A funeral liturgy held on Thursday at St. Patrick’s Cathedral for Cecilia Gentili, a prominent “transgender activist and actress, former sex worker and self-professed atheist,” has ignited a firestorm of controversy.
The service, which took place in one of the most revered Catholic churches in the United States, has drawn intense criticism on social media.
The service, which took place in the hallowed halls of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, has been criticized for the misuse of the iconic church, challenging Catholic teachings.
Gentili, an Argentinian transgender activist and self-proclaimed atheist, was a leading figure in efforts to decriminalize sex work in New York and championed the inclusion of “gender identity” as a protected classification under state human rights law, according to Post Millennial.
Gentili was also a significant fundraiser for transgender causes and had received a $540,000 grant from the Biden administration for transgender outreach related to HIV.
The funeral was organized by Ceyenne Doroshow, founder of Gays and Lesbians Living in a Transgender Society (GLITS), who saw St. Patrick’s Cathedral as a fitting venue for Gentili’s “iconic status.”
However, Doroshow admitted to the New York Times not disclosing Gentili’s transgender identity to the church officials, stating, “I kind of kept it under wraps.”
The funeral service itself included prayers for access to sex-change surgery. A particularly provocative farewell message described Gentili as “puta,” which means whore in English.
“This whore. This great whore. St. Cecilia, Mother of all Whores!” said one of the activists.
SICK: Funeral of Transgender Activist and Atheist Prostitute Faces Backlash for Including Prayers for Sex Change and Celebrating ‘Whoredom’ at Catholic Cathedral in NYC (VIDEO) via @gatewaypundithttps://t.co/7JoZdZRgu7
A registered child sex offender was welcomed at the Human Rights Campaign’s North Carolina Dinner gala last week, just months after a controversy involving him being awarded a top LGBT advocacy prize. Chad Severance-Turner, a former youth minister, is currently the Chief Executive Officer at the Carolina LGBT+ Chamber of Commerce.
On February 10, the Human Rights Campaign in North Carolina held its annual dinner gala, with a number of top LGBT activists in attendance. Among the speakers at the Bank of America-sponsored “Without Exception” event was HRC Press Secretary Brandon Wolf and Democrat State Senator Lisa Grafstein.
A world we can all be proud of is on the horizon. We just have to fight for it.
But among those featured in attendance was Chad Severance-Turner, a registered child sex offender who has managed to rise to prominence as an LGBT advocate in North Carolina.
As previously reported by Reduxx, Turner was first accused by three boys of sexual abuse in 1998.
According to a GoUpstate report on the case from 2000, all of the victims who had come forward had met Turner through his position as the music director at the New Harvest Church of God in Gaffney, South Carolina. The cases were tried separately due to the nature of the charges, and Turner was ultimately only convicted on one offense.
Of the incidents Turner was convicted on, a 14-year-old boy had testified that Turner had invited him to spend the night at his house in the nearby community of Bessemer City, North Carolina. The victim stated that during the visit, Turner had questioned him on how he’d feel about a man performing oral sex on him.
Turner, wearing a silver vest, at the February 10 HRC Dinner.
“I thought he was joking,” the boy told the court. He explained that Turner frequently questioned him about sexual acts between men and women, which upset him because of the man’s position in the church. The victim continued that, following a revival meeting, he and Turner stayed overnight at the home of one of the other alleged victims.
The teen says he awoke to find Turner fondling his genitals, but didn’t immediately report it due to shame.
The second minor, who said he was 15 when the incident occurred, stated he was invited to Turner’s home where the older man showed him a pornographic video of a man and a woman having sex. He then said that later that night, after he and Turner went to sleep in the same bed, he woke up to find Turner fondling him.
The third alleged victim, who was also 15 at the time, said Turner had made the same advances to him over a three-week period when he stayed in the boy’s home. The minor said Turner had fondled him several times.
“He told me if I ever told the pastor, he’d make me look like a fool and a liar,” the boy said.
Turner’s registration with the North Carolina Sex Offender and Public Protection Agency.
During the trial, Turner’s defense attorney, Thomas Shealy, accused the boys of perpetrating a “witch hunt,” and asserted that it was suspicious that there was a few month delay between them being sexually abused and them going to their parents.
Turner was ultimately convicted on the charges related to the first victim, and sentenced to 10 years in prison for committing lewd acts on a minor under the age of 16. He served 2 years behind bars before being released on parole and being ordered to the sex offender registry.
Since being released from prison, Turner has become an active and notable member of the Charlotte LGBTQ advocacy community.
