#Eastland Life Church

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Mike Hixenbaugh at NBC News:

METROPOLIS, Ill. — The pastor began his sermon with a warning. Satan was winning territory across America, and now he was coming for their small town on the banks of the Ohio River in southern Illinois. “Evil is moving and motivated,” Brian Anderson told his congregation at Eastland Life Church on the evening of Jan. 13. “And the church is asleep.” But there was still time to fight back, Anderson said. He called on the God-fearing people of Metropolis to meet the enemy where Satan was planning his assault: at their town’s library. A public meeting was scheduled there that Tuesday, and Christians needed to make their voices heard. Otherwise, Anderson said, the library would soon resemble a scene “straight out of Sodom and Gomorrah.” The pastor’s call to action three months ago helped ignite a bitter fight that some locals have described as “a battle for the soul” of Metropolis.

The dispute has pitted the city’s mayor, a member of Eastland Life Church, against his own library board of trustees. It led to the abrupt dismissal of the library director, who accused the board of punishing her for her faith. And last month, it drew scrutiny from the state’s Democratic secretary of state, who said the events in Metropolis “should frighten and insult all Americans who believe in the freedom of speech and in our democracy.” Similar conflicts have rocked towns and suburbs across the country, as some conservatives — convinced that Democrats want to "sexualize" and indoctrinate children — have sought to purge libraries of books featuring LGBTQ characters and storylines. Republican state legislatures have taken up a wave of bills making it easier to remove books and threatening librarians with criminal charges if they allow minors to access titles that include depictions of sex.

To counter this movement, Illinois Democrats last year adopted the first state law in the nation aimed at preventing book bans— which ended up feeding the unrest in Metropolis. Under the law, public libraries can receive state grant funding only if they adhere to the Library Bill of Rights, a set of policies long promoted by the American Library Association to prevent censorship.

Many longtime residents were stunned when these national fissures erupted in Metropolis, a quirky, conservative city of about 6,000 people that has a reputation for welcoming outsiders. Because of its shared name with the fictional city from DC Comics, Metropolis has for the past half century marketed itself as “Superman's hometown.” Tens of thousands of tourists stop off Interstate 24 each year to pose beneath a 15-foot Superman statue at the center of town, to attend the summertime Superman Celebration, or to browse one of the world’s largest collections of Superman paraphernalia at the Super Museum.

“Where heroes and history meet on the shores of the majestic Ohio River,” the visitor’s bureau beckons, “Metropolis offers the best small-town America has to offer.” But lately, the pages of the Metropolis Planet — yes, even the masthead of the local newspaper pays homage to Clark Kent — have been filled with strife. Unlike in comic books and the Bible, the fight in Metropolis doesn’t break along simple ideological lines. Virtually everyone on either side of the conflict identifies as a Christian, and most folks here vote Republican. The real divide is between residents who believe the public library should adhere to their personal religious convictions, and those who argue that it should instead reflect a wide range of ideas and identities.

During his sermon in January and in the months since, Anderson has cast his congregation and their God as righteous defenders of Metropolis — and the Library Bill of Rights and its supporters as forces of evil. If Christians didn’t take a stand, Anderson warned, there would soon be an entire children’s section at the library “dedicated to sexual immorality and perversion.” And before long, he said, the town would be hosting “story hour with some guy that thinks he’s a girl.”

[...] A week later, the board went into a closed session and presented Baxter with an ultimatum: If she wanted to keep her job, she needed to sign a performance improvement plan. It stipulated that she would abide by the Library Bill of Rights, seek state grant funding and discontinue praying aloud with children and other religious activities at the library. Baxter refused to sign and began to criticize the board. Voices were raised, according to three members. After a few minutes, James, the board president, slammed her fist on the table. “This is not up for debate, Rosemary,” she said. “Either sign it, or don’t.” Baxter stood up and left. Minutes later, the board came out of closed session. By a vote of 5-3, they terminated Baxter’s employment. Baxter’s departure left the library in turmoil. Four employees resigned soon after, and the board got to work picking up the pieces.  They brought on a former library employee to serve as interim director and embarked on top-to-bottom reviews of the library’s catalog and finances. “Our focus,” James said, “is making sure our library is strong and healthy and there to serve everyone.” Then, on March 19, the story of Baxter’s firing was picked up by Blaze Media, a national conservative outlet. In a column titled, “A librarian’s faithful service is silenced by a secularist takeover,” conservative talk radio host Steve Deace interviewed Baxter and Anderson and reported that both had come under fire for their Christian beliefs.

Deace presented the local saga as a warning that evil forces were now coming for small-town America and blamed the problems in Metropolis, in part, on “a California transplant who is living with another man,” referring to Loverin, the library board member. Three days later, Metropolis Mayor Don Canada — who in 2021 had appointed Anderson, his pastor, to an open seat on the City Council — took a stand of his own. In letters addressed to James and two other board members, Canada announced that he’d “lost faith in the Board in its current state.” As a result, he was removing James and two others who’d voted to terminate Baxter. 

In Superman's alleged hometown of Metropolis, Illinois, the town has been engulfed with strife over conflicts on the direction of the town's public library, with Eastland Life Church Pastor Brian Anderson leading a war against the library as part of the faux moral panic about LGBTQ+ books that right-wingers falsely claim such books "sexualize" children.

[ghoulsbounty]

Can I request baby billy maybe reader Is a Virgin and he has plenty of skills he will help teach his innocent girl ?

Hidden Sins

Uncle Baby Billy Freeman x Fem!Reader

Warnings: smut (18+), oral (f receiving), unprotected sex, loss of virginity, p in v, fingering, dirty talk, corruption kink, slight cum play, innocent reader, takes place in a church (it used to be a sears, okay), description of a religious service, talk of religious beliefs/upbringing, manipulation, possessiveness, idolisation.

Word Count: 7.3K

A/N: I joined these two requests, I hope that's okay! I love writing for Baby Billy, he just oozes charm but has that slight edge of manipulation 🥵 Thank you for the kind words on A Fall From Grace, anon! I’d love to know what you all think to this, and feel free to send me more requests 💌

As the doors of the newest Gemstone Prayer Centre opened on Sunday morning, the congregation trickled in. There was a gentle murmur of voices as families, couples, and individuals made their way to their seats. The set lights created colourful patterns on the floor as they streamed through imitation stained-glass windows, giving a warm and inviting glow to the sanctuary, which was a recently renovated Sears in Locust Grove’s Eastland mall.

There was a comforting rhythm to the rituals performed as people settled into their seats. Some bowed their heads in silent prayer, while others leafed through their hymnals or exchanged hushed conversations with their neighbours. Children, dressed in their Sunday outfits, fidgeted beside their parents, their impatience to be let free into the mall barely contained. The musicians, positioned near the front, tuned their instruments and chatted quietly among themselves, their voices blending in harmonious laughter.

The keyboardist played a soft prelude, the gentle notes filling the space and creating an atmosphere of reverence and anticipation. Conversations gradually quieted as the music swelled, drawing the congregation’s attention towards the front of the church. The choir stood, their faces reflecting a mixture of concentration and serene joy as they prepared to lead the opening number, a soulful blend of rock and country.

At the pulpit, Baby Billy Freeman took his place, his persona commanding yet approachable. He adjusted the microphone, his warm hazel eyes scanning the room, acknowledging familiar faces with a nod and a smile. As the last notes of the prelude faded, a hush fell over the sanctuary. He cleared his throat, his melodic voice resonating with warmth and authority as he welcomed everyone to the service, setting the tone for the morning’s worship.

“Good morning, brothers and sisters,” he began, rich and melodious, filling the space with ease. “It is a blessing to see so many familiar faces, and I extend a heartfelt welcome to those who are visiting us for the first time. We gather here today, not just as individuals, but as a community of faith, bound by the love and grace of our Lord.”

Calls of “Amen” rang out through the room as he stepped away from the pulpit, moving to the front of the stage with a graceful confidence that commanded attention. He began weaving a story, his voice rising and falling with the rhythm of his words. You found yourself entranced, unable to take your eyes off his tall, lean frame. He oozed magnetic charm, from the way he adjusted the cufflinks on his impeccably tailored suit to the slick, groomed hair that crowned his head. This was a pastor who clearly appreciated the finer things in life, and it showed in every deliberate movement he made.

His story unfolded with the elegance of a master storyteller, each word chosen with care, each pause perfectly timed to draw the crowd deeper into his narrative. The light caught the fabric of his suit just right, highlighting its quality and fit, and you couldn’t help but admire the attention to detail in his appearance. It was evident that Baby Billy Freeman understood the power of presentation, using it to enhance the impact of his message, much like the Gemstone family did.

As he spoke, his eyes scanned the crowd, ensuring each person experienced a sense of direct connection as he addressed them. His hands moved gracefully, emphasizing points with a natural ease that came from years of practice and a deep understanding of his craft. The way he stood, the way he gestured, even the way he smiled—all of it contributed to the aura of a man who was not only confident in his message but also in his place at the front of the room.

When his eyes settled on you, it appeared time itself slowed. His gaze lingered, a hint of a smirk tugging at the corner of his lips as he took you in, assessing you with a knowing look. The intensity of his eyes sent a jolt through you, igniting a heat that rocketed to your cheeks under his watchful scrutiny. Your fingers moved subconsciously to smooth the pleats of your dress over your lap, a nervous attempt to steady yourself against the flurry of emotions his intense stare provoked.

In that moment, it was as if the world had shrunk to just the two of you. The sanctuary, its audience and ambient murmurs, faded into the background, leaving only the charged connection between you and Baby Billy. His eyes, so penetrating and vivid, held you captive, conveying a silent message that was both thrilling and unnerving.

His smirk deepened, a small but deliberate acknowledgment of the influence he had on you. You felt exposed, as though he could see right through the façade of composure you tried to maintain. The room felt warmer, the air thicker, every sense heightened by the charged interaction. Your heart raced, and your breaths came quicker, shallow and uneven, as you struggled to regain control.

The folds of your dress became a focus for your hands, fingers trembling as they smoothed and re-smoothed the fabric in a futile attempt to calm your nerves. Nothing could lessen the impact of his gaze. His sermon and presence made you feel singled out and significant, as if he intended them solely for you.

His eyes moved on, continuing to scan his flock, but the spell he had cast remained. You were left feeling flustered, your cheeks still flushed, and an unfamiliar yet exhilarating sense of longing settling in your chest. The rest of the room came back into focus, the collective presence of the congregation reasserting itself, but the lasting effect of his stare lingered. You knew that something had shifted within you, a spark ignited by the magnetic pull of Baby Billy Freeman’s attention, leaving you both eager and apprehensive about the next encounter.

The moment came sooner than you expected when Judy Gemstone grabbed your hand and marched you toward the backroom after the service, her heels clipping briskly on the tiled floor as you hurried to keep up. Suspense and lingering incense from the church filled the air, adding a heady sense of urgency to Judy’s determined stride.

You had been friends with Judy long enough to recognize the signs—her set jaw, the tenacious glint in her eyes, and the way she moved with single-minded purpose. Judy was on a mission, and right now, that mission was to secure the coveted position of the lead vocalist of her uncle’s church. Almost tangibly, her passion fuelled her determination to prove her brothers wrong and show her father she could uphold the Gemstone reputation.

Like the rest of the Gemstones, Judy’s determination was a force of nature. Her drive to impress her family was relentless, and it often swept you up in its wake. You had long accepted your role as her loyal sidekick, accompanying her on various ventures and ambitions. Today was no different. She dragged you into the backroom of the church, her arm linked tightly through yours. Memories of similar situations flooded your mind, each one of her ideas more hare-brained than the last.

The backroom, a repurposed Sears storage room, was a hive of activity, with band members chatting animatedly and church staff tidying up after the service. The noise and movement seemed to part like the Red Sea before Judy, her appearance commanding immediate attention. You stayed close, your heart fluttering at the prospect of finally meeting Baby Billy Freeman.

The service wasn’t the first occasion you had laid eyes on him, but it was the first time you had done so in person. Your mother admired Amy-Leigh Gemstone for a long time. They became close friends, which likely led to your introduction into Judy’s social circle. She had keenly tracked Amy-Leigh’s ascent to fame, along with her brother, accumulating their albums and any related merchandise available.

Your family home was practically a museum dedicated to the siblings. Vivid posters of Baby Billy decorated the walls, providing a stark contrast to the otherwise subdued décor. Shelves brimmed with collectibles ranging from signed photographs to rare figurines, each item echoing your mother’s deep appreciation for the famed clogging pair. Items adorned with Baby Billy’s image, from coffee mugs to decorative pillows, filled the space, turning it into a veritable shrine.

After your own mother passed away, Amy-Leigh became like a second mother to you, and her eventual passing left a profound void in your life. The Gemstones embraced you, providing a modest home within their compound and a job assisting with their ministry. The day Eli announced Baby Billy’s appointment as head pastor of their new centre, you could hardly believe it. Years of fawning over the man on the poster, and finally you were going to be within proximity of him.

Judy’s heels clicked with authority as she approached the corner where her uncle stood, surrounded by a small group of admirers. His charismatic aura was unmistakable, even in this more casual setting. He was in the midst of a conversation, his laughter rich and inviting, but it cut off smoothly as he noticed Judy’s determined approach.

“Uncle Baby Billy,” Judy called out, her voice clear over the din. “We need to talk.”

He turned towards her, his eyes momentarily flicking to you, a spark of recognition lighting up his features. His smile broadened, that familiar smirk playing at the edges of his lips. Your pulse quickened as his gaze held yours for a beat longer than seemed necessary before he turned his full attention to Judy.

“Judy, my favourite niece,” he greeted, his voice warm and welcoming, though his eyes still held a mischievous glint. “What brings you here?”

Judy didn’t waste a moment. She launched into her pitch with the fervour of someone who had rehearsed every word, every inflection. She spoke of her vocal talents, her dedication to the church, and her deep desire to serve in a greater capacity. Her words were passionate and persuasive, painting a vivid picture of her as the ideal candidate for the lead vocalist role. All true for the moment, but her attentions were often fleeting.

As Judy presented her case, you couldn’t help but notice how Baby Billy listened intently. Yet, every so often, his eyes would dart back to you, a silent, lingering glance that made your skin heat. You busied yourself by nodding along to your friend’s speech, trying to appear composed despite the tumult of emotions within you.

Judy concluded her pitch with a confident smile. “So, Baby Billy, what do you say? Give me the chance to prove myself.”

Baby Billy leaned back, his expression thoughtful and appraising as he considered her request. His eyes flicked between Judy and you, a smile spreading across his face. “Well, Judy, you certainly make a compelling case,” he said, his tone measured. Then, his gaze settled on you, and his smile took on a warmer, more personal touch. “What about you, darlin’? Do you think my niece has the pipes to pull it off?”

You felt the hairs on the back of your neck stand under his attention, the depth of his gaze making your heart race. You noticed every detail—the slight arch of his brow, the glint of curiosity in his eyes, and the expectant look on Judy’s face. Your mind whirled, searching for the right words, knowing that this moment was crucial for your friend.

Clearing your throat, you straightened up, wrangling your fingers out of nervous habit. “Absolutely, Pastor Freeman,” you began, your voice steady despite the butterflies in your stomach. “Judy has an incredible voice and a passion for music, just like her mama.” A small, white lie. You would pray later.

Baby Billy smiled, his eyes never leaving yours as he seemed to weigh your words. The connection between you felt almost tangible, a silent communication that left you both exhilarated and unnerved. He nodded, his gaze shifting back to Judy.

“Well, it sounds like you’ve got quite the endorsement, Judy,” he said, his tone approving. “Let’s see what you’ve got. How about a little audition, just so’s its fair? Don’t want ol’ Baby Billy being accused of playing favourites, now.”

Judy beamed with excitement, her eyes sparkling with a readiness that lit up the room. “I’m ready, Uncle Baby Billy! I’ll blow the roof off this place,” she declared, bouncing on the balls of her feet. “Just tell me where you want me!”

“Hold on there, speed racer,” he chuckled, raising a hand to temper her enthusiasm. “There’s a bit of preparation that needs to be done first.” He gestured toward a group of staff members who were exiting the backroom to continue the clean-up in the centre. “Why don’t you help tidy up while the band gets themselves ready on stage?” he suggested, handing her a mop from the trolley behind him with a playful smile.

Judy’s face fell for the briefest moment, a flicker of disappointment crossing her features. “Uh, no fuckin’ way,” she protested, holding the mop out to you. You took it from her, feeling the rough handle in your grip. “I’m the star, not the help.”

Baby Billy exhaled and caressed his forehead with his thumb as he glanced at her. “Now, Judy, we must exhibit grace in all our actions,” he murmured, retrieving the mop from your grasp and placing it in her hands. His fingertips grazed yours, sending a shock wave of energy through your nerves. “Amy-Leigh and I, we began by mopping the floors of the church halls where we would perform each Sunday.”

Judy looked down at the mop in her hands, her defiance wavering as she absorbed his words. “Those were humble beginnings,” he continued, his voice filled with a nostalgic warmth. “But it taught us the value of hard work and humility. We learned to appreciate every step of our journey, no matter how insignificant it seemed.”

Judy sighed, the tension in her shoulders easing slightly. “Alright, Baby Billy,” she muttered, reluctantly accepting her fate. “But you owe me one for this.” She turned to you, jutting her head towards the door. “Let’s go.”

Baby Billy chuckled, a soft, reassuring sound that seemed to lighten the atmosphere. “Hold on a minute,” he patted Judy’s shoulder gently, his touch almost fatherly. His gaze then shifted to you, his eyes twinkling with both mischief and sincerity. “I have a different job for your friend here,” he said, his voice laden with a sense of importance. He turned fully towards you, his smile warm and inviting. “If you’ll accept.”

You felt the weight of his words, the air thick with anticipation as Judy’s eyes fell on you. Baby Billy’s influence was commanding. It made you feel both honoured and nervous.

