will have a lot to say about all of that and we'll also have a lot to say about x pope benedict who blamed homosexuals clicks in the priesthood for the abuse crisis that he enabled our guest is mick mean in who just settled a suit against the archdiocese of new york for abuse by a priest who became a bishop and mick is planning another suit against an abusive at fordham prep wants to talk about the supreme court of the united states dodged one gay case and deny the appeal of another and the national guard in california has stood up had to practice the walk of shame apologizing for denying a marriage license to a gay couple the high court in china and india rebuffed l g b t rights cases but progress was made  he and half the m s n b c shows he's all over the news with his announcement it is the flavor of the month while flavor of the month and why is that i think it's because he has he has an interesting story to tell in so many ways and that's you know that's what was true with barack obama and perhaps lincoln with his log cabin and don't forget before him william henry harrison in his log cabin seriously presidential candidates have always put together because i've said here before that i think he inspires confidence by the way he talks he's calm he's sure of himself he doesn't get you know ruffled when people throw stuff out i mean there were hecklers this we're going to go into some of the gay parts he talked about having to take his mother to the hospital and how his husband chast and was involved were all faith so that tough and a few things going for me as difficult as it was father brian who gave the invocation today who lifted us up which faith and companionship and i had my husband  ok was right there at the hospital he stayed there he was at the hospital where he belongs because in the eyes of the hospital and the state and the law he was not just someone i love he was my lawfully married  our marriage exists by the grace of a single vote on the u s supreme court the nine women and men sat down in a room and took a vote and they brought me the most important freedom in my life how to integrate this couple of things about this first of all i highly resent hospital rules that say only your married spouse could go into the room i think people ought to be able to designate a lot of for you can call the health care limited by certain relationships i think that's unfortunate the other thing is he says by the grace of one vote of the supreme court and i just read something today that someone wrote that said come on in technically that's that was the end game but what about all the millions of us who have been working for this for years who came out to our families who signed petitions who brought court cases in states all over the country who lobbied for th doesn't need to be more yes more appreciation for who has come before i mean you know we talked last week about his husband going before the human rights campaign and saying you did all this and the human rights campaign and of course it was done by a lot of grassroots groups and  you know because now they are going to be looked to as spokespersons for the community yeah because of what you know and well but and pete is going to give the keynote speech at the h r c dinner in los vegas  eleven and i think the fact that he is openly campaigning at l g b t q plus events the victory fund h r c is good i think not everybody would he said well he sort of talks to his seventeen year old self and integrates a bunch of issues including his sexuality so why don't we watch that part as well ok and it will take courage to move on from our past we're not going back you know if i did get a chance to go back it wouldn't be out of a desire to live in that past if i went into the past i go just twenty years back so i could find a teenage boy in the basement of his parents brick house thinking long thoughts as he played the same guitar lick over and over again on a school stratocaster wondering how he could belong in this world wondering if his intellectual curiosity means he'll never fit in wondering if his last name will be a stumbling block for the rest of his life wondering what it means when he sometimes feels a certain way about young men he sees in the hall at school the means he'll never wear the uniform never be accepted if i found him and told him what was ahead what he believed me could picture it if i could put my arm around and tell him that he was going to see the world and service country that he would not only find belonging in his hometown but be entrusted by its citizens with the duty of leading it and shape that he would have a hand in transforming the neighborhoods he knew was a boy and that he would help the lights come back on in that giant factory whose broken windows loom like the face of a ghost over the ballpark where his dad used to take him again where he wondered if the city was his own to tell him that he'll be all right or that all right to tell him that one radio before he even turns forty he'll wake up to headlines whether he's rising too quickly into becoming a in that sense trump is very unapologetic as well and i but i think people understand that i think that's an unfortunate no i'm just saying people a lot of politicians high like who they are in many respects i don't mean about being he describes it and his conversation with rachel maddow about it when she asked him about his coming down process on her show well i think he was giving a signals a long time ago when he won the profile in courage award for an essay he wrote in the year two thousand when he was a kid from the kennedy group that gives out the profile in courage he wrote but bernie sanders for a variety of reasons but he especially praised bernie's support of same sex marriages he put that in his essay and i think something was going on that it was sort of trying to tell you are now absolutely i would agree with that so i've had a number of conversations with people since the rachel maddow interview to some are furious that she asked the question at all plants be a lesbian saying well money that's what she asked them i mean she said i don't understand how you felt on rhodes scholar could keep your identity bottled up for so long i couldn't have done it well i don't like the way she asked the question and i don't buy her premise but i think there is certainly something to be discussed in terms of his process and we don't agree on all of this but to me it portrays quite vividly for the american people because he talks about his fear and not wanting to be this and he says you only get to be one person and it was very important to me to be a soldier it was very important to me at the time he entered the military it was still forbidden to be out when he was serving in afghanistan it was after don't ask don't tell had been repealed and he also had these political ambitions and he couldn't put all that together at that point exactly and i think that just echoes what i have observed over the years which is those with the most privileged those with the most ambition those most invested in the status quo and certainly the military is the status quo are the most fearful about challenging that image and mike barnicle on morning joe this week told the story of talking to mayor peek behind the scenes off camera at one of his appearances and asking him what were you more afraid of serving in the afghanistan or coming out to your parents and that  stopped pete for a minute in his tracks and he then said to barnicle i was very fearful and sweating when i told my parents and luckily they were very good about it now that's a whole other story about how we're afraid of telling our parents and and yet they turn out to be supportive not mine my mother said why don't waste my father said well you seem to accept this and if we don't i guess we're not going to see very much  anymore yeah my father said oh i always knew so which i said then why didn't you say something to me anyway anyway but i think that i think it's important to understand that even in a would support a parent sitting there even in a world as advanced as we think ours is these days that people still can find themselves in this personal bubble no matter what's going on around them all they see is their own fear of assuming minority status of rejection of failure in their career ambitions and they stay quiet i think alone but i was trying to get at and you know sexuality most people would find that unusual i think it's less unusual than you imagine i'm not going to argue now they now of course that now they're making up for lost time let's put up that picture of him  chest and yeah kissing a radical moment now the thing about this is and these parker who was the out mayor of houston said you know head of the victory fund i would not have formed to see something like that in my lifetime you know and that's part of being able to kiss is part of being able to normalize now the press of course is absolutely over the moon about all this they can talk of nothing else lawrence o'donnell says to rachel we've never talk to each other and i think yeah that's true but but it's interesting because it also distracts us from a lot of pete's actual political history and opinions about issues and there are those who are paying attention and say you know he did some south bend redevelopment that really threw a lot of people of color out of their houses and was too fast and even peters said well maybe we didn't do that the right way and he fired a black police african american gay journalist wrote this candidacy is going to expose fault lines between the white gay men and the rest of the old g b t community and he says queer america is a lot to the left of the white merry gave god fearing centrist  seriously you know i do think it's an evolution in people's thinking and understanding and i think it is unimaginable that he as an out gay man could have run until now in the first and be taken serious worst woman to be prime minister of the united kingdom was a right wing reactionary who didn't put any women in the night exactly so that this is how well we have now is not all that more progressive well you know obama i mean it was it was a we would say that we admire his openness and i would expect that as he gains more power that he will he will be a force for good in terms of our issues he could be the kind of can was sort of predicting a couple of years ago when trump got in it's going to be somebody we're not talking about who's a fresh face and he's nothing if not that but he says he hopes his being an out candidate will make it easier for the next one now in the polling you know by his leading this is the new hampshire i the new hampshire poll yeah biden is a twenty three sander sixteen and pete is in third place at eleven percent irises at seven warren at nine  i hope that pete because don't forget pete was a mayor in the end of wall mike was governor i hope that pete will offer more than attacks on my christian faith or attacks on the president as he seeks the highest office of the land he'd do well to reflect on  the importance of respecting the freedom of religion of every american you might think about that to my exact life and pete said that god made him day and pence responded because he was pressed on this all of us have  convictions i have mine i'm a bible believing christian and pete said i have a problem with religion being used to harm people my well my favorite footnote to that is pants is supposed to give a commencement address at an evangelical college in indiana taylor universe any sure he has a relationship there but students in fact while they are  standing up and saying cancel hence because he is a hateful bigot it was a petition started by a gay alumnus alex huxter of the class of zero seven so the so the but the school is sticking by him at the moment but we'll s should we talk so we've done with people the moment you know let's talk about well you know we can talk about the i think this is been one of them i think this is been one of the biggest steps towards fascism we've had in this country in the past week  you had trump telling an appointee to break the law i will pardon you i mean that alone ought to be everybody say well you're done we can't have that from the person who's supposed to execute the laws he vetoed a congressional vote to end our war on yemen migrant from honduras i was scuse me trans woman right migrant from our interest was granted asylum granted asylum ice will not let her go they say they're going to appeal that they're keeping her locked up well state's department of defense he had a three year reserve or our o t c scholarship he'd already had top surgery homeowner replacement and gender marker name changes all that but the r o t c department chair could not get him grandparents in under this policy act like he still wants to serve this country which is abuse and i saw a trans member of the military on i think c n n as this was going into effect saying  even though i am grandfathered in because i was serving as an outrageous person before the ban took effect this now interferes with my career i cannot be promoted i cannot be promoted and  i can't even with a straight face call this good news the navy has announced that its trance members who haven't transitioned are allowed to cross dress off duty where they will then be arrested and thrown out of the military like not in the california national guard and i have to understand this they are a part of the military but they were the major general there matthew beavers said as long as you can fight we don't care what gender you identify with nobody's going to get thrown out but you think bill weld is going to have some effect on trump romney well right i mean bill weld was basically a liberal republican from massachusetts who had been very pro gay and then he decided he wanted to run for governor of new york that he became against same sex marriage was kind of ridiculous but with we you need somebody as a repository for anti trust votes in the primaries and in the primary i realize the trump is held on to his republican base very strongly but independents get to vote in a lot of republican primaries and they can go over there and they can make a statement about how problematic he is but it's exactly because of the primary bout that the republican senators are all sticking with trump because they are afraid of challenged and i am very sad to lose i don't think trump is going to lose the nomination i think he's lost his mind but but i think he can get hurt by having someone there  even jeff lake and bob corker neither of whom is anywhere near bill weld in liberalism quit the senate rather than having to face that right wing opponent in prime did you and of course the other appointment the  see but there was something good that they actually did this week did you read this thing about the office of federal contract compliance now the director is a guy named craig craig lean he told legal represent atives of legal law firms out of town hall but his office is concerned about the lack of diversity of big law firms especially at the top and that this agency demands no discrimination based on race color religion sex national origin sex orientation gender identity disability or veteran status and it's good by little mike pence finds out about that i don't think he's long for his job what else with trump this we welcome to talk about the supreme court before we get to our guests and i think we should couple of things first of all i keep reading i read on the cover of usa today that roberts and cavanaugh are moderating influences on some of these of the crazier people on the court but this week the court refused to hear the appeal we have a picture of them of south dakota a death row inmate charles rhymes a jury sentence sentenced him to death because some on the jury felt that letting a gay man have a life sentence was a would be a pleasure to him be with other men cast what he wants we're not letting him have that he's the no one is better on death row for twenty five years and now the court is  ruling well you raise these issues too late or it's too amorphous we're not interested in hearing it so we're not we're not even going to hear your case we're just rejecting it on the other hand the right wing the alliance defending freedom all those kinds of folks maybe the liberty council brought cases against new jersey banning conversion therapy and asked the court to overturn that and say that states should not be allowed to ban conversion therapy because religious freedom allowed people to do it even though it does and those laws don't ban religious practitioners from doing it they just ban state licensed medical  reimbursement for doing it right on the court refused to hear that but they're going to keep trying on this they're going to they have another angle and everything i'm saying they are immediately filed another case on how they fund raise and keep themsel paid the big cases that we keep telling you about whether title nine and title seven would forbid sex discrimination cover us as sexual orientation or gender identity they still haven't ruled on how they're having a conference this week w capture one of our fellow journalists you yes you report an outage creation from new york one you wrote for the new york times we were colleagues the gay city news you wrote terrific stories there is more of winning stories and you are here two and a half years ago talking about your case against the settlement this is again before the child victims act was passed before i had any legal redress in the state of new york because these matters or time barred right there's a statute of limitations and that was they've now broadened on your show i am an ivy league graduate living on food stamps and that makes a lot of people uncomfortable you know when when they hear that perhaps but that's the fact of the matter right and it took that level of deprivation to force me to take the actions are taken against these men who sexually abused me fern and beck was a late religion teacher afford him for who in my senior year engaged in a felony crime that would have been a multi count to judge which is one of the reasons why this predator targeted me yeah because i had confided all of this in him he knew kind of like as a spiritual advisor exactly was going on the boy was head over heels in love with at the time was in the same house asleep when the sexual attacked occurred i have met other men from ford also been victims of ferdinand and this guy had a criminal pattern that he followed the way someone would rob banks or that they would rob cars or this guy went after seventeen year old boys waited till they were asleep or drunk when under arrest and then perform oral sex on them and he only stepped down as a teacher like last year no he stepped down he didn't step down they fired him because i came forth and went public and they hired an outside law firm to do an investigation and they forced him out they were he has other victims i'm not the only victim i've spoken to some of these a highly catholic irish ethnic working class little clamshell in the bronx just like thousands and thousands of other young irish guys who also grew up in these little  clamshells these priests had more authority than the cops sounds very nineteenth century you know they had more authority then then your parents in some cases you know whose parents were beleaguered they know i mean i had great parents my mother and father were dogshit in how they raise six kids and my father worked like a dog to pay tuition at catholic schools but my father had health problems there were stresses on the family i have suffered with grinding depressions all my life which are part genetic part circumstantial and part a result of the sexual abuse and the predators pick up they smell it like a dog smells blood and at the age of thirteen fourteen you know me well enough to know my personality and to know who i am i was a brash outspoken kind boisterous kid i was having sex smoking pot drinking and i grew up with guys who were even more pressure than i you know you lived your life out on the street with other kids there was no yeah there were no video games there was no you know we had the gym club in the parish where we would play basketball or shuffleboard but unless you were in the street in the schoolyard you know the bronx has a lot of parks and fields and you know that is where i kind of came came to be and also came to wrestle with my sexuality i've had sex with girls i've had sex with boys men and women you know but when you're thirteen and fourteen coming out of this  really terrifying stress yeah so all this is coming out now you have the pennsylvania attorney general's report the new york attorney general is going to do a report it's a worldwide phenomenon and yet you had this week next pope benedict blaming priest priestly abuse crisis on homosexual cliques in seminaries and the absence of god i mean he was in charge of the buick archdiocese while the this was going on and didn't pay any price for it and he was the head of the church entirely and did not and did not clean house when it was rampant they never take responsibility for it themselves there's that and then i see why don't you make catholics in some point say you guys can't solve this problem priests this is a this is a generational shift it's not going to become apparent overnight but what we're witnessing is a whole sale dismantling i comes from benedict says we have human science and we have human data and then we have this mysticism a higher authority if you will that goes beyond human reason and we saw that it applied to his intrinsically busy order ok diagnosis of gay people and himself which has now been it's just been simply debunked anywhere in the world where there is a catholic imprint you can pretty much get married now ok yeah i mean that this is just simply been debunked ireland with a a gay prime minister it's just it's extraordinary  applied this human reason science but mystical approach now to the pedophile abuse epidemic which is basically rooted in the fact that once a priest  in most of the developed world right ok i agree that in parts of the other catholic world you would struggle to have law enforcement to help you solve the problem but in the united states in europe in arland in large parts of latin america you have law enforcement root out these criminals absolutely shocking that this is going on long without that happening right so if a government has collaborated with the church  are incredible paradigms of shame and corruption the corruption has been based on i think most to believe in our own money i mean follow the money that dictum follow money right and you will you will you will get to the end of this problem but shame is a very very powerful tool right and we all know how shame is used to terrorize gay and lesbian people can you talk a little bit about your negotiation with the archdiocese lawyer when you were settling your case or no you can we can talk about it it's but that was like that at some point and i thought about it before it came in today it was it was either marching down fifth avenue or it might be on the floor of a nightclub maybe the roxy with three thousand other shirtless men that something kicked in and i said they're not going to get away with this i'm not going to let them get away with this you targeted a thirteen year old kid now i'm not painting this guy out to be the great  did they respond to you or how did they miss it was there was a degree of pushback but not that much forced back they did an investigation and i don't know what they have found out or i haven't seen it because that's a closed matter again this happened out of court they took here pretty much to investigate this the question is did they understand what you were saying about what happened to you do they understand what you went through i think that they regarded some of what i was saying as being slightly fantastic when i tell you that at the age of fourteen i am sitting drunk in a movie theater in the village with my parish priest who's showing  you know art flicks that involve boys being anal he raped i had never seen this kind of stuff growing up i never been exposed to any of this i mean my response is how am i supposed to respond to this so that's how he groomed you ok there was that process there was the process of the letter there was the process of ingratiating himself to my family these are incest based crimes these are forms so you know you've kind of responded to the nonsense that benedict was saying but are you what are you we're all hopeful that we're we are actually making going to be making some progress to finally stopping this the  what needs to happen is catholics need to pull back their money stop giving money to the church and then people say well children need to go to school and the catholic high school my community is very good and why should i sell my kid crappy public school well to each their own but in terms of the amount of money that has been given to the catholic church pull the money back ok and you will see that they will start to sing a different t attorney generals in every state in this country or certainly where we have large catholic populations and perhaps that includes united states departed justice need to do an extensive investigation so that we get the correct numbers ok living and dead who are these guys where are they what are they doing the guys that are alive and that you can bring indictments against you need to prosecute them ok send them to prison  to me it appears logical that the first thing they vatican want to do is to defrock us now they've opened up in new york state for one year the statute of limitations on your ability to sue of this right now you know usually it was a short period where  one when you were like twenty three now you can do it for year but what about statue of limitations on crime on it just now fifty five crime no there's no the criminal i think was up to twenty eight which is still too low there should be no statute of neighbor of people get i mean women were getting knocked over the head on a regular basis and robbed on the street i grew up unfortunately in a time of high crime these to me were crimes that simply needed to be adjudicated in well you have been a good and i tell you these are moments in your life where it is very clarifying and defining as to where people stand when it comes down to push t run for congress our chief homophobe in the city of new york he would like to spread rumors that he's not going to be so homophobic any more about will believe it when we see him will and we're very concerned that he's he's you think good news from arizona governor do you see republican had to sign a bill repealing the one nine hundred ninety one law that barred h i b and aids instruction that promotes a homosexual lifestyle that's a quote it's an attempt to end  lawsuit versus the state and the republican a journey attorney general by the way refused to defend the state from the suit from the national center for lesbian rights that's good news from arizona and in where else well in upstate new york a town clark in route new york are o t she refused to same sex marriage license to a gay couple in the twenty eighteen sherry erickson but this week she publicly apologized for the hurt she caused but she had told the couple to make an appointment with a different clerk governor cuomo offered to marry them himself but they had to settle they answered they had to settle a lawsuit for twenty five thousand dollars and she had to make the public apology and she said it won't happen again i can only imagine what pressure they put on her to do that well did it did it didn't break kim this all right few stories of violence in dallas texas trans woman in malaysia booker got into a small fender bender in the parking lot of an apartment we told you about the black church fires that arson fires that were suspected well they did arrest someone named holder matthews get a lot of yes yes that's him for those fires some of the sheriff's deputy sheriff deputy sheriff down there and it is nice to see in light of the notre dumb thing that now money is finally pouring into these black churches that was a good boon to that and in gurney ville california vincent o'sullivan another charmer we have a picture of him there he has been sentenced to nine months in jail and three years probation because he very violently threatened a gay man there with attack and violence and said he was going to bring pipe bombs and blow up the place where he worked and then he called him a lot of bad slurs and better news san diego is going to fly rainbow flags at the airport around the chip let you know howard now and in and in florida the south florida sun sentinel won the top pulitzer prize they public service award for its reporting on parkland because they did not only on the spot reporting but they followed it and they followed the consequences for the kids and they followed up on legislation and they just did in depth reporting over a long period of time and so they wanted a well deserved pull it so we told you that the american museum of natural history was going to rent its hall to a over this especially from the staff that said we can't have this in the building so the museum said no we're canceling the event but revolting lesbians the group that's been out there for a years trying to get rebecca mercer also a right wing nut off the board who's a climate change denier had to be out there again and the museum said oh we don't judge people by their politics on the board we just take their money i colleges going to admit trans men there yeah but they're going to here's the deal i'd say and spelman next door which is the women's college couple of years ago decided to admit trans women but are more houses being very strict which is not what some other colleges do if you enroll in morehouse as a man and you transition to female you're out you cannot stay now  let's people say when they transition even though they are women's college so i was a little controversial also they were insisting on male pronouns for everyone they're not recognizing the non binary we skipped a political harsh oh we told you roy moore was looking to run for the republican nomination for senate to oppose doug jones in two thousand and twenty well he's polling among the republicans the highest at twenty seven percent over three members of congress i think it would be kind of nice to have him as the candidate again fifty only fifteen percent like in party there you can find that at campus pride dot org slash shame lists the texas senate passed two anti gay bills were we haven't heard what's going to happen in the house on these things they're rather complicated things but it's all about getting  us in los angeles there's going to be a memorial service for virginia from the friends of project and on june first i'll put that in mark weekly e mail telling you about that cop scotching through international news we can do that yes in row in st petersburg a court says a trans woman must be returned to her printing job she was fired because she was now seen as a woman doing the job and we're not all are now allowed to have those jobs  not allowed to have four hundred and fifty six jobs in russia i had no idea about me there in brunei there their representatives are now defending the stone the law stoning gay people to death i content in toronto the pride parade now won't let uniformed police officers march so no turn of the parade called unity inclusion has sprung up to welcome the cops but they're going to vote on throwing the corporate floats out next door how about india the supreme court the air last week but the appeals court issued an injunction against the same sex marriage ruling so that's delayed until an august hearing in richlands virginia a gay fortune teller is suing the town no wrong part of the united states after the civil war in armenia trans activist was invited to address parliament but is now getting death threats china sure the beijing high court rejected an appeal challenging china's ban on l g q internet content and the country's largest internet social media platform has been removing such content a gay couple got attacked in france by a guy they met on the bus one of them is dead the other severely injured in the ukraine you have the four right and religious protesters tried to disrupt the lesbian conference the european lesbian conference and we got a picture of them nice they're there right and a board member of the air said the protesters were afraid of those big bad dykes and they were right to be because lesbian and it's are out to smash the patriarch i love it exactly all right aids news well cuba has begun finally distributing prep in a pilot program twenty eight people in one place but they used to quarantine us events progress now but they also have universal health care oklahoma on broadway now which is the critics darling folk and it focuses on the divisions in america there is lori and curly there i thought there was plenty of all that in the original came through coming back to broadway george and martha will be played by eddie izzard and maury metcalf with out actor russell tovey as young nick and patsy fern as his wife honey joe mantello will direct its gay gay game although you're to andre that's andre leon talley vailable april twenty third and d v d look for i didn't i watched it i kind of liked it it's you know he's an interesting guy so it was interesting and by the way in discussing th way it's written now it will sound extremely racist to be using these lines with this character and that was their reason for stopping that one right so it's a little more nuance yes and it is it is thank you scene or where putting together the big march and rally alternate parade go to our web site sign up to be a volunteer on the day we need marshals for the parade and people helping set up the rally