Tuesday, December 27, 2011

World’s biggest gay magazine: no compassion and tolerance for a former lesbian and her daughter

World’s biggest gay magazine: no compassion and tolerance for a former lesbian and her daughter

By Julio Severo
The Advocate, the biggest gay magazine in America and, in its own words, “The World’s Leading News Source for LGBT”, has just put its sights on LifeSiteNews and me in its defense of lesbian activist Janet Jenkins.
The Advocate: Mockery of Christ
The mission of The Advocate, as its name implies, is to advocate — for the gay agenda and its militants. Jenkins wants the daughter of her former lesbian partner Lisa Miller, who renounced homosexuality for Jesus. Regardless of the well-being of the girl, the infamous mission is to “rescue” her from her own biological mother to give her to an unrelated lesbian.
What would make a lesbian pursue the custody of a child at the expense of her biological mother? Of course, gay readers of The Advocate agree with any gay mission, as long as the gay agenda is ultimately exalted. But one lesbian commentator, who sided with Jenkins, asked the tough question:
“The child was about a year old when they split up and Miller has been the sole parent of the child for all this time. So any question of whether she is a fit or unfit mother is moot… I understand the heartache Jenkins must feel for her loss but what kind of relationship could she possibly have at this point if Miller is uncooperative and hostile?”
In fact, Jenkins was able to have some time with Isabella, in court-ordered visits that left the girl traumatized.
Yet, who else is asking tough questions? The US government, which is actively promoting the gay agenda around the world, wants nothing to do with tough questions detrimental to the homosexualist interests. And the FBI, to its own shame, is after a girl and her natural mother, because an unrelated lesbian wants her, at all costs.
The cost has been high, indeed. So far, two ministers have been arrested, because they helped Lisa Miller and her daughter Isabella flee the United States. Rev. Timothy Miller was arrested by FBI when he arrived at the US from his missionary work in Nicaragua. He was arrested at the airport in the presence of his wife and four children. To show PC compassion to the interests and ambitions of a lesbian activist, the FBI had to show cruelty to a Christian family.
In its investigations, the FBI decoded the Pennsylvania German language used by the ministers in their efforts to transfer Lisa Miller and her daughter from the United States to Canada, then to Mexico, then to Nicaragua and then to Ecuador — as alleged by The Advocate. (If the FBI had been this effective in decoding the “language” of Islamic terrorists before 2001, 9/11 would have never happened!) Subsequently, another minister was arrested. It is implacable persecution solely to serve the gay agenda.
The Advocate, satisfied with the FBI engagement, implied that LifeSiteNews may be involved. Hey, publish any article defending a former lesbian and her daughter, and the Gaystapo will say that you have committed a crime against the gay agenda. And perhaps many Christians have begun accepting the wrong-headed idea that it is a crime to defend this helpless mother and her daughter, because while the secular and gay media have been vocal about the “rights” of Janet Jenkins, the Christian media are largely silent.
By the way, The Advocate has also mentioned me, calling me and other Christians “antigay”, just because we do not accept the gay agenda, and just because we oppose the wickedness that the gay agenda has been committing against Lisa Miller and her daughter.
The Advocate said,