You nodded, your voice barely audible, and uttered, “I’ll help.”

“Alright,” he grinned, slapping his hands together with enthusiasm. He instructed the band and the other employees to return to the main area as he carefully led Judy to the exit. “Make sure you give it a thorough cleaning, Judy. The Lord is always watchin’,” he remarked, nudging her through the door and shutting it on her objections.

Your throat dried as you watched him twist the lock, producing a thunderous click that reverberated throughout the silent room. The sound seemed to echo endlessly, amplifying the tension that had been steadily building. He redirected his attention to you, his expression warm and inviting, a reassuring smile playing on his lips. Yet, there was a glint of something darker in his eyes, a flicker of intent that sent a shiver down your spine.

“She’s got a lot of spirit, doesn’t she?” he said, his tone light as he stalked towards you. You nodded, feeling a lump form in your throat under his potent stare. “Always been so desperate to prove herself, our sweet Judy,” he continued. His eyes didn’t leave yours. He stopped just a step away from you. “What about you?” he asked, his voice dropping to a soft, almost tender whisper.

As you swallowed hard, the severity of his question hit you. The room felt suffocating as you struggled to calm your breathing. His eyes bore into yours, searching for something deeper, and you found it hard to think straight under his watch.

“What about me?” you gulped, your voice hardly steady.

He stepped closer, and instinctively, you took a step back. Your back hit the edge of the vanity, causing various lotions and potions to topple over, clattering onto the floor. Your fingers grasped at the table, the cool wood grounding you as you looked up into Baby Billy’s predatory gaze.

His eyes, fierce and unyielding, locked onto yours, making your heart pound against your chest. He was so close that you could feel the raw magnetism seeping from him, leaving you feeling both vulnerable and electrified.

“Are you desperate to prove yourself?” he asked, his finger lightly grazing your chin. He tilted it upwards, leaving you no choice but to look directly at him. The touch of his fingertip sent a pulse of arousal through you, making your pussy thrum. You squeezed your thighs together to ease the ache between them. His gaze was unrelenting, piercing through your defences and searching for the truth hidden within you.

“I-I don’t know,” you stammered, your voice breaking. It wasn’t true. Deep inside, you felt a magnetic pull toward the older man standing before you, a profound need to please him. You’d fantasized about this moment countless times over the years, your fingers teasing your most sensitive spots as you pictured him. You had writhed against your mattress, biting your lip to stifle his name from escaping them in a heated whisper. You’d wanted him for so many years.

“Don’t be shy now,” he said, a smirk tugging at his lips. His eyes glinted with amusement and something primal. “You certainly weren’t when you were giving me those eyes during the service.” His voice dripped with a teasing tone, each word deliberately slow, as if savouring the memory.

His words sent a flush of heat through your cheeks and you tried to look away, but his finger held your chin in place, keeping your gaze locked with his. You could feel the warmth radiating from his body, his presence overwhelming. The room seemed to shrink around you, the atmosphere heavy with unspoken tension and desire as you looked up at him, transfixed.

His thumb brushed lightly across your jaw, sending shivers down your spine. The scent of his cologne filled your senses, making it hard to think clearly. His eyes, a captivating blend of mischief and command, searched yours for any sign of resistance, but all he found was the raw vulnerability you tried to hide.

“You don’t have to hide from me,” he uttered, his voice a velvety whisper that seemed to wrap around you. “I see you, all of you.” The sincerity in his tone made your heart clench, any defiance melting away under the heat of his gaze.

He leaned in closer, his breath ghosting over your lips, teasing and tempting. The closeness was intoxicating, every nerve in your body alert to his presence. You could feel the strength in his grip, the subtle dominance that made you weak with craving. The atmosphere crackled with electricity, the promise of what could happen hanging heavily in the air.

“I saw the way you looked at me,” he continued, his voice low and intimate. “Like you were daring me to come over and do something about it.” His eyes smouldered with intent, and the smirk on his lips grew more pronounced. The weight of his gaze was almost too heavy to withstand, filled with challenge and promise that made your pulse quicken.

You struggled to react to his words, a haze of lust clouding your mind as he leaned in closer. The mixture of authority and need in his eyes was utterly mesmerizing, making it impossible to look away. Your entire being, every fibre in your body was alive with excitement.

“Tell me,” he murmured, his lips brushing against your ear. “Do you want me to do something about it?” His question hung in the air, the weight of it pressing down on you as you struggled to find your voice.

Another sharp intake, the proximity and the raw emotion in his voice, leaving you vulnerable. “Yes,” you whispered, the admission sending a thrill through you.

A satisfied smile curved his lips as he pressed a soft, chaste kiss to your mouth. “Good,” he whispered back, his voice low and commanding. “Clothes off, angel.”

His words sent a shiver of anticipation through you, and you hesitantly glanced toward the door. Sensing your distraction, he gently tilted your chin back toward him, his eyes locking onto yours with a determined gaze.

“Don’t you worry about her,” he assured, his voice soft yet assertive, drawing your attention back to the moment. “You focus on me.”

“But you said that the Lord is always watching,” you reminded him, echoing the words he had spoken to Judy just moments before.

Raised in a devout Christian household, you had lived and worked with the Gemstones, always striving to be the virtuous, Christian woman your mother wanted you to be. A part of you knew that this was sinful, felt wrong, like a lamb being led to slaughter. Yet a larger part of you—the part that felt a fire ignited within, burning and aching for more of his touch—knew that your words were a hollow attempt to save face before you gave in.

He smiled, running his hands up and down your arms in a soothing gesture. “The Lord and I, we have a deal,” he said, his voice calm and reassuring. “Ain’t no one’s eyes on you but mine.”

His words wrapped around you like a warm blanket, both comforting and thrilling. Taking a step forward, his hand made contact with your cheek, his thumb softly caressing your skin. “I bet you’ve tried so hard to be the good girl, to live up to everyone’s expectations,” he murmured. “But what about your own needs? What about what you want, hmm?”

Your heart pounded as his words took hold, resonating within you. The years of restraint, the hidden fantasies, all converged at this single moment. “I... I want this,” you admitted, your voice barely above a whisper. “But I’ve never been with a man before.”

His smile widened, a mix of triumph and tenderness. “Oh darlin’, I know that. I’ll be gentle,” he said, his voice a low, seductive murmur. His hand slid from your cheek to the back of your neck, drawing you closer until your lips were almost touching. “Let me show you what it means to truly surrender.”

The last barrier within you crumbled, and with a shuddering breath, you closed the gap, your lips meeting his in a kiss that was both fervent and tender. You sighed into his mouth as his tongue licked against your own; the sensation sending waves of pleasure through you. You felt consumed by him. It was as if all your reservations had melted away, leaving only a deep, aching need for his touch. His hands roamed your body with a possessive tenderness, and you knew there was no turning back.

He released you, gave you an encouraging smile as his eyes flickered over your body. You hesitantly undressed, your fingers fumbling with the buttons and fabric. The room seemed to grow warmer with each piece of clothing that fell away, leaving your skin exposed to the cool air. His expression was a mix of appreciation and yearning, his eyes darkening with every inch of you revealed.

“That’s it,” he said when you were bare before him. He stepped closer, his fingers tracing a path down your chest, over the swell of your breast. The touch was exhilarating, sending waves of sensation through your body. “Beautiful,” he murmured, his eyes roaming over you with undisguised admiration. “A sight to behold.”

His hands moved to your hips, pulling you closer until your bodies pressed together. The feel of the rich fabric of his suit against your skin gave you goosebumps, and he slowly traced kisses down the expanse of your neck, over your collarbone, until he reached your breasts. He took one hardened nipple into his mouth, enclosing his lips around it as you gasped.

You grabbed hold of his shoulders for support as your legs weakened from the fiery touch of his tongue. His mouth worked skilfully, alternating between gentle sucking and flicking, setting your nerves on fire. His other hand caressed your side, his touch both reassuring and tantalizing.

“You’re so sensitive,” he mumbled into you, his voice thick with want. His hand moved to your other breast, his thumb brushing over the nipple, eliciting another gasp from you. He switched his attention, giving your other nipple the same devoted attention, his mouth and hand working in perfect harmony.

Your body responded to his touch, arching into him as the pleasure built. The contrast of the soft fabric of his suit and the firmness of his body against your bare skin heightened every sensation. You could sense the power in his shoulders under your grip, grounding you as he continued his exploration.

He left your nipple with a suctioned pop, lifting you until you perched on the vanity table. His mouth was back on you, kisses trailing lower over your breasts, down your stomach as his hands guided you to lean against the mirror. He knelt between your legs, his eyes locked onto yours with an intensity that made your heart race. His fingers grazed your thighs as he paused. Looking up at you, a devious grin spreading across his lips.

“Wouldn’t deny an old man a taste, would you?” he asked, low and teasing as he parted your legs wider.

You held back a moan, the longing building as his hands caressed your thighs, spreading them apart. The cool surface of the mirror against your back contrasted with the heat of his breath on your skin, making every feeling more intense. His eyes never left yours, the connection between you pulsating.

“No,” you whispered, your voice trembling with desire. “I wouldn’t.”

His smile widened, a look of triumph and hunger in his eyes. “Good girl,” he murmured, his hands sliding round to grip your thighs firmly, your mind reeling from his praise.

He leaned in, his mouth descending to your core, and you mewled his name as the flat of his tongue dragged through your wet slit. He moved skilfully, exploring every inch of you, his hands holding you open as he flicked and swirled his tongue over your sensitive flesh. When his lips wrapped around your clit and he began sucking gently on the bundle of nerves, you couldn’t suppress the whine that escaped your lips.

One of your hands left the vanity, slipped into his perfect hair, tugging and pulling him closer, desperate to feel more of the intense, foreign sensation. He groaned in response; the vibration adding another layer of pleasure as he continued his ministrations, his tongue dancing over your most sensitive spots with precision and care.

Your hips bucked against him when you felt his tongue dipping into your tight hole. He laughed, his grip on your thighs tightening as he held you to the table and fucked your cunt with his tongue. His strong nose brushed against your sensitive clit, and you cried out, fighting against his hold to grind against him, desperate for more friction.

“Baby Billy, it feels s-so good,” you moaned, your voice trembling with pleasure.

With his finger prodding at your entrance, your grip on his hair tightened and your back arched, while his lips encased your clit again, sucking with fervour as you adjusted to the stretch of his finger.

As he stared at you greedily, he pulled back to witness his finger sliding into you, wet with your juices. “Oh, you sweet thing,” he cooed, his voice dripping with lust, adding to the growing tightness of the coil within you. Your eyes widened as you felt another finger prod experimentally at your hole, swirling through your arousal before pushing in to join the first. You gasped at the stretch, then broke into a cry when he curled them against you, hitting a spot that had your vision spotting.

With precision, he twisted and thrust his fingers, never taking his eyes off your face as he watched your reactions. “That’s it,” he murmured, his voice a mix of encouragement and dominance. “Let me see how good it feels.”

Your pleasure built to an almost unbearable peak. His fingers moved faster, curling and stroking the sensitive spot inside you with expert skill as the rings that adorned them stretched you deliciously, the chill of them a shock against your dripping heat. The wet sounds of your arousal and your increasingly frantic moans echoed throughout the room.

“Please,” you begged, your voice breaking. “Don’t stop.”

He smirked, relishing the impact he had on you, and the sight of him so dishevelled—hair unkempt and face glistening from your juices—had you grasping at him, pulling him up toward you for another heated kiss. You rocked your hips harder as he continued to fuck his fingers into you, the taste of yourself on his lips adding to the sinful pleasure.

His mouth swallowed your moans, the kiss deep and hungry, your tongues tangling as you revelled in the shared intensity. His fingers moved relentlessly, curling and thrusting with expert precision, hitting that perfect spot inside you over and over as he thumbed your clit.

The room seemed to spin as the pleasure built, your body tightening around his fingers. His free hand roamed your body, caressing and gripping your curves, adding to the sensation of overload. Every touch, every thrust, pushed you towards the brink.

“You like this, don’t you?” he murmured against your lips. “Feel how wet you are, letting Baby Billy do such unholy things to you.”

You nodded, unable to form coherent words, your breath coming in ragged gasps. The rhythm of his fingers was driving you wild, the coil inside you tightening to the breaking point.

A choked sob escaped you as your muscles clenched around his fingers, your body convulsing with pleasure as the tension finally broke. He held you through it, fingers never stopping their assault, drawing out every shudder and gasp. You slowly came back down, eyes bleary and body quivering around him. He looked down at the mess between your thighs where his fingers were slowly retracting from your cunt. His eyes shone with a satisfied gleam.

“That’s a good girl,” he murmured, his voice filled with admiration. His fingers glistened with your arousal as he brought them to his lips, tasting you once more with a low, appreciative moan. “You’re nice and ready for me now,” he grinned, pushing between your legs to grind his clothed arousal against you.

He groaned, his hands gripping your hips, guiding you to move against him. “Feel that?” he asked, his voice a low growl. “That’s what you’ve done to me.” His eyes locked on yours. The intensity in them makes even more heat pool between your thighs.

The friction of his hard length against your slick folds sent shivers through your body, your hips rocking against him to seek more. His grip tightened, controlling your movements as he pressed harder against you, the fabric of his pants only heightening the sensation.

“You want this, don’t you?” he whispered, his breath hot against your ear. “Tell me how much you want it now.”

You reacted to his command, a moan escaping your lips as you ground against him with more urgency. “I want it,” you uttered, your voice quivering with longing. “Please, Baby Billy. I need you.”

His grin widened, satisfaction gleaming in his eyes as he watched you writhe against him. “Oh angel,” he sighed, his voice rough with lust. “You’re gonna get exactly what you need.”

He pulled back just enough to unzip his pants, freeing his aching cock. The sight made your mouth water—thick and long, with a slight curve and beads of pre-cum glistening on his swollen, red tip. He stroked himself, spreading the slickness over his length, and you watched, mesmerized. A sudden curiosity flooded you, imagining the weight and taste of him on your tongue.

“See something you like?“ he teased, his voice a sultry, enticing rumble. His eyes clouded with desire as he watched your reaction, enjoying the effect he had on you. He stepped closer, his hand still working his shaft slowly, as if to give you a show. His eyes flicked to the door, then back to you, his expression deep in thought. “Ain’t enough time for that now, but you best believe I’ll be puttin��� that mouth to good use next time.”

Before you had time to contemplate his words, Baby Billy grabbed at your thighs, wrapping them around his waist as he positioned himself at your entrance. The weeping head of his cock teased through your slick folds, sending shivers up your spine. His eyes snapped to yours when he heard the whimper fall from your lips, an almost sadistic grin spreading across his face.

Whispering softly, he brushed his lips teasingly against yours, and said, “Once I’m finished with you, you’ll belong to me, understand?”

With a slow, deliberate thrust, he entered you. The stretch was an exquisite blend of pleasure and pain, making your vision blur and chest heave as you clung to him. Driven wild by the sensation of your tight, wet heat, he let out a guttural moan as he pushed himself deeper.

“Good Lord, you feel so fuckin’ good,” he groaned, his voice thick with passion. His firm hands held onto your hips tightly, bringing you closer as he filled you entirely. The overwhelming force of the moment left you breathless, your body trembling with each inch he claimed.

He paused for a moment, letting you adjust to the fullness, his eyes hardened with possessiveness as they locked onto yours. “Look at you,” he murmured. “Made just for me.”

His words made you keen, your mind empty except for the thought of Baby Billy and his cock consuming you. Pleas tumbled from your lips, urging him to move, begging him to fill you, and he groaned as he snapped his hips, setting a slow and deliberate pace so that you could feel every ridge of his cock as he moved within you.

“That’s it,” he groaned, his eyes fluttering shut briefly at the tightness of you around him, fingers digging into your hips as he fucked into you. “Take all of me. I know you can.”

As the sparks of pain subsided, overwhelming surges of pleasure took over. The vanity and mirror slammed loudly against the wall as he rocked your hips to meet his, matching his rhythm perfectly. You were so absorbed in him you didn’t care about the door just a few feet away, separating your friend — his kin — from possibly hearing the illicit act you were engaged in.

With your back arching into him, you pleaded for more, as his lips wrapped around your nipple again, eliciting a desperate whine from you. “Faster, please.”

With a growl, he responded, grazing your sensitive bud with his teeth, causing you to sharply inhale. His muffled curse vibrated against your skin as he picked up the pace, pounding into you with deep, powerful strokes that reached new depths, pushing you closer to the edge. Your nails dug into his shoulders, crinkling the fabric of his expensive suit.

“I knew you weren’t as innocent as you seemed,” he mumbled against your skin, his voice dripping with raw desire. “Can’t get enough of Baby Billy, can you?”

His breath was hot and heavy against your chest, each word making your spine tingle. His grip on your hips tightened, pulling you closer as he thrust deeper, the intensity of his movements mirroring the hunger in his voice.

“It’s like music to my ears, hearing you beg,” he murmured, delivering a final flick of his tongue over your nipple before straightening to meet your gaze. “My new favourite song.”

The sincerity in his eyes made your heart race even faster, the connection between you electrifying. He held your gaze with an intensity that left you breathless, his hips never faltering in their relentless rhythm. Every thrust, every touch, was a symphony of pleasure that built and built, pushing you both closer to the edge.

As you teetered on the brink of another orgasm, your breaths came in ragged gasps, and your muscles spasmed. One of Baby Billy’s hands left your thighs, snaking between you to trace wet circles over your swollen clit. You bucked into his hand, his touch sending jolts of pleasure through your body, as he looked down at you with pride.

“That’s it. Sing for me, angel,” he commanded.

As your body convulsed around him, a broken cry ripped from your throat. Your thighs shook and you gripped him tighter, riding out your earth-shattering ecstasy, every muscle tightening as you clutched desperately at him. He watched you with a primal hunger, his eyes dark and filled with greed, captivated by the sight of you falling apart on his cock.

