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Friendly Atheist ★ Pastor Daimon L. King, twice imprisoned for offenses involving minors, opened a North Carolina GOP campaign rally.

How hard is it to find a conservative Christian pastor who isn’t problematic?

Recently, at a campaign event, North Carolina Republican Senate candidate Michael Whatley had Pastor Daimon L. King deliver the opening prayer. The prayer itself was predictably hypocritical, with King calling for “integrity and honesty” in a room full of voters who don’t care about either one.

But that’s not why the event made news. After the event, the Associated Press’ Brian Slodysko pointed out that King was a registered child sex offender who’s gone to prison two separate times for his crimes.

While there’s no video of the campaign event, Whatley posted a video from the event in which King could be seen giving a double thumbs-up behind Whatley and Dr. Mehmet Oz.

So what did King do that everyone organizing the event decided to ignore?

Some 30 years ago, King was a marching band assistant at a high school outside Raleigh when he was charged with statutory rape and indecent liberties with a 15-year-old student, The News & Observer reported at the time.

Continue @ Friendly Atheist.

GOP Candidate Michael Whatley’s “Integrity” Prayer Was Led By A Registered Sex Offender

Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières ★ Kai I analyses the BJP’s latest assault on trans rights in India, situating it within the broader structures of Hindu nationalism, capitalist patriarchy, and the bourgeois family.

On the 30th of March, the Indian parliament passed a bill proposing a series of amendments that redefine the rights and identification of trans Indians. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill removes the right of transgender people to self-identification, reduces prison sentences for sexually assaulting trans women, and subjects the trans community to dehumanising medical exams in exchange for legal protections. This is an attack against one of the largest queer communities in the world – produced by a Hindu nationalist political project that combines capitalist modernisation with a traditionalist family structure. Revolutionaries globally need to stand in solidarity with trans people in India.

The Hindutva government, currently dominated by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has faced sustained criticism for enacting discriminatory laws and inciting violence against ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities in India. This includes the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019, which explicitly excludes minorities such as Eelam Tamils and Muslims from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan from seeking citizenship following refugee status. 

Continue @ ESSF. 

India 🪶 The BJP’s War On Trans Rights

Right Wing Watch 👀Written by Peter Montgomery.


Dallas megachurch pastor and Christian nationalist Robert Jeffress, a fervent supporter of President Donald Trump, spoke at the Republican midterm convention this week, where he told the crowd that they are in a war against “unseen forces of wickedness.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are in a war,” he said, slamming the Democratic Party as advocates for sin:

There’s a difference between falling into sin and being an advocate for sin, an advocate for evil. And ladies and gentlemen, the Democrat Party are advocates for evil. They are advocates for sin. And we need to call it that way.

Jeffress demonstrated religious-right leaders’ intolerance for Christians who don’t interpret the Bible the same way they do, demeaning the outspoken Christian faith of Democratic senatorial candidate James Talarico.

“James Talarico believes that Jesus was little more than a wimpy, woke rabbi who roamed the hillside saying sweet things to people,” Jeffress said. He claimed that no “true Christian” could hold Talarico’s views on gender and other topics, saying:

The beliefs of James Talarico are blasphemous. They are evil. And they are not beliefs that any true Christian could support ever.

Continue @ RWW.

MAGA Pastor Robert Jeffress Calls Democrats ‘Advocates for Evil’

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand One Hundred And Five

 

Pastords @ 63

 

A Morning Thought @ 3277

Louth For Ever ★ writing in Medium on  25-August-2026.

Photo by Natalia Gusakova on Unsplash

What Actually Happened

A court has reopened Drumcree, and unionism believes it has secured a victory. It has not. The real issue is whether our side can keep its composure over the next twelve months, on terrain where there is nothing to gain.

Be exact, because tonight almost no one else will be.

