<![CDATA[Jezebel: mormon church]]> http://tags.gawker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/jezebel.com.png <![CDATA[Jezebel: mormon church]]> http://jezebel.com/tag/mormonchurch http://jezebel.com/tag/mormonchurch <![CDATA[Brad Pitt To Jen Aniston: STFU]]>

  • Oprah asked Jennifer Aniston about calling Angelina's behavior "uncool." Jen said she was merely responding to the reporter's question. "I basically just answered it as honestly as I could." Plus, did you know that her flick, Marley And Me, is opening the same day as Brad Pitt's The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button? [People]
  • Brad Pitt called Jen and cut her a slice of "shut it" cake. [TMZ]
  • Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson are heading to Paris, where they'll get engaged, says a spy. "After spending weeks discussing rings, they want to visit two leading jewellers there with their finalised design." OMG please do it at the top of the Eiffel Tower? Please? [Mirror]
  • Prince Harry on his hair: "I'm not ginger. I'm auburn, that's what I've been told." Some of us would beg to differ, dear. [Telegraph]
  • Oh God: Sarah Palin on Desperate Housewives? [Page Six]
  • Madonna told a friend that A-Rod "has the heart of a poet trapped inside an insanely gorgeous body." Vom. [Page Six]
  • Miley Cyrus says she'd love for Sasha and Malia Obama to come to the set of Hannah Montana: "I know they have a lot going on, but I think for them to come and hang out with normal kids would be fun." Cuz having your own TV show is like, so normal. Way more normal than having a dad in politics! [E!]
  • Three Amy Winehouse fans buzzed her apartment, found her to be at home and had a lovely conversation with her through the intercom. She asked them for the spelling of their names and then signed photos for them. Watch the video just to hear the girls adorable Liverpudlian accents! [TMZ]
  • Whoa. George Clooney may come back to ER for the finale? Yeah. Right. [E!]
  • Goodbye, Lipstick Jungle and My Own Worst Enemy! NBC has canceled you, and you will live on in TV heaven. [E!]
  • Mariah Carey went to London for three days and brought 20 pieces of luggage: Business as usual. [MSNBC]
  • Mariah Carey says she goes over the top at Christmas and has a bedroom in her Aspen home made to look like the North Pole. What's cooler than cool? [The Sun]
  • Here's how Mariah celebrates the holidays with her friends: "We go in the hot tub in our Christmas bikinis, then roll in the fresh snow and jump back in the tub." Her Christmas outfit is "a red bikini with a Santa hat." [Page Six]
  • '90s boyband Boyzone got into a drunken brawl with Rihanna's band in Sydney and security had to break it up. When did pop get so rock and roll? [News.com.au]
  • Speaking of Boyzone, they've got a gay couple in their new video. [BBC News]
  • As for Rihanna, she canceled a concert in Indonesia after a travel advisory was issued. [Yahoo News]
  • Click to see a snippet of Rihanna's new video, the one with Justin Timberlake! [Concrete Loop]
  • Will Arnett on his new baby with Amy Poehler: "He's loving being a baby right now. He's thinking about smiling. He's trying to decide if he's ready or not." [People]
  • If you'd like to see a picture of Clay Aiken, his egg donor and his baby, click away. [Perez Hilton]
  • Some gay rights groups are thinking about boycotting the Sundance Film Festival in an effort to protest the Mormon Church and hurt Utah's business. But is affecting Robert Redford's celeb-studded film fest the right way to go? "Sundance was founded on the idea of championing diversity and freedom of expression," says a spokesman. "It would be a grave disappointment to us if our festival were to be singled out for a boycott." [Independent]
  • Ed Norton's documentary about Barack Obama, or as one commenter suggested, "Barackumentary," is drawing wide interest. A lawyer repping the film says: "We’ve had an enormous number of incoming calls from territories all over the world." It should hit HBO next spring. [NY Times]
  • Bob Saget approves of Mary-Kate and Ashley's boyfriends.
    "I approve of anyone that makes my friends happy, and they're my friends," he says. What he meant was: "I am not their actual father, I just played their dad on TV, get over it." [People]
  • The former American Idol contestant found dead in an apparent suicide near Paula Abdul's home had been causing "a disturbance" there for several years, the police say. [People]
  • Read more about Paula Goodspeed, one of the "delusionally bad performers" from American Idol, here. Was she ridiculed when she was clearly mentally unstable? [Washington Post]