Your walls clenched rhythmically around him, drawing a gasping moan from his lips. The sensation was too much for him to handle, and his thrusts became sloppy and erratic, each movement driven by pure instinct. His hands gripped your hips with bruising force, trying to maintain some semblance of control as the pleasure overwhelmed him.

“Fuck,” he groaned, his voice heavy with need. “You got me feelin’ some kind of way, angel. Something wicked.”

His words had you spiralling, your orgasm continuing to crash over you like a tidal wave. Your garbled cry cut short as he captured your lips with his and you moaned into his mouth, riding out the rest of your climax with desperate ruts of your hips, clinging to him for dear life.

His kiss was deep and consuming, his tongue exploring your mouth as if he couldn’t get enough of you. He held you tight, grounding you both as he bucked at a frenzied pace, chasing his own release. The sound of skin slapping against skin filled the room, the faltering rhythm of his thrusts echoing in the heated air. Your lips tore from his, head dropped back against the mirror, eyes half-closed, as you surrendered to Baby Billy’s insistent need.

He used your cunt for his own amusement, his thick girth splitting you open and filling you. Every thrust sent waves of pleasure and pain through your body, the intensity almost too much to bear. You breathed in shallow, erratic gulps, mingling with his groans of pleasure.

“You gonna let Baby Billy finish inside of you?” he grunted as you felt the powerful contraction of his muscles under your fingers. “Go back out there with my cum filling you, let everyone know who owns you now.”

His words, steeped in raw, possessive control, gave you goosebumps. The heat between you was almost unbearable, and the thought of being so intimately claimed ignited a fire within you. You could barely manage a nod, overwhelmed by the intensity of the moment, your breath coming in shallow gasps.

“Yes,” you managed, your voice trembling with need. “F-fill me.”

His eyes shone at your words, lighting up with pride. You felt him pulse and throb inside you, and with a final, deep thrust, he buried himself to the hilt. His body shuddered as he found his release, the hot spurts of his cum flooding you, mingling with your own arousal to create an intoxicating warmth. You milked him for every drop of his seed, drawing out every ounce of pleasure.

Your body, wrecked and trembling, collapsed against his as you sobbed into the crook of his neck. A combination of fulfilment and exhaustion washed over you, your breathing slowly adjusting to a calmer rhythm. His gentle touch roamed your spine in soothing strokes, grounding you as you both basked in the afterglow. The surrounding air seemed to hum with the energy of your passion, the scent of sweat and sex lingering, creating a heady, intimate atmosphere.

With his breath still uneven against your skin, he pressed a tender kiss to your temple. “That was a job well done,” he murmured, his voice prideful despite his jest. He groaned as he pulled himself from your swollen cunt, eyes shining at the sight of you leaking with his load. You whimpered at the emptiness, a pout forming on your lips as he tucked himself away, but then he pushed two digits into you, stuffing your pussy almost full again.

“Keep it all in there,” he said, his eyes flicking to you as he twisted his fingers. The squelch of his load being forced back inside of you filled the room, an erotic sound that made your mouth water. “I wasn’t lying. Baby Billy wants you out there, front and centre.”

The intensity in his gaze, coupled with the sensation of his fingers pushing his cum deeper inside you, had you shaking again. Each movement was deliberate, ensuring you felt every bit of his claim on you. The thought of stepping out, filled with his essence, ignited a mix of thrill and arousal within you.

He finally withdrew his fingers, leaving you with a lingering sense of fullness. “Now, let’s get you dressed,” he said, a mischievous glint in his eyes. He helped you to your feet, steadying you as you adjusted to standing. The rush of reality hit you as you caught sight of yourself in the mirror—marks from his mouth adorned your breasts, and bruises from his fingers dotted your thighs. You looked spent, yet there was a radiant glow to your skin that hadn’t been there before.

You watched in the mirror as Baby Billy adjusted his suit, fixing his hair until it was back in almost perfect condition. He dabbed at the sweat that had formed on his brow with his handkerchief, his focus intent on readying himself. The sight of him, composed and immaculate, made you suddenly aware of your own state. You felt uncomfortably exposed and quickly retrieved your clothes from the floor.

Your body ached as you dressed, each movement a reminder of what you’d just done. Your muscles throbbed from the recent exertion, and as you put on your clothes, the thoughts that had been repressed by passion now surged through your mind. The reality of your sin with the pastor drowned you in a wave of guilt and confusion.

You wanted to regret it, to tell yourself that you would pray for forgiveness, but you knew it wasn’t true. You’d wanted him so much, was willing to throw all caution to the wind and give yourself so freely to him. Now, he seemed so distant from you, and maybe that felt worse than anything. The desire that had driven you to this moment still simmered under the surface, a raw and undeniable truth.

As you finished dressing, you caught your reflection in the mirror. The marks on your body, the glow in your skin, all told the story of what had transpired. You felt a complex mix of emotions—shame, guilt, satisfaction, and a strange sense of pride.

Baby Billy turned to you, his eyes softening as he took in your appearance. “You alright?” he asked, his voice gentle, a stark contrast to the intensity of moments before.

With a nod, you managed a slight smile. “Yeah, I think so.”

Drawing nearer, he lightly brushed his thumb against your cheek. “No one else needs to know what happened here.”

You took a deep breath, fully absorbing the impact of his words. The secret you now shared felt like a heavy burden, one you couldn’t speak of to anyone. The fear that this might be your last moment with him gnawed at you, prompting you to ask softly, “Will I see you again?”

He smiled, a teasing glint in his eye, as he leaned in to place a gentle, lingering kiss on your lips. When he pulled back, he lightly tapped his finger over your bottom lip, his touch both tender and possessive.

“Oh darlin’,” he drawled, his voice low and filled with promise, “didn’t I already tell you I’d be puttin’ this mouth to good use one day?” 

The way he said it sent a chill through you, the intimacy of his words and the light touch on your lip igniting a spark within you. His eyes held yours, the playful glint mixing with something deeper, a reassurance that this moment was far from the last.

As he stepped back, his hand trailed from your lip to your chin, lifting it slightly. His gaze softened, the teasing replaced with genuine affection as he murmured, “this isn’t the last you’ll see of Baby Billy.”

[exxar1]

Episode 11: New Believer, New Faith, and a New Vow

2/7/2021

- 1 -

Good morning! It’s a beautiful Sunday here in Las Vegas. I have much to talk about so I’m just going to get right into it.

           It’s hard to believe we’re already a full month into the new year. This year for me has been very rewarding thus far. For starters, I have had no trouble keeping up with resolutions 1 and 4. (For a refresher, you can scroll back through my previous posts to the one from New Year’s Eve.) I have found time each day to read my Bible and pray, and I have had little difficulty in maintaining a pleasant attitude and a smile in my daily encounters with my co-workers and customers. As expected, though, that latter one has been tested a few times by the occasional sour apples that woke up on the wrong side of the bed. But I’ve surprised myself every time by my patience and my ability to keep a calm and pleasant demeanor. (Those of you who have known me for a long time will understand how truly remarkable that is for me.) It’s simply another testament to the power of God to change our basic attitudes when we are willing to let Him.

           I’ve also made great strides in resolution #3, and that’s where I’m going to spend the bulk of my time on this post.

           Have you ever sought something – therapy, a particular medication, advice from a friend or colleague – thinking that it might help with one problem, only to be pleasantly surprised that one, the result helped in many other ways you hadn’t anticipated; and two, that the change/outcome/counseling exceeded your initial expectations by such a great magnitude that you couldn’t believe you hadn’t sought this help long ago? That feeling has been with me for over three weeks now, and it’s only getting better with each session.

           One of my first tasks in tackling resolution #3 was to consult a pastor on this issue of homosexuality and the Bible. I needed to know what God really said in His Word on this controversial topic, and since I have yet to find a home church here in Las Vegas the only pastor that I am casually acquainted with is Mark Sjostrom of the church in which I was born and raised back in Twin Falls, Idaho.

           For those of you unfamiliar with Twin Falls or this particular church, allow me to forge a brief rabbit trail here to give you a short history. Grace Baptist Church was founded in 1975, and, back then, it was just a one-story, oblong, red-bricked building, its main auditorium forming a bubble at one end, at the intersection of Eastland Drive and Falls Avenue on the eastern edge of town. It’s still that same building today, only now there’s a massive, two-story gymnasium/classroom on the other side of the back parking lot, and a third, smaller, two-room annex that sits behind the gym. The first of those latter two structures was needed in the early eighties when the church launched its own private school, Twin Falls Christian Academy. I was in kindergarten when the gymnasium was under construction. I have many memories of watching my dad and some of the other men in church up on the scaffolds, putting together the walls, while I waited for my mom to pick me up after school, which was held in the various Sunday school rooms in the church. A few years later, I would be attending high school in the classrooms above that gym.

           In the years since I have grown and left Twin Falls, I have come back to that church on the occasional Sunday morning worship service when I’m home for a vacation visit. I’ve always had mixed feelings every time I set foot beyond the threshold of its main doors (see my previous posts about my struggles during my teen years.) It’s the same feeling you get when you come back to something that is at once familiar and strangely comforting, but also brings with it unpleasant memories and the pain of old wounds that have never quite healed.

           Grace’s pastor since 2005 has been Mark Sjostrom (pronounced ‘shos-trum’), and I didn’t know him that well when I decided to consult him on this issue. Our only interaction thus far had been a brief handshake and a greeting after those sporadic Sunday morning worship services, and I wasn’t sure he would even remember me when I nervously texted him a brief ‘Hello’ a month ago. He responded within a few minutes, and I re-introduced myself and then gave a short explanation of what I needed. We agreed on a time and date for a phone call, and I emailed him the next day with a longer explanation of what I needed to talk about with him.

           That letter was a  somewhat detailed account of what most of you are already familiar with: my struggle in high school with keeping my secret of being gay while trying to fit in socially and eventually declaring myself an Atheist after being expelled from school my senior year a month before graduation. It was probably about 2 pages, and I was now very nervous after clicking the ‘Send’ button. I suppose now is a good time to tell you something else about me.

           I have been one of ‘those people’ for all of my adult life. You know who I’m talking about: the people who silently judge the other customers in the book store who pause to browse the Self Help section; or the people who quietly scoff when anyone talks about their latest therapy session with their friends or coworkers at lunch in the break room. I’m glad I don’t need self-help or therapy, I’ve always thought. But, then again, good for them, I guess. I’m glad I have all my issues worked out, and I’m a stable, normal adult. I’ve never had any issues that were so bad I needed to get help from an armchair counselor’s latest best seller or a psychiatrist’s couch.

            Hhmmm. My life, lately, has been chock full of irony.

           When the time came to dial Pastor Sjostrom’s number my level of nervousness was up to a ten out of ten on the anxiety scale. I hadn’t felt like this since high school when it was opening night of our Agatha Christie play, and I was one of the main cast. I had prepared a detailed outline of what I wanted to discuss, and, after a few initial pleasantries, Mark quickly put me at ease. I was pleasantly caught off guard by his relaxed, casual personality. I found immediately that he was very easy to talk to, and my anxiety level dropped to a ‘three’ in the first five minutes. Pastor Sjostrom is definitely one of those people who has found the right calling. His warm, personable demeanor made me feel like I was talking to an old friend over coffee at Starbucks, and after about ten minutes of getting to know one another, he brought the conversation back around to my letter.

           Here’s where my second surprise occurred. Mark was bluntly honest. I had told him that I believed I was saved in 1985, when I was seven, after the evening service of one of our church’s mid-summer week long revival meetings. “Neal,” Mark said rather pointedly, “after reading your description of your life after high school, I gotta say that it doesn’t sound like you were saved. Your behavior and your atheism doesn’t reflect the change that is described in the Bible.” He went on to explain that salvation is a change brought about the presence of the Holy Spirit in the new believer. There is a desire to learn more about God and His Word. There is a desire to serve him and to live one’s life in surrender to Him.

           I had to pause and think about that. And, doggone it, you know what? He was right. And the reason I knew that was because I had only to look at the last four months of my life, even more so since I had returned from Christmas vacation. That desire – that hunger – to know God had never been present in my life until September 17, 2020. That was the night I surrendered to Christ in an awkward, fumbling prayer on the way home from work. Ever since, I have had nothing but a desire to read my Bible and change my life. I told pastor this, and he agreed. It was evident now that I was truly saved. That evidence was lacking in my youth and my adult life up to this point.

           My third major surprise of that initial counseling session – yes, that was what is was – was when pastor told me he was assigning me homework for our next weekly conversation. He wanted me to read the book of 1 John. He explained that we would eventually get to the issue of homosexuality, but that we needed to cover this ground first. I agreed  to the assignment, and we hung up. I glanced at the clock in the upper corner of my computer screen. We had talked for almost an hour. I immediately reached for my Bible and opened it to 1 John. I read the whole book in about ten minutes.

           1 John is a primer for the new believer. John states clearly and succinctly what makes a Christian a Christian. Chapter 1:9 was immediately familiar to me from my Sunday School days: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” So was chapter 2:9: “He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness, even until now.” John goes to say in chapter 5:2: “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God, and keep His commandments.” And, finally, verse 20 of that same chapter: “And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life.”

           Yep. All of that book made perfect sense. Part of that was because I had absorbed so much of God’s Word in my youth that it had sat in the deep recesses of my brain for all of my life, and much of it had begun floating to the surface in the last several months – like debris from an ancient wartime submarine that has been recently dislodged from its ocean grave. Except that these artifacts – Bible verses, fragments of sermons, some of Mr. Walker’s proverbs from Bible class – were not dirty, soggy, disgusting relics. They were bits of priceless treasure, and I’ve been rediscovering them in dribs and drabs ever since.

           I have had three sessions with Pastor Sjostrom, and they are each the highlight of my week. I very nearly broke down after hanging up from our first talk. I felt a combination of immense relief, peace and calm. Not to be overly melodramatic, but it was if something had dislodged in my very soul, like a sliver of wood just beneath the skin that has never quite come all the way out. I realized with immediate clarity that I was getting far more than just a pastor’s opinion on a particular issue for my book. I had stumbled on to something else, something I needed far more: spiritual counseling and guidance for my new life as a child of God.

           I am a new believer.

That seems so strange to say out loud. I was raised in the church. I had at least a third of the Bible memorized by the time I was twelve. I knew all the major stories from the Old Testament – the creation of the world; God’s covenant with Abraham; Jacob, Esau and Isaac; Joseph sold into slavery into Egypt and God’s eventual deliverance of the Israelites from their captivity there; the introduction of the ten commandments and the Mosaic Law; Esther, Ruth, King Saul, David, the Book of Psalms, the prophet Isaiah – I knew all of it by heart by the end of my days in elementary school. Same for the New Testament – the birth of Christ; all of His teachings and parables; His death on the cross; His resurrection after three days; the founding of His church after His ascension back to Heaven – it was all as familiar to me by the time I walked away from high school as the mathematical precepts of basic addition, subtraction, division and multiplication.

           I had assumed all this time that I was still saved. I thought I had really, genuinely believed in Jesus as my savior that long ago night in 1985 when I was seven years old. And maybe I did. But, for whatever reason, the Holy Spirit had not come into me back then. I was not truly saved. (This is perhaps worthy of a more detailed discussion and analysis later on down the road.) Whatever the case, I am most definitely a new believer now. The Holy Spirit is alive and well within me, and I have only a single desire and purpose: to know the God that created me, and to serve him with all my heart, soul and mind.

           Pastor and I did discuss my homosexuality issue in our second talk, and that, along with the extracurricular reading I’ve been doing on this topic, has enabled me to finally reconcile what I couldn’t in my teen years when I first fought with this problem.

 - 2 -

If I am gay, and God – through His written word – has condemned what I am as a sin, how can I be His child and serve Him as he commanded me to do? That’s the question I’ve been wrestling with anew for the last few months. I began this new journey in last September with the premise that I was born gay. I’ve believed that my whole adult life. I proceeded from that assumption through all of my reading and research these last few weeks. But if God made me this way, why would He then condemn as an abomination the very thing that I am? Is He not contradicting Himself? How can this be?

           Pastor Sjostrom asked that very question in our second talk. He then went on to answer it by explaining that my unnatural desire for the same sex was a cause of the Fall, when Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. This is what led their descendants to the sins of idolatry, fornication, sexual perversion, and many, many others. Yes, I was born gay. But that’s not how God made me. There’s a very distinct difference.

           His explanation corroborated what I have come to discover in the last couple weeks as I’ve read Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church from the Counterpoints series. Author and editor Preston Sprinkle gathered four prominent Christian authors, scholars, and theologians to discuss this issue – two for and two against. I will not go into great detail of what these authors debate and discuss, mainly for the sake of page and time, but also because this issue is not anywhere near as complicated as it seems.

           All four of the contributing authors to the Two Views book have used the following Bible verses/passages as the foundation of their arguments:

1.)   The creation story in Genesis 1 and 2.

2.)  Genesis 19:4-11 (Sodom & Gomorrah)

3.) Leviticus 18:22 & 20:13

4.) 1 Corinthians 6:9-11

5.) 2 Corinthians 5:17

6.) Romans 1:18-32, emphasis on verses 26-28

7.) 1 Timothy 1:9-10

Those authors have also drawn from extra-Biblical material such as the writings of Philo, a Jewish historian who was a contemporary of the apostle Paul; the Apocrypha; the writings of Saint Augustine; and various other books – most written in the last 50 years – on sociology, sexuality and anthropology in the ancient world.

Here’s an example of one of one of the arguments for the church’s endorsement of homosexuality. One of Two Views’ contributors, Megan Defranza argues that there were many people in Biblical times that were born with no distinct male or female genitalia or other defining sexual characteristics. These “intersex individuals” were often referred to as eunuchs by the people of that time, and many of them were used as sex slaves. Megan claims that Genesis 1 is “…a theological account describing creation in broad categories, not an exact scientific inventory of all of God’s good creatures.” She goes on to say that Adam and Eve were not the exclusive, ideal models for all of man and womankind. They were, rather, just the broad categories; that the birth of eunuchs and other such of types of intersex people prove that God would welcome the church’s acceptance of gays, lesbians and transgenders since they have been born that way, and their sexual desires are natural to them. She claims that God was not condemning the eunuchs and other similar people in those verses/passages I listed above. Those condemnations were for the ones who had turned deliberately turned away from God to worship idols and indulge their sinful lusts.

