In this hour-long interview, Butch talks about the difference between liberals and leftists, and why independent people-powered parties (often referred to as “third parties”) are crucial to the health and survival of U.S. democracy. He also shares his percepctive on his removal from the ballot by the Democratic establishment in California, and the differences and similarities between the two major corporatist/oligarchic parties – “Team Blue Genocide and Team Red Fascism,” as Ware calls them.
Says Ware:
A majority of registered voters [63%] say that both parties do such a “poor job” that a “third major party” is needed. . . . The two-party system is a fabrication [and] the “lesser of two evils” argument was actually formulated by the CIA in the 1960s to try to prevent the emergence of genuine leftist politics, and especially of genuine Black leftist politics. It’s a psyop [psychological operation], and we’re living under it. The people who live outside of this constant mental conditioning see through it. . . . What we perceive from the inside as a battle between Democrats and Republicans is actually a factional dispute inside a single capitalist, imperialist, white supremacist party. They alternate power back and forth, and that’s it. What they never do is create space for you to express your political dissent from the capitalist, imperialist, white supremacist framework in its totality. . . . The system is so fragile right now. We can break the duopoly control. A majority of people do not identify with this political system at all. The time is ripe for a third party. And you know who knows it? The Democrats. That’s the reason why they’ve sued to knock me off the ballot in California [and] the reason they spent 20 million dollars trying to knock Dr. Jill Stein and myself off the ballot in 2024.
Following is more of what Dr. Ware says in the above interview.
The relationship between Team Blue Genocide and Team Red Fascism is that one steals while the other holds the bag. So while one can argue that Republicans were responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade, when the Democrats had control over the House, the Senate, and the White House, did they protect Roe v. Wade? Did they enshine and codify it into law?
Just ask yourself a set of questions about what function the Democrats are actually playing. . . . They have preferred to weaponize issues and rights [a woman’s right to choose, the Voting Rights Act, affirmative action, and DEI) as ways to activate their voter base in “lesser of two evils” arguments rather than just securing and protecting [all of these rights] because their job is actually to weaponize your fear of Team Red in order for them to undertake identical policies.
[For instance] I push back strongly against the idea that the Republicans are [solely] responsible for ICE. The Democrats massively funded and escalated ICE. The Democrats were the ones responsible for starting the policies of family separations, for pioneering putting kids in cages. Trump, despite the theatrics of the [recent] escalation, and the visibility and the fascist violence we see in the streets, is still chasing Obama’s deportation record. He can’t catch the “Deporter in Chief.” . . . The problem is when Rebuplicans do it, liberals resist; and when the Democrats do it, liberals applaud.
. . . Voters are constantly fear-mongered about the other side being worse. . . . It’s a toxic relationship. The Republicans do the same thing with Democrats that Democrats do with Republicans. It is a game of mutual recrimination and fear that is built on stoking a fake culture war that does not affect the money flow of the corporations and the billionaires that are at the top of the system. They want you identifying with those parties because they know that those parties serve their interests one way or the other.
[A major study from 2014 showed] that there is “little or no” correlation between what either the Democratic voting base or the Republican voting base want and what our elected officials do. But there is a 100% correlation between what the donor class wants and what the political parties do. And the reason is simple: who funds you runs you.
. . . My colleague at UC-Riverside, Dylan Rodriguez, says that "the Democrat Party is the most effective counter-insurgency organization ever to come into existence in human history." They are where real possibilities for change go to die.
If you remove the Democrats from the equation, American fascism becomes virtually impossible because that hard white supremacist core that is driving the extreme right is actually a small fraction of people. But people are so disaffected with the Democrats and do not see any possibility of any emancipation coming through their corrupt capitalist imperialist practices, that they disengage. If we had an actual opposition party rather than just two factions of a single white supremacist party, coalitions which are possible would [form and] drown out this small hard core kernal of white supremacy. [That core] would become vastly outnumbered once the Democrats are out of the way.
But the Democrats are in the way of a real opposition party emerging, and they have to continuously weaponize identity politics in order to keep that position of material privilege where they control the access to resources. As long as they are there, no liberation is possible.
Here in Minnesota, four of the state’s Green Party endorsed candidates require a certain number of signatures from the public in order to be on the ballot in November.
