posted
STOCKHOLM, Sweden — A Swedish pastor convicted of hate crimes for a sermon denouncing homosexuals as a "cancer" was acquitted Friday by an appeals court that said he was protected by the country's free speech laws.
The Goeta Appeals Court said that while Aake Green's (search) views of gays can be "strongly questioned," it was not illegal to offer a personal interpretation of the Bible and urge others to follow it.
"The purpose of making agitation against gays punishable is not to prevent arguments or discussions about homosexuality, not in churches or in other parts of society," the court said.
Green, 63, was the first clergyman convicted under Sweden's tough hate crimes (search) laws, which make it a crime to make inflammatory remarks against racial, religious or national groups. The laws were ratified in 2003 to include homosexuals.
Green gave his sermon the same year, telling a congregation on the small southeastern island of Oeland that homosexuals were "a deep cancer tumor on all of society." He warned congregants that Sweden risked a natural disaster because of its leniency toward gays.
"Homosexuality is something sick," Green said. He compared it with pedophilia and bestiality, saying gays were more likely to rape children and animals.
He was convicted in June and sentenced to 30 days in jail.
In an interview Thursday with The Associated Press, Green said it was not the month in prison he's worried about, but "the freedom to preach God's word."
The appeals court shared that concern, saying statements during sermons rarely qualify as racial agitation.
Green's acquittal brought a sigh of relief from some ministers who saw the case as a challenge to freedom of religion and expression.
"This indicates that the justice system works, and that it gives a certain amount of protection to us who preach God's word," said Ralph Toerner, a priest from the Swedish branch of the British-based Holy Catholic Church (search).
"But at the same time, I think this should be a warning signal to preachers overall, that they shouldn't use such coarse language when talking about something sensitive. The Christian faith is not about judging people."
Prosecutor Kjell Yngvesson argued that Green — who invited several newspapers to hear the sermon — "expressed disdain for the homosexuals as a group. He compared the sermon to a racist shouting out the Nazi salute "Sieg Heil."
Johanna Nystroem, a spokeswoman for RFSU, the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education (search), had hoped Green's sentence would be upheld.
"To say these things in a public setting is to call for action (against gays)," said Nystroem. "It's one thing to be against homosexuality, but when you're urging people to take action in the way he did, it's a completely different matter."
Not all religious leaders support Green. Swedish Archbishop Karl Gustav Hammar has denounced his sermon, calling it "a miserable theology," and said the case should not be seen as a threat to religious freedom.
"It's not a question of the freedom of the pulpit," Hammar said. "The sermon was evidently sent out to the media to create a reaction."
Posts: 396 | From: Blue Springs MO USA | Registered: Oct 2004
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posted
Religion should have the right to assert false ideas, as all religions do. That is why they are religions and not sciences. If a scientist asserts a false idea, he or she is incompetent. If a preacher asserts a false idea, that is to be expected.
Homosexuality is genetically based and increases with animal crowding - too many animals in a restricted space.
This is likely some unknown mechanism of nature to reduce population growth.
Humans need more homosexuality because human population increase is geting out of hand.
Homosexuality is sometimes accompanied by increased sexual appetite - some homosexuals are promiscuous and prefer sex several times a day. Some prefer youth, even children, as partners. This makes homosexual predators a real problem, traumatizing the personalities of their young victims.
The upside is less population increase, the downside is sexual abuse.
As is always the case, anything good has bad aspects, and anything bad has good aspects.
-------------------- The light of truth is blinding to most.
More comforting to look only at the shadows of falseness. Posts: 4402 | From: Florida | Registered: Jun 2003
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"Homosexuality is genetically based and increases with animal crowding - too many animals in a restricted space."
Exactly... people say thats why you don't see many gays being brought up in small towns, compared to big cities.
Posts: 270 | Registered: Aug 2004
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posted
Homosexual offspring are also associated with increased female fetility - fetile mothers (who tend to have many offspring) have more children that are homosexual (but not all are).
This is separate from the crowding issue - which can be demonstrated in crowding together lab animals to produce more homosexual offspring - though more fertility is likely to induce more crowding.
Homosexuals appear to be more creative - more artistic, more film, stage, music and dance performers, decoraters, hairdressers, etc.
-------------------- The light of truth is blinding to most.