There’s a lot more detail to Megan’s argument, especially regarding the eunuchs and their forced sexual slavery to their male masters, but it’s not worth going into here. The other three contributing authors give similar arguments, citing external sources in addition to scripture, to support their particular view. Wesley Hill and Stephen Holmes, the two that are opposed to the church’s condoning of homosexuality and gay marriage, give the stronger of the four arguments. Two Views opens with Megan’s and William Loader’s essays (the other author who falls on the affirming and open acceptance side of this debate), but by the time I reached the end of their arguments, I already knew which side of this issue I was going to fall on.

Wesley Hill and Stephen Holmes – as well as Pastor Sjostrom – present a much stronger, sounder case for why the Christian church, no matter the denomination, should be condemning ALL forms of homosexuality as clearly as God does. My own Bible reading and prayer showed me this after only a few weeks. I don’t really need to read all the other books on this topic to know the truth. To be completely honest, I had a pretty good idea of what the end of this journey would look like before I even started it. All the verses from Genesis, Leviticus, Romans, 1st and 2nd Corinthians, and 1st Timothy that deal with this specific issue are quite clear. It is stated over and over: homosexuality is a sin in the eyes of God. Paul stated it best in 1 Corinthians 6:9-11:

“Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of our Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.”

That word “effeminate” in the KJV is translated from the original Greek word that Paul used: arsenokoitai. This is a compound word: arsen – male; koite – bed. “Male bedders”, in other words; those men who sleep with other men. In the NIV translation, the word “effeminate” is replaced with the phrase “men who sleep with other men”. The only other passage that Paul uses that word is in 1 Timothy 1:8-10 (NKJV):

“But we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully, knowing this: that the law is not made for a righteous person, but for the lawless and insubordinate, for the ungodly and for sinners, for the unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, for fornicators, for sodomites, for kidnappers, for liars, for perjurers, and if there is any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine…”

The meaning of these two passages is quite clear: those that practice any or all of those sins listed will not inherit the kingdom of God. They are not true believers and followers of Christ. And thus, any church that not only allows its homosexual members to remain in their sin, but also performs gay marriage, is not a true church of God.

And such were some of you.

God has commanded those that follow Him and declare His name to turn from their wickedness and be transformed. Those that believe on His name and repent of their sins will no longer practice those sins listed in the passages I quoted above. That’s the meaning of the phrase, “…and such were some of you.” Well, I have definitely been transformed. I can feel the Holy Spirit working in me. And, because of that, I have no other choice. If I am to be faithful to my Lord and Creator, if I surrender myself completely to His will, I must take a vow to turn away from my sin nature. I cannot indulge in the “lusts of the flesh”, as Paul says in Romans, if I am to call myself a true Christian. I am now a child of God, and His will alone must govern all I say and do.

But, even more important than those passages I listed and quoted above, is the book of Genesis, chapter two. God created Adam first and then He decided it wasn’t good for man to be alone. So God made the woman out of Adam’s rib, and he called her ‘Eve”. Then, in verse twenty-four, God said, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.” This chapter, more than any other passage in the Bible, clearly and explicitly demonstrates what God had intended from the very beginning. The only natural desire of the flesh was for the opposite sex: man for woman and woman for man. That was God’s original plan.

Unfortunately for us, Adam and Eve did not resist the serpent’s temptation to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. After the Fall, their perfect, pure natures were corrupted by sin, and that corruption was passed unto their children, and their children’s children. Part of that corruption was the perversion of the natural, normal sexual desire. Men lusted after men and women for women. Even though the subsequent passages in Genesis which describe mankind’s deplorable state before the Great Flood never state it specifically, it is not unreasonable to assume that more than just homosexuality was a problem. Bestiality, pedophilia, rape and incest were very likely abundant among the first few generations of man, as well as the worship of false idols and complete rejection of God. Why else would God have felt the need to punish his creation by wiping them from the face of the Earth, save for Noah and his family?

As the old saying goes, ‘God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve’. I’ve always hated that pithy, snarky retort whenever I had to defend my sexuality to anyone who tried to tell me I was living in sin. But it’s true. God created only Adam and Eve; not Adam and Steve; not Melissa and Eve; not Adam, Eve, and some other non-gender, non-binary person.

Just Adam and Eve.

Man and woman were joined in holy matrimony and, until the Fall, they lived in perfect peace and union with their Lord and Creator. Anything that deviates from that original, holy standard that God still demands of His children today, is a sin. That includes homosexuality, bestiality, pedophilia, incest, idolatry and devil worship, to name a few. Anyone that willfully practices or engages in any of those things and does not repent cannot call himself a true believer in Christ. Nor can any church that not only openly endorses homosexuality but also performs gay marriage can call themselves a true church of Christ.

So then, what now? If I accept that my sexuality is a byproduct of my sin nature, and that God, in fact, did not make me this way, how can I best serve Him? I’m still gay. That hasn’t changed. (And, yes, I’m sure. I’m watching last week’s episode of The Resident as I write this. Matt Czuchry and Manish Dayal are among the best male eye candy on TV right now.) I still desire a physical relationship with another man. (Either of the aforementioned actors would be especially nice.) But that desire – as well as the act – is a sin. God has made that clear in his Word. After some more talk with Pastor Sjostrom, I finally came to an answer – or, at least, part of one.

 - 3 -

I mistakenly assumed that after I asked Christ into my heart, after I surrendered myself to God, that my sin nature would be transformed. I thought what many torn, conflicted gay Christians and their family have thought: with enough prayer, genuine repentance, and strong faith I would no longer be a homosexual. God would change my unnatural desire, and I would be sexually attracted to women instead of men. I would throw out all the symbols of my gay pride that I had collected over the years – t-shirts, bracelets, baseball caps, the rainbow colored Apple watch bands – and I would begin my new life as a heterosexual man. 2 Corinthians 5:17: “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” Yes, it would be hard at first, but God and I would make this work, glory hallelujah amen!

But that’s not how salvation works. Yes, there was a transformation, but not quite the kind that I was expecting. It’s hard to put into words exactly what I felt in the weeks and months following that quiet prayer on that car ride home from work late the night of September 17, 2020. I knew for sure that something was different. To begin with, there was an almost instant peace and calm that settled over my entire being. All the anxiety, the fear, and the worry about the state of the world around me that had been plaguing me for many weeks melted away. In its place was a quiet, firm assurance that, no matter what happened from then on, I was in the hands of God. He would take care of me.

And then, in the days and weeks that followed that moment of salvation, I began to feel more than just spiritual peace and tranquility. The first was a hunger – an insatiable, ravenous desire to read my Bible. I had only the app on my iPad, and I started with Genesis 1. Every night, before bed, I would read two or three chapters. And then I would pray. It was awkward and nothing like the prayers that I heard time and again from my dad or my teachers in high school or my pastor back then. I stumbled over my words, I repeated myself, I kept forgetting what I wanted to say. And I still felt weird doing it. It was like I was talking to myself. But I kept praying nonetheless.

Gradually, as Christmas loomed closer and closer, and the more I read my Bible and talked to God, I felt something stronger inside of me. But it wasn’t anything physical, like an emotion. It was…something else, something in my soul. I imagined this new feeling as a few drops of red ink falling into a bowl of clear water. At first, the drops fall straight down, coloring only a little bit of the water. But then the ink begins to slowly spread, crimson tendrils that stretch outwards, eventually turning the whole water into the color of blood. That’s what it felt like was happening inside of me. My soul – the very thing that made me me was being changed from the inside out. And it felt damn good!

It was after my Christmas vacation, after ten days of rest and relaxation with my family in Idaho, that I noticed an even bigger change. When I returned to the daily grind of my two jobs, I realized that my whole attitude – and, by extension, my whole outlook on life – had been transformed. I was no longer the angry, anxious, frustrated, fearful man that was always pissed about something – usually the people who were my customers. Before, I was short tempered, impatient, always inwardly complaining whenever those around me were being difficult or annoying me in some way. Now, however, I was at peace. The difference in my new attitude from the old was as glaring as night from day. I greeted my customers with a smile. It was no longer an effort for me to be patient with the difficult ones. Nor did I feel the need to rant and rage on social media about the problems of the world, as I had been doing practically non-stop before I became saved.

It was like being wrapped inside joy, as if joy was something tangible – like a big, soft, warm blanket fresh from the dryer. I had to constantly check my reflection because I was sure I had a giant, stupid grin on my face all day long. And that feeling only got stronger the more I continued to read my Bible – now an actual book that I had bought from Amazon – and pray. That, too, was getting better. I no longer stumbled over my words or forgot what I wanted to say. The hunger to know God, to build a new relationship with my Creator, overshadowed everything else in my life. I lost interest in many of the things that had once taken up all my time, like watching TV or playing video games. All I wanted to do every night when I got home from a busy day was to open God’s Word and keep reading.

But there was one thing that didn’t change during all of that wonderful transformation. I’m still gay. The desire for that sin is still there, as strong and lustful as ever. Everything else about me seems different. I am, indeed, a new creature in Christ. So why am I still gay? Why is this particular thorn still lodged firmly deep in my flesh?

I still don’t have an answer. But I do have a theory. The transformation of the new believer in Christ is not like wiping the old operating system of your ten year old iMac. With a computer you can install a whole new operating system that’s free of the bugs, viruses and malware that plagued the old system. The hardware is still the same old hardware, but the software is brand new. Your computer has been transformed. It performs and operates like a new machine.

But we humans are not machines. We are creatures born of the Fall. Being saved in Christ has made us like new, but the old self – the old, corrupt nature – is still there. The old operating system hasn’t been wiped away. Rather, the new OS is now installed, and the two systems are at war with one another. Why is that, I wonder? Why doesn’t God simply transform our sin nature by wiping it way when He fills us with the Holy Spirit? Wouldn’t that be easier – and more complete – than  forcing us to constantly battle our old selves in order to remain faithful and obedient to Him?

The honest answer is, I don’t know.

What I do know is that God, in His infinite wisdom, has chosen not to remove this particular thorn in my flesh. I am still gay.

           The thorn in my flesh. Yeah, that phrase sounds familiar. In fact, it’s been rolling around in the back of my brain for several weeks now.

In 2 Corinthians 12:7-10, Paul writes of the “thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan sent to buffet me.” Those four verses, more than any other Bible passages that I’ve read and also read about, have continued to echo within me ever since the beginning of this journey. Many pastors and scholars agree that that the thorn Paul speaks of was of a spiritual nature, not a physical. Paul says that he “…besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me.”

The thorn in my flesh.

What if I am in the same seat as Paul? What if my sexuality is the ‘thorn’ in my own flesh?

I think that part of the reason that God doesn’t just snap his fingers and wipe away our old self is because, without those old, sinful desires and temptations, we wouldn’t continually come back to Him for mercy, grace and forgiveness. It might have taken a little longer for me to surrender if the outside world hadn’t melted down last year, but I have no doubt now that God has always been working in my life, and He wants my love, worship and obedience. My homosexuality is a reminder from Him that I have a choice: I can give in to my sin nature and indulge my own desires, or I can turn from the flesh, take up my cross daily, and follow Him.

God knows us better than we know ourselves. He knows our sin nature, and He knows that when times are good, when everything is going our way, we often forget Him – just as the Israelites did over and over in the Old Testament. We get wrapped up in our daily lives, turn away from Him, and give our worship to false idols instead; or we just pay Him our weekly rituals and sacrifice on Sunday, and then put aside our Bibles until the following week. But it’s during the times of adversity, when God allows the trials and tribulations of life to afflict us, that we come to Him. We seek Him because He is our only source of comfort and peace. The storms in our lives remind us that God alone can save us, can heal us. Our afflictions draw us closer to Him. And, if we remain faithful to Him, there is much reward for our devotion and service. When the storm has passed, we often find a rainbow.

The rainbow was God’s covenant with Noah and his descendants that God would never again destroy the world with a flood. In our modern world the homosexual revolution of fifty years ago took the rainbow as a symbol of pride and diversity. When I entered my adult life as an out and proud gay man, I, too, adopted the rainbow as a symbol of pride in myself. I vowed to live my life on my terms, and I wouldn’t be cowered or ashamed into silence about who I was, of what I had been born as. But, of course, I have renounced all of that since becoming a new child of God. It is NOT my life, but His as a gift to me. I live now in complete service to Him, and Him alone.

But I’m not quite ready to throw away my rainbow bracelet that I wear on my right wrist every day. It is still a symbol to me – and to everyone I meet in daily life – but not the one that it used to be. I have found a new place beneath the rainbow created by God in the aftermath of that flood in Genesis. The peace and reconciliation I have long sought has been found at last, and the rainbow is a symbol of both my old life and my new one in God’s service. I don’t find that conflicting at all, just as I have no problem calling myself a gay Christian. Until such time as God, in his perfect timing and wisdom, decides to change my unnatural desire completely, I will always be a gay Christian, and the rainbow will be a sign of my personal covenant with Him.

The process of reconciling this issue, the spiritual traveling and soul searching that I have done over the last few months, has shown me clearly that God is my Lord and Savior. He has allowed this affliction so that I would do the work that I needed to reconcile what appeared to be a crisis of faith. I wouldn’t have experienced personal growth in my life – and my faith – without this conflict and pain. Yes, it has been painful. Peeling back the faded scars of old wounds wasn’t not all pleasant. I had to go back to that fifteen-year-old kid and have a long talk with him. (See section 5 of this post.) I wrote letters to my parents and my three brothers, apologizing for the way I treated them all those years ago. I have recognized how selfishly I have been living my adult life, and the pride of my old nature has screamed fiercely whenever I bow my knee and my heart every morning in prayer. There is now a fight within me – the old nature vs. the new self – that will never let up until I die. And, sometimes, that fight will be painful. And yes, I already know that there are times when I will fail, when I will give in to the temptation to break my new vow with God. But that failure is not as important to God as whether or not I stay in the fight. And I will stay. I’m in this for the long haul, and I know without a shred of doubt that God is on my side. He wants me to succeed.

Hallelujah, amen!

 - 4 -

           Most of you have seen my post on Facebook from three days ago. My only answer from God to this twenty-four-year-old conflict has been a call to celibacy. Until such time as he chooses to change my sin nature, to change my unnatural desire into a natural one, I have made the following vow to Him:

           I take a vow of celibacy before God; that I have surrendered my life and my will unto Him; that I will not give in to the temptations of my sinful flesh; that I recognize my homosexual desire as a sin in His eyes, an abomination caused by the Fall; that He has saved my soul from eternal damnation, and I owe him nothing less than my whole heart, soul and mind.

           I take this vow on the 3rd of February, 2021.

           Amen.

 - 5 -

           I read a long time ago – probably in a textbook somewhere in college – that one of the tools therapists and psychiatrists use in their counseling of patients is to have their patients write a letter to their past selves. As I mentioned earlier in this post, I wrote letters to my family to apologize for how I had wronged them in the past. After some more thought and deliberation I decided to write one more letter, this time to that fifteen year old kid that used to be me.

           At first, I thought this a stupid idea. I mean, how much more clichéd can one get? Plus, I’ve already treaded into dangerously melodramatic waters in this post. Is yet one more emotional, sappy passage needed?

           Ehhhh…yes and no. Turns out, I had a lot more to say to myself than I thought at first, and, son-of-a-gun, I did feel remarkably better afterwards. Guess there was some genuine, therapeutic value to this little exercise after all.

           So…here it is.

 Hello.

It's been a long time.

Yes, I see you. You've been there all along, but only recently have I begun to really see you. You've been with me my whole adult life, affecting me, shaping me in ways I never realized until now. I thought I left you behind when I left high school. At various times in my life since, I've judged you, shunned you, tried to erase you, or just simply ignored you. I could never understand why you never had the courage to speak up, to ask for help. There were a few adults – or even your friends – who would have very likely sympathized and tried to help you. All you had to do was say something! But you didn't. You kept your secret, protecting it, guarding it like Gollum with his precious ring. I was the one who eventually had to reveal the secret to those around me when I was old enough and no longer ashamed of what I was.

           But now I realize that instead of judging you and blaming you, there's one thing that I should have done long ago. I never said, “Thank you.” Thank you for giving me the strength and courage to step into the world as a confident, independent adult. It was because of you, what you went through silently as a teenager, that I developed the strength and resolve to live my truth as an adult. It was because of you that I knew what I wanted in life. It was never my desire to just go with the flow, to blend into the crowd and do whatever everyone else was doing. I did my own thing. And yes, it would have been better if I had been living that truth within God's will, but God, in His infinite wisdom, decided not to work His will just yet. He chose to wait while I forged my own path.

           Part of me wishes that I could go back in time and be the adult that you needed. I would have embraced you, told you that you weren't a mistake; that God loves you just the way you are, including being gay. And, deep down inside, you knew that you were loved. Your parents told you that every day. But you always had that sliver of doubt in the back of your mind.

“Would you still love me if you knew my secret? Would you still accept me if I was gay?”

I, the adult looking back at you across the gulf of years between us, know the answer to that is a resounding “Yes! They have always loved you, no matter what!”

           Part of me also wonders how our life would have been different if you had reached out to the one person that understood what you were going through; the one that knew your pain – and your secret. It was He that made you, after all. What I can see so clearly now is that it never occurred to you to reach out to God. You only knew Him through the church, through your teachers, through your parents, through all the endless rules, and restrictions, and demands that they all placed on you. That's what you rebelled against. God, to you, was just a system, an institution that governed every corner of your life. That institution would never understand your secret, would never accept you for the real you.