“In a December 1 Life Site News op-ed titled ‘Cowardice: The State and Homosexualist Powers Against a Former Lesbian and Her Daughter,’ Brazilian antigay activist Julio Severo characterized Lisa Miller and her daughter as victims in a perceived war against religious freedom. Jenkins, meanwhile, was cast as a predator and cynical ‘lesbian activist.’”
If Miller and her biological daughter are not victims, what are they? Oppressors of Jenkins? Poor Jenkins: the FBI and the liberal mass press have been smearing her, because Miller refuses to return her biological daughter! How cynical Miller is to defend her daughter!
The homosexual desires of Jenkins are more important than Miller’s biological motherhood, more important than Jesus Christ (to whom Lisa and her daughter have dedicated their lives) and more important than the moral, spiritual and physical well-being of Isabella herself.
Another The Advocate commentator noted,
“The issue here is simple. Isabella does not belong to Jenkins because she is not her biological mother or father. No court or government has the right to force custody like this. The sooner Jenkins understands this the better.”
In spite of all the facts, the blind militancy of The Advocate and its supporters keep them from accepting basic realities, biological and otherwise. Instead, people are forced to accept their unnatural realities. And the US government and the FBI side with them, not with Miller, me or LifeSiteNews, to make sure the unnatural takes precedence over the natural, for the sake of homosexuality and its agenda.
So what now? Should LifeSiteNews be targeted for FBI surveillance? Should I also be targeted for FBI surveillance, because of my article defending the oppressed, not the oppressor? “Oh, sure!” The Advocate and its gay chorus would shout. Other radicals would say, “Arrest him!” “Crucify him” — this last wish came from a Brazilian gay in a homosexual website. The Advocate could reply, “Oh, we are not that mean! FBI and imprisonment is enough”.
And, actually, the FBI is making arrests. Kenneth Miller, the second minister arrested, was under FBI surveillance for other religious contacts that helped Lisa Miller and her daughter. The FBI is determined to arrest any other evangelical minister involved in their defense. If such FBI surveillance had targeted Islamic contacts, it would have been labeled a hate crime. Apparently, only gays and Muslims are entitled to protest government interference in PC America.
With such FBI policies, how can America be safe? Yet, what does it matter to the liberal US government and liberal media? The important thing is to make the gay agenda safe, regardless how unsafe the innocent will be.
Evangelical ministers, a biological mother and her daughter: everybody may be left on the lurch, except for Jenkins and other homosexualists, who are granted government and media favors and privileges.
Meanwhile, those who supported Lisa Miller and her daughter, in the face of threats and imprisonments, are not receiving any media support and have no powerful friend like the FBI to help them. Instead, their meager support comes from a few churches.
Mennonite churches affiliated with Rev. Kenneth Miller have created a website expressing “solidarity with Ken as he faces charges for choices and actions we believe were correct. By God’s grace we would want to make the same choices he did. Our involvement with Lisa and Isabella Miller has stemmed from a desire to obey our Lord Jesus — both His commands and example”.
This was the proper Christian response in the times of Nazi and Communist tyranny.
This is the proper Christian response in these times of PC, gay tyranny.
Source: Last Days Watchman, the personal blog of Julio Severo: www.lastdayswatchman.blogspot.com