The Belfast High Court has quashed the Parades Commission’s ruling on the Garvaghy Road. It occurred without any contested hearing and without any decision on the substance, after the Commission acknowledged a procedural mistake. In court, counsel for the applicant described the lapse in very forceful terms. The Commission has since challenged that version, stating that the matter was debated and then agreed unanimously by all commissioners at a meeting. The one point on which there is agreement is that some part of the process was flawed enough that the Commission chose not to stand behind it.

There is no ruling that the prohibition of the parade is illegal. The applicants relied on a human-rights case that has not yet been examined. What was quashed was the decision on the parade notified for 5th July this year, and since that date has already gone by, nothing is restored. Any parade on that road now would need a new application, to be assessed on its own merits, where the same outcome is still fully open.

When a public authority admits that it mishandled its own decision-making, that is not trivial. It is a genuine and humiliating lapse. Even so, it is a procedural lapse, and the gap between overturning a decision and authorising a parade has already begun to narrow in the reporting, as it invariably does.

The Error Unionism Is Committing

Think about the timing, because it is extraordinary.

The Democratic Unionist Party is trailing the Ulster Unionist Party in the polls, waiting for the sentencing of its former leader and for the findings of the expert it itself hired to determine what its own senior figures knew.

And at this exact point the loyal orders have decided to revive the one quarrel that caused unionism more damage abroad than anything else in the past thirty years. Not the sea border. Not the protocol. Drumcree. The confrontation that demonstrated, to every foreign correspondent and every American senator, that unionism could not be dealt with by persuasion. The conflict whose long aftermath included murders carried out by loyalists during the years the road was contested, and which the men responsible for them bear entirely themselves.

They will argue that this time is different, that they chose the courts instead of the fields. In a limited sense, they are correct, and that should be conceded. Twenty-eight years at police barriers produced nothing. One judicial review altered the position in weeks. That is a real strategic lesson.

Yet look at what the victory amounts to. They have not secured the road. What they have secured is the chance to have the refusal reconsidered more carefully. At the same time, they have placed back on television the images unionism spent a generation trying to put out of sight, precisely when it must convince people that it is an ordinary political tradition able to govern an ordinary place. A short-term triumph purchased with the remainder of its strategic capital.

The Provocation

Now for the more difficult part, and the more important one.

Everything in this dispute is designed to trigger a reaction. The imagery is incendiary, the history is acute, and the grievance is genuine. The residents of the Garvaghy Road were not imagining the intimidation. They endured years of it, and the fear of children witnessing a repeat was set out in writing in the Commission’s own determination this summer. No one should require them to deny that, and no one should demand that they fall silent about their own street.

But there is a distinction between the people on a road defending their street and a national movement organising itself around that defence.

A referendum requires fifty per cent plus one. That is the whole arithmetic. It is not decided on the Garvaghy Road. It is decided among those who tell pollsters they are neither unionist nor nationalist, among Alliance voters in Bangor and Lisburn who want nothing to do with the Orange Order and also feel no enthusiasm for a united Ireland, among people who have arrived here within the last twenty years and have no stake in this whatsoever, and among unionists, of whom there are more than the noise implies, who could live in a new Ireland if it were made bearable for them.

All of those people watch a parade dispute and draw the same conclusion. That this place is still two tribes fighting over a road, and that anyone who wants to change its constitutional status is asking to give the entire island that fight.

There is no form of sustained republican mobilisation against this parade that wins even one vote in the only ballot that matters.

What Slovo Knew

I have made this case before, using South Africa as the comparison, and it applies here as well, so I will state it again briefly.

Joe Slovo was chief of staff of the ANC’s armed wing and general secretary of the South African Communist Party, and in 1992 he published the argument that made the transition feasible. Neither side had beaten the other. The state had not been toppled and the movement had not been destroyed. So power could transfer only if the transfer was made survivable for those surrendering it, which is why he proposed the sunset clauses. He was attacked viciously by people who had endured far more than any of us, and he was right.

The point is not that the situations match. They do not. The point is about what success requires. A movement that wants a transfer of power should avoid the fights that strengthen its adversary, and devote its effort to making the result tolerable for the people most afraid of it. The maximalist stance and the winning stance are often not the same, and choosing the second is not a sign of weakness.

Applied here, the point is straightforward. Our job between now and a referendum is to make a united Ireland survivable for people who do not want one. Every hour spent battling over a parade is an hour spent demonstrating to those very people that it would not be.

Not Silence, Accuracy

Where credit is due, and it was due within hours.

John Finucane’s statement did exactly what this argument requires. He set out what the ruling was, a determination quashed because of defects in how it was reached, and what it was not, permission for any marching. He noted that the road has been peaceful for 28 years. He rejected the language of victory and defeat, and asked those calling it a win to identify who they think was beaten. Then he explained the party’s position on any fresh application and stopped.

That is the entire approach in four paragraphs. A commentary that only ever tells its own side where it is failing is not analysis; it is resentment.

The more difficult truth is that the discipline now has to last for a year.

The pressure will not come from the road, because it has already shifted. Within hours the demand moved away from a parade and onto the Parades Commission itself. Commissioners were declared untenable. Letters went to Downing Street. A British Secretary of State said the body cannot operate without the respect of all communities. That is a campaign against the referee, it will continue all winter, and every month of it will call forth a reply.

There is also a quieter danger that no amount of noise will solve. The Commission’s own determination in July 2026 said community relations in Portadown had greatly improved. Portadown District has asked whether the residents’ coalition still exists, pointing to demographic change, and says its offers of dialogue were ignored. Whatever view is taken of that, it is the case that will be advanced in the next determination, and it rests on institutional ground, not on the street.

That is the entire point. The answer to a forensic legal challenge is not mobilisation. It is representation, evidence, and being the side that appears in the process rather than the confrontation.

The road is not the prize. It never was.

⏩Louth For Ever writes on Irish politics and constitutional change. Follow for analysis of Ireland’s democratic future as it’s constructed by those actually engaged in the work.

Garvaghy Road Is Not The Prize

Anthony McIntyre ☠ Tomorrow night the Irish national soccer team is scheduled to play the nation of child killers.

The game will take place in Hungary, if the last men standing decide not to stand against genocide,

Many of the players, we are told by the team head coach Heimir Hallgrimsson, feel 'really uncomfortable playing".

That discomfort has to have intensified after witnessing the actions of the Israeli goal scorer in the child killers 3-1 defeat to Austria, the only part of the game I did watch when my son brought to my attention the murderous celebration of the player. Picking up the corner flag the monster assumed the firing posture, the corner flagpole positioned to simulate the rifle. He was red carded for the worst type of simulation to have taken place on a soccer pitch. It conjured up an image of the IDF child killers deliberately aiming at the genitals of Palestinian kids for sport. If they failed to murder the children they left them maimed for life.

We are reminded of when Professor Nick Maynard bore witness to this heinous activity:

almost like the Israeli soldiers were having target practice . . . One day we would see mainly gunshot wounds to the head and neck. Another day we would see gunshot wounds mainly to the abdomen or the chest. Another day, the legs and even on one day, about 12 days ago, we saw four young teenage boys coming in, all of whom had been shot in the testicles.

There is no moral maze to be negotiated here. There simply are no grounds for a person of conscience to take to the field alongside these people. To do so would be to step down to the same moral nadir as an Irish soccer team playing against Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, and whose players hissed each time they found the opposition net in a macabre emulation of the sound of Zyklon B gas being released from its capsule before making its way into the airways and lungs of its Jewish victims in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

At this late stage all the people in authority have refused to follow the proper course of action. While Taoiseach Micheal Martin made a laudable speech to the UN General Assembly a few days ago, his government refused to join the walk out when the man wanted by the International Criminal Court on suspicion of crimes against humanity took to the podium to lie through his teeth. What sort of message was being transmitted to the players here other than say one thing but do another?

Regrettable as it is no one else can now cut the Gordian knot - just the players.

We can accept that the players have been failed by sporting authority and government alike. We cannot accept that there is any compelling reason for the players to now fail themselves. They have a choice. As moral actors they should make the right one just as the Dunnes Stores women did against Apartheid White South Africa in the 1980s and who have been remembered fondly ever since.

The choice is very clear for the players. Celebrity does not remove their responsibility to behave as moral actors. Ed Sheeran's supporting acts demonstrated this in crystal clear terms when they walked away from him in support of the billionaire-cancelled Macklemore. Regrettably but unavoidably, it is now down to the players, as the powerful have displaced the difficult responsibility away from themselves and onto the shoulders of those about to take to the field. No matter what choice the players make they are going to walk away. They either walk away from the child killers or walk away from the children killed.

⏩Follow on Bluesky.

Walk Away

Hedley Lamarr ✍ The Drumcree challenge should focus on the fact that mediation was suggested before a decision was made and mediation didn't happen so a decision should have been postponed. 

It isn't Drumcree Sunday so after waiting 28 years a further delay or exploration can't be too much to ask.

The mediators themselves said that if one party wasn't happy with it then their views should be respected. The residents can't be punished for not going along with mediators who the Orange Order themselves employed in the past. They're not at arm's length. Bias is a real danger. One party has an existing relationship with the mediators.

The residents should have to agree. Most human rights can be trumped by other human rights and in this case the right to assembly should be trumped by the residents' rights. They're the host community.

Not only the residents' rights but opening this Pandora's Box could cause instability and conflict. The rights of society as a whole to prosper and live in peace and relative harmony should be respected. The public order threat is real not from the marchers or the residents but from the touch paper of societal strife being lit. The tension is palpable.

This march hasn't happened in 28 years so there's more of a tradition of it not happening than happening in 50 years.

There is also the elephant in the room that the Orange Order isn't purely a religious organisation. It and it's spokesmen often intervene in the political arena.

The Orange Order have unilaterally changed countless other routes over the last 28 years. The Field has been in Ormeau Park, The Giants Ring and also Barnett's Demesne for example and all feeder parade routes changed also to suit this.

There is an alternative marching route back from the church.

There is undoubtedly a triumphalist nature to this march as was witnessed in the years before it was stopped. It is designed to provoke and agitate.

The strife that will be created will undoubtedly next year shore up DUP votes after a number of high profile scandals. No demographic or organisation is immune from sex abuse but do the DUP kick-start an education drive on consent for our young people or a respect for women campaign? No, they campaign for the ghost of Drumcree to be reawakened.

Supporters of the Drumcree March killed people to get it down this road and they shouldn't be rewarded even indirectly.

A decision not only has to be fair it has to be seen to be fair.

They obviously panicked after the Portadown Orange Order member's successful judicial review. The court didn't say that banning the march was the wrong decision just that it was decided the wrong way. The Commission probably and quite rightly thought that it was a no-brainer and unsurprisingly got fed up crossing T's and dotting I's.

The daftest thing about the decision to allow the march is that it was made because community relations in Portadown have improved dramatically so violence is unlikely. It is widely acknowledged that community relations have improved because the Drumcree Parade was banned.

You couldn't make it up.

⏩ Hedley Lamarr is a student of the conflict out of which has developed his strong interest in justice.

Touch Paper Of Societal Strife

Christopher Owens 🎵 with the 67th in his Predominance series alongside some observations on a new magazine.

It’s always gratifying to see new magazines hit the shelves, particularly ones that try to add to the discussion rather than just operate as an excuse for adverts.

And it’s even better when well established ones (in this case Shindig!) put out a one-off edition dedicated to a topic that could fill a magazine in itself.

Such is the case here.

The top 100 tracks has the obvious (Robyn Hitchcock, The Cult), the less obvious (Psychic TV, Strawberry Switchblade) and the ‘ever so slightly stretching it’ (A Guy Called Gerald, John Foxx) but plenty of obscure numbers to ensure you go down a YouTube rabbit hole for a while. Alongside pieces on the Television Personalities, Spacemen 3, The Prisoners and Siouxsie and the Banshees, the issue makes it plain how the year zero approach (“No Elvis, Beatles or Stones in 1977”) had given way to a love of 60’s psychedelia and garage rock, setting the stage for some astonishing bands (and Dr. And the Medics) to come to the fore.


🎵 🎵 🎵 🎵 🎵 🎵


Horns up 

New Horizons



The Rezillos – Psycho Tornado

The legendary Scottish cartoon punk/rockabilly act return with their first new album in over a decade and it’s just what you expect: upbeat rock n roll that makes you click your fingers like a hip daddy-o. ‘Cranium’ is a perfect example of just how joyous and inventive this band can be, while ‘Peppermint Lounge’ salutes the legendary New York nightclub.

The album can be streamed here and purchased here.

Godflesh – Decay

After the solid, if unspectacular, release of Purge, it seemed that the industrial metal legends were settling comfortably into a holding pattern. Thankfully, Justin Broadrick realised this and produced their best album since ‘Post Self’. Opener ‘Master and Slave’ pulverises while ‘Ferel Colony’ feels like a homage to ‘Eighties’ by Killing Joke and ‘Consume Me’ isn’t for lightweights.

The album can be streamed and purchased here.


Golden Oldies


The Slits – Cut

One of the pioneering post-punk records, this astonishing debut sees the band creating a hybrid of reggae, punk, indie and jazz. Songs like ‘Instant Hit’ and ‘Shoplifting’ (where you can hear singer Ari Up admit to pissing herself) have a girlish enthusiasm and sensibility that’s impossible to replicate. Bassist Tessa is the secret weapon as her basslines can make dead men jump.



Gang of Four – Entertainment

Another masterpiece from 1979 that changed so many lives. From the likes of INXS, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana and Bloc Party, the combination of black funk and white noise continues to influence today. Lyrically, songs like ‘Ether’ compare British rule in Ireland to finding oil in Rockall, while ‘Anthrax’ criticises the concept of love while deconstructing the love song.

  

⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist and is the author of A Vortex of Securocrats and “dethrone god”.

Kaleidoscope 🎵 The Effect of Psychedelia on the 80’s + Predominance 67

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand One Hundred And Four

 

A Morning Thought @ 3276

Ian Major  ✒ In the UK, no group have the right to parade public roads; and right of veto exists for locals along any parade route. It is not a matter of rights either way. So what is the issue? 

I am conscious of the hurt felt by Irish Nationalists living on the Garvaghy Road at the prospect of an Orange church parade passing through their area. Most of the Unionist people would find no offence if such a parade passed through their area - but we would not want a similar Nationalist parade passing down our street. Having said that, both communities do accept Orange or Hibernian parades in some areas and circumstances. We may not agree with the aims and beliefs of the marchers, but we have tolerance on those occasions. 

The trouble arises where the particular parade has had a history of contention associated with it. That moves it from being a mere parade to be a win or lose contention. So what considerations remain when we Christians consider contentious parades, parades that are opposed by a majority of locals in the route of the march? In our calling to love our fellowman we should give due weight to their feelings.

Where there are definite and fixed objections from the local community, Orangemen who are believers should respect that and urge their colleagues to choose a different route. They would not be conceding rights, just respecting others' feelings. There are real concerns about the threat to civil & religious liberties in the UK - but they come from ideologies unrelated to Nationalism and Unionism. The British and Irish of Northern Ireland should direct their attention to those, and avoid disrespecting the feelings of our fellow-citizens about the events of 1690 and 1916.

⏩Ian Major grew up a heathen Protestant, was converted at 17. He lives out his Evangelical faith as a Baptist. 

A Christian Reflection On Contentious Parades

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