           But He was there all along. He was there on those nights when you cried yourself to sleep. You were struggling to understand your pain, to understand the turmoil inside you, but you didn't have the words or the wisdom or the experience to fully realize it all. All that you knew was anger, frustration and fear. But God understood you, and He was there in the darkness, crying with you.

           I want so badly to be there now, to wrap you in my arms and wipe away your tears and tell you that everything will be okay. Because it will be. You can’t see it now, but things will get better. You will find a way through this, and you will emerge on the other side with a strength and resolve that you never knew you had within you. The rest of your life is an as-yet-unwritten map of joys and blessings, failures and setbacks, triumphs and successes that will make all of this suffering worthwhile. You will know happiness that you couldn’t dream of – most of it found within the family that you don’t understand or get along with now. (There are 10 nieces and nephews that think you’re the greatest uncle ever, for example.) God has a plan for you, and, like the father of the prodigal son, He will be there with open arms when you finally come back home. He will accept you, just as you are.

           But all of that is for later. For now, just know this: the storm will pass, and there will be peace.

           You will find your rainbow.

[emunenen]

Makao Bora

New Post has been published on https://wp.me/paK8na-3Vg

Area Code - Kayole Estate Nairobi

It is one of the most popular and populous estates in Nairobi. With a population of over half a million, Kayole leads among its peers like Dandora and Umoja estates, which offer affordable housing to the city’s rising population.

The estate located in Nairobi’s Eastlands area is, however, famous for all the wrong reasons. In the past, several incidents of crime, notably kidnapping, have been linked to the estate thus catapulting it to the limelight. In addition, different outlawed gangs operating in the area have muddied its name and clouded its many economic activities.

despite this, Kayole’s dense population is its strength. This has made it a business hub as exemplified by various banks and microfinance organisations that have opened their branches in the estate. Among them are Cooperative, Family and Equity banks all located along the estate’s main road. Kenya Commercial Bank also seems to be keen to tap the market if their Sales Centre and ATM machine installed recently are anything to go by.

Most of the popular small businesses include food kiosks, shops, groceries, money transfer services and second-hand clothes trading. Many of the roads in the estate are jammed with these traders, who jostle for space with pedestrians and matatus.

Talking of matatus, Kayole has the highest number of public service vehicles in Nairobi. Estimated to be about 800, these vehicles have been blamed for causing major traffic jams on Jogoo Road during peak hours.

  When it comes to housing, Kayole is a favourite for those seeking decent and affordable houses. Most of the houses are storied with the tallest going up to fifth floor. They are closely packed, giving the estate an aura of congestion.

Nonetheless, rents are affordable. Bed-sitters go for Sh2,000 to Sh3,000 while single bedroom houses go for between Sh5,000 and Sh6,000.

Rent for a two-bedroom house ranges between Sh8,000 and Sh10,000. Lately, rent has increased significantly as many developers put up spacious and modern houses. Noteworthy also, Kayole is home to numerous churches and bars scattered in every alley in the estate.

These two institutions jostle for attention from residents especially on weekends. However, on who wins, your guess is as good as mine.

    In the education circles, every year, Kayole claims a stake of national fame in Kenya Certificate of Primary Education. New Light Primary, one of the private schools here produces some of the best students.

Very soon, the area is set to transform as businesspeople and property developers strive to explore opportunities offered by Kayole and adjacent estates like Komarock, Umoja, Jacaranda and Donholm.

A Sh103 million shopping mall will be constructed in the area. Dubbed East Gate, the Good Life Mall, the shopping complex will be the first one of its kind in Eastlands.

According to developers, the mall will have a supermarket hall, a banking hall, four ATM lobbies, 30 franchise shops, a cinema hall, a 150-capacity parking space and a food court consisting of eight restaurants.

        Read original article on Standard

[hudsonespie]

IMO And Arctic States Slammed For Endorsing Continued Arctic Pollution

The Clean Arctic Alliance slammed the decision by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) to approve a ban ridden with of loopholes on the use and carriage of heavy fuel oil in the Arctic (HFO), saying that it would leave the Arctic, its Indigenous communities and its wildlife facing the risk of an HFO spill for another decade.

The ban was approved during a virtual meeting of the IMO’s Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC 75), despite widespread opposition from Indigenous groups, NGOs, and in a statement released this week, the Catholic Church. At the IMO’s PPR 7 subcommittee meeting in February 2020, the IMO agreed on the draft before sending it to MEPC.

Image Credits: imoarcticsummit.org | JONATHAN EASTLAND / AJAX / Alamy

Following PPR7, the Clean Arctic Alliance called the inclusion of loopholes – in the form of exemptions and waivers – in the draft regulation “outrageous” as they mean an HFO ban would not come into effect until mid-2029. With the ban now scheduled to go forward for adoption at MEPC 76, the Clean Arctic Alliance – a coalition of 21 non-profit organisations, called for waivers to not be granted by Arctic coastal states and for the deadline beyond which exemptions would not apply to be brought forward.

“By taking the decision to storm ahead with the approval of this outrageous ban, the IMO and its member states must take collective responsibility for failing to put in place true protection of the Arctic, Indigenous communities and wildlife from the threat of heavy fuel oil”, said Dr Sian Prior, Lead Advisor to the Clean Arctic Alliance. “In its current form, the ban will achieve only a minimal reduction in HFO use and carriage by ships in the Arctic in mid-2024, when it comes into effect. It is now crucial that Arctic coastal states do not resort to issuing waivers to their flagged vessels”.

Heavy fuel oil is a dirty and polluting fossil fuel that powers shipping throughout the world’s oceans – accounting for 80% of marine fuel used worldwide. Around 80% of marine fuel currently carried in the Arctic is HFO; over half by vessels flagged to non-Arctic states – countries that have little if any connection to the Arctic.

As Arctic heating drives sea ice melt and opens up Arctic waters further, even larger non-Arctic state-flagged vessels running on HFO are likely to divert to Arctic waters in search of shorter journey times. This, combined with an increase in Arctic state-flagged vessels targeting previously non-accessible resources, will greatly increase the risks of HFO spills in areas that are difficult to reach, and that lack any significant oil spill containment equipment.

According to recent analysis by the International Council on Clean Transportation, as currently drafted, the regulation approved today will only reduce the use of HFO by 16% and the carriage of HFO as fuel by 30% when it takes effect in July 2024, and will allow 74% of Arctic shipping to continue with business as usual. The analysis found that between July 2024 and July 2029, when the ban becomes fully effective, the amount of HFO used and carried in the Arctic is likely to increase as shipping in the Arctic increases, and as newer ships replace older vessels and are able to take advantage of the exemption or change flag and seek a waiver from the ban.

“The ban that the IMO has approved today will mean that a full three-quarters of the ships using HFO today will be eligible for an exemption to the ban, because their fuel tanks are ‘protected’, or because they can apply to an Arctic coastal state for a waiver from the ban”, continued Prior. “As a result, the use of HFO in the Arctic is likely to continue to grow until the ban takes full effect in 2029 – so not only does the ban not sufficiently protect the Arctic, it’s actually contributing to a greater exposure to the risks associated with the use of heavy fuel oil.”

“The Clean Arctic Alliance urges IMO Member States to seriously consider how the ban can be strengthened ahead of formal adoption next year, and for individual states to examine domestic options for providing the protection required for the Arctic from the risks of HFO use and carriage, such as Norway’s recent proposal to ban HFO from the waters around Svalbard”, she added.

Already banned in Antarctic waters, if HFO is spilled in cold polar waters, it breaks down slowly, proving almost impossible to clean up. A HFO spill would have long-term devastating effects on Arctic Indigenous communities, livelihoods and the marine ecosystems they depend upon. HFO is also a greater source of harmful emissions of air pollutants, such as sulphur oxide, and particulate matter, including black carbon, than alternative fuels such as distillate fuel and liquefied natural gas (LNG). When emitted and deposited on Arctic snow or ice, the climate warming effect of black carbon is up to five times more than when emitted at lower latitudes, such as in the tropics.

“Today’s International Maritime Organization decision is a massive missed opportunity to provide urgently needed protection for the Arctic and Indigenous Peoples who rely on those waters. Even worse, today’s approval of the ban will inevitably cause widespread confusion, with the wider world assuming that a ban means ending HFO use in the Arctic when in fact, the IMO has put in place only a modest and likely temporary reduction in its use for the first ten years. We cannot wait ten years to stop HFO use in the Arctic. Ten years is simply too long to wait!”, said Mellisa Johnson, Director of the Bering Sea Elders Group, based in Alaska, who spoke, representing Pacific Environment, during the IMO meeting, during the presentation of a comment paper on the draft ban.

“The IMO’s decision to approve this weak HFO ban will force us to find other ways to protect the Arctic”, said Alexey Knizhnikov, Responsible Industry Programme Leader at WWF Russia. “In Russia, this kind of action is needed even more than in other Arctic regions, due to the huge increase in shipping traffic expected to occur in upcoming decades, and this year’s massive oil spill on Taymyr has highlighted the cost to nature of using oil-based fuels in the Arctic. There is a little room for optimism – in October 2020, Russia’s new national Arctic strategy was adopted, which priorities the switch from oil based fuels to alternatives in the Russian Arctic”.

Under the new regulations, five central Arctic coastal States – Russia, Norway, Denmark (Greenland), Canada and the United States – will have the option of issuing waivers to their own flagged ships while they are operating in their own waters.The regulation is not flag-neutral, and it will create a two-tier system of environmental protection and enforcement in the Arctic, along with lower standards and negative environmental consequences in the Arctic’s territorial seas and exclusive economic zones. This version of the ban could also potentially lead to transboundary pollution.

‘All Arctic states need to eliminate the use of HFO by 2024 to ensure an HFO ban fulfils its original intent. The food security and livelihoods of local and Indigenous communities is dependent upon the success of this ban to protect them from pollution and spills. Any benefits of the IMO decision today will be cancelled out by projected increases in shipping, leaving Indigenous and local communities facing larger risks and impacts in the future,’ said Andrew Dumbrille, Senior Sustainable Shipping Specialist at WWF Canada. “The Arctic Council should build on the example of Norway’s proposal for Svalbard, assert its Arctic stewardship role, and scale up the ambition of the IMO ban within the jurisdictions of Arctic countries, without waivers and exemptions. Such commitment should be reflected in the Ministerial Declaration concluding the Icelandic chairmanship in May 2021”, said Peter Winsor, director of WWF’s Arctic Programme.

“An HFO spill in our Arctic waters, where our people have survived and depended on for thousands of years, would devastate our subsistence way of life. The sensitive marine wildlife we depend on for food, such as seals, whales, walrus, fish and birds, would be devastated. We have a major concern that the use of waivers will create a risk of transboundary HFO pollution in the Bering Straits region where my family lives between Russia and Alaska USA,” said Verner Wilson III, Senior Oceans Campaigner at Friends of the Earth US, a Siberian Yup’ik Inuit from Alaska.

“Instead of an effective and ambitious ban on use of heavy fuel oil in Arctic waters, the IMO has committed Arctic shipping to a course of action that may lead to a devastating spill of the world’s dirtiest fuels,” said Sarah Bobbe, Ocean Conservancy’s Arctic Program manager. “The IMO’s lackluster decision is beyond belief considering it has already been ten years since the Arctic Council identified an oil spill as the biggest threat from ships, with heavy fuel oil by far the most detrimental, to Arctic waters.”

“A ‘ban’ that affects just a quarter of ships is not a ban at all”, said John Maggs, Senior Policy Advisor at Seas at Risk. “The IMO’s new regulation fails to treat all flags equally, allowing the five central Arctic coastal states to issue waivers that will allow all ships flying their flag to continue to use HFO out to the furthest stretches of their EEZs, thus rewarding their own-flagged vessels, while other ships must comply with the regulation. This is regardless of ship type, size, or age, or whether or not they have protected fuel tanks.”

“We are also concerned that issuing waivers will relax international environmental standards in waters of the Arctic coastal States. The Law of the Sea Convention requires that flag states adopt regulations for the prevention, reduction, and control of pollution from ships flying their flags that must at least have the same effect as international standards. Because waivers would weaken the protection of the marine environment in these areas, it raises important legal questions”, added Maggs.

“It is important to recognise that issuing waivers to ships to exempt them from the requirements of the ban is not mandatory, the central Arctic coastal states have a choice. But if waivers are issued there should be full transparency and reporting,” said Danielle Fest Grabiel, Wildlife Team Lead, US office of the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA). “We urge the five central coastal Arctic states to choose not to issue waivers in order to ensure that the use and carriage of HFO in the Arctic ends by 2024.”

“The Government of Iceland should take note of the leadership demonstrated by Norway in its proposal to ban heavy fuel oil from the waters around Svalbard by putting forward a plan for similar protection in Iceland’s waters”, said Árni Finnsson, chair of the Iceland Nature Conservation Association (INCA). “Arctic nations are facing unprecedented changes in the marine environment. There is not much time to act and Iceland must forge ahead with a total ban on HFO within Icelandic waters, and along with other Nordic countries must take a strong stand within the IMO to speed up the adoption and entry into force of a ban on HFO in Arctic waters.”

“Grøn Omstilling (Green Transition Denmark) recommends Denmark and Greenland to introduce high port fees for ships using HFO in Arctic waters, thereby motivating companies to use the less polluting distillate fuel, which will better protect the Arctic population and unique ecosystems against global warming, air pollution, and catastrophic oil spills”, said Kare Press-Kristensen, senior adviser at Green Transition Denmark.

“This is yet another sad day for the Arctic”, said Sigurd Enge, Manager Shipping, Marine and Arctic Issues, Bellona. “The Arctic environment is threatened from all sides, from climate change, toxic contamination, plastic pollution, oil exploration and other extractive industries. What the Arctic needs now is better protection and bold politicians. There are no technological barriers, no shortage of alternatives to heavy fuel oil, and the shipping industry needs in any case ust switch from fossil fuels to fulfill the IMO’s own Greenhouse gas – strategy and Arctic waters are the place to start. The Norwegian government’s proposal to ban HFO in waters around Svalbard proves that this is feasible. The coming decade is crucial to the future health of the arctic environment and the IMO’s decision today is just not acceptable.”

Press Release

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from Storage Containers https://www.marineinsight.com/shipping-news/imo-and-arctic-states-slammed-for-endorsing-continued-arctic-pollution/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[violetsystems]

On a cold morning back in January, I walked along the railroad viaduct that buffers 16th Street in Pilsen. Today the embankment is best known for its two miles of colorful murals, primarily between Halsted and Western.

You wouldn’t know it from those artworks, but the spot where the bridge crosses Halsted Street was also the site of one of the bloodiest labor uprisings in Chicago history.

I first read about the Battle of the Viaduct in Union Made, Heath W. Carter’s history of the social justice movement in Chicago’s churches. It described three days of violence in the city’s working-class immigrant neighborhoods during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, or the Great Upheaval, which took place in various industrial cities across the country.

In Chicago, 30 people were killed by police and militia. Two hundred men, women, and children were injured. Of every American city that participated in the strike, Chicago claimed the most casualties.

The Battle of the Viaduct — or as it’s sometimes called, the Battle of Halsted — describes one particular clash on July 26, 1877, the final and deadliest of three days of fighting. Armed forces shot at thousands of striking workers and supporters who’d gathered on Halsted Street near the bridge, killing several of them.

When I read about the skirmish, I’d already spent six years living in Pilsen, four of them on Halsted and 18th Street, where part of the melee was fought. But I’d never heard of the Battle of the Viaduct. How could I have been sleeping, quite literally, on the site of one of the bloodiest days in Chicago history?

That’s how I ended up walking 16th Street, searching those murals for a sign of the battle. Starting in the early ’80s, Latino activists began using the wall as a canvas for protest art. Now, you’ll find everything from literary references to heartfelt memorials. At 16th and Newberry Avenue is a somber portrait of Marlen Ochoa-Lopez, the pregnant teenager murdered last year after being lured into a Southwest Side home. West of Carpenter Street, ghostly figures painted by Viktor Valášek honor the 100th anniversary of the Eastland Disaster, the catastrophic shipwreck that killed 844 Chicagoans.

But there are no memorials for the Chicagoans who died at the viaduct in 1877. The closest thing is on a stretch of wall on Morgan Street at 15th: a foursome of railroad workers swinging hammers in the sun, part of a tableau depicting 19th-century life in what’s now University Village.

[brandilovevip]

Healing America – Is It Possible?

Maybe but doubtful.

I want to believe that We The People are rational & capable of healing.

But  I’m convinced this can only happen if we push the media, politicians and other puppet masters out of the discussion and out of influence. And this can only happen if both sides agree that The Constitution, The Bill of Rights and our Representative Republic remain the cornerstones of our nation.

Some, or perhaps many will say that “maybe but doubtful” is a cynical perspective. Perhaps it is. Unfortunately however, history tells me that it's also more likely to be accurate.

When contemplating if and how our nation can heal in the aftermath of Charlottesville, it's important to keep in mind these three things:

1.  Our History

2.  The Current Division

3.  Healing is Based in Compromise

OUR HISTORY:

It's no secret that America is hurting. Regardless of what news outlet you tune in to, there is extreme tension.

A simple glance at a U.S. electoral map from Nov. 8 shows a striking red/blue divide that in most cases separates big cities and coastal areas from the rest of America.

As angry protests rage in the streets, it’s easy to conclude that we’ve never been so irreconcilably divided. Are Americans even in a mood to heal?

The truth however is that throughout our history we have found ourselves at odds with each other again and again. The question is:  Did we heal the wounds that divided our nation previously? 

I would suggest the answer is:  Not really.

On April 9, 1865, Confederate General,  Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant in Appomattox, Va. The surrender ended the bitter four year long Civil War, and eight months later the USA adopted the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which outlawed slavery nationwide.

Our "fairytale" is that we began healing on that very day in April 1865.

University of Richmond historian Edward Ayers states:  “When you think about the stories we like to tell, we like to tell the story about Appomattox;  Lee and Grant shaking hands, Grant sending those Southern boys home with their guns and horses, and Lee handing his sword and so forth.”