In 2012, Turner was elected the president of the LGBT+ Chamber of Commerce, immediately heading efforts to push for an expanded “nondiscrimination” ordinance which many complained would have prevented businesses from maintaining spaces such as washrooms as single-sex.
He was named “Person of the Year” by LGBT news outlet QNotes in March of 2015, but would resign from his Chamber of Commerce post in 2016 after his history as a child sex offender came to light. He would once again join the LGBT+ Chamber of Commerce as its inaugural CEO in 2021, a position he has held since. Under his leadership, the Chamber has secured partnerships with prominent organizations like Fifth Third Bank, NASCAR, Duke Energy, Wells Fargo, Sonoco, and Novant Health. He was also recently appointed by Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles to serve on the city’s Business Advisory Committee.
Turner has previously been awarded an honor by the Human Rights Campaign at their annual gala, though at the time, HRC officials refused to state whether they were aware of his child sex offender status prior to giving him the award.
As the author of the recently published Logic for Kids, I thought I’d take a close look.
Alas, the article is nothing to brag about. While Meier makes some good points, he also harbors serious misconceptions about logic, overlooks serious problems with mathematics instruction, and would do away with a key component of mathematics with us since Euclid. I sent him an email suggesting he study my book. No reply as of this writing.
Meier may well be right that most people “have no use for imaginary numbers or the Pythagorean theorem” and that “more than three-fourths of the population spends painful years in school futzing with numbers.” Many computations can be done by simple calculators and, in technical jobs, by sophisticated software such as Matlab. The convoluted mess known as Common Core, which has caused massive headaches among students, parents, and teachers alike, goes unmentioned, however. My critique of Common Core is here and here.
Meier’s proposal that schools “end useless math requirements” will elicit howls of protest (laughter?) from the education establishment in this country and, indeed, probably worldwide as well. He wants to dump those requirements in favor of “something more useful.” Like what? Meier answers, “applied logic.” What’s that? Let’s take a close look at Meier’s exposition of this idea, quote:
This branch of philosophy [logic] grows from the same mental tree as algebra and geometry but lacks the distracting foliage of numbers and formulas. Call it the art of thinking clearly.
Logic is not a branch of philosophy or any other subject. It’s a subject in its own right. See my book or any standard logic textbook, e.g., Hurley.
The association with philosophy is because credit as “the first logician” usually goes to the philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC), who devised syllogistic logic, which boils down to Venn diagrams.
Logic is about methods for assessing the correctness (validity) of arguments regardless of subject matter, including all of mathematics and, by implication, science.
Logic didn’t “spring from the same mental tree as algebra and geometry.” Rather, logic sits in judgment of them.
Stated in simple terms, logical reasoning means using the word “therefore” correctly. My book explains in ways kids can understand what is involved in using this word correctly.
To refute Meier’s other metaphor, that logic “lacks the distracting foliage of formulas,” the reader need only consult a symbolic logic textbook.
Logic isn’t an art, of any kind. It’s as rigorous as anything in mathematics; in fact, even more so because logic seeks to represent mathematical argumentation in a way that renders validity (or invalidity) apparent, for which purpose powerful symbolic resources are necessary.
But wait, there’s more, quote:
“Logic teaches us how to trace a claim back to its underlying premises and to test each link in a chain of thought for unsupported assumptions or fallacies. People trained in logic are better able to spot the deceptions and misdirection that politicians so often employ. They also have a better appreciation for different points of view because they understand the thought processes that produce multiple legitimate conclusions concerning the same set of facts.”
“Tracing back to premises” is another metaphorical muddle. Logic shows, rather, how an argument can move forward from premises to conclusion, making sure that each step in the inference chain exemplifies a rule of inference.
Steps in an inference chain are checked against rules of inference to determine whether (a) the correct rule was applied and (b) whether the rule was applied correctly.
The term “fallacy” is ambiguous between formal and informal fallacies.
A formal fallacy is committed when (a) the wrong rule of inference is applied, or (b) a rule of inference is misapplied. Logic can test for both as explained in my book as well as standard logic textbooks.
Testing for informal fallacies means determining which fallacy out of a known list has been committed, e.g., false cause, poison pen, hasty generalization, appeal to authority, and so on. Standard logic textbooks have lists of informal fallacies. These errors are less cut-and-dried and as such are more difficult to prove than formal fallacies.
An argument can be logically correct even though (a) it’s premises are false and its conclusion is true; or (b) all components of the argument are false.
However, an argument cannot be logically correct if its premises are true but its conclusion is false.
These are key distinctions that Meier’s gloss obscures.
Too much “futzing with numbers” is not the problem with mathematics instruction. The problem is exemplified by this astonishing admission in a recent geometry textbook, quote:
We have said that theorems are going to be proved by logical reasoning. We have not explained what logical reasoning is, and in fact, we don’t know how to explain this in advance. As the course proceeds, we will get a better and better idea of what logical reasoning is, by seeing it used, and best of all by using it yourself. This is the way that all mathematicians have learned what a proof is and what it isn’t. (My italics).
As a mathematics major in college, I can attest from personal experience that the logical structure of mathematical proofs is never made explicit. What we get is a proof sketch, which leaves it to students to fill in the logic blanks (good luck) and repeat the reasoning process for other theorems (good luck). Here is a sample, from a well-known analysis textbook by Edmund Landau (page 9):
Theorem 12: If x < y, then y > x.
Proof: Each of these means that y = x + v for some suitable v.
Got that? A logically explicit version of Landau’s proof is on pp. 271-275 of my article on logic in mathematics education, available here.
Finally, it seems not to have occurred to Meier that his proposal to end mathematics requirements means doing away with teaching mathematical proofs, a key component of mathematics since Euclid; and, paradoxically, also teaching the logic behind proofs, however cursorily. Maybe Meier should try proving the Pythagorean Theorem using “practical logic.”
One of the crime scenes. Photo: Freiwillige Feuerwehr Ettlingen
The fare dodger who brutally tortured a conductor and urinated on her on Tuesday is also said to have set fire to a garden shed after disappearing, killing a dog and sexually abusing another woman (17). The 35-year-old Syrian-born stateless man has now been committed to a psychiatric ward by a magistrate. The train attendant (57) had to endure the worst nightmare on Tuesday. The fare dodger beat the woman until she was hospitalised and also urinated on her. And he tried to force her to shout “Heil Hitler”. She had caught him without a ticket. Then he fled!
Shortly after the incident with the train attendant, the man went on the rampage in a Rewe supermarket and attacked a car driver (23) with a broken bottle neck. He injured him, took his keys and fled in his VW T-Cross, causing several accidents. A manhunt was unsuccessful and the police only warned the public about the brutal offender 22 hours later. The stateless man was apparently on his way to Ettlingen, 34 kilometres away. At around 5.08 pm, a garden shed caught fire here. A fire brigade spokesman: “During the fire-fighting work, a dog was found which could not be rescued.”
It got worse: an hour later, the man chased a girl (17) all the way to a gym. A CID spokesman: “Despite fierce resistance, he grabbed the young woman’s private parts. When she called for help, several people became aware of the situation and detained the accused until the police arrived.” The girl’s arm was slightly injured. The fire caused damage totalling 10,000 euros. Added to this is the damage caused by the suspect causing accidents during his escape. The getaway car remains missing. The police are still looking for the vehicle.
‘Biden mourned Navalny’s death and said ‘even in prison he was a powerful voice for the truth’. ‘An interesting statement while journalist, Julian Assange, who published truth inconvenient to the US and the west, presently rots in Belmarsh Prison.’
A 39-year-old behaved in a very bad and disorderly manner at a carnival party in Auerbach (Amberg-Sulzbach district). The intruder sexually harassed a ten-year-old girl and two women, according to the Auerbach police. The result is several charges. The 39-year-old had first offered a ten-year-old girl vodka and then suddenly kissed her on the forehead. The child’s mother and another woman then approached the man to confront him about his misbehaviour. However, before the women could say anything, he grabbed their breasts. Other visitors to the event then called a police patrol on the intoxicated man. The police officers ordered him to leave the area and threatened to take him into custody if he did not comply with the ban. The Afghan nevertheless remained at the event, which is why the officers used force to remove him. The 39-year-old then attacked the police officers and slightly injured them. He ended up spending the night in a custody cell. He now faces charges of assaulting and resisting law enforcement officers, assault and sexual harassment in three cases.
Prominent Canadian anti-woke psychologist Jordan Peterson blasted Pope Francis for neglecting the salvation of souls and focusing on “climate change” and criticized attempts to make the Catholic Church “relevant” since the 1960s and the Second Vatican Council.
On February 11, Peterson joined Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) reporter Colm Flynn to discuss a sundry of topics, including his wife Tammy’s miraculous recovery from cancer, the widespread loss of faith in the Catholic Church since the 1960s, and Pope Francis’ fixation on “climate change.”
“That’s not working. It’s shallow,” he said, slamming the “guitar and hippies” that proliferated in the Church following the ’60s and Vatican II.
Peterson explained that religion is “supposed to be an invitation to the great adventure of life.”
“What’s the great adventure of life?” he questioned.
“Pick up your cross and follow me,” Peterson responded, quoting Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew.
“That’s a h-ll of an invitation,” he admitted, “but that’s the invitation, and the Church lost faith in that.”
Peterson explained that efforts in the Catholic Church to make the Gospel message more “relevant” have clouded the Gospel’s true calling.
“As soon as you say that you need to be more relevant than that what you’re doing, technically it is putting something else above that,” he said.
“Well, that’s not going to work not if the original proposition was correct,” Peterson warned, adding, “and obviously the original proposition is correct.”
Peterson explained that just as “Christ faced and triumphed over death and hell,” each person must likewise triumph over death and hell in their own lives. According to Peterson, the Catholic Church is currently not challenging Her members to take the difficult path.
“The gateway to Paradise is barred by the cherubs who have swords that flame,” he said. “It means it’s hard to get into the club, man.”
“Anything that isn’t worthy gets cut and burned away,” he warned, adding, “well of course that’s hell.”
“There’s no sugar-coating that and that isn’t what people want anyways. Young people want an adventure,” Peterson said.
He stated that the desire for adventure is the reason that young people feel called to “save the planet” from “climate change,” which “Pope Francis seems to be on about constantly when you should be saving souls.”
“That’s how you save the planet, not by worshiping Gaia,” Peterson stated, referring to the pagan name for “Mother Earth.”
“I don’t see for the life of me what the Catholic Church has to do with the ‘climate crisis,’” he continued. “Just the formulation is wrong; the priority is wrong; you save the world one person at a time.”
“It lacks faith in its own mission,” he added.
While his wife Tammy is set to enter the Catholic Church this Easter, Peterson has yet to publicly affiliate himself with one specific religion but says he remains dedicated to searching for the truth.
However, he admitted that “there’s plenty of things the Catholic Church got right,” for which he has an “appreciation.”
A row erupted between a man and a police officer after the man shouted “racist” in the direction of a pro-Palestine protest. The man was pushed through his doorway by the police officer who told him he could not shout because it would ‘provoke’ people. Reasoned contributor Chloe Dobbs unveils the reasons why the police treat individuals in this way whilst ignoring extremely offensive chants. ℹ️ About Chloe Dobbs Chloe Dobbs is a political commentator who has contributed on GB News, TalkTV, Sky News, ITV News, and the BBC. Chloe makes independent commentary videos also, which can be found on her Instagram, YouTube and X accounts, all @dobbsandpolicy
French police shot and killed a Sudanese national who had attempted to attack passengers on a Paris tram with a butcher knife in the early hours of Saturday morning.
A 40-year-old man from the nation of Sudan dressed in a North African djellaba robe and carrying a “notebook with Arabic inscriptions” in one hand and brandishing a butcher’s blade in the other was shot and killed by Paris police at around 3 am on Saturday morning, Le Figaroreports.
According to police info, the Sudanese man had asked a fellow traveller on the train for a lighter and when he was refused, the 40-year-old took out a meat cleaver from his Moroccan dress and began attempting to attack the passenger.
The passenger was able to evade the attacks and quickly notified the police. The Paris prosecutor’s office said that officers discovered the African “holding a butcher’s blade in one hand and a notebook with Arabic inscriptions in the other”.
While police ordered him to throw down his weapon, the Sudanese man refused to comply and only responded with “words in Arabic”.
Officers initially used tasers on the knifeman, however, he was undeterred and attempted to rush officers from the railway brigade with the knife. At this point police opened fire on the attacker, firing off around twenty rounds, one of which shot the Sudanese man through the head, killing him on the spot.
The local prosecutor’s office has opened two investigations, including one for “attempted intentional homicide against a person holding public authority” against the deceased attacker and another against the officers who killed the knifeman for “intentional violence by police officers leading to death”.
The incident came just days after another knife attack at a Paris train station, during which a Malian man stabbed three people. Although he reportedly confessed to wishing to “attack French people” and had previously expressed anger about France’s colonial history in Africa, authorities have chosen not to treat the attack as an act of terrorism.
The countdown is ticking down inexorably to the launch of the Olympic Games in Paris, but France’s capital city has never seemed in such a poor position to host this international event. Controversy after controversy is undermining Mayor Anne Hidalgo to the point where international tourists, athletes, and officials are worried about whether the city will even be able to provide the right conditions for the Games.
Since November, panic has begun to set in about the viability of holding the Olympic Games in Paris. Anne Hidalgo, who stubbornly wanted to host them—and has put all her energy into the project—is now herself casting doubt on the event. At an organisational meeting at the end of November, the mayor put on a grand theatrical performance to explain that the transport system would never be ready in time, taking everyone to task for her negative attitude.
One wonders whether all this might not be part of a mediocre but predictable strategy: announcing a possible disaster so that you can then drape yourself in a convenient “I told you so”—with a perfectly clear conscience.
For several months now, one report after another has been released, undermining the credibility of the municipal team and proving its appalling amateurism and inability to meet the challenge it has been given. Lies follow lies. It is becoming increasingly clear that Anne Hidalgo has said just about anything and everything to help Paris’ bid to host the 2024 Games win, but is in no way able to keep her tantalising promises.
Free transport is just one example. Anne Hidalgo had made free transport for visitors at the time of the Games one of the key arguments of Paris’s bid, touted as an open, green, and welcoming city: €0 transport to limit the carbon footprint of the Games. But the organisers backed down in the face of the cost of such a measure to a budget that was already well overrun. As a result, a significant increase in the price of metro and RER tickets during the Games has been announced: between July 20th and September 8th, the price of a metro ticket will rise to €4 (from the current €2.10) and a book of tickets to €32 (from €16.90). It’s simply a question of realism: guaranteeing a good quality of service has a cost. But realism is not one of the primary qualities of the teams in charge of organising these Paris games.
Transport is not the only cause of budget overruns. From one project to the next, the slate continues to grow by millions, without any real results. Parisians were stunned to discover that the magnificent Olympic swimming pool promised for Seine-Saint-Denis will not be built as planned, and that the swimming events will be held in a rugby stadium. According to figures provided by L’Express, the initial assessment for building the Olympic pool put the cost at €67.8 million. The estimate has risen to €90 million for the final project, well below the actual cost of a building of this type. A consortium led by the Bouygues company finally won the contract in April 2020, but for a sum of €174 million—not for the 17,000-seat building initially envisaged, but for a 5,000-seat complex. In the end, it will not be possible to host the inline swimming events there.
As if all of that wasn’t enough, there are now suspicions of corruption involving the chairman of the Games Organising Committee, who is the target of an investigation into his remuneration.
The amateurism of the Paris City Council in the management of the organisation of the Games can be seen in the sometimes authentically grotesque statements made by Anne Hidalgo, such as when she declared, in a 2017 video released at the beginning of 2024, that solar collectors would be installed to recover the energy generated by the athletes and spectators in order to power various facilities.
Ridicule is alive and well in Paris, but on a more serious note, it’s a source of great concern. Very few people now look forward to the Games. In high places, there is a subject that people dare not talk about, but which is on everyone’s mind: what if the whole thing ends in a gigantic fiasco? What if the huge opening ceremony on the Seine, which was supposed to be the highlight of the show and the biggest thing in living memory, turns out to be a gigantic flop?
Anne Hidalgo was very clear on the related subject of the swimming events scheduled to take place in the Seine: there is no plan B. However, some people are starting to think that this plan B is a vital necessity if the city of Paris, and therefore France behind it, is not to lose all international credibility in the event of problems. According to revelations in the always well-informed satirical newspaper Le Canard enchaîné, a last-minute alternative solution is presently being studied at the request of the Élysée Palace.
In the face of the predicted chaos, more or less alarmist announcements are being made to Parisians. In the run-up to the Games, Parisians are delighted to learn that they will have to stop using public transport, work from home as much as possible, and stop having parcels delivered. Publicly-funded posters are now plastered all over the walls of the metro encouraging people to take shelter during the ‘tornado.’
From then on, it becomes increasingly clear that Parisians have only one option: to leave, to flee Paris to avoid being plunged into hell. They are already more than disgusted with the Games before they have even begun. Even Anne Hidalgo, who is so quick to fall into blindness, is beginning to realise the disaster that has befallen public opinion. She has just issued the kind of voluntarist communication she is famous for to try and make up for it, in the most flowery language: “Don’t go, it would be a connerie [expletive]!”
One thing’s for sure: at the end of July 2024, there’s a good chance that your favourite Parisian correspondent will choose not to listen to the wise advice of Madame le Maire, and will take to her heels.
