This morning I launched a mobile edition of this journal. If you have an iPhone, you now have the option to view a custom-made web page. I don’t know how or if it works in other mobile telephones.

The new page is still very much a beta test. I will work more on the layout when I have the time to do it proper. Until then, you can view the not-yet-finished version here.

Pastor Rick Warren, who was invited to speak at Barack Obama’s inauguration, is a devout homophobe. He is against equality and thinks love between people of the same sex is immoral. Now it turns out he cannot even allow himself to condemn a proposed Ugandan law that would allow courts to sentence gay people to death. He has no problem comparing abortion to the Holocaust, but has nothing to say when one of the groups targeted by the Nazis once again is threatened by hostile politicians.

A local politician is southern Sweden has become something of a national celebrity after she said that part of being Swedish is being able to “lick pussy in the morning and suck cock in the evening if you want to”. I think she is right, although it has more to do with a belief in individual liberty than sexual practice.

Today, many batte din (rabbinical courts) do everything in their power to deter Gentiles from converting to Judaism. This was not always the case. Before the destruction on the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, Judaism not only embraced converts but sought them.

From an interesting article in Moment, I learn that the Israelites grew from about 150,000 to eight million in less than 600 years largely by absorbing men willing to be circumcised and women marrying Jewish men. I also learn that the word “proselytize” comes from the Greek word proselytos, which means to convert to Judaism.

A reader writes:

Have you heard about this rather secretive Christian group called The Family? Scary shit.

The journalist who’s been digging the most into their inner-workings just found out that the Ugandan politicians, who have proposed the sick anti-gay legislation you’ve been blogging about, are the core of this group, The Family, in Africa.

Jeff Sharlet was interviewed about his new book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, on NPR’s Fresh Air earlier this week. Listen to the programme online here.

My reader is right, this is scary shit.

Could the leaked emails (I wrote about this in an earlier entry) from top scientists prove the final nail in the coffin of the theory of anthropogenic global warming? James Delingpole thinks so.

Sexual orientation is genetic, at least to some extent:

Each person has about a 4-6% chance of being same-sex attracted. If, however, one has a twin brother that’s gay, the odds increase to about 12%. Make it an identical twin and you have a 50/50 chance that you too will be gay.

The National Geographic has made a short video to explain and discuss the latest data.

A piece of European history told by colourful blobs.

Private email correspondence between top scientists shows that they are increasingly annoyed by the fact that reality doesn’t fit their global-warming theory. Kevin Trenberth, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, blames technology:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

I have to admit that I am not very exited over global warming. I am far more worried about the threats to free trade, cheap travel, and new technology than I am about the planet heating up a bit. I realize that Al Gore’s worst-case scenario looks bad, but I think a lot more people will suffer if we let the environmentalists halt globalization. If we want to fight poverty, we must engage more in global trade, not less.

In 1998, Pope John Paul II formally apologized for the failure of Catholics to help Jews during the Holocaust, but considering that the Vatican continues to claim the moral highground, we should remember what exactly it did—or rather failed to do:

Throughout the Holocaust, Pius XII was consistently besieged with pleas for help on behalf of the Jews.

In the spring of 1940, the Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Isaac Herzog, asked the papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Luigi Maglione to intercede to keep Jews in Spain from being deported to Germany. He later made a similar request for Jews in Lithuania. The papacy did nothing.

Within the Pope’s own church, Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Vienna told Pius XII about Jewish deportations in 1941. In 1942, the Slovakian charge d’affaires, a position under the supervision of the Pope, reported to Rome that Slovakian Jews were being systematically deported and sent to death camps.

In October 1941, the Assistant Chief of the U.S. delegation to the Vatican, Harold Tittman, asked the Pope to condemn the atrocities. The response came that the Holy See wanted to remain “neutral,” and that condemning the atrocities would have a negative influence on Catholics in German-held lands.

In late August 1942, after more than 200,000 Ukrainian Jews had been killed, Ukrainian Metropolitan Andrej Septyckyj wrote a long letter to the Pope, referring to the German government as a regime of terror and corruption, more diabolical than that of the Bolsheviks. The Pope replied by quoting verses from Psalms and advising Septyckyj to “bear adversity with serene patience.”

On September 18, 1942, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, wrote, “The massacres of the Jews reach frightening proportions and forms.” Yet, that same month when Myron Taylor, U.S. representative to the Vatican, warned the Pope that his silence was endangering his moral prestige, the Secretary of State responded on the Pope’s behalf that it was impossible to verify rumors about crimes committed against the Jews.

Wladislaw Raczkiewicz, president of the Polish government-in-exile, appealed to the Pope in January 1943 to publicly denounce Nazi violence. Bishop Preysing of Berlin did the same, at least twice. Pius XII refused.

