Social|Median - Election Updates and Discussions

Socialmedian is excited to launch http://election.socialmedian.com today, a first-of-its kind site where people can track election news, tweets, photos, videos, blog posts, and more all in one place.

The site, launched in partnership with The Washington Post, enables anyone anywhere to follow along and participate by adding their feeds from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, their blog, and more.

You can also grab our socialmedian Election Talk widget and add it to your own website and blog to enable your readers to follow user-driven coverage of the election.  The Washington Post and The Guardian are two the first sites who will be featuring the Election Talk widget.

On election day, we will be featuring user-submitted reports from the election … so make sure to tweet your experiences, send in your photos and videos, and join in the coverage.

Check it out by clicking here.

Gay Christians are Modern Day Lepers

From DenverPost.com:

Elizabeth Bennett sits in her Denver church contemplating the elephant in the sanctuary that few polite Episcopalians want to mention.

Bennett grew up in the Episcopal church. She sang in the choir. She was married in one and baptized her five children there. Her mother’s ashes are buried under a tree outside an Episcopal church in Massachusetts.

But being openly gay now in the Colorado diocese, she says, is like being given “half-a-loaf acceptance.”

Gays are offered some sacraments but not others.

“I’ve gotten mine. But this is wrong — to go to church, have potlucks and not care about other people’s rights,” said Bennett, 59.

And, she said, the pain of partial acceptance is the pain of rejection.

“There are places in our lives where we truly want to be loved,” Bennett said.

The church’s hope is that a moratorium on blessing gay unions and ordaining openly gay priests — “passionate patience” — will help hold the fracturing American church together and keep it part of the larger, less liberal international Anglican Communion.

Sex and Politics Go Hand in Hand

You may be asking yourself, “What does she mean, sex is political?” Well, it’s quite simple.

Politics are our views and actions based on materialistic ideals. You can learn a lot about somebody by asking them what their political views are. For example, people who are pro-life aren’t just pro-life because they believe killing is wrong; they just can’t picture themselves being put on trial for killing an unborn child. Politics are personal and self-centered. People pick and choose their lovers based on so many political factors that have absolutely nothing to do with romance. Does he have a good eye color? Was she an acceptable beer pong partner? If we have kids, will they be attractive based on our looks? Are his pants designer? Does he go tanning, and if so, does that mean that he’s possibly gay?

And what about people who base their sexual preferences on political party affiliation? “I won’t sleep with him because he’s a Republican.” That’s just crap. It almost seems like people assume that during sex, their partner will begin to blurt out their views on tax cuts and abortion. Unless, of course, you’re participating in some orgy on the White House lawn accompanied by Bill Clinton (he wouldn’t miss it for the world) and Larry Craig (he’s not gay! He said so himself!), I doubt that would ever even happen. But then again, I never thought I would see a man who could have played poker with Jesus on the Republican ticket. Touché, America, touché.

Read the rest at hofstrachronicle.com.

John McCain is Just Another George W Bush

Russia invades Georgia and President Bush goes on vacation. Our president has spent one-third of his entire two terms in office either at Camp David, Maryland, or at Crawford, Texas, on vacation.

His time away from the Oval Office included the month leading up to 9/11, when there were signs Osama bin Laden was planning to attack America, and the time Hurricane Katrina destroyed the city of New Orleans.

Sen. John McCain takes weekends off and limits his campaign events to one a day. He made an exception for the religious forum on Saturday at Saddleback Church in Southern California.

I think he made a big mistake. When he was invited last spring to attend a discussion of the role of faith in his life with Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, McCain didn’t bother to show up. Now I know why.

It occurs to me that John McCain is as intellectually shallow as our current president. When asked what his Christian faith means to him, his answer was a one-liner. “It means I’m saved and forgiven.” Great scholars have wrestled with the meaning of faith for centuries. McCain then retold a story we’ve all heard a hundred times about a guard in Vietnam drawing a cross in the sand.

Asked about his greatest moral failure, he cited his first marriage, which ended in divorce. While saying it was his greatest moral failing, he offered nothing in the way of explanation. Why not?

Read more at cnn.com.

Right Wing Groups Have Dissension Among the Ranks

Tim Pawlenty’s evangelical Christianity and his ties to the 30-million-strong National Association of Evangelicals (now chaired by the pastor of Pawlenty’s Eden Prairie church, Leith Anderson) has remained strong.

In 1993, Pawlenty was one of 11 House Republicans to vote for the Human Rights Amendment that outlawed discrimination in housing and employment based on sexual orientation. It was the first legislation in the nation to offer protections for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. While he was running for governor in 2002, he has repeatedly said that vote is the only one he regretted from his days in the Legislature.

When labor unions asked for health benefits for same-sex partners in state labor contracts in 2001, he vehemently opposed those benefits.

In 2004, he signed a pledge to support a constitutional anti-gay marriage amendment. “Traditional marriage is itself a pledge, and I will take a pledge to defend it,” he said. “Some issues are too important to play the field with.”

In 2006, he appeared in an anti-same-sex-marriage video produced by the Republican Party of Minnesota.

Despite all this, Pawlenty was criticized for “promotion of homosexual agenda” in 2006 by the religious right group EdWatch. “Homosexual advocacy groups are being funded by grants from the state Department of Health under his authority,” wrote EdWatch in a letter about Pawlenty. “Additionally, under Governor Pawlenty’s supervision, his administration is actively promoting the indoctrination of students into a homosexual worldview and value system.”

Looks like the witch-hunt for those gay agenda supporters continues.

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