THE DIVERSITY CENTER OF SANTA CRUZ, WHERE PEOPLE SUPPORT "THE FREEDOM TO LOVE" PEOPLE
This week, UpRights News sat down with Joe Cosentino, the Diversity Coordinator for the Diversity Center of Santa Cruz County, in California.
The mission of the Diversity Center is "to inspire and support every member of the LGBTQ+ community by creating a culture of well-being", and their vision as specified on their website, is "We envision a healthy, vibrant, and diverse intergenerational LGBTQ+ community, safe and secure in their persons, schools, work, and homes; fueled by a spirit of collaboration with each other and the greater community".
More simply, Joe and the Diversity Center are committed to supporting people who want the freedom to love other people, making Joe and the Diversity Center are heroes of the week.
The Center for Diversity operates a number of programs found here.
As Joe also specified, COVID had a detrimental impact on the many different social and environmental justice programs that Santa Cruz is well known for, resulting in the closure of many really important operations, but due to massive public support, the Diversity Center of Santa Cruz County was able to survive COVID's negative impact on all communities to come together.
For those organizations who lost their space, Joe specified that the Center for Diversity is seeking to expand the programs and diversity of their programming, and they have some space available for others who are interested in operating out of their center.
THE POPE IS AN ALLY OF THE LGBTQA+ COMMUNITY AND DEMANDS U.S. CHRISTIANS TO STOP HATING
In alignment with the teachings and core values of true Christians - who champion brotherly love - even Pope Francis supports the LGBTQ+ community, and has demanded that Christians "must" decriminalize and stop the hate against the LGBTQA+ community.
Joe of the Diversity Center specified that the "A" in LGBTQA+ stands for "allies", and where the Pope or leader of all Christians is an ally of the LGBTQA+ community, as follows.
As specified in the Guardian, in their January 25, 2023 article, "Pope Francis calls for end to anti-gay laws and LGBTQ+ welcome from church", "LGBTQ+ advocates hail Pope’s rejection of sexual orientation as crime and call to bishops to resist anti-gay laws as ‘milestone’".[2]
"Pope Francis has criticized laws that criminalize homosexuality as “unjust”, saying God loves all his children just as they are, and calling on Catholic bishops who support the laws to welcome LGBTQ+ people into the church. “Being homosexual isn’t a crime,” Francis said".
"Francis’s comments, which were hailed by gay rights advocates as a milestone, are the first uttered by a pope about such laws. But they are also consistent with his overall approach to LGBTQ+ people and his belief that the Catholic Church should welcome everyone and not discriminate."
"The UN has repeatedly called for an end to laws criminalizing homosexuality outright, saying they violate rights to privacy and freedom from discrimination and are a breach of countries’ obligations under international law to protect the human rights of all people, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
Declaring such laws “unjust”, Francis said the Catholic church can and should work to put an end to them. “It must do this. It must do this,” he said.
Francis quoted the Catholic catechism in saying gay people must be welcomed and respected, and should not be marginalized or discriminated against.
“His historic statement should send a message to world leaders and millions of Catholics around the world: LGBTQ people deserve to live in a world without violence and condemnation, and more kindness and understanding,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of the US-based advocacy group Glaad."
“We are all children of God, and God loves us as we are and for the strength that each of us fights for our dignity,” Francis said."
THE DIVERSITY CENTER IS ON "A MISSION FROM GOD TO PROTECT LOVE" FROM THE GREAT DECEIVERS
Accordingly, from a certain perspective, the Diversity Center of Santa Cruz is on "a mission from God", to help the Pope, the leader of all Christians, to fight the hate of the "Great Deceivers" under the failed leadership of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and/or others, who seem to embrace the total opposite teachings and core values of real Christians, and thus by default embrace Satanic or evil teachings and evil values, refusing to support the love, charity, and kindness towards all of God's children, as taught by both Jesus and his man on Earth, the Pope.
THE POPE SPECIFIED THAT REPUBLICAN TEACHINGS OF HATE ARE ANTI-CHRISTIAN OR "BACKWARDS"
The Pope went one step further in the last month, and called out the Republican Party and its satanic worshipers, specifying they had Christianity "backwards", and that they were engaged in this behavior in order to shore up "support" or votes, supporting a hateful agenda that was "backwards" to the teachings and core values of Jesus.