Accordingly, over the past two weeks I’ve joined with other local Greens in collecting signatures for Steve Young and Jane Kirby, Green Party candidates for Governor and Lieutenant Governor; Seth Kuhl-Stennes, Green Party candidate for Secretary of State; and Ngone Niang, Green Party candidate for State Senate District 39.
In the image above, for instance, I’m with fellow members of the Lavender Caucus of the Green Party of Minnesota at The 19 Bar, the oldest gay bar in Minneapolis and among the oldest in the United States ~ Thursday, May 28, 2026.
Above and below: Gathering signatures at a speaking event in New Brighton featuring Norman Finkelstein ~ Saturday, May 23, 2026. Pictured fourth from left is Ngone Niang, Green Party candidate for State Senate District 39.
Above: With my friend Rachel Braaten. We’re at Shish Mediterranean Kitchen, taking a break from collecting signatures on Grand Avenue in St. Paul ~ Sunday, May 24, 2026. Rachel is the Green Party candidate for Three Rivers Park Board District 3.
Above: My friend Jane Kirby, Green Party candidate for MN Lieutenant Governor ~ Sunday, May 24, 2026.
Above: Steve Young and Jane Kirby, Green Party candidates for Governor and Lieutenant Governor.
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6/7/26 UPDATE
After submitting above and beyond the necessary number of signatures, the Minnesota Secretary of State’s office has verified that all four Green Party MN candidates requiring of signatures are officially on the ballot for November 2026.
Congratulations Steve, Jane,
Seth and Ngone!
Following is Socialist News and Views’ June 1 interview with Steve Young and Jane Kirby, Green Party candidates for MN Governor and Lieutenant Governor.
In his recent response to liberal pastor and author John Pavlovitz, writer Oliver Kornetzke (right) provides a truly epic takedown of the liberal tactic of blaming and shaming leftists for not supporting milquetoast Democratic candidates and thus being responsible for the rise of fascism.
Following is part of what Kornetzke shared yesterday on his substack.
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The trajectory that produced this exact historical moment was not authored by leftists. It was not authored by protest voters. It was not authored by young people who looked at the Democratic Party and felt nothing, or by anyone exhibiting what gets condescendingly diagnosed as political nihilism by people who have been comfortable enough to afford patience while others could not. It was authored by the Democratic Party itself, over decades, through a series of deliberate, documented, explicitly chosen strategic and ideological decisions made by people with real institutional power who had every opportunity to build something different and chose, repeatedly, consciously, and profitably, not to.
And if you want to understand how we got here, and I mean actually understand it rather than just assign blame in a direction that conveniently protects the institutional party from examination, you have to go back further than 2024. You have to go back further than 2016. You have to go back to the structural conditions that made both of those elections possible and understand what produced them.
The American working class did not wake up one morning and spontaneously decide to distrust democratic institutions and embrace authoritarian politics. That distrust was built, systematically, over generations, by a set of material conditions that were themselves the product of specific policy choices made by both parties acting on behalf of the same concentrated class interests.
The deindustrialization of the American economy did not happen by accident. The collapse of organized labor did not happen by accident. The destruction of pension systems, the elimination of defined benefit retirement plans, the explosion of predatory debt as a substitute for wages that never grew, the transformation of healthcare into a for-profit industry that bankrupts families, the collapse of rural economies, the defunding of public education, the construction of a carceral system that consumed entire communities, none of this happened by accident and none of it was imposed solely by Republicans. These were bipartisan achievements of a political system operating on behalf of a specific class of people who were not the ones experiencing the consequences.
The Democratic Party, beginning explicitly and consciously with the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980s, made a strategic decision that has defined the party ever since. They decided, in writing, in documents that exist and can be read, that the path to electoral success ran through corporate donors and suburban professional class voters rather than through organized labor and the multiracial working class that had been the party’s political and moral foundation for fifty years.
They dressed this up in the language of pragmatism and modernization and electability and Third Way politics and they celebrated it, and their media allies celebrated it, and their think tank infrastructure celebrated it, and for a while in a narrow electoral sense it worked. Bill Clinton won twice. And in the process he signed NAFTA and watched manufacturing communities get hollowed out across the Midwest and the South. He signed the 1994 crime bill and presided over the largest expansion of mass incarceration in American history. He signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall Act and deregulated the financial industry in ways that set the conditions for the 2008 collapse. He gutted welfare and called it reform. He signed telecommunications deregulation that began the consolidation of media that would eventually produce the information ecosystem that makes democratic politics nearly impossible. And the working class communities that absorbed all of these consequences, that watched their factories close and their unions dissolve and their sons get incarcerated and their daughters get buried in debt, were told by the Democratic Party establishment that they were the beneficiaries of good governance and that any anger they felt was being exploited by demagogues on the right.