And then everything was unicorns & rainbows.. the lions laid down with the lambs and we were one big happy family.

Not even close.

Abraham Lincoln, whose statues are currently being defaced across the country, had, of course, pushed for unity.  Lincoln's second inaugural address, delivered on March 4, 1865, as the war wound down, concluded with this plea:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Only six weeks later, and six days after the war’s end, Lincoln was assassinated.

While Lee’s surrender and Grant’s gracious response were indeed significant, the rebuilding of the South called The Reconstruction was plagued by a 12-year, bloody guerrilla war waged against Southern blacks showing that the violence of the Civil War wasn’t done playing out.

Were there any real moments of genuine healing and unity after the Civil War?

Sort of.

The moment occurred between soldiers.

In a touching & powerful moment in 1938, during the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, a handful of surviving Civil War veterans, dressed in suits and fedoras, reached across a rock wall to shake hands for newsreel cameras.

“That was seen as the great reconciliation of North and South,” Ayers said. Nonetheless, a look at voting patterns after the Civil War showed that southerners voted for Democrats and “against the North” for more than a century. “As the saying went, ‘People voted as they had shot.’"

Then, a century later, came the Civil Rights era... 100 YEARS LATER!

That's right...  100 years after the Civil War, in the mid 1960s, a decade of expanding rights for African Americans culminated in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The measures, guided by President Lyndon B. Johnson, were approved just months after the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who had pushed for expanded civil rights. They effectively began the transformation of a century long voting pattern in the South, turning whites against the Democratic Party and, in the 1960s, stirring intense passions against African American civil rights leaders.

And while Lyndon Johnson was a civil rights hero .. he was also a racist.

Lyndon Johnson, a DEMOCRAT said the word “nigger” a lot.

According to an MSNBC ... yes MSNCB piece: "In Senate cloakrooms and staff meetings, Johnson was practically a connoisseur of the word. According to Johnson biographer Robert Caro, Johnson would calibrate his pronunciations by region, using “nigra” with some southern legislators and “negra” with others. Discussing civil rights legislation with men like Mississippi DEMOCRAT James Eastland, who committed most of his life to defending white supremacy, he’d simply call it “the nigger bill.”

Then in 1957, Johnson would help get the bill passed, known to most as the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

Enter Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. King, an Atlanta preacher who rose to prominence in the late 1950s and who delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington, D.C., in 1963, was one of the key leaders of the movement, spearheading efforts for desegregation, voting rights and unionization.

While there are agitators on both sides of the political spectrum that seek to claim Dr. Martin Luther King Jr as their own, his message wasn't based in politics. It was centered in The Constitution and Faith... God.

The faith that he defended and helped refine was a sort of national creed based on what had come to be widely accepted, after many painful years, as the immutable truth in the Declaration of Independence; that all of us are created equal, and on the idea that Americans are united not by race or by a particular religious belief or ethnic origin, but by our devotion to the concepts of The Constitution and individual rights.

Dr. King carried his faith to the pulpit and the nation. “There is something wrong with our world, something fundamentally and basically wrong,” he told a Detroit congregation in 1954. “The great problem facing modern man,” he said, “is that . . . the means by which we live have outdistanced the spiritual ends for which we live. . . . The problem is with man himself and man’s soul.”

A Washington Times editorial stated this beautifully.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached to us as he knew we were as he knew he was; Flawed beings too often given to cruelty and selfishness, yet capable of being elevated to something higher by the power of divine love. For some, that may seem to be language for the church pew rather than the halls of government. But Dr. King showed that it was the kind of language that can also lead a nation to better itself, to renew its attention to the ideals on which it was founded, to proceed, however unevenly, toward equal justice under the law.

Unfortunately, we’ve heard precious little of it, if any, in our national political discourse over the past eight plus years.

“My friends,” Dr. King said in his Detroit sermon, “all I’m trying to say is that if we are to go forward today, we’ve got to go back and rediscover some mighty precious values that we’ve left behind. That’s the only way that we would be able to make of our world a better world, and to make of this world what God wants it to be. . . .”

On April 4, 1968, visiting Memphis to support striking sanitation workers, he was shot and killed at a local motel.

It has been 49 years since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. …have we healed?

I would contend things are at an all time low.

"I hope Trump is assassinated!" -  Missouri state Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal

“The point I was making was not that Grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn’t. But she is a typical white person…” — Barack Obama

“If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,’ if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s gonna be harder and that’s why I think it’s so important that people focus on voting on November 2.” — Barack Obama

“It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere…That’s the world! On which hope sits!” — Barack Obama quotes Rev. Wright

“…I’ve got two daughters. 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.” — Barack Obama

“ Elections have consequences and at the end of the day I won.” — Barack Obama

"We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. - Hillary Clinton

And then there is Donald Trump.  While I support him, voted for him. believe in his policies and love that he is exposing how deep  the swamp really is...  He's completely obnoxious and the worst public speaker I’ve seen in a long time. 

I refuse however to post Trump quotes because they are always taken out of context and used to make politically left points that don’t actually exist.

And now we have Charlottesville.

So... Have we healed?

No.

Can we?

Maybe.

Before we get to that however, you have to be willing to understand and appreciate what all those red counties understand to be true.

THE CURRENT DIVISION

It’s hard to be a parent tonight for a lot of us. You tell your kids, “Don’t be a bully.” You tell your kids, “Don’t be a bigot.” You tell your kids, “Do your homework and be prepared.” Then you have this outcome and you have people putting children to bed tonight. They’re afraid of breakfast. They’re afraid of “How do I explain this to my children?” I have Muslim friends who are texting me tonight saying, “Should I leave the country?” I have families of immigrants that are terrified tonight. . . .  This was a white-lash. This was a white-lash against a changing country. It was a white-lash against a black president in part, and that’s the part where the pain comes.

~ Van Jones  (on the Trump victory 2016)

It wasn't a whitelash Van... it was a left lash.

Those of us in the red counties are sick and tired of an increasingly radical left wing agenda being forced down out throats. We are tired of being labeled as racists, bigots, Islamophobes , homophopes and uneducated morons. We are tired of being force fed a liberal agenda that is at odds with our politics and faith.

Dr. Bill Perkins, in response to Charlottsville,  put it better than anyone when he stated : "When you violently shove your finger down your throat, vomit is usually the result. For the last eight years, the left has been shoving their radical agenda down the throat of America and what we are seeing today is the result."

We have got to focus on stopping the finger thrust of leftism or else we will never clean up the vomit. It will continue forever.

Racism is a real issue, and it must be eradicated.  AND  at the same time, what we saw in Charlottesville, was the result of a concerted effort of those who seek to benefit from chaos, and who seek to grab power out of the ruins of American culture: that is the ugly face of leftism and "The Swamp" which includes Democrats,  establishment Republicans, the mainstream media and leftist funded groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

The side on the left is far more powerful and dangerous that all of the white supremacy groups combined.

As Dr. Bill Perkins aptly put it,  "While neo-Nazis and white supremacists exist in the dark fringes of America and are roundly and regularly condemned by all sides, leftist Marxists are out in the open, enjoying the bully pulpit of the media and near universal celebration by the ignorant and the devious. If we fail to see leftism as the real driving force behind the racial turmoil in this country, then we will never truly solve the problem."

This current division is an issue of political ideals not race. It's the left that wants to advance a sickening fraud that this current division is about race.

I want to believe that We The People are rational & capable of healing.

But this can only happen if we push the media, politicians and other puppet masters out of the discussion and out of influence. AND this can only happen if both sides agree that The Constitution, The Bill of Rights and our Representative Republic remain the cornerstones of our nation.

HEALING IS BASED IN COMPROMISE

Last night I had a lengthy and fascinating interaction with a Twitter follower by the handle of @CBH94  that highlights the potential for healing as well as the significant challenges.  

The context of this discussion had to do with hate groups. Here is where my belief system diverges from my conservative roots. I wish that all of these groups were listed as terrorist groups or something similar and outlawed. This would include but not be limited to groups such as the KKK, Arian Nation, neo-Nazis, ANTIFA , CAIR , Muslim Brotherhood Black Lives Matter, Black Panthers etc.

They are all based on hate, violence, division & social unrest. All serve to divide along racial and or political lines. The challenge would obviously be impartially defining and labeling these groups.

Here are just a few of the exchanges:

It basically started with this:

https://twitter.com/CBH94/status/898042917347926020

Midway through the conversation:

https://twitter.com/CBH94/status/898057955802628096

Two thirds through:=

https://twitter.com/CBH94/status/898063794378637314

And by the end:

https://twitter.com/CBH94/status/898068057385353217

As you can see there was an initial challenge, then some discussion, some more butting of heads and ultimately we both gave up something(s). We were able to  come to a compromise we may not love but we could both live with.

And this is going to have to be the process if we are to have healing.

For example,  regarding this issue of statues, 95% of those I speak with in the red counties have no problem removing Confederate statues from government buildings and instead placing them at Civil War sites / museums or on personal, residential property. They would however ask that statues of Lenin,  Malcolm X etc be treated with the same care and thought.

While these are but two small examples, this same process will need to take place on core political issues if there is ever going to be healing and peace.

Is it possible?

Maybe but doubtful.

I want to believe that We The People are rational & capable of healing.

This will only happen if we push the media, politicians and other puppet masters out of the discussion and out of influence. AND this can only happen if both sides agree that The Constitution, The Bill of Rights and our Representative Republic remain the cornerstones of our nation.

References:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/11/21/historians-healing-america/93875968/

https://www.economist.com/news/international/21600156-how-nations-torn-apart-atrocity-or-civil-war-can-stitch-themselves-together-again

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/lyndon-johnson-civil-rights-racism

https://www.traveloak.com/stories/rwanda-initial-thoughts-on-politics-and-the-economy/

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/08/15/pelosi-challenges-park-service-on-permit-for-white-supremacist-rally-in-san-francisco.html

http://metrocosm.com/election-2016-map-3d/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/martin-luther-king-jr-was-a-true-conservative/2017/01/15/b0f465e4-d9c6-11e6-9a36-1d296534b31e_story.html?utm_term=.bf432bdc7c8c

https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/civil-war-and-reconstruction-1861-1877

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40915356

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/ku-klux-klan

http://www.newstandardpress.com/the-myth-of-trump-and-the-kkk/

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2017/aug/14/context-president-donald-trumps-saturday-statement/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOT3wDR7WZU

https://squawker.org/analysis/leftist-identity-politics-are-what-caused-the-violence-in-charlottesville/

[husheduphistory]

A Shipwreck in Chicago: The Disaster of the SS Eastland

On the chilly early morning of July 24th 1915 the south bank of the Chicago River was bustling with activity. Young men dressed in their Sunday best and the ladies arrived in long dresses, hats, and boots in eager anticipation of the activities ahead. The yearly picnic for the employees of Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works (located in present-day Cicero) was a huge event for the company with the hard workers, their families, and friends taking a day off from their grueling work week for fun and relaxation. Thousands arrived that morning, but hundreds of people never left.

In the early 1900s a standard work week was typically six days long and well exceeded forty hours so when the picnics first began for Western Electric employees, they were an instant success. Washington Park, located across Lake Michigan in Michigan City, Indiana was a idyllic setting for the event offering merry-go-rounds, a roller coasters, bandstands, a baseball park, beaches, and picnic grounds alongside tranquil wooded sections for calmer conversational relaxation. The ticket prices ranged from $.75 to $1.00, not a small fee in those days, but to those buying it was well worth it and that year ticket sales hit an all time high with over 7,000 sold.  For many people the picnic was the social event of the year, they would not have missed it for the world.

Enjoying the beach at Washington Park.

In order to get the employees and their guests across Lake Michigan Western Electric chartered five excursion boats, one of which was the SS Eastland, the “Speed Queen of the Great Lakes.” The ship had already been in the hands of several owners and had even been the scene of a mutiny in 1903 when six of the ship’s firemen refused to tend to the fires because they had been denied potatoes with their meals. Despite its colorful past there was no reason for anyone to feel nervous boarding the Eastland. Earlier in the year the federal Seamen’s Act was passed requiring all passenger ships to be retrofitted with a complete set of lifeboats, a move partially enacted because of the tragedy of the Titanic only three years earlier. On July 2nd 1915, just under three weeks before the picnic, the owners of the Eastland complied with the new regulations and added three lifeboats and six rafts all weighing approximately fourteen tons to its top deck. By all appearances the vessel was the safest ship in the world. That morning it was also the most desirable ship to be on because it was scheduled to leave the dock first. Boarding the "Speed Queen" began at 6:30am and people rushed onto the decks at a rate of fifty people per minute in anticipation of a 7:30am departure. The 2,500 passenger limit was soon reached and excited picnic goers began to stake claims on their spots for the boat ride. Due to the light rain many women and children went to the lower decks while others went to the top deck where they gazed over the railings and called to friends down below. Music from a band drifted out from the main cabin beckoning people to dance and begin their festivities early.

The festivities never did begin, because they never had the chance to.

The SS Eastland docked in Ohio circa 1911

The tilting of the Eastland began just after 7am but initially it did not alarm those already on board. At first it was able to right itself, the problem was that tilting did not stop there. The ship was listing toward the port side (the left-hand side of a vessel facing forward) and passengers were asked to disperse and move to the starboard side (the right-hand side of a vessel facing forward) but they did not follow these directions. At 7:20am water began to pour onto the main deck and engines were ordered to stop. However, departure was still not called off as the ship was able to again right itself. Minutes later the tilting resumed and despite being ordered to move to the starboard side passengers still refused due to rain making the desk slippery. The captain of the Eastland, Captain Harry Pedersen, still did not call off the departure, instrad ordering a standby. By 7:27am the listing resumed with the ship tilting away from the dock at a forty-five degree angle, only this time it did not right itself.

The jovial scene only moments before quickly disintegrated into chaos. Dishes began falling off of shelves, the refrigerator behind a bar crashed over pinning passengers underneath, water began to pour onto the ship and the piano on the promenade deck was thrown to the other side of the room crushing two people. Realizing the imminent disaster passengers began to scream and run toward staircases that would become deathtraps in a matter of seconds. Passengers were suddenly whisked off their feet and found themselves inexplicably falling, crashing into other people and anything else in between them and the floor which had been a wall only a moment earlier. The piles of bodies grew and were added to by the tables, chairs, bottles, lunches, and garbage that no longer had anything to hold them upright. Those who were on the top decks wondered if they should jump, and some of them did.

At 7:30am the SS Eastland rolled over in place, coming to rest on it’s side on the muddy bottom of the Chicago River submerging the port side and trapping hundreds of people in twenty feet of cold, murky water. It was only feet from the dock with its ropes still attached.

The disaster happened so fast that none of the new lifeboats were launched, no life jackets were handed out, and no life rafts were utilized simply because passengers did not even have the time to react to the sudden danger they found themselves in. Horrified onlookers, some of which were other picnic goers still waiting to board a ship, began to help in any way they could and people began to jump into the river that had transformed into a frantic screaming sea. Nearby boats hurried to the scene and onlookers began to throw ladders and shipping crates into the water for people to hold onto. To those still trapped in the non-submerged portion of the ship, salvation came in the form of welders who ran to the site and were able to cut holes into the hull with their torches giving people a way out. Bystanders dragged people out of portholes in hopes of saving them from suffocation and those still on the visible portions of the ship scrambled to the dock with some being able to simply walk across the now-horizontal side of the ship to safety.

People standing on the side of the Eastland waiting to be rescued. Image via Smithsonian Magazine.

Being pulled from the capsized ship.

The SS Eastland on its side in the Chicago River.

While there was hope for a percentage of passengers, there was nothing that could be done for those that were trapped inside the ship underwater and the result was absolutely devastating. Nearly everyone that was on the port side of the ship when it tipped was doomed. 844 people lost their lives in the Eastland disaster including 228 teenagers and 22 entire families.Many were lost by drowning but just as many lives were snuffed out by suffocation.

In the days following the disaster the magnitude of the event and the loss became apparent all over the city. Surrounding buildings became morgues and makeshift hospitals where frantic family members circulated desperate for word of their missing loved ones or hoping to finally find a familiar body among the dozens lined up in rows. The tight-knit communities of Polish, Czech and Hungarian immigrants who worked for Western Electric began to drape their homes in black while preparing the so many unexpected funerals. The first week was dedicated to burying the dead with families being given assistance in arranging and paying for the burials. The bells seemed to never stop ringing, the local churches had multiple funerals for days, and funeral processions became a constant sight.

St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church overwhelmed by funerals. Image via OriginalShipster.com.

When the initial shock began to fade it was only replaced by countless questions of what happened that day on the SS Eastland. The answer was simple, the ship was too top heavy to support the passengers and as a result it tipped over. The explanations as to how the ship ended up in the position to tip over with thousands of people on board were not as easy to accept.

The fact of the matter was that the Eastland had a long unstable history. Built in 1902, it was originally constructed to carry produce and only up to 500 people. The design of the ship was top heavy and relied on ballast tanks to keep it balanced but repeated modifications in order to increase passenger space and speed made it unstable when being loaded or unloaded. All inspections were done only when the ship was traveling, making it seem stable and earning it multiple safety certifications. 1904 and 1906 saw two extremely close calls with the Eastland nearly tipping over, each time with over 2,500 people on board. When the ship was bought by  the St. Joseph-Chicago Steamship Company in 1914 the only thing that crossed their minds was how much of a bargain they were getting by only paying $150,000 for the vessel. Tragically, the final straw in the unsettling of the Eastland may have been the retrofitting of the life boats required by the federal Seamen’s Act which added thousands of pounds to its top decks.

A few days after the disaster of the Chicago River a coroner’s inquest questioned an official of the St. Joseph-Chicago Steamship Company who remarked “I didn’t know much about the boat except that we got it at a bargain. All I do is sign blank checks.”