Speaking of the Catholic Church, I think this video is excellent. It has nothing to do with the church’s relationship with the Jewish people, but I think it shows that the Catholic leadership only changed its minds about Jews because they had to. The Good Friday prayer gives it away.

By the way, it has become popular among Swedish Catholics to play victims of politically correct bigotry. Every time anyone voices the slightest of criticism, these people say, “We are harassed!” I don’t care. I’m a libertarian, which means that I loathe all forms of authoritarian ideology—and few religious movements are more authoritarian than the Catholic Church.

They call it the “Manhattan Declaration” and it states that the conservative Christians reserve the right to ignore laws they do not like. I think everybody knows what laws upset them the most. A clue: it is not the laws that protect the rights and liberties of the male Christian clergy.

Personally, I think the declaration is a tedious repetition of numerous similar statements from conservative theologians. The only thing that makes this declaration somewhat different is the media spin on the signing of it.

You find the declaration in full here. If you find it too boring, then go directly to Timothy Kincaid’s review here.

A was vaccinated against swine flu the other day and now I feel ill. I’m extremely tired and I have a fever. My body hurt whenever I move a limb.

I thought the vaccination would make me immune, not ill.

Once again, the Swedish Humanist Association affirms homophobic theology by stating that religion contradicts gay rights. The new atheist movement is a sad spectacle. In its eagerness to label all religion as bad, it sides with religious orthodoxy against gay people of faith.

The National Gay Pentecostal Alliance’s word-for-word translation of Leviticus 20:13 from the original Hebrew:

“And a man who will lie down with a male in beds of a woman, both of them have made an abomination; dying they will die. Their blood is on them.”

The NGPA also suggests a modern English translation:

“If two men engage in homosexual sex while on a woman’s bed, both have committed an abomination. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”

Compare this to the translation in the New International Version of the Bible:

“If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”

We have come a long way from the original. What began as a divine instruction to gay men became a priestly prohibition of gay men.

More information here.

A few devout homophobes tried to get arrested in Washington yesterday. Their plan was to say ugly things about gay people in order to provoke a reaction from the police and thus prove that free speech and religious freedom is threatened by new hate-crime legislation that include sexual orientation. They failed. The police did nothing, and people ignored their pathetic attempts to get attention.

From Mount Sinai to the Internet: Jewish people have a new hub in common.

The sun does not always shine in California. New statistics from the Golden State pain a grim picture. In 2008, hate crimes directed at Jews increased by 37% from previous year, and hate crimes directed at gays and lesbians rose by 28%.

It is not only the Catholic clergy that has a problem with sexual predators. A Jewish congregation in America recently addressed the problem when an outspoken rabbi condemned the Orthodox community’s leadership for ignoring cases of rape and sexual abuse.

It is good that religious leaders act, but I think the bigger problem is the strict interpretation of the biblical commandments. The strictness of some religious communities is a trap for people who are unable to live up to the social rules, and instead they abuse the trust of society’s most vulnerable, whom they can persuade not to report them.

The trend in favour of same-sex marriage suggests a majority of Americans will support it within five years.

Amsterdam, my former hometown, wants a new image. “What we are aiming for is a mix of quality stores, housing and businesses together with the traditional window brothels,” says one local politician.

The Netherlands is only an hour by aeroplane from Sweden, but politically it could not be further away. Here, the news of the day is that top politicians are considering toughening the laws against prostitution.

During the Church of Sweden’s debate on same-sex marriage, Lutheran priest Dag Sandahl publicly reduced the lifelong love between two people of the same sex to a matter of “arse fucking” and became an underdog hero to the Christian Right. I wonder if Jesus had this in mind when he said, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

A judge in Argentina has decided that a Buenos Aires same-sex couple is allowed to marry.

On this day, fifteen years ago, Sweden held a referendum on joining the European Union. I wonder what would be different had the people said no.

The scene stands stubborn: skinflint trees
Hoard last year’s leaves, won’t mourn, wear sackcloth, or turn
To elegiac dryads, and dour grass
Guards the hard-hearted emerald of its grassiness
However the grandiloquent mind may scorn
Such poverty. No dead men’s cries

Flower forget-me-nots between the stones
Paving this grave ground. Here’s honest rot
To unpick the heart, pare bone
Free of the fictive vein. When one stark skeleton
Bulks real, all saints’ tongues fall quiet:
Flies watch no resurrections in the sun.

At the essential landscape stare, stare
Till your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind:
Whatever lost ghosts flare,
Damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor
Rave on the leash of the starving mind
Which peoples the bare room, the blank, untenanted air.

By Sylvia Plath

Some people seem to think so:

Doctors in south-western Sweden will soon be able to prescribe cultural activities such as choir lessons or ceramics classes as part of a taxpayer-funded initiative to help reduce prolonged absences from work due to illness.