  • Anne Hathaway's ex, Raffaello Follieri, is not having fun in jail in Brooklyn. He says there are "unspeakably harsh conditions" and "unspeakably unsanitary" toilet and shower facilities and an "intolerable" stench. Rats "roam freely" and there is "excrement in the shower." [The Smoking Gun]
  • Baz Luhrmann answers questions about Australia, which Oprah and her audience saw and LOVED. The film is getting compared to Gone With The Wind and Luhrmann says: Gone with the Wind is more than a movie; it's an icon, you know? So it's always scary to make that comparison. But in the same way that Gone with the Wind has a passionate love story that is played out on the canvases of a country's landscape and historical events, this movie has that about it." [LA Times]
  • Luhrmann also says the rumors that he's had to reshoot the ending are "absurd." [Page Six]
  • What the world needs now: A sequel to Meet The Fockers, with Ben Stiller and Bobby DeNiro. [Fox News]
  • Carmen Electra will appear in an eight-page spread pictorial in the January 2009 issue of Playboy. Snooze. [Daily Express]
  • What's this? Billy Corgan ranting about James Iha on stage? [Rolling Stone]
  • Julia Stiles' mom just opened a home furnishings store in New York's Tribeca neighborhood. [Page Six]
  • James Bond's Lotus from The Spy Who Loved Me is expected to fetch up to £120,000 at auction next month. It sorta looks like a DeLorean… [The Star]
  • Jamie Oliver will not stop swearing on his TV show, where he uses the F word repeatedly, when he's angry about pork farms and stuff. [Mirror]
  • Willam Shatner's moving his online feud with George Takei to a TV show on the Biography Channel. Leave George alone! [MSNBC]
  • Hmm, George Takei is on I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here? And no one met him at the airport when he flew to Brisbane. Boo. [Mirror]
  • Rob Corddry and his wife welcomed a second child on Wednesday: A daughter named Marlo Stevenson Corddry. [People]
  • A woman has been placed on three years of probation following her guilty plea to a misdemeanor charge of stalking actress Sandra Bullock. [Yahoo News]
  • "My daddy said that I should wear it up and put it in a 'Get your hair as high and close to Jesus as possible' type hairdo. I said, 'Daddy, I don’t think I can get it any higher, but I did my best.'" — Miley Cyrus on her hair at the Country Music Awards. [E!]
  • "I love Monopoly by the fire on Christmas Day." — Sienna Miller. [WWD]
  • "In the future, if a gay person in California wants to get hitched, he'll have to do it the way God intended, to Liza Minnelli." — Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report. [Page Six]
  • "I've had a hair transplant. Because I have got a very strange shaped head. It's very pointy. And I don't like wearing wigs." — John Cleese. [Telegraph]
  • "My insomnia started in my mid-20s. It got to the point where my immune system would give out. It affected my concentration level and being able to perform on the job." — Debi Mazar, who is promoting a web site for insomnia sufferers. [Daily Express]
  • "I don’t think about it much because I don’t plan to keep acting very long. I’m ready to do a few things now and fade away and get ready to be a grandma one day. So I’m not so worried that I want to keep this pace up and try to be something and be a celebrity and be a successful actress forever. I think it’s nice, I’ve had a time to tell stories and be able to be successful enough to tell the ones I want to tell, and to earn some money at the same time is great. But everything comes in seasons and, you know, I hopefully won’t be needing to do that later in my life in any way." — Angelina Jolie's answer to the question of whether losing her looks would cut her career short. [The Sun]
  • "I moved to California and my mom moved with me when I became a star. If we were still in Chicago she wouldn't have had that done. I've been going through anguish thinking about it. I have been so lonely." — Kanye West, on his mother's death after having plastic surgery. [Mirror]
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<![CDATA[LGBT Advocates In Utah Take The LDS At Its Word]]> As part of the LGBT community's counter-initiative against the Church of Latter Day Saints — whose message in California has been that marriage is the only right it thinks gay people shouldn't be entitled to — a group of advocates and legislators in Utah has decided to take them at their word. State Senator Scott McCoy and two lesbian colleagues — with the help of Equality Utahplan to introduce legislation in Utah in January that will codify other rights afforded to LGBT individuals in California that the LDS swore it supported.