“Doing this, you lose the true tradition and you turn to ideologies to have support,” he said. “In other words, ideologies replace faith.”
“The vision of the doctrine of the church as a monolith is wrong,” he added. “When you go backward, you make something closed off, disconnected from the roots of the church,” which then has devastating effects on morality.
The pope also said: “I want to remind these people that backwardness is useless, and they must understand that there’s a correct evolution in the understanding of questions of faith and morals,” that allows for doctrine to progress and consolidate over time."[3]
As the moral authority of all Christians on Earth, its hard to argue with the Pope, and high time to obey God's man on Earth.
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY LEADER, DONALD TRUMP, SECRETLY SAID CHRISTIANITY IS "BULLSHIT", AND THAT CHRISTIANS WERE "FOOLS", "IDIOTS", AND "SMUCKS", AND THEN TRUMP SAID HE WAS GOD
As the Pope implied, it's time to recognize that the Great Deceiver is among us, and leading the Republican Party, who now seeks to overthrow Christianity - in the context that Trump specified that Christianity was "bullshit", and that Christians were "idiots, fools, and schmucks" - proving the Pope right about the leadership of the Republican Party, and outing them as "backwards" Christians, in league with the bible's Great Deceiver, or Satan, and in the context the Washington Post has clocked Trump lying over 30,000 times in four years, or about 21 lies every single day, making him a fitting candidate for the bible's "Great Deceiver". Since then, Trump and/or the great deceivers has/have specified that Trump is God. [4][5][6][9]
MORALIST THOM HARTMANN WAS INVITED TO MEET WITH POPE JOHN PAUL II, AND INVESTIGATED TRUMP AS THE ANTICHRIST, AND DETERMINED THAT TRUMP WAS INDEED THE ANTICHRIST OR SATAN
Moralist Thom Hartmann, who was invited by Pope John Paul II, investigated the evidence for Trump being the Antichrist, and specified the following.
"In The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus spoke in the plural when he predicted "false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves."
After warning that grifters and con artists (in secular terms) would try to exploit His followers, He said, "by their fruits ye shall know them."
Trump's "fruits" are pretty obvious:
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More than twenty women have accused him of rape and sexual assault.
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Hundreds of contractors, customers and employees have accused him of stealing from them or refusing to pay them (or both), as have members of his own family
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Throughout his presidency, he lied over 30,000 times
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He pit Americans against each other by race, religion and region in an effort to tear our country apart and thus weaken opposition to his authoritarian rule
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He openly encouraged violence against unarmed people at multiple rallies and encourage state violence at a speech to chiefs of police
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He tried to overthrow and end our democracy
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He embraced murderers, kleptocrats and "strongman" rulers while ridiculing western democracies and their elected leaders
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He tried to damage or dismantle political and military systems designed to keep peace in the world, including the UN, NATO and the Iran JCPOA
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He reaches out to Jesus's followers and then directs them toward bigotry, violence and hatred
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As an object of admiration and a role model, he's replaced Jesus in many white evangelical congregations
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He delighted in tearing children from their parents and putting them in cages
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He tried to end Americans' access to lifesaving medical care by killing Obamacare and privatizing Medicare
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He watched on TV, like a delighted child, as his followers killed a police officer, sent 140 others to the hospital, and tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House
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He lied about Covid (after disclosing the truth to Bob Woodward in February, 2020), causing more disease and deaths in America than any other nation in the world
The main reason many Christians freak out about an antichrist is that following him will get you banned from heaven or even cast into hell.
But what did Jesus--the guy Trump's white evangelical followers claim as their savior--say was necessary to get into heaven?
Back in 1998 I had a private audience with Pope John Paul II at his invitation; a person close to him had read one of my books. Louise and I sat through an open-air concert with him and about 30 VIPs, including the leader of Germany's Bundestag, for more than an hour, surrounded by the splendor of Castel Gandolfo, the Pope's summer palace on the rim of an extinct volcano overlooking lake Albano.
When we spoke privately after the concert, His Holiness's forceful comments reminded me of Jesus' words in Matthew 25. It's an amazing 2,000 year-old story that tells us everything we need to know about today's "Christian" politics:
Jesus' disciples had gathered around him in a private and intimate setting.