More comforting to look only at the shadows of falseness. Posts: 4402 | From: Florida | Registered: Jun 2003
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posted
Well the point of my post was that this preacher was tried convicted and sentenced for saying something negative about homosexuals. This was labeled a hate crime which sounds alot to me like thought crime {Im sure we have all read 1984} Art you did forget one more downside that would be the rampant spread of disease throughout this community. For some time our hard earned tax dollars have been used to fight a sickness these people know how to avoid.
Posts: 396 | From: Blue Springs MO USA | Registered: Oct 2004
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posted
s word spread of a rare and potentially more aggressive form of H.I.V., first reported publicly in New York on Friday, communities already hit hard by the disease, professionals who combat it, and people who are infected reacted yesterday with fear and skepticism. But few were surprised, given that the sense of urgency about the disease has waned.
Michael Justiniano, 37, who lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, said he watched his father die of AIDS in 1993. "I have spoken to young kids, sometimes here, who say, 'If I get it, it's no big deal. I can just take a pill,' " he said. "I'm like, 'Are you stupid?' It is so disgusting. I find it really disturbing."
City health officials announced on Friday that they had detected the rare strain of H.I.V. in one man whose case they described as particularly worrisome because it merged two unusual features: resistance to nearly all anti-retroviral drugs used to treat the infection, and stunningly swift progression from infection to full-fledged AIDS. Scientists say that only with more testing will they hope to determine how virulent the strain is and how specific to this one man its effects are.
That combination drug resistance and rapid AIDS onset, the officials said, could signal a new, more menacing kind of infection, and its discovery set in motion an anxious search by city workers to find the man's sexual partners and have them tested.
The infected man, gay and in his 40's, tested negative for H.I.V. in May 2003, then tested positive last December, health officials said. Investigators believe he may have contracted the virus in October when he engaged in unprotected anal sex with multiple partners while using crystal methamphetamine. By last month, it was clear that three of the four classes of anti-retroviral drugs used against H.I.V. were not working in this case, and the man showed signs of AIDS, including rapid weight loss, a high level of the virus in his bloodstream, and a depleted supply of crucial immune system cells.
Even though the anti-retroviral "cocktail" has extended many lives, some infected people still deteriorate and end up with AIDS, but that process usually takes many years. Doctors say that for a patient to reach that stage in a matter of months is extremely troubling.
AIDS experts and public health officials have long maintained that since the development of anti-retroviral drugs in the 1990's, people have developed a false sense that AIDS no longer poses a significant threat, leading to a rise in unprotected sex. Clear evidence of the trend has been seen in the growing number of cases of sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis, chlamydia, and lymphogranuloma.
In 2003, a survey by New York City's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene found that more than half of city residents with multiple recent sexual partners had not been tested for H.I.V. in the previous 18 months, and 40 percent said that they had not used condoms the last time they had sex. At the time, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city health commissioner, attributed the results to "H.I.V. precaution burnout."
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg described the failure to take precautions against H.I.V. in stark terms yesterday. "It's just a sin in our society, where we know how it's transmitted from one person to another," he said, "and we should be able to get people to conduct themselves such that they don't catch it themselves, and certainly that they don't infect anybody else."
Unsafe sex practices combined with growing resistance to medications among people with H.I.V., has had officials warning for years about a possible resurgence of AIDS, a fear voiced yesterday by many people across the country as they struggled to make sense of the news out of New York.
Oliver Palan, 19, a gay student at Baruch College, said that he had slept with 10 men recently, and that none of them had wanted to use a condom. "So many people are like, 'It is so much more fun without the condom,' so they prefer to take the risk," he said, noting that he insists on using condoms. Often, he said, partners will try to dissuade him by saying, "I trust you, you should trust me."
Edsel Gonzalez, 30, a business owner in South Beach, the Miami Beach neighborhood filled with nightclubs and restaurants that is popular among gays, said he was "absolutely worried about this."
"It seems like we're moving backwards in the fight against AIDS," Mr. Gonzalez said. "I'm scared for my son and my family - to think that a type of unknown H.I.V. can resist the effects of modern medicine is unsettling."
Yesterday morning at the Big Cup, a popular coffee shop in Chelsea, the customers, most of them gay men, talked about how the fear of AIDS had declined, especially among a younger generation that did not have the searing experience of watching friends die. Some said they feared that a new strain of the disease might have emerged, but none were surprised, given the prevailing attitude.
"People got so comfortable with the drugs that they have started becoming complacent," said Will Elosei, 37, from Jersey City. Now, he said, "I think people are going to be more paranoid about everything. Hopefully, open sex will not be a common thing like it is right now."