The Eastland being righted after the disaster

Despite the cause being somewhat agreed upon, many still felt someone needed to take the blame for what happened that day. Although it was widely agreed that Captain Harry Pedersen and other crew members were negligent, they were never prosecuted along with officers from the steamship company who also avoided legal action. The hammer seemed to fall on chief engineer Joseph Erickson who was blamed for mishandling the ballast tanks and failing to right the Eastland as it tilted away from the dock. Erickson died during the long proceedings putting the question of fault to rest with him. More than 800 wrongful death lawsuits were filed but the proceedings dragged for more than twenty years with families getting almost nothing in return.

It was not until 1990 that the city of Chicago placed a memorial plaque dedicated to the Eastland disaster on the site. The plaque was stolen but replaced and rededicated on July 24, 2003.Today, at the corner of West Wacker Drive and North LaSalle Street the five foot tall black marker stands silent, often being swallowed up by the bustling city around it. When someone stops to read it, it has a story to tell that sounds unbelievable. A shipwreck, called “Chicago’s Titanic”, that took over 800 lives and happened only feet from dry land.

The marker for the Eastland disaster. Photograph by Victorgrigas on Wikimedia (Creative Commons).

Remarkably, in 2015 a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Chicago discovered previously unknown video footage taken of rescue efforts of the disaster. That footage can be viewed here.

Please do take some time to look at the official website of the Eastland Disaster Historical Society for much more amazing information, stories, and images from this disaster. Click here to go directly to their site.

*********************************************************************************

Sources:

www.EastlandDisaster.org

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/eastland-disaster-killed-more-passengers-titanic-and-lusitania-why-has-it-been-forgotten-180953146/

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/chi-chicagodays-eastlanddisaster-story-story.html

[womenoflibraryhistory]

Jewell Mazique

Jessamyn West suggested that we repost the Wikipedia article about Jewell Mazique, which she (mostly) wrote. She adds, “Ms. Mazique was notable for her activism regarding racism, labor history and international cooperation. She was also photographed as part of the ​Office of War Information's attempt to show Americans how their way of life was "worth fighting for" and there are many photographs taken of her when she was a clerk at the Library of Congress in the 40s.” The photos, which are in the public domain, include images of Mazique at work, speaking at church, giving blood, reading, and spending time with her family.

Jewell R. Mazique (2 October 1913 - 18 September 2007) was an activist who helped found the Capital Transit campaign with United Federal Workers to integrate Washington D.C.'s bus operators.[2] [3] Mazique wrote extensively for The Washington Afro-American newspaper on topics such as the United Nations position on African Nations, and how black children were being educated in DC schools.[4] She served on the National Council for the Southern Negro Youth Congress in 1945, a group claimed to be a Communist front organization. [5]

She was the subject of a U.S. Government Office Of War Information documentary photo series in 1942 while she was a clerk at the Library of Congress.[6] The photos, taken by John Collier, were supposedly depicting a day in the life of a typical black Washingtonian but critics argued the photos were "less picturesque and less a credit to freedom's national seat" than a typical day of an average black woman in Washington D.C. [7]

Mazique graduated from Spelman College and received a Masters in African Studies from Howard University where she wrote her thesis on the development of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. [8] [4] Mazique argued her own acrimonious divorce case despite the court's requests to take legal counsel. She kept her children, but lost her case for personal financial support.[9]

Personal life

Mazique was married to Edward Craig Mazique in 1937, separated in 1961, and divorced in 1965.[10] [11] They had two sons, Edward and Jeffrey.[2] Edward was the first black child to attend kindergarten at the Sidwell Friends School in 1956. As a direct result, Senator James Eastland, an anti-integrationist from Mississippi, withdrew his son from the school. [4]:49

Jewell Mazique preferred to be involved with social causes more than having a social life, stating in an interview, "The frills of social life hold no charms for me, I am more concerned for instance with what the political leaders of Paris decided to do about their colonial possessions than what the Paris designers decide about what women will wear. [4]

Divorce

Mazique decided that her marriage to Edward could not continue although she did waver in her decision. Eventually Edward started divorce proceedings on the grounds of desertion. Mazique hired a number of lawyers before she decided that she could do a better job herself. The divorce was very public and at one point Jewell's friends appeared with placards outside the Park Sheraton Hotel in Washington in support of her divorce case. The location was chosen as Marguerite Belafonte had a fashion show there and she was seeing Edward Mazique. One placard read "Let not justice be rationed to Jewell R. Mazique in the Domestic Relations Court". Jewell's friend wrote to the newspapers and they formed a committee to support her.[12] The case was settled in her husband's favour and it was noted that Jewell had argued her own case despite the court's advice. She argued, unsuccessfully, that she had worked to put her husband through medical school and that the court had ignored their expensive home.[10] Jewell appealed the case and particularly the finances arguing that the court was biased toward men. She lost the appeal in 1965. Mazique kept her children and Edward agreed to pay maintenance, but she lost her case for personal financial support. The court ruled that her case was a fabrication.[9] Both of her sons went on to be physicians.[12]

References

1. "Jewell R Mazique United States Social Security Death Index".

2. "Jewell R. Mazique obituary". Washington Post. Retrieved 21 January 2017.

3. Simpson, Craig. "The Fight Against Capital Transit's Jim Crow Hiring: 1941-55". Washington Area Spark. Retrieved 21 January 2017.

4. Ridlon, Florence (March 25, 2005). A Black Physician's Struggle for Civil Rights - Edward C. Mazique MD. University of New Mexico Press. ISBN 978-0826333391.

5. Cronin, Rev. John (October 29, 1945). "The Problem of American Communism in 1945 - Facts and Reccommendations" (PDF). St. Mary's Seminary. Retrieved 21 January 2017.

6. "Washington, D.C. March, 1943. Jewel Mazique, Negro federal worker employed in the Library of Congress". Prints and Photographs Online Catalog. Library of Congress. Retrieved 21 January 2017.

7. Trueheart, Charles. "A Distorted Glimpse of 40's DC". Washington Post. Retrieved 21 January 2017.

"Africa-Related-Dissertations-Database". Africa-Related Dissertations Database. Howard University. Retrieved 21 January 2017.

8. Mazique v. Mazique, Open Jurist, Retrieved 21 January 2017

9. "Famed DC Medic Mazique Wins Hot Divorce Battle". Jet Magazine. September 24, 1964. Retrieved 21 January 2017.

10. "356 F. 2d 801 - Mazique v. C Mazique". OpenJurist. Retrieved 21 January 2017.

11. Florence Ridlon (2005). A Black Physician's Struggle for Civil Rights: Edward C. Mazique, M.D. UNM Press. ISBN 978-0-8263-3339-1.

[sophocleschoice]

James Baldwin

James Baldwin was an African American ovelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His essays, as collected in Notes of a Native Son, explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th-century America, and their inevitable if unnameable tensions.

Baldwin's novels and plays fictionalize fundamental personal questions and dilemmas amid complex social and psychological pressures thwarting the equitable integration not only of black people, but also of gay and bisexual men, while depicting some internalized obstacles to such individuals' quests for acceptance. Such dynamics are prominent in Baldwin's second novel, Giovanni's Room, written in 1956, well before the gay liberation movement. During his teenage years in Harlem and Greenwich Village, Baldwin started to realize that he was gay. In 1948, he walked into a restaurant where he knew he would not be served. When the waitress explained that black people were not served at the establishment, Baldwin threw a glass of water at her, shattering the mirror behind the bar. As a result of being disillusioned by American prejudice against blacks and, he left the United States at the age of 24 and settled in Paris, France. His flight was not just a desire to distance himself from American prejudice, but to see himself and his writing beyond an African-American context. Baldwin did not want to be read as "merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer".

Baldwin's lengthy essay "Down at the Cross" (frequently called The Fire Next Time after the title of the book in which it was published) similarly showed the seething discontent of the 1960s in novel form. Around the time of publication of The Fire Next Time, Baldwin became a known spokesperson for civil rights and a celebrity noted for championing the cause of black Americans. He frequently appeared on television and delivered speeches on college campuses. The essay talked about the uneasy relationship between Christianity and the burgeoning Black Muslim movement. After publication, several black nationalists criticized Baldwin for his conciliatory attitude. They questioned whether his message of love and understanding would do much to change race relations in America. The book was eagerly consumed by whites looking for answers to the question: What do blacks really want? Baldwin's essays never stopped articulating the anger and frustration felt by real-life black Americans with more clarity and style than any other writer of his generation.

Baldwin returned to the United States in the summer of 1957 while the Civil Rights Act of that year was being debated in Congress. He had been powerfully moved by the image of a young girl braving a mob in an attempt to desegregate schools in Charlotte, N.C., and Partisan Review editor Philip Rahv had suggested he report on what was happening in the American south. Baldwin was nervous about the trip but he made it, interviewing people in Charlotte (where he met Martin Luther King), and Montgomery, Alabama. The result was two essays, one published in Harper's magazine ("The Hard Kind of Courage"), the other in Partisan Review ("Nobody Knows My Name"). Subsequent Baldwin articles on the movement appeared in Mademoiselle, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, where in 1962 he published the essay that he called "Down at the Cross" and the New Yorker called "Letter from a Region of My Mind". Along with a shorter essay from The Progressive, the essay became The Fire Next Time. External audio

National Press Club Luncheon Speakers, James Baldwin, December 10, 1986, speech: 05:22-20:37, National Press Club.

While he wrote about the movement, Baldwin aligned himself with the ideals of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1963 he conducted a lecture tour of the South for CORE, traveling to locations like Durham and Greensboro, North Carolina and New Orleans, Louisiana. During the tour, he lectured to students, white liberals, and anyone else listening about his racial ideology, an ideological position between the "muscular approach" of Malcolm X and the nonviolent program of Martin Luther King, Jr.. Baldwin expressed the hope that Socialism would take root in the United States. By the spring of 1963, Baldwin had become so much a spokesman for the Civil Rights Movement that for its May 17 issue on the turmoil in Birmingham, Alabama, Time magazine put James Baldwin on the cover. "There is not another writer," said Time, "who expresses with such poignancy and abrasiveness the dark realities of the racial ferment in North and South."

In a cable Baldwin sent to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy during the crisis, Baldwin blamed the violence in Birmingham on the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, Mississippi Senator James Eastland, and President Kennedy for failing to use "the great prestige of his office as the moral forum which it can be." Attorney General Kennedy invited Baldwin to meet with him over breakfast, and that meeting was followed up with a second, when Kennedy met with Baldwin and others Baldwin had invited to Kennedy's Manhattan apartment (see Baldwin–Kennedy meeting). This meeting is discussed in Howard Simon's 1999 play, James Baldwin: A Soul on Fire. The delegation included Kenneth B. Clark, a psychologist who had played a key role in the Brown v. Board of Education decision; actor Harry Belafonte, singer Lena Horne, writer Lorraine Hansberry, and activists from civil rights organizations.

Although most of the attendees of this meeting left feeling "devastated," the meeting was an important one in voicing the concerns of the civil rights movement and it provided exposure of the civil rights issue not just as a political issue but also as a moral issue.James Baldwin’s FBI file contains 1,884 pages of documents, collected from 1960 until the early 1970s. During that era of illegal surveillance of American writers, the FBI accumulated 276 pages on Richard Wright, 110 pages on Truman Capote, and just nine pages on Henry Miller.Baldwin also made a prominent appearance at the Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. on August 28, 1963, with Belafonte and long-time friends Sidney Poitier and Marlon Brando. 

The civil rights movement was hostile to homosexuals. The only known gay men in the movement were James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin. Rustin and King were very close, as Rustin received credit for the success of the March on Washington. Many were bothered by Rustin's sexual orientation. King himself spoke on the topic of sexual orientation in a school editorial column during his college years, and in reply to a letter during the 1950s, where he treated it as a mental illness which an individual could overcome. The pressure later resulted in King distancing himself from both men. At the time, Baldwin was neither in the closet nor open to the public about his sexual orientation. Later on, Baldwin was conspicuously uninvited to speak at the end of the March on Washington. After a bomb exploded in a Birmingham church not long after the March on Washington, Baldwin called for a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience in response to this "terrifying crisis." He traveled to Selma, Alabama, where SNCC had organized a voter registration drive; he watched mothers with babies and elderly men and women standing in long lines for hours, as armed deputies and state troopers stood by—or intervened to smash a reporter's camera or use cattle prods on SNCC workers. After his day of watching, he spoke in a crowded church, blaming Washington—"the good white people on the hill." Returning to Washington, he told a New York Post reporter the federal government could protect Negroes—it could send federal troops into the South. He blamed the Kennedys for not acting. In March 1965, Baldwin joined marchers who walked 50 miles from Selma, Alabama, to the capitol in Montgomery under the protection of federal troops. Nonetheless, he rejected the label "civil rights activist", or that he had participated in a civil rights movement, instead agreeing with Malcolm X's assertion that if one is a citizen, one should not have to fight for one's civil rights. In a 1964 interview with Robert Penn Warren for the book Who Speaks for the Negro?, Baldwin refuted the idea that the civil rights movement was an outright revolution, instead calling it "a very peculiar revolution because it has to...have its aims the establishment of a union, and a...radical shift in the American mores, the American way of life...not only as it applies to the Negro obviously, but as it applies to every citizen of the country." In a 1979 speech at UC Berkeley, he called it, instead, "the latest slave rebellion.” In 1968, Baldwin signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

[mystlnewsonline]

New Post has been published on https://www.stl.news/mississippi-burnings-kkk-leader-killen-dies-prison-at-92/66577/

Mississippi Burnings KKK leader Killen dies in prison at 92

JACKSON, Miss/January 12, 2018(AP)(STL.News)— Edgar Ray Killen, a former Ku Klux Klan leader who was convicted in the 1964 “Mississippi Burning” slayings of three civil rights workers, has died in prison at the age of 92, the state’s corrections department announced Friday.

The one-time Klan leader was serving three consecutive 20-year terms for manslaughter when he died at 9 p.m. Thursday night inside the Mississippi State Penitentiary. An autopsy was pending, but no foul play was suspected, the corrections’ statement said.

His conviction came 41 years to the day after James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, all in their 20s, were ambushed and killed by Klansmen on June 21, 1964. The three Freedom Summer workers had been investigating the burning of a black church near Philadelphia, Mississippi. A deputy sheriff in Philadelphia had arrested them on a traffic charge, then released them after alerting a mob. Mississippi’s then-governor claimed their disappearance was a hoax before their bodies were dug up.

The slayings shocked the nation, helped spur passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and were dramatized in the 1988 movie “Mississippi Burning.”

The part-time preacher and lumber mill operator was 80 when a Neshoba County jury convicted him of three counts of manslaughter on June 21, 2005, despite his assertions that he was innocent of the killings. Killen was the only person ever to face state murder charges in the case.

Killen wouldn’t say much about the 1964 killings during a 2014 interview with The Associated Press inside the penitentiary. He said he remained a segregationist who did not believe in racial equality, but contended he harbored no ill will toward blacks. Killen said he never had talked about the events that landed him behind bars, and never would.

Long a suspect in the 1964 slayings, Killen had made a livelihood from farming, operating his sawmill and preaching to a small congregation at Smyrna Baptist Church in Union, south of Philadelphia, Mississippi.

According to FBI files and court transcripts from a 1967 federal conspiracy trial, Killen did most of the planning in the ambush killings of the civil rights workers. According to testimony in the 2005 murder trial, Killen served as a kleagle, or organizer, of the Klan in Neshoba County and helped set up a klavern, or local Klan group, in a nearby county.

Nineteen men, including Killen, were indicted on federal charges in the 1967 case. Seven were convicted of violating the victims’ civil rights. None served more than six years.

Killen’s federal case ended with a hung jury after one juror said she couldn’t convict a preacher. During his state trial in 2005, witnesses testified that on June 21, 1964, Killen went to Meridian to round up carloads of Klansmen to ambush Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, telling some of the Klan members to bring plastic or rubber gloves.

Witnesses said Killen then went to a Philadelphia funeral home as an alibi while the fatal attack occurred.

The three bodies were found 44 days later, buried in a red-clay dam in rural Neshoba County.

In February 2010, Killen sued the FBI, claiming the government used a mafia hit man to pistol-whip and intimidate witnesses for information in the case. The federal lawsuit sought millions of dollars in damages and a declaration that his rights were violated when the FBI allegedly used a gangster known as “The Grim Reaper” during the investigation. The lawsuit was later dismissed.

In the 2014 AP interview, Killen repeated his contention that he was not a criminal, but a political prisoner. Of one thing he was certain: “I could have beat that thing if I’d had the mental ability.”

In the four-hour interview, he spoke of associations with hundreds of people during his life — from political figures to friends and neighbors. He was talkative about corruption in the Mississippi prison system, his good times and close relationship with the late Sen. James O. Eastland and his preaching at a tiny Baptist church in east Mississippi from which he got the nickname “Preacher.”

Killen said people at Parchman were well aware of his identity before he arrived: “Oh yes. They knew who I was,” he said.

By Associated Press, published on STL.NEWS by St. Louis Media, LLC (TM)

[the-record-obituaries]

Sept. 20, 2017: Obituaries

Velma Pennington, 91

Velma Grace Pennington, age 91, of North Wilkesboro, died Saturday, September 16, 2017 at Wilkes Senior Village. She was born October 16, 1925 in Wilkes County to Norman and Emmaline Rhodes Brown. Mrs. Pennington was preceded in death by her parents; and her first husband, Harl "Red" Finney, her second husband, Lester Lee Pennington; son, Tony Gene Finney; two sisters; and three brothers.

          Surviving are her daughter, Brenda Reavis and husband Larry of North Wilkesboro; sons, James Finney and wife Vickie, Butch Pennington and wife Kathy all of North Wilkesboro; sisters, Wanda Morton and husband H.D., Jean Jennings and husband Larry, Emalene Sheets and husband Robert all of North Wilkesboro, Elise Barefoot of Greensboro, Katherine Byrd of North Wilkesboro; brothers, Howard Brown of High Point, Homer Brown of North Wilkesboro; nine grandchildren; sixteen great grandchildren; and seven great great grandchildren.

