My Daily Domestic Diigolet 12/31/2008

• Melissa Etheridge: The Choice Is Ours NowKudos to Melissa Ethridge and Pastor Rick Warren. Maybe we really can “disagree without being disagreeable.”tags: politics
  • Well, I have to tell you my friends, the universe has a sense of humor and indeed works in mysterious ways. As I was winding down the promotion for my Christmas album I had one more stop last night. I’d agreed to play a song I’d written with my friend Salman Ahmed, a Sufi Muslim from Pakistan. The song is called “Ring The Bells,” and it’s a call for peace and unity in our world. We were going to perform our song for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, a group of Muslim Americans that tries to raise awareness in this country, and the world, about the majority of good, loving, Muslims.
  • I received a call the day before to inform me of the keynote speaker that night… Pastor Rick Warren. I was stunned. My fight or flight instinct took over, should I cancel? Then a calm voice inside me said, “Are you really about peace or not?”

    I told my manager to reach out to Pastor Warren and say “In the spirit of unity I would like to talk to him.” They gave him my phone number. On the day of the conference I received a call from Pastor Rick, and before I could say anything, he told me what a fan he was. He had most of my albums from the very first one. What? This didn’t sound like a gay hater, much less a preacher. He explained in very thoughtful words that as a Christian he believed in equal rights for everyone. He believed every loving relationship should have equal protection. He struggled with proposition 8 because he didn’t want to see marriage redefined as anything other than between a man and a woman. He said he regretted his choice of words in his video message to his congregation about proposition 8 when he mentioned pedophiles and those who commit incest. He said that in no way, is that how he thought about gays. He invited me to his church, I invited him to my home to meet my wife and kids. He told me of his wife’s struggle with breast cancer just a year before mine.

    When we met later that night, he entered the room with open arms and an open heart. We agreed to build bridges to the future.

• Born at just 23 weeks, the baby who defied our abortion laws | Mail Onlinetags: mothersloveyourbabies, abortion
• TheCatholicSpirit.com – Remembering EmilieMore about Emilie Lemmons, the blogger who passed away last week from sarcoma. tags: death, grief, mothersloveyourbabies

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.