Jennifer Marie Brissett

Fred Astaire once called this performance “the greatest dance number ever filmed.” I heard that when this premiered the audience cheered so loud that they had to stop the movie and show this scene again!

It just keeps coming ... Donna Summer passed away today. I know that she had issues about gay people and her Christianity sometimes turned her into a hypocrite. But that’s neither here nor there. I’ll miss her because of her amazing voice. She WORKED “MacArthur Park.” The words never made sense to me, but her incredible voice made that song a classic!

It’s this kind of thing that made me need a vacation. St. Lucia was paradise but as the song says, “Back to Life, Back to Reality.” When I heard Randi Rhodes play a clip from this video, I was tempted to think that she made it up as some kind of joke. I suppose there was a part of me that wanted this to not be real. But it’s real. There is a war on women going on all right and the church is smack in the middle of it. If you happen to be both black and a woman, well, all bets are off and they are really out to get you. And this guy ... oh, man ... this guy is just unbelievable. This is the “Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, a fundamentalist black pastor and up-and-coming Republican leader.” Listen to him for as much as you can stomach ...

I was a member of the church once. I still believe that there is a force of good in the universe—maybe even a personality that you can call on that guides and blesses. But I also see that there is serious evil in the world as well. It gets its power from Ignorance and Fear, the two devils that work hand in hand on the hearts of people to make them do hateful, misguided things, and to utter vile and depraved words. They sit in the pews of churches every Sunday, sometimes stand in the pulpit, too. And many are those who think they are praising God but are in fact working for the other one.