          Graveside service was   held September 18,  at Round Mountain Baptist Church Cemetery with Rev. Danny Dillard officiating. Flowers will be accepted.

          Miller Funeral Service is in charge of the arrangements.  

Ethel Davidson Pardue

Ethel Davidson Pardue went to her heavenly home September 12th, 2017, surrounded by loving family. Ethel, 84, was born December 6th, 1932, in Alexander County, to the late Edith Bentley Davidson and Asa Homer Davidson.

Ethel accepted Christ as a young girl and was a faithful, lifelong member of the Church of God in Taylorsville, NC, where she loved the Lord and enjoyed the church fellowship and her church family. In her early years, Ethel taught Sunday school and worked with the youth program.

On February 17th, 1948, Ethel married her late and beloved husband, David Lee Pardue. They established a business, the Downtown Shoe Shop, in Taylorsville, and worked side by side for 33 years. Later, Ethel began working with the Alexander County Food Service, where she retired.

Besides her parents and husband, she was preceded in death by two sisters, Shelby Davidson Broyhill and Barbara Davidson Childers.

Those left to cherish her memory are her five children, Laura Baker and friend Glenna Chronister, Danny Pardue and wife Bertie, Doris Pardue-Watts and husband Tommy, Sharon Pardue-DeLemos and Stephen Pardue. Five brothers, James Davidson and wife Judy, William Davidson and wife Verlie, Homer Davidson, Jr., Charles Davidson and wife Deborah and Larry Davidson.  She is also remembered by nine grandchildren, three great grandchildren, and three great-great grandchildren and many nieces and nephews.

The family will receive friends on Sunday, September 17, 2017, 1:00-2:30 at Alexander County Funeral Services.  The service will begin at 3:00 p.m. at Taylorsville Church of God with the Rev. Mark Albertino officiating.  Burial will follow at the Taylorsville Cemetery.

In lieu of flowers, memorials may be sent to the Taylorsville Church of God-Building Fund at 556 Kerda Street, Taylorsville, NC  28681.

  Bessie Sheets

Bessie "Bess" L. Sheets, of North Wilkesboro, passed away, Sunday, September 17, 2017. Originally from Laurel Springs in Alleghany County , she married Richard Sheets in 1946. They were married for 58 years. She was a long time member of Baptist Home Baptist Church in the Mulberry community, and was a hair dresser for many years. She was preceded in death by her parents; her husband, Richard Franklin Sheets; sister, Madge Miller and brothers, Cecil and Webb Miller.

           Surviving are her daughter, Cindy Sheets Maier of Greensboro; two grandchildren, Alex Maier of London, U.K., and Meredith Maier of Chapel Hill; sister, JoAnn Killingsworth of Eastland, Texas; several nieces and nephews including, Traci Miller Blackburn of Lumberton, Terri Miller Fay of Gibsonville; Tom Miller of Sparta; several grandnieces and grandnephews; and very close friends of the family, Jill and Eric Rogers and Clarine Foster.

           Funeral service was held  September 19, at Miller Funeral Chapel with Rev. Jeff Blackburn and Rev. Tommy Miller officiating. Entombment   followwed in Mountlawn Memorial Park. Memorials may be made to Baptist Home Baptist Church, 2367 Sparta Road, North Wilkesboro, NC 28659.                            Miller Funeral Service is in charge of the arrangements.  

 Grace Hall, 89

Mrs. Grace A. Hall, age 89 of Wilkesboro, formerly of Mulberry, passed away Saturday, September 16, 2017 at Westwood Hills Nursing and Rehab.

           Graveside services will be held 2:00 Wednesday, September 20, 2017 at Mountlawn Memorial Park with Pastor Harold Wood and Pastor Kent Wood officiating.

           Mrs. Hall was born December 23, 1927 in Wilkes County to James Presley and Dora Sebastian Adams. She retired from Ithaca Industries in Wilkesboro and was a member of Pine View Baptist Church.

           She was preceded in death by her parents, her husband; Tam Hall, a daughter; Vickie Hall Rhoades Reimondo, two sisters; Rena Coffey, Reba Dillard and two brothers; Clyde Adams and Beechel Adams.

           Mrs. Hall is survived by a daughter; Margaret Hall Miller and husband, Gary of Millers Creek, a son; Eddie Hall and wife Karen Haynes Hall of North Wilkesboro, eight grandchildren; Luke Rhoades, Carrie Rhoades Meisinger, Elizabeth Miller Milligan, Logan Hall, Justin Hall, Angela Anieliszi, Carrie Sizemore and Cynthia Reimondo, nine great grandchildren; Jack Meisinger, Adam Milligan, Andrew Anieliski, Ashley Anieliski, Amber Reimondo, Jake Johnson, Blaine Sizemore, Brennan Sizemore and Emma Rhoades, two sisters; Lucy Griggs of Salisbury, Clara Jean Wagoner and husband, Freeman of North Wilkesboro and one brother; James Arvil Adams and wife, Gloria of Acworth, GA.

           In lieu of flowers, memorials may be made to the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, Designate for Heart and Cancer research in her memory Medical Center Blvd, Winston Salem, NC 27157 or to the charity of the Donor's Choice.

  Glen Wingler, Sr.  80

Mr. Glen Alan Wingler, Sr. age 80 of Wilkesboro, passed away Friday, September 15th, 2017 at Wake Forest Baptist Health Wilkes Medical Center.

           Funeral services were held  September 19th,   at Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church Reach Center with Pastor Joey Moore officiating.

           Burial with Military Honors by Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 1142 Honor Guard and Masonic Rites by Mt. Pleasant Masonic Lodge will be in the church cemetery.  The family will receive friends from 6:00 until 8:00 Monday evening at Reins Sturdivant Funeral Home.

           Mr. Wingler was born May 13, 1937 in Wilkes County to Clarence Landis and Hattie Darnell Wingler. He served in the US Navy. He was retired from the Wilkes County Sheriffs Department and Wilkes General Hospital after 31 years as Director of Material Management. He was a member of the Mt. Pleasant Masonic Lodge for over 50 years, the Mt. Pleasant Ruritan Club, the Lions Club and Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church.

           In addition to his parents, Mr. Wingler was preceded in death by his wife; Patti Sue Huffman Wingler, a brother; Guy Sheets and a grandson; Mathis Alan Wingler.

           He is survived by a daughter; Melinda Wingler Pegg and husband, Jason of Wilkesboro, two sons; Glen Alan Wingler, Jr. and wife Jennifer of North Wilkesboro and Thomas Alan Wingler and wife Melissa of Wilkesboro, nine grandchildren; Meredith Wingler, Whitney Parsons, Lauren Pegg, Jacob Golden, Emma Wingler, Christian Wingler, Aiden Wingler, Brandon Little and Bailey Lilly, two great grandchildren; Penelope Parsons and Elena Davis, two brothers; Bill Wingler and wife, Patty of Glade Valley and Nile Wingler and wife, Shirley of Warner Robins, GA.

           Flowers will be accepted or memorials may be made to Samaritans Purse PO Box 3000, Boone NC 28607.

  Effie  Porter, 97

Mrs. Effie Church Porter, age 97 passed away Tuesday, September 12, 2017 at Westwood Hills Nursing and Rehab Center.

           Funeral services will be held 2:00 PM Thursday, September 14, 2017 at Fairplains Baptist Church with Rev. David Dyer and Rev. David Key officiating. Burial will be in Mountlawn Memorial Park.  The family will receive friends from 1:00 until 2:00 PM prior to the service at the church.

           Mrs. Porter was born November 18, 1919 in Wilkes County to Candis Church.  She was a member of Fairplains Baptist Church

           She was preceded in death by her husband; Willard Roy Porter, her mother; Candis Church, and brother; Fred Church.

           She is survived by two daughters; Shirley Whitley and husband Johnny of North Wilkesboro, Carolyn Hincher of Ferguson and son; Edward Porter and wife Judith of North Wilkesboro, five grandchildren and seven great grandchildren.

           In lieu of flowers, memorials may be made to Fairplains Baptist Church Community Handicapped Playground Fund, 141 Fairplains Church Street, North Wilkesboro, NC 28659.

                                                                                                                                                        Donald Hamby, 66

Mr. Donald Lewis Hamby, age 66 of Ferguson, passed away Monday, September 11, 2017, at his home.

           A private family graveside service will be held at a later date.

           Mr. Hamby was born June 18, 1951 in Caldwell County to Sherman Garfield and Gladys Gaynell Hicks Hamby. Donald loved life, his friends and his family. He was ready to go home to be with the Lord. He has nieces, nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews that he loved dearly.

           He was preceded in death by his parents, Sherman and Gladys Hamby.  

           He is survived by three sisters; Sharon Duncan and husband, Jake of Hudson, Nancy Walter and husband, Donnie of North Wilkesboro, Carolyn Hamby of North Wilkesboro and four brothers; Calvin Hamby and wife, Loretta of Purlear, Robert Hamby and wife, Norma of Morganton, Ronald Hamby and wife Claudine of Deep Gap and Gregory Hamby of Greensboro.

           In lieu of flowers, memorials may be made to Elk Creek Baptist Church, PO Box 57 Ferguson, NC 28624.

 Mattie Wright

Mattie Lee Elmore Wright transitioned to her heavenly home on September 11, 2017, at the SECU Hospice Center in Yadkinville.  Mattie was born in Wilkes County on August 24, 1922, to Elgie Martin Elmore and Mattie Sebastian Elmore.  In addition to her parents, she was preceded in death by eight siblings: Pansy Harmon, Walter Elmore, Edna Catherine Elmore, Thelma Elmore, Carolyn Sprinkle, Albert Elmore, Claude Elmore, and Clarence Elmore.

           Mattie is survived by three daughters: Sharon Call of Yadkinville, Guylene Cox and husband, John  of State Road, and Janice Lambey and husband, Tom of Wilkesboro; three grandsons: Brian Call and wife, Kimberley of Durham, Brent Cox and wife, Kelli of Lawrenceville, Georgia, and Jonathan Cox and wife, Stephanie of Winston-Salem. She has four great grandchildren: Tyler and Chase Call and Lily and Sam Cox.  Mattie is also survived by siblings Jim Elmore and Pauline Sloop of North Wilkesboro and Mary Osborne of Greensboro.

           As a young girl Mattie accepted Jesus as her Lord and Savior.  She was an active member of Arbor Grove Baptist Church until her health declined, and then she enjoyed listening to Charles Stanley on Sunday mornings. Mattie was a wonderful mother and grandmother. She was happiest when she was spending time with her family. She especially enjoyed getting the family together for Sunday dinners. These were not your usual meat and two vegetables, but the table was laden with a variety of meats and so many side dishes there was hardly room on the table for them all.  Many of her sick or bereaved neighbors and relatives were the recipients of her good home cooking.

           Funeral services were held at Arbor Grove Baptist Church on  September 13th,  with the Rev. Elliot Smith and the Rev. Ted Combs officiating.  

           Burial will be in the church cemetery.

           In lieu of flowers, please make memorials to SECU Hospice Care Center at 243 North Lee Street, Yadkinville, NC.  The family is so appreciative of the loving care that Mattie received during her stay at the Hospice Center.

Fred Morrison, Sr., 75

Fred Leonard Morrison, Sr., age 75, of Wilkesboro, died Friday, September 8, 2017 at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. He was born April 6, 1942 in Wilkes County to Fred and Fannie Katherleen Isenhour Morrison. He was a member of New Direction  Ministries. Mr. Morrison was preceded in death by his parents; and sisters, Lelar Odessa Harris and Mollie Oressa Morrison.

           Surviving are his children, Julius Morrison Ferguson and wife Cheryl of Drexel, Katherine Morrison Jackson and husband Boris, Greensboro; Fred Leonard Morrison, Jr. and wife Patricia of Valdese; seven grandchildren; and fifteen great grandchildren.

           Memorial service was  held September 14,  at Miller Funeral Chapel with Bishop Morgan officiating.    

           Miller Funeral Service is in charge of the arrangements.  

 Jill Turner, 58

Ms. Jill Wiles Turner, age 58, of 120  Magnolia Drive, North Wilkesboro, NC, passed away Sunday, September 10, 2017 at Wake Forest Baptist Hospital.

           Memorial services were  September 16th,  at North Wilkesboro Presbyterian Church with Rev. Susan Moorefield officiating.  

           Jill was born March 1st, 1959 in Wilkes County to Barbara Jean Wiles and the late Jim Wiles. She grew up in Anderson, S.C. and graduated from T.L. Hanna High School. She attended Anderson University, graduated from Gardner-Webb University, where she earned a B.S. Degree in Journalism and education. She studied at Appalachian State University for a Library Science Degree.

           She was a member of Boulevard Baptist Church, and attended North Wilkesboro Baptist Church.

           Jill lived in New Orleans, LA for a number of years and was employed by Dietrich Destinations Consultants as an account executive. She also worked for several years as Tour Manager and Riverlorian aboard The Delta Queen Steamboat.

           Upon returning to North Carolina to be closer to family, she was a teacher at Shelby Middle School, Shelby, NC, and later worked for the Wilkes County School System.

           She is survived by her mother of the home and many cousins and friends who loved her dearly.

           In lieu of flowers, memorials may be made to the Humane Society of Wilkes PO Box 306 North Wilkesboro, NC 28659 or the North Wilkesboro Presbyterian Church 804 E Street, North Wilkesboro, NC 28659.

[noahprojectnews]

                                WOULD YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO?

If you were approached by a victim of domestic violence, would you know what to do to help them?  If there were only time for one phone call to escape abuse, harm, or even worse, death, who would you insist they call?

What if they had escaped out of an abusive house in the middle of the night with nothing but what they are wearing?  What if they feared for their children’s safety as well?  When a victim of family violence comes to Noah Project alone or with their children, they are afraid, bruised, and often hungry. We meet them with warmth, a new pillow, clean bedding, and encouragement. If they are hungry, we have healthy snacks available 24 hours a day.  Each victim is assigned a trained, compassionate advocate that has the tools to empower them to change from victim to survivor through prevention, education, and support.  In addition, Noah Project's full-time, on-site attorney can help with protective orders and other legal issues to keep that person and their children together and safe.  Our family counselor can facilitate individual, group, and child therapy to help survivors cope with their new life.   Family violence can escalate quickly, often leading to serious injury or death, and the most dangerous time in an abusive relationship is when the battered person decides to leave.  Are you, your family, or your church equipped to meet their needs and keep them safe?  We are. Our facility has multiple layers of security.  We have emergency clothing.  Each person who comes to us is encouraged to make a Safety Plan.  While these people are in our care, we offer life skills classes, health check-ups, and social services assistance.

Where else could you send them for safe shelter and professional help that is confidential, available 24/7, and is free of charge? Put our 24 hour crisis line number in your phone.  Do it right now.  It’s (800) 444-3551. Be ready to change someone’s life...or even save it.

We serve the following counties: Taylor, Callahan, Eastland, Jones, Shackleford, Stephens, Stonewall, Haskell, Throckmorton, and Knox.

If you would like more information about Noah Project, we encourage you to have us come address your church, business, or civic club about Noah Project. Find out more about Noah Project's services and needs at www.noahproject.org. ax�O��

[emunenen]

Makao Bora

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Area Code - Kayole Estate Nairobi

It is one of the most popular and populous estates in Nairobi. With a population of over half a million, Kayole leads among its peers like Dandora and Umoja estates, which offer affordable housing to the city’s rising population.

The estate located in Nairobi’s Eastlands area is, however, famous for all the wrong reasons. In the past, several incidents of crime, notably kidnapping, have been linked to the estate thus catapulting it to the limelight. In addition, different outlawed gangs operating in the area have muddied its name and clouded its many economic activities.

despite this, Kayole’s dense population is its strength. This has made it a business hub as exemplified by various banks and microfinance organisations that have opened their branches in the estate. Among them are Cooperative, Family and Equity banks all located along the estate’s main road. Kenya Commercial Bank also seems to be keen to tap the market if their Sales Centre and ATM machine installed recently are anything to go by.

Most of the popular small businesses include food kiosks, shops, groceries, money transfer services and second-hand clothes trading. Many of the roads in the estate are jammed with these traders, who jostle for space with pedestrians and matatus.

Talking of matatus, Kayole has the highest number of public service vehicles in Nairobi. Estimated to be about 800, these vehicles have been blamed for causing major traffic jams on Jogoo Road during peak hours.

  When it comes to housing, Kayole is a favourite for those seeking decent and affordable houses. Most of the houses are storied with the tallest going up to fifth floor. They are closely packed, giving the estate an aura of congestion.

Nonetheless, rents are affordable. Bed-sitters go for Sh2,000 to Sh3,000 while single bedroom houses go for between Sh5,000 and Sh6,000.

Rent for a two-bedroom house ranges between Sh8,000 and Sh10,000. Lately, rent has increased significantly as many developers put up spacious and modern houses. Noteworthy also, Kayole is home to numerous churches and bars scattered in every alley in the estate.

These two institutions jostle for attention from residents especially on weekends. However, on who wins, your guess is as good as mine.

    In the education circles, every year, Kayole claims a stake of national fame in Kenya Certificate of Primary Education. New Light Primary, one of the private schools here produces some of the best students.

Very soon, the area is set to transform as businesspeople and property developers strive to explore opportunities offered by Kayole and adjacent estates like Komarock, Umoja, Jacaranda and Donholm.

A Sh103 million shopping mall will be constructed in the area. Dubbed East Gate, the Good Life Mall, the shopping complex will be the first one of its kind in Eastlands.

According to developers, the mall will have a supermarket hall, a banking hall, four ATM lobbies, 30 franchise shops, a cinema hall, a 150-capacity parking space and a food court consisting of eight restaurants.

        Read original article on Standard