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Showing posts from June, 2016

We Reject Racism

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In the aftermath of the UK's vote to leave the EU, there has been a horrifying upsurge of racist incidents. Tell MAMA reported a 540% increase in reported incidents. (Reported in The Independent , Huffington Post , The Guardian , Mashable , Vice News , Washington Post , and many more. Incidents are also being collated by This is what you have done , the Worrying Signs Facebook group and Twitter account , and the PostRefRacism hashtag and account on Twitter.) It is not that every Leave vote was motivated by racism, but extreme toxic racism was expressed by the Leave campaign (which went unchallenged by the Remain campaign, which also promised to "control immigration" and boasted about how being in the EU helped us to deport hundreds of criminals - which is unjust because then they are being punished twice for the same crime). Surveys of Leave voters have indicated that their main reason for voting Leave was to "take back control" (just so they could give

Wands Up for Orlando

After the Orlando shooting, a small group of LGBTQIA Pagans came together to create a ritual for the dead of Orlando. The group is called Wands Up for Orlando . The founder, Salvatore Caci, wrote: Why “wands up”? In the movie Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince , after the death of Dumbledore, all students of Hogwarts take their wands and raise them into the air to light up the sky and sweep away Voldemort's evil curse. Similarly, we want to sweep away the curses of intolerance and violence with the light that shines from our hearts and hands joined together and in support of one another. Together, we have written a ritual to commemorate the dead of Orlando. We want to emphasise that, as many of the dead may have been Catholics or have had an ambivalent relationship with religion, we are being respectful of that. We performed divinations to check that the ritual would be welcome and needed. The ritual is available in English , Italian , Spanish , French , and Polish (and

We are rising!

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The Queer Ones are rising. We are rising out of the woods, out of the ocean, out of the cracks between the concrete. Genderqueer, transgender, glorious peacock-shimmering, rising out of the darkness, the healing and sacred darkness, into the many-hued light of day. Queer deities, genderqueer deities, transgender goddesses and gods. Inari the fox god/dess; Vertumnus the changeable and ever-changing; tricksters and healers, poets and seers and shamans. Gender is not a binary, not even a spectrum, it is a vast glittering field of possibility, many gender, many hues, many different expressions of being and love. We are rising, out of the silence, out of the hidden places, daring to be, to shine forth our glorious queer radiance, because we are the holy ones, the liminal ones, the dreamers and the creators of possibility. Our freedom is frightening to some who want there to be a binary, a set of limitations. We call them out of their fear and into the radiant and glittering field of