Finally, they thought, they could ask him, straight up, the question that had been haunting them, particularly now that the Roman authorities were starting to talk about punishing or even executing them: How they could be sure to hang out with him in the afterlife?
Jesus told them that at the end of days he'd be sitting on his throne separating the sheep from the goats "as a shepherd divideth."
The nations of "sheep" would go with him to heaven, the "goats" to hell.
"For I was an hungred, and ye gave me food," he told his disciples he would say to the sheep. "I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me."
At this point, his disciples--who had never, ever seen Jesus hungry, thirsty, homeless, sick or naked--freaked out. Whoa! they shouted. We're screwed!
"When saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee?" they asked, panicked. "Or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? Or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?"
"Verily I say unto you," Jesus replied, reassuring them, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."
This is the only place in the Bible where Jesus explicitly tells his disciples what acts they must perform, in their entirety, to get into heaven.
Feed the hungry, care for refugees, house and clothe the homeless, heal the sick, have compassion on those in prison.
That's it.
And it's a list that is quite literally the opposite of everything that Donald Trump advocates, stands for, and has done in his career.
While biblical scholars are split about who the actual "Beast" was that John referenced in his Revelation, many consider it to have been a politically-necessary cloaking of the identity of Roman Emperor Nero.
It was clearly a political figure, who represented the antithesis of the values and works Jesus laid out in the Sermon on the Mount and in Matthew 25.
A leader whose actions unleashed "a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth."
Caller after caller yesterday offered their own proofs of Trump being the Beast or the Antichrist:
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"MAGA" means "magic" or "sorcerer" in Latin and multiple other languages
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His grandfather's name when he emigrated to America to start a whorehouse in the Pacific Northwest was "Drumpf," which he changed to Trump. John in German is "Johann." Therefore, his "actual" name is Donald Johann Drumpf--each name having six letters. (Weirdly, the same is true of Ronald Wilson Reagan.)
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He armed the Saudis for their merciless bombing war against Yemen which has five million people facing famine as the Saudi military blocks food arrivals.
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His family owns 666 Fifth Avenue.
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He fooled millions of evangelical followers of Jesus, just as the Beast was supposed to do.
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He put his own red-hat MAGA mark on their foreheads.
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He consorts with "whores" and criminals.
It was an interesting exercise and conversation, and I was surprised by how many people are actually religiously freaked out about Trump.
But for me, all the proof I need that Trump, if not the biblical Antichrist, is at least a political one, is what he says and does.
His "fruits" tell us all we need to know about who he really is."
But for those who need to follow someone other than the leaders of the Christian faith for moral guidance - or those moral investigators they have invited to meet with them - even Tucker Carlson of Fox News likened Trump to a "demonic force", "In a text message to his producer, Alex Pfeiffer, sent the day of the January 6 insurrection, Tucker Carlson—friend to war criminals and serial liars alike—called Trump “a demonic force, a destroyer.”[7]
Similarly, the leadership of the GOP in Georgia specified, "Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan (R) blasted Donald Trump in a searing CNN opinion piece Friday, comparing the former president to the devil, “looking for a party’s soul to steal.” Duncan referred to the late Southern rocker Charlie Daniels’ song “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” ahead of Trump’s rally in the state this weekend."
Even Harvard University, the home of Harvard's Divinity School, has determined that Trump is in fact Satan.[8]
So it is quite a hurdle to claim to be Christian AND support Donald Trump, because to do so is to disobey the leader of all Christians on Earth, the Pope, and to think you are smarter than someone from Harvard University who researched the same, while Trump secretly bashes Christians and Christianity behind their backs, but publicly claims he is the Second Coming of God - as the Great Deceiver would.[9]
Has anyone ever deceived more people than the man with the red tan? It's time to get woke argues the Pope, before Trump and the GOP trick American Christians to burn up in smoke.
SOURCES AND ATTRIBUTES
[1] https://www.diversitycenter.org/
[2]
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/29/pope-francis-criticizes-us-conservatives
[7] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/02/tucker-carlson-donald-trump-demonic-force
[9] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/08/donald-trump-king-of-israel