On Monday, the Swedish government announced that health authorities in Skåne in southern Sweden will receive 500,000 kronor ($72,600) from the public purse to fund a pilot programme called Kultur på recept (‘Culture by prescription’).

The average Russian man drinks about 70 litres of vodka in a year. This makes them the world’s number-one alcoholics. In some bizarre way, it’s impressive.

The executive director of the Jerusalem Open House for Pride and Tolerance has written a letter about tolerance to the Jerusalem Post. As always, the comments section proves that the people who should learn from the letter opt for ignorance and hatred. Someone even suggests that two people of the same gender loving each other is a sin equal to murder.

On the day, twenty years ago, the people of East Germany had enough of communist oppression and tore down the Berlin Wall. It would be the first in a series of events that led to the collapse of Soviet-style communism in Europe. Tonight, world leaders will gather in Berlin to celebrate the anniversary.

In 1989, I was caught up in my own teenage rebellion and an outspoken fan of anarchism. In my record collection, I had “Die Mauer” by Swedish punk group Ebba Grön. When I listen to it now, it brings back memories.

Those of us who remember the 1980s must never forget how bad it was during the Cold War.

It is a local election in Copenhagen and the city is filled with posters from various parties. Some of them are odd, but none is as odd as the Danish Nihilistic Party, whose slogan is, “Everything is meaningless anyhow—waste your vote on us!”

I snapped this picture of one of their posters on Østerbro on my way to the synagogue yesterday. If you can read Danish (and Swedish readers should), then there’s more information on the party’s website.

Things went bad in Maine, but there were some success in Washington State. However, adding “marriage-like benefits” to registered same-sex couples is not satisfying. It will help people in their everyday life, but marriage equality is about more than legal recognition.

Opponent to same-sex marriage won yesterday’s referendum in Maine. A slim majority has denied gay people equal treatment under the law.

But Andrew Sullivan is an optimist. He thinks there might be a recount.

I think that no matter what the outcome of this referendum will be, people will look back on this era with the same disgust that we feel when we look back on the era of racial segregation. We should remember that in 1967, sixteen American states had laws against interracial marriage. Back then, skin colour was the biological quality that made some couples’ love an abomination. Today it is gender.

The leading clergy from dominant religious groups in Uganda have appealed to the government to scrape the death penalty in a new anti-homosexuality bill that is currently being debated in the country’s national parliament. But the appeal has nothing to do with compassion for oppressed people or concerns for human rights. On the contrary, the clergy think killing homosexuals does not serve its purpose; instead, they want the government to leave gay people to rot in prison.

Karl af Hällström reports that a recent survey in Finland suggests forty-four per cent are in favour of same-sex marriage in the country’s Evangelical Lutheran Church.

Maybe there is some toxic chemical in the Uppsala air, because here is another stupid article from the same town.

(Mohamed Omar, whom I wrote about in the previous entry, lives in Uppsala. That is also the home of Christian newspaper Världen Idag.)

This article in Swedish is among the stupidest things I have ever read.

Sweden’s most famous Islamist, poet Mohamed Omar, interviews student Islamist Porang Zahedi, who describes himself as a proud homophobe. Zahedi’s biggest problem in life is the “homophobe-phobes” who oppress bigots like him. In a rough translation, one the many stupid things he says reads, “Those who claim that gays are badly treated have not idea about what it is like for the homophobes. Gays have the state and the public on their side. But I cannot report homophobe-phobes when they bully me for being a homophobe.”

This week’s issue of The Economist makes the argument.

Almost one in five Swedes under the age of thirty think that George W. Bush’s administration was behind the terror attacks on 11 September 2001. This is an unbelievable figure. In my book, this is like questioning the Holocaust. From The Local:

Of the 1,000 Swedes surveyed in an internet panel, 70 percent responded that al-Qaida were behind the attacks, while seven percent did not think so.

Among those under-30 only 58 percent believed responsibility lay with al-Qaida, while 15 percent did not.

When asked whether the US government orchestrated the attacks, eight percent supported the theory while 64 percent rejected it.

However among the under-30s there was once again more scepticism: 51 percent rejected the conspiracy theory while 18 percent believed that the US government, led at the time by President George W Bush, had a role in the attacks.

As many as 31 percent of the young people interviewed in the survey responded that they did not know what to believe.

I’m stunned.

President Obama has lifted the ban on HIV-positive visitors to America. This is good news.

The British Government has sacked David Nutt, a chief drugs adviser, after he said cannabis is less harmful than alcohol or nicotine. As a protest against the Government’s decision, several experts are handing in their resignations. “If governments appoint expert advice they shouldn’t dismiss it so lightly,” says Lord Robert Winston in a comment. And he is right. If government ministers do not want the experts’ opinions, they should not pretend to be interested in the first place.

Update: The Guardian has more.