Which it was. But it was being exploited by demagogues on the right because the institutional “left” had abandoned the field.
Then the 2008 financial crisis happened and the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history occurred in broad daylight. Banks that had committed documented, systematic fraud were bailed out with public money while millions of ordinary people lost their homes, their savings, and their retirement funds. And Barack Obama, who had run on a platform of hope and change and who had genuine political capital and genuine public support for using it, chose Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers and a cabinet full of Goldman Sachs alumni and decided that the priority was stabilizing the financial system rather than holding anyone accountable or providing material relief to the people who had been destroyed by it. Not a single senior financial executive went to prison. The banks were made whole. The American people were not. And the Democratic Party called this responsible governance and told everyone who was angry about it that they were being unrealistic.
Out of that specific, documented, material failure grew two things simultaneously. On the right, the Tea Party and eventually Trumpism, movements that channeled the legitimate economic rage of people who had been abandoned into authoritarian ethnic nationalism because the liberals had provided no alternative vessel for that rage. And on the left, Occupy Wall Street, which was the first mass movement in decades to correctly identify concentrated wealth as the central political problem, and which was subjected to a coordinated federal crackdown involving the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security and local law enforcement, and which the Democratic Party establishment did absolutely nothing to defend, and which was then replaced in the national conversation by a series of culture war flashpoints that were significantly more useful to the donor class than a movement explicitly organized around taxing them.
Bernie Sanders ran in 2016 with a genuine, documented, cross-demographic, multiracial working class coalition built around exactly the structural critique that the moment demanded, and the institutional Democratic Party, with full knowledge of what it was doing and why, actively worked to prevent his nomination. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is in the Podesta e-mails. It is in Donna Brazile’s memoir. Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned in disgrace over it. It happened. It was deliberate. The party apparatus made a calculation that a candidate who threatened the donor class was more dangerous to their institutional interests than losing to Donald Trump. And the response from the establishment and its media allies was not to hold the party accountable for this calculation. It was to tell everyone who was furious about it to shut up, get in line, and wait for the next election.
Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, a man so transparently, cartoonishly, documentedly unfit for office that his victory should have been impossible, and the Democratic Party spent exactly zero time examining what structural conditions had made it possible and instead spent four years blaming Russia, third party voters, Bernie Bros, and everyone and everything except the thirty year strategic project of abandoning the working class in favor of the corporate donor class that had created the conditions for the loss.
In 2020, when the party had a second consecutive opportunity to nominate someone who might actually address the structural rot, they cleared the field for Biden in a matter of weeks, and the media apparatus that serves the party’s institutional interests amplified that consolidation with remarkable efficiency, and everyone who raised concerns was told to shut up and fall in line because winning was what mattered.
Biden was [. . .] a competent institutional caretaker who governed more progressively than many expected on some issues and who offered absolutely nothing transformative to the people whose lives had been systematically dismantled over the previous three decades, and whose administration’s most significant domestic achievement, the Inflation Reduction Act, was a fraction of what had been promised and was celebrated by the establishment as proof that the system worked while the working class continued to fall behind on every material metric that actually governs the quality of a human life.
Democrats then ran Kamala Harris in 2024. She ran a campaign so surgically, deliberately, almost ideologically allergic to economic populism, so committed to reassuring the donor class and the suburban professional voter that nothing too disruptive would happen, so studiously avoidant of any structural critique of the conditions producing working class rage, that it managed to bleed support across nearly every demographic the party needed while the party apparatus watched and dispatched consultants and held fundraisers. And when she lost, the immediate response from the establishment was to look for someone to blame who was not the establishment.
And now here is John Pavlovitz, with his slideshow, fucking pointing blame at leftists. At young people. At protest voters. At the people who looked at this fucking broken system with clear, open, historically-informed eyes and assessed accurately what it had produced for them and their families and their communities and their futures over the entire course of their lives and responded with the entirely rational, evidence-based, morally coherent conclusion that it was not working for them, had never seriously been designed to work for them, and showed no credible institutional signs of intending to change that.