At an H.I.V. treatment center run by the group Housing Works, in East New York, Brooklyn, an H.I.V.-positive woman named Pat, who would not give her last name, said: "The medications gave people a false sense of security. It gave them a sense that they could do things that before were a death sentence."
People who work in H.I.V. treatment and prevention reported a spike in calls from distraught patients Friday and yesterday, some of them with inaccurate or exaggerated information. "I got a call from someone who had heard that there was a new strain of virus that was spreading around, that resulted in an all but instant onset of AIDS and was totally untreatable," said Martin Delaney, founding director of Project Inform, an AIDS advocacy group in San Francisco.
The true significance of Friday's announcement immediately became a topic of heated debate among scientists who study H.I.V. and AIDS. Many of them said it was too soon to say if the single infection in New York was truly something new. Some noted that they had seen the rapid progression of H.I.V. to AIDS and high drug resistance before, though not both in combination. They said that the New York case could indicate more about the vulnerability of the infected man's immune system than about the dangers of the virus in his body.
"We need better characterization of the virus in this man," said Dr. Marcus Conant, a professor at the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. "What does it look like genetically?"
Yet he, too, voiced a lack of surprise at the possibility that a more dangerous strain had emerged. "All of us have been expecting for some time there would be the multidrug resistance," he said. "This virus has mutated around what we've thrown at it."
Patrick McGovern, executive director of Harlem United Community AIDS Center, said he was unsure what to think, but added, "I don't know this to be a scare-mongering administration, so I would tend to take them pretty seriously."
Even as he announced the detection of the aggressive strain of H.I.V., Dr. Frieden, the city health commissioner, said that more testing was needed before health officials and scientists could be certain about the extent of the threat. But for now, he said, the responsible reaction was to treat it as a real menace and to alert the public.
Yesterday, doctors and counselors who specialize in H.I.V. treatment and prevention were focused on news that the more virulent infection had appeared in a man who used methamphetamine and then had unprotected sex with multiple partners.
For decades, methamphetamine - a powerful and sometimes addictive stimulant also called crystal meth or speed - was found mostly in states in the West. But it has made deep inroads around the country in recent years, and in much of the nation's midsection it has supplanted cocaine and heroin as the biggest drug problem. In recent years, H.I.V. counselors say, sexual marathons, fueled by methamphetamine and other drugs, have become popular among some gay men.
"In the last 12 to 15 months, we've seen a huge increase in meth use among people that are newly tested H.I.V.-positive," Mr. McGovern said. "People become hypersexual when they're using crystal, but crystal by itself can limit your ability to function sexually. So people combine it with something like Viagra, that lets them keep going for hours."
Doctors disagree about the role methamphetamine may play in making users more susceptible to infection, but there is widespread agreement that it lowers inhibitions and can lead to more unprotected frequent sex with multiple partners.
Dennis DeLeon, the president of the Latino Commission on AIDS, said it was common for men using methamphetamine to have sex with 10 to 20 partners in one night. "It is a drug where they just lose count," he said.
Most gay men do not engage in such behavior, nor is it limited to gays. But medical history has shown repeatedly that a small number of infected people can cause a serious health hazard.
With doctors, medical researchers and public health officials now on the lookout for signs of a spreading condition, the true nature of the threat may soon become apparent. Health officials seeking to protect the infected man's privacy have said little about him except that he had been very active sexually - one person briefed on the case said he had had hundreds of sexual partners - raising the prospect that others have been infected with the same strain. If the virus is as dangerous as some health officials fear, similar cases could be expected to crop up soon.
If experts were uncertain how concerned they should be, average citizens were even more so.
At the Housing Works center in Brooklyn, where most of the clients are black, some said they thought a more virulent form of AIDS was old news. Others said they believed it affected only white people, and still others said the entire affair was an overreaction.
Lissa Welchel, 32, a wine broker in Miami, said the more she learned about the strain the more worried she became. "What scares me the most is the rapid progression of this strand," she said. "AIDS is a scary disease in itself, and to think that an unknown strand with such power could be transmissible is a definite alarm for concern."
Still, she said she was unsure how great a threat it was. "I hope that this is just a single case and we don't experience a wide-spread event of people dying from AIDS years before their time," she said.
Posts: 396 | From: Blue Springs MO USA | Registered: Oct 2004
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quote:Originally posted by GHOSTRADER: did yall get sprinkled with fairy dust or sumthing yall are warped !!!
I have fairy dust for only $1,000 per ounce.
Also, investors can invest in my new company FDCON:OTCBB, which I plan to list soon. I have an investment package for ground-floor venture capitalists which consists of 10 billion shares of the new stock and an autographed picture of myself, for only $5,000.
Chance of a lifetime. Try an ounce for $1,000 and you will see.
-------------------- The light of truth is blinding to most.
More comforting to look only at the shadows of falseness. Posts: 4402 | From: Florida | Registered: Jun 2003
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I'm in Art. Now I know why I never visit this part of the site. You guys need some serious help.
-------------------- Amazing how much time we spend looking for the truth but never spend the time to get to the point. Posts: 1164 | From: KANSAS CITY | Registered: Aug 2003
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Good to hear from you. Visit swing traders for posting your picks at times.
Serious help not needed by me and other posters here - just more fairy dust from me.
My fairy dust is a sun-cured special blend of herbs from the Amazon river region, developed after 75 years of my personal research. It cures headaches, polio, catatonic schizophrenia, arthritis, hyperlipodemea, high blod pressure, and prostate cancer, besides just making you light in your loafers. It also doubles your life span (I am now 110 years old).
-------------------- The light of truth is blinding to most.
More comforting to look only at the shadows of falseness. Posts: 4402 | From: Florida | Registered: Jun 2003
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posted
You guys spend to much time in front of the computers. I have not burnt latley on pinks still playing. Tried a big boy stock the other day at lunch lost 300.00. Art what do you think of oghc? It is the highest priced stock in my bag. Glass if you have any of my all in play you bpwrf might get out. Art do you go to stock house? They have a art 2004 over there
-------------------- Amazing how much time we spend looking for the truth but never spend the time to get to the point. Posts: 1164 | From: KANSAS CITY | Registered: Aug 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Sgt. Steiner: Well the point of my post was that this preacher was tried convicted and sentenced for saying something negative about homosexuals. This was labeled a hate crime which sounds alot to me like thought crime {Im sure we have all read 1984} Art you did forget one more downside that would be the rampant spread of disease throughout this community. For some time our hard earned tax dollars have been used to fight a sickness these people know how to avoid.
Yes, forgot that.
I long for a nation where people are held responsible for themselves instead of a nation that robs my hard earned money and uses it to bail irresponsible people out. Such liberal policies increase irreponsibility among citizens, and this degrades the nation. Charities should bail people out and not government.
-------------------- The light of truth is blinding to most.
More comforting to look only at the shadows of falseness. Posts: 4402 | From: Florida | Registered: Jun 2003
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posted
I have a swing for you art bpwrf at .50 to .70 pm me before you buy
-------------------- Amazing how much time we spend looking for the truth but never spend the time to get to the point. Posts: 1164 | From: KANSAS CITY | Registered: Aug 2003
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On this topic I thought I would get a terrorist charge riding around with 5 guns loaded. We call it hunting where I come from.
-------------------- Amazing how much time we spend looking for the truth but never spend the time to get to the point. Posts: 1164 | From: KANSAS CITY | Registered: Aug 2003
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quote:Originally posted by DOUBLE L: Art what do you think of oghc? It is the highest priced stock in my bag. Glass if you have any of my all in play you bpwrf might get out. Art do you go to stock house? They have a art 2004 over there
OGHC may still seek a floor here and becomes very interesting at the 1.5 level. BPWRF may be closer to a floor and would be interesting at .56. Have to be quick and get out, either with a good profit or when it starts to dive 5%below your purchase price.
Best to trade OTC stocks with large doses of fairy dust.
That Art2004 is not me, as far as I know, but not even sure who I am - maybe more fairy dust will help.
-------------------- The light of truth is blinding to most.
More comforting to look only at the shadows of falseness. Posts: 4402 | From: Florida | Registered: Jun 2003
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posted
I"m sure it will. I was thinking .45-.50 bpwrf big money has been leaving for a week or so he thinks he will get back in around .50. And news for oghc. Bpwrf might put some news out soon and back to .75 we go. I am out right now waiting for news. Oghc is a longer term play to $2.90 again.
-------------------- Amazing how much time we spend looking for the truth but never spend the time to get to the point. Posts: 1164 | From: KANSAS CITY | Registered: Aug 2003
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