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Associated Press defends Umbanda as an “Afro-Brazilian religion under threat”

Associated Press defends Umbanda as an “Afro-Brazilian religion under threat”

By Julio Severo
Lying in a pentagram is Rosa Cardoso, a woman that has practiced the Afro-Brazilian religion of Umbanda most her life and, according to the Associated Press (AP), has been “hiding her faith from the rest of the world”.
Umbanda house of worship
Century-old Afro-Brazilian religion under threat”, the AP report by Juliana Barbassa, makes no mention of animal sacrifices, a practice not uncommon in the Afro-Brazilian religions. And, because her article obviously intended to portray Umbanda in a positive light as a threatened, poor religion, this omission was necessary.
I grew up seeing in the Brazilian crossroads of my neighborhood offerings to the African spirits. These offerings comprised fruits, food, alcohol beverages, cigarettes and sacrificed animals such as goats. Interestingly, the English version of Wikipedia has also no mention of animal sacrifices in its entry on Umbanda. Its Portuguese version makes a mere passing mention, saying that these sacrifices are practiced only by some Umbanda ramifications.
By reading this AP report and the English Wikipedia, you see no sacrifices. But when you live in Brazil in a place where there is a lot of “hidden” Umbanda, you see a lot of these weekly, very visible offerings to the African spirits in the crossroads. A lot of sacrificed animals.
The AP omission hit other aspects of this “threatened” religion. Young women that want to entice an employer turn to Umbanda to receive “assistance” from the African gods. Married men, who do not understand what is happening, are driven to an obsessive adultery under the powerful influence of spiritual forces.
Yet, the AP worry was the “intolerance and outright hostility against Umbanda, as well as Brazil’s other major African-descended religion Candomble”. AP reports that Rosa “Cardoso said she’s learned not to let down her guard when it comes to protecting herself from religious scorn. This country of 190 million remains predominantly Roman Catholic, even as Pentecostal congregations have won over legions of converts”.
The AP “report” said,
Many in Rio can rattle off the names of a few Orixas, and thousands of believers and sympathizers flock to beaches on New Year's dressed in white to leave offerings for the ocean goddess Iemanja.
Nonetheless, many Brazilians often view Umbanda and Candomble as barely benign versions of witchcraft, and believers are loath to acknowledge publicly they follow the faiths. In many parts of the country, practicing Umbanda was outlawed until the 1950s, and in the following three decades believers were supposed to register with the police.
Umbanda was founded a little more than a century ago, drawing from older traditions such as Catholicism, the beliefs of enslaved Yoruba people brought from West Africa, the spirituality of Brazil’s indigenous groups and the teachings of 19th century French spiritualist Allan Kardec.
The religion has many variations, but all share belief in a supreme being, Oxala, and in a pantheon of other African-origin deities, many of whom are identified with a Catholic saint and with natural forces or elements. They also believe these deities, along with other spirits, can enter the body of psychics to advise and interact with the living.
A city survey in 2011 found 847 Umbanda houses of worship in Rio, though like Cardoso’s they’re often not easy to spot.
Coincidently, the Rio de Janeiro state has almost 50% of all murders in Brazil. This was another omission in the AP “report”. Umbanda has gods for prostitution and even destruction, including death. And Rio has a lot of these.
AP says,
Brazil’s post-dictatorship 1989 constitution enshrined the freedom to hold such ceremonies, but Umbanda’s followers say official disdain and intense prejudice still put their lives and shrines at risk.
[A] report, which was submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council by a Brazilian religious-freedom group, details 39 cases of discrimination around the country in 2009.
Cases of persecution against Umbanda and Candomble have increased along with the presence and the power of Pentecostal religions…
AP fails to report that the former Lula administration and the current Dilma Rousseff administration (both the most socialist governments in the Brazilian history) had and have active policies to protect Afro-Brazilian religions as a “culture” inherited from African slaves. While Catholic and Protestant traditions have increasingly been banned from schools and other government places because the State is “secular”, Afro-Brazilian religions and their practices are making inroads, with state assistance, into schools and other places, in a privileged way. Because Christianity is religion, and Afro-Brazilian religions are “culture”.
With such state protections, even Brazilian Blacks are banned from criticizing the Afro-Brazilian gods, as reported by me in WND:
“In Rio, a Pentecostal [Black] minister led a criminal to Jesus and convinced him to deliver himself to police. Rev. Isaías da Silva Andrade accompanied the former criminal to police and when they asked how his life had been changed, the minister answered that the former criminal lived under the influence of demons from Afro-Brazilian religions which inspired him to criminal conduct, but now he found salvation in Jesus. Because of this innocent account, Rev. Andrade is now being prosecuted for discrimination against the Afro-Brazilian ‘culture’! If condemned, he will serve between two and five years in jail.”
As a son of a former Umbanda leader who accepted the Gospel of Jesus Christ, I see no problem in speaking the truth about the witchcraft derived from Africa. In fact, Brazilians remember, when there was still no veil of racial censorship, the regular scandals reported by media of pai-de-santos (Afro-Brazilian priests) involved in a number of child sacrifices.
In his book Porque Deus Condena o Espiritismo (Why God condemns spiritualism, CPAD: Rio de Janeiro, 1987, pages 66-68), journalist Jefferson Magno Costa tells of a case:
It was noon when he found little Fernando, a 9-year-old boy, walking along the railroad track near the city of São Roque, in the rural area of São Paulo. He took the boy home, asked his lover (with whom he had been living for some weeks), Dalva Braga Medeiros, to give the boy food and change his clothes.
Dalva was slow to comply and he took the clothes of one of the woman’s children and put them on Fernando. After drinking blue rum, he took the boy by his hand and went out, saying that he was going to buy more rum. Upon his return, Dalva saw blood stains on the little Fernando’s clothes. Immediately she understood that the boy had been raped.
Some minutes later, he invited Fernando to go out again, but because the boy refused and showed fear, he decided to call 12-year-old Rogério, Dalva’s son, to keep company with that scared and defenseless child, and to “see how a little pig is killed”.
Leading the two boys up to a hilltop, he drew a trident on the floor. Next, as Rogério reported, he grabbed little Fernando by his neck and jabbed a knife deeply into his chest. But, unsatisfied because the boy was slow to die, pai-de-santo Josué Rodrigues de Souza made a four-inch cut on the neck of the small victim, and began to lick his blood.
After committing this abominable, horrendous and devilish act, the pai-de-santo murderer called Dalva, “because she had never seen a sacrifice”. He showed her the dead child covered in blood. He confessed to her that he’d committed the murder under possession of demon Zé Capoeira, and that he raped the child before killing him, “because Satan does not accept the soul of pure people” (O Globo newspaper, 13/03/1986). “I had to kill a person and give his blood to Satan. He was demanding”, were his words when seized after the crime. (Veja magazine 19/03/1986, p. 111).
Journalist Jefferson Magno notes,
The atrocious crime committed by pai-de-santo Josué is only one of hundreds of cases involving people that, thinking that they are serving God, are serving Satan… Given the numerous cases of that kind reported by press, it is sad that the outrage of the general populace has no memory. Society forgets things easily. Some years ago, pai-de-santo Waldir Souza Lima was taken into custody in Rio, because he killed, in black magic rituals, six children abducted in different locations in the State of Rio. (Page 73)
In the past, newspapers were free to report and denounce child sacrifices in the Afro-Brazilian religions. You can find a lot of old reports on these crimes involving child rapes and murders by Afro-Brazilian priests. But nowadays, under the watchful state eye, only flattering reports are allowed, such as “oppressed” religion, “threatened” religion and other words that the AP “report” used abundantly.
Today, the Brazilian media no longer reports pai-de-santos sacrificing children. And they are unwilling to talk about other related crimes.
When Pentecostal minister Francisco de Paula Cunha de Miranda was stabbed to death by an Afro-Brazilian priest in 2008, the Brazilian media was silent.
Miranda, 47, was murdered in Rio Grande do Sul. He was Black (and cannot, even after his death, be accused of “racism”) and was on his 33rd day of fasting and prayer when pai-de-santo Júlio César Bonato, incorporated by exu caveira (demon of death in the Afro-Brazilian “culture”), left his temple during a ritual to go to the minister.
The pai-de-santo returned to his ritual with his ritualistic knife bloody.
The minister, who was very weak because of the long fasting, was stabbed to death.
The Brazilian media remains silent about this horrific murder even today. Even the AP “report” made no mention of this crime.
Last year, a group of Umbanda adherents stabbed to death another evangelical, Nilton Rodrigues, 34, and wounded others, including an evangelical minister, João Carlos de Oliveira. Media was silent again.
I am worried that this special protection may have been made strong by Condoleezza Rice, a famous daughter of an American Presbyterian minister. She came to Brazil to strength the roots of the Afro-Brazilian religions. Her example shows that the Afro-Brazilian religions are now an international interest.
The “Brazilian religious-freedom group”, which AP said that denounced Brazilian evangelicals in the UN, is headed by an Afro-Brazilian priest, who has a high standing with the Brazilian government, which sends him to the UN meetings to denounce Brazilian evangelicals, who denounce Afro-Brazilian religions as witchcraft. As in the case of homosexuality, the mere criticism of them is treated as “prejudice, bias, discrimination, intolerance”, etc. Now, even Catholic books criticizing them are banned.
Afro-Brazilian practices that have always been seen as witchcraft by the Brazilian society have increasingly been protected by the government, UN and media. And Christianity and its values have increasingly lost protection and even been attacked by them.
Sodomy, which has been extoled and afforded the status of a special human right in the UN, is largely practiced by Afro-Brazilian religions, where their gods and spirits entice and lead their adherents, especially their priests, into prostitution, including homosexuality.
Will this sodomy-loving religion have a special status in the New World Order?
Economic and ecological disasters are flooding the world, but whatever happens, people will not renounce Umbanda, Santeria and homosexuality, because, even after many last-day plagues, God says that mankind will not “repent of their sorceries or their sexual immorality” (Revelation 9:20-21 ESV).

Tuesday, December 06, 2011

Cowardice: the state and homosexualist powers against a former lesbian and her daughter

Cowardice: the state and homosexualist powers against a former lesbian and her daughter

The FBI is after Lisa Miller and her daughter Isabella. At any time, they may be captured. At any time, Isabella may be kidnapped by the FBI and her mother arrested.

By Julio Severo
Rev. Timothy David “Timo” Miller, who acted courageously in his defense of a persecuted child and her mother, has now made a deal with federal prosecutors, who are seeking to take Isabella Miller away from her mother and give her to an unrelated lesbian. No one knows exactly what this deal is, but prosecutors appear to be pleased with the results.
Miller’s case is disturbing: He was arrested last spring when he returned to the United States from Nicaragua, where he worked as a missionary. He was charged with helping Lisa Miller (no relation) flee the United States with Isabella, her 9-year-old daughter.
Isabella and her mother Lisa Miller
Even more disturbing is the fact that a Vermont court gave the custody of Isabella to Janet Jenkins, a lesbian activist and former sexual partner of Lisa Miller.
Jenkins and Miller had been joined in a Vermont civil union in 2000 and, two years later, Miller gave birth to daughter Isabella, conceived by artificial insemination. The lesbian union ended in 2003, with Miller accepting Jesus Christ in her life and renouncing homosexuality. She became a Baptist, then a Mennonite.
Janet Jenkins, lesbian activist and the owner of a day care
But Jenkins, her former partner and the owner of a daycare, has never renounced her homosexuality or her activism. Even though she has no biological connection with Isabella and had chosen not to include her name as a “parent” of the girl on the birth certificate, Jenkins, probably under the ideological inspiration of other homosexualists, began a custody fight, having initially been awarded the “right” to have the girl for visits. One of the consequences of these unsupervised, court-ordered visits was that Isabella herself complained of being forced to bathe naked with Jenkins. The girl was being traumatized by the first steps to force her into the lesbian lifestyle.
“Isabella suffers from sleep disturbance and nightmares, having difficulty sleeping through the night,” Gwen Corley, a social worker, told the court in September, 2007. Before the court-ordered visits, the girl was a well-adjusted, healthy child, according to a June, 2007, sworn testimony of Clinical Therapist Sylvia Haydash, who had clinical sessions with Isabella.
Miller tried to protect Isabella from these morally-harmful visits, but then a court awarded full custody to Jenkins, who was able, with her homosexual connections, to summon the entire court and police apparatus to her aid.
To shield her biological daughter from further trauma at the hands of an obsessed lesbian activist, her biological mother took the hard decision to flee her own country. Into this hopeless scenario enters Rev. Timothy Miller, who just wanted to help. As a missionary in Nicaragua, he brought hope to a lonely mother and her daughter, arranging a hiding place for them among Mennonites in the Central American nation.
Perhaps Rev. Miller was not expecting to be arrested or to see the FBI involved in the case, accusing him of abetting a “kidnapping.”
But at this point he became acutely aware that the gay agenda is vastly bigger than he had previously thought. Indeed, the movement has a massive support from courts and law-enforcement agencies.
Prosecutors ultimately secured Miller’s cooperation, presumably through threats of imprisonment. They know that Lisa Miller and Isabella traveled to Nicaragua in September 2009 where a group of Mennonite missionaries had helped shelter them. They also know that mother and daughter were last seen in Nicaragua in the spring of 2010.
Earlier this year, a Mennonite pastor in Nicaragua told AP, “the Nicaraguan brethren felt it right and good to help Lisa not only free herself from the so called civil marriage and lesbian lifestyle, but especially to protect her 9-year-old daughter from being abducted and handed over to an active lesbian and a rabid activist.”
Rev. Miller is now free from the ominous claws of the FBI, which in a sane legal system would persecute thugs and terrorists. But Lisa and Isabella are not free: the FBI is after them. At any time, they may be captured. At any time, Isabella may be kidnapped by the FBI and her mother arrested.
America is resurrecting Sodom with a vengeance, supported by the formidable power of the State. While Christian social services in the US are losing their traditional right to help children because they refuse state orders to adopt children to homosexual couples, lesbian activist Janet Jenkins is free to run a day care. And because of Janet’s radical activism, Isabella and her mother are not free or safe from massive state persecution. Persecution for their faith and their refusal to compromise with evil.
This tragedy was made possible only because gay civil unions were allowed in Vermont. And when homosexual “marriage” is allowed, the gay agenda and the State become united in an unholy “marriage,” where special rights and freedoms are granted to those in the footsteps of Sodom. This unholy “marriage” enables homosexual activists to oppress and persecute people who renounce homosexual perversion, with assistance of the FBI, which has effectively become — at least in the Jenkins-Miller case — a Gaystapo.
Rev. Miller tried to oppose this unholy “marriage” and its threats against Lisa and Isabella, but it proved too strong for him. Consequently, he was arrested. Only through a compromise was he released from prison. In exchange for his testimony in future proceedings in the case against Isabella’s mother, federal prosecutors dropped criminal charges against him.
It is a major disgrace for the United States of America that a helpless mother and her daughter have been left to face alone State bullies serving the interests of the gay agenda.
Where are the honorable men and women of the US and the world who will confront this state-sanctioned homosexualist cowardice?
What you can do:
Pray that God will lead Lisa and Isabella in his grace, mercy and power.
Pray that the FBI and other authorities working for darkness and wickedness will be covered in confusion and shame.
Pray that God will bring blindness to those planning to arrest and kidnap Lisa and Isabella (see 2 Kings 6:18).
Pray that ultimately the name of Jesus Christ will be honored.
With information from the Associated Press and LifeSiteNews.
Another important article: State nightmare for children