That is not where the culpability lives. That is not where the blame goes. The blame goes to a class of people, a specific, identifiable, named, documented class of people with concentrated wealth and the institutional power that concentrated wealth purchases, who have captured both political parties to varying degrees and used that capture to ensure that the range of acceptable policy outcomes never seriously threatens their interests regardless of which party wins. The blame goes to a Democratic Party that consciously, deliberately, and profitably chose its donors over its constituents for thirty fucking years, suppressed every internal movement that threatened that arrangement, destroyed its own working class coalition through active institutional negligence rather than bad luck or foreign interference, and then had the staggering, almost magnificent audacity to turn to the people it abandoned and tell them that their failure to show up with sufficient enthusiasm was the “real reason” that democracy failed.
No.
The people who created the conditions for democratic failure were the ones who spent thirty years making democratic institutions deliver nothing of material value to the people who needed them most, and then expressed bewilderment when those people stopped believing in democratic institutions.
You cannot starve people of material hope and then be surprised when they stop showing up for the institutions that starved them. You cannot abandon the working class to deindustrialization and debt and precarity and incarceration and tell them it’s their own fault and then be surprised when they vote for the first person who performs rage on their behalf, however cynically and destructively. You cannot rig your own primary against the candidate who might have actually rebuilt the coalition and then blame the people who noticed that you rigged it.
Here is the part that is most important and most deliberately avoided: the intellectual and moral framework that John is deploying here, the framework that says any structural critique of the Democratic Party is dangerous, irresponsible, and functionally equivalent to supporting fascism, is not a framework for defeating fascism. It is a framework for ensuring that the only alternative to fascism is an institutional party permanently insulated from accountability, permanently captured by the same donor class, permanently incapable of offering the working class anything that might actually rebuild the coalition that defeats fascism, because doing so would threaten the people paying for the party. It is, in the most precise and non-hyperbolic sense, a mechanism of control. It keeps the Overton window pinned. It keeps the structural conversation from happening. It keeps the donor class comfortable regardless of which party wins. And it keeps producing the outcome we are currently living through, a slow rightward drift of the entire political spectrum, an increasingly desperate and diminishing Democratic Party that offers less and less to more and more people and then blames those same people for noticing and saying it out loud.
If you want to break the cycle, you have to be willing to look at what is producing it. That means looking at who funds the party. It means looking at what those funders receive in return. It means looking at the thirty year strategic project of abandoning the working class and examining what it produced. It means being willing to say out loud that a political party that shares a significant portion of its donor base with the party it claims to be the only alternative to is not capable of being the structural opposition to the interests those donors represent. It means being willing to have the conversation that John’s entire slideshow is designed to prevent.
Because if we keep shutting that conversation down every single time an election approaches, and there is always an election approaching, and we keep demanding that everyone silence their structural analysis and their historical memory and their material interests and their entirely legitimate anger at the people who created these conditions in order to support the controlled opposition that those conditions produced, then we will keep getting this. We will keep getting a Democratic Party that moves right to chase donors and the fascism that fills the vacuum on the left. We will keep getting Trumps. We will keep getting this conversation, every three days, forever, with John pointing at leftists and young people and protest voters while the donor class counts its money and funds both sides.
That is the cycle. That is what it looks like from the inside. That is what keeping the structural critique silent produces. Not safety or stability or a functioning democracy. Just a slower, more managed, more politely narrated version of the same collapse into fascism.
And I am fucking done being told to shut up about it because the midterms are coming.
The midterms are always fucking coming. That is the whole mechanism. That is the trap. And recognizing the trap is not nihilism. It is the prerequisite for getting out of it.
Until the Democratic Party can give us a genuinely compelling reason to vote for them beyond “at least we aren’t the fascists,” a bar so fucking low it is buried in the ground, they are going to keep having this problem.
Not because leftists are nihilists or because young people are naive or because protest voters are irresponsible. But because “we are marginally less catastrophic than the alternative” is not a compelling political vision. It is not a coalition, nor is it a movement. It is a hostage negotiation in which the hostage is democracy itself and the party holding it expects gratitude for not pulling the trigger quite as fast as the other guy.
Give the American people something to fucking vote for. Not just something to vote against. That is not a radical demand. That is the bare minimum threshold of a functioning political party in a functioning democracy, and the fact that meeting it is apparently beyond the institutional capacity of the Democratic Party in 2024 or 2026 is not the left’s fault. It is the thirty year bill coming due. Pay it or keep fucking losing. Those are the only options left on the table.
