I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that Providence Road Baptist Church’s flock is now coming forward to defend its spiritual leader. Charles Worley’s “final solution” — a concentration camp for gays with its goal of extinction — is popular with some of his followers.

In Harmony, North Carolina, a chapter of the Loyal White Knights of the KKK are inviting the locals to attend a cross burning this weekend. This is America, and it’s 2012, but time has passed these people by.

It’s nice to see this outlandish man exposed on national media. As I blogged yesterday, Pastor Charles Worley of Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, NC recently told his congregation during a sermon that his solution to dealing with LGBTs is to send them to concentration camps to starve to death. Here’s more media coverage and videos.

The race-baiting, divisive people behind the National Organization for Marriage and the Family Research Council take note. The NAACP is not having your wedge strategy. Today the national NAACP held a press conference; here are the remarks.

Pastor Charles Worley of Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, NC recently told his congregation that his solution to dealing with lesbian, gay, bisexual & transgender people is to send them to concentration camps to starve to death.

Dr. Robert Spitzer announced plans to officially apologize to the gay community for a 2001 study he published which claimed that gays can change their sexual orientation. But anti-gay groups led by Tony Perkins and Peter Sprigg still site this recanted work on their anti-gay websites. Time to demand they recant too.

What welcome news; and it clarifies and underscores that the social justice movement will not be divided by NOM, race-baiters, and anti-equality activists that try to conflate church and state and court communities of color in a divide and conquer strategy. At a Miami meeting of civil rights organization’s board of directors, the NAACP voted to support marriage equality.

After passing through the horrible fire of battling Amendment One here in North Carolina, I felt drained, not just because of the results, but the battle on this front and many others shows just how far we have to go in addressing society’s myriad problems with racism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, misogyny, etc.

It makes me sad and weary. If only we could harness all of the energy put into hate- and fear-based thoughts and actions and turn it into positive action for everyone’s benefit.

Homophobia, mysogyny and hip-hop — these are topics that I’ve blogged about quite a bit; that’s why it’s meaningful that an artist with street cred (and controversy) in that milieu like Jay-Z comes forward to make a statement in support of marriage equality.

When I read Jennifer Kahn’s well-written, draining piece in the NYT about the plight of a family whose child is exhibiting all the signs of a sociopath at the tender age of 9, all sorts of questions ran through my mind. Science often just uncovers the tip of the iceberg when it comes to mental illness/conditions we don’t understand very well, and it’s true in this case.