McCoy's legislation will remove a prohibition from Utah's constitution against civil unions, expand protections for same sex couples in health care, insurance, and estate decisions and eliminate discrimination in housing and employment — all of which are laws on the books in California that the LDS Church said it didn't support eliminating and touted as the reason that same-sex couples should have the right to marry yanked denied to them. The Church, naturally, has no comment on the pending legislation, but Utah is one of now 4 states that prohibits same sex couples from adopting following the passage of a ban in Arkansas on Election Day.

In fact, there are some in the LGBT community who are now saying that the state institution of marriage — which provides couples with certain contractual rights and responsibilities — should be far from the only right that the LGBT community focuses on pursuing. From the need to continue to fight for laws that prohibit discrimination in employment, to seeking legal requirements for domestic partnership benefits to fighting laws that prohibit same sex couples from adopting or participating in foster care, there are plenty of rights beyond marriage that the state and federal governments have seen fit to deny Americans based on who they choose to share their lives — and their beds — with. And it all sucks equally bad — and if every dollar of funding seeking to expand or maintain rights for the LGBT community floods into the effort to get the courts there to overturn the ballot initiative on technical grounds, the fundies will keep advancing their agenda to deny as many rights as possible to the LGBT community — which is what they're seeking to do, LDS hypocrisy in California notwithstanding.

Gay Leaders in Utah Plan 5-Bill Attack in Legislature [NY Times]
Activists Rethink Their Gay-Marriage Tactics [Time]
Legality of Same-Sex Marriage Ban Challenged [Washington Post]

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<![CDATA[Mormon Leaders Ask California Members To Fight Gay Marriage]]> The LDS Church is asking its 750,000 Californian constituents to support the California Marriage Protection Act, an election day referendum that will change the state's constitution to define marriage as strictly between a man and a woman, the AP reports. In a letter leaked to several websites, Mormon Church President Thomas S. Monson said, "The church's teachings and position on this moral issue are unequivocal…Marriage between a man and a woman is ordained or God, and the formation of families is central to the creator's plan for his children." But that's not all the Mormon Church has to say about homosexuality. On the Church's official website, there is an entire section devoted to "Same-Gender Attraction," in which Church elders complain about the curtailing of freedom of speech and charges of homophobia.

Elder Oaks says on the LDS website, "Over past years we have seen unrelenting pressure from advocates of that lifestyle to accept as normal what is not normal, and to characterize those who disagree as narrow-minded, bigoted and unreasonable. Such advocates are quick to demand freedom of speech and thought for themselves, but equally quick to criticize those with a different view and, if possible, to silence them by applying labels like 'homophobic.'…Given these trends, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints must take a stand on doctrine and principle. This is more than a social issue — ultimately it may be a test of our most basic religious freedoms to teach what we know our Father in Heaven wants us to teach."

The website also has tips and tricks for Mormons who experience same sex attraction; they all boil down to remaining celibate for the rest of their lives. But there is a small glimmer of hope: the gay Mormon organization, Affirmation, has plans to meet with the head of LDS Family Services in August in an attempt to "bridge the divide between Mormonism and gay members hurt by church teachings that homosexuality is a sin," the AP reports. According to Affirmation spokesman David Melson, "We're not going to let this stand in the way.The church has said they are open to finding new avenues and new solutions to minister to gay members, and we are taking them at their word."

Mormon Church Enters Calif. Gay Marriage Fight [AP]
Same-Gender Attraction [LDS Official Website]
LDS Church Officials Urge California Members To Support Marriage Amendment [Mormon Times]

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