* All too often the word “radical” is erroneously equated with extremism of one kind or another. Yet that’s not what “radical” means. It means to go to the root, to recognize and address the underlying essence of a given reality, along with the deep-seated issues, questions, and/or problems associated with it. To be radical is to not get mired on the level of symptom, to not confuse symptoms with the problem that’s causing them. To be radical is to be clear and focused in recognizing and addressing the actual problem, the underlying root cause or causes of a given situation, issue or conflict.
Community activist Marshan Camese gave a fiery testimony before Louisiana lawmakers during a state Senate hearing on redistricting on Monday, May 12, 2026.
Seated before Louisiana lawmakers, Camese delivered the kind of testimony that doesn’t just enter the record – it enters the bloodstream of a community. His remarks cut through political choreography and forced the room to confront the lived consequences of policy, power, and the narratives that shape public life.
His testimony was not the polished language of a lobbyist or the cautious phrasing of a political insider. It was the voice of someone who has lived inside the systems he was describing — someone who understands how legislation lands on real bodies, real families, and real futures.
Camese called out the modern MAGA movement, the legacy of the Confederacy, and the political forces still working to strip people of power, dignity, and basic rights.
Speaking plainly and directly, he challenged lawmakers to reckon with the forces he sees eroding dignity and democratic participation. His words named the modern political currents – including the rise of MAGA extremism and the lingering legacy of the Confederacy – that continue to shape the state’s political landscape. In doing so, he refused to sanitize the truth for the comfort of those in power.
Camese’s testimony underscored a central theme: the struggle for political voice in a state where many residents feel their rights are increasingly under threat. He spoke to the ways political actors use fear, misinformation, and historical revisionism to maintain control, and he urged lawmakers to confront the real-world impact of these tactics.
His remarks resonated because they articulated what many Louisianans – and many Americans – feel but rarely hear acknowledged in official spaces: that democracy is not an abstract ideal but a daily practice, one that requires courage, clarity, and accountability.
Observers in the room and online described the speech as “fearless,” “blistering,” and “the truth spoken without apology.” The video quickly went viral, amplified by viewers who recognized the urgency of his message and the rarity of such candor in a legislative chamber.
Camese’s testimony also served as a reminder that public comment periods – often treated as procedural formalities – can become powerful civic interventions when people speak from conviction rather than calculation.
While Camese did not shy away from naming the political forces he believes are undermining democratic participation, his testimony was ultimately a call to action. He urged lawmakers to legislate with integrity, to protect the rights of marginalized communities, and to resist the temptation to govern through division.
His message was clear: the future of Louisiana depends on leaders willing to confront hard truths and reject the politics of fear.
In a state grappling with debates over voting rights, representation, and the role of history in public life, Camese’s testimony arrives at a critical time. It reflects a broader national struggle over who gets to shape the narrative of American democracy – and whose voices are dismissed or diminished.
By speaking plainly about the stakes, Camese reminded lawmakers and residents alike that democracy is strongest when people refuse to be silent.
– The Urban News May 18, 2026
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Following is the video (and a partial transcript) of Marshan Camese’s calling out of the machinery of power.
The state of Louisiana in 2025 deported multiple children, one of whom was born in New Orleans and had brain cancer. Donald Trump got the pro-life, Bible-thumping Republican Party to say, “Yes, we want more of that.” As a matter of fact, send Gregory Bovino down here to harass more people.
So I have no doubt in my mind that the map is going to pass. If y’all could give us less than zero seats, you would do it.
Y’all do this under the orders of somebody who said the Civil Rights Act was harmful to white people, that it caused reverse racism.
RFK said that Black children are over-medicated on anti-depressants and that they need to be re-parented on different farms, all of them.
Pete Hegseth constantly brings Doug Wilson to the Pentagon to give a prayer service. Doug Wilson is the same pastor who said that slave owners were on strong spiritual ground.
I don’t have any belief in the morality of anybody who followed Donald Trump. If you weren’t with this map, you wouldn’t be underneath this president. You wouldn’t be in your party. You would stand up. You would stand against it. You would speak out about it.
So as far as I’m concerned, if you’re here as one of these Trump Republicans, you already showed us who you are. You showