff, executives and members. With no concern for their security or safety, Ortega lays them open to harm from his rabid and ill-informed followers.
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
That Scientology is fun is one of those things that’s so obvious and normal to those who actually know and practice it that it almost goes without saying. But my last blog on the subject seems to have struck a chord with readers, so I thought I would do a follow-up and use a little contrast.
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
A Massachusetts member of a white supremacist group created an online calendar day designating April 3 as “Jew-killing day,” planting a five-gallon plastic canister filled with gasoline near a Jewish assisted-living home on April 2. The bomb was lit but did not go off. The man was arrested on April 15.
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
We sat in front of the rabbi that day in 1977, my wife and I, a bit sheepishly explaining how we had run off and gotten married a year earlier after just a week of dating—and how she wasn’t Jewish at the time, and how she still wasn’t Jewish, and how now she needed to convert so that we could have a Jewish ceremony so that my observant Jewish mom and dad would speak to us.
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
“They were snickering, they started drawing red marks for blood,” recalled Jimmy McGee, Impact Movement president, who was leading the meeting. “Then they started calling out by our names. By that time we realized we couldn’t control the Zoom call. So we abandoned the meeting. When we got on our next call, they hacked right back in and started playing pornographic pictures.”
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
If someone were to make a list of the top 10 least funny things, “bigotry” would undoubtedly make the cut. There’s very little that’s funny about bigotry. That’s all the more unfortunate because everyone tells me laughter is the best remedy.
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
With thousands falling ill daily, sex-trafficking promoter Tony Ortega viewed COVID-19 as an opportunity to stir up hate against religion. He first intentionally misrepresented a bulletin issued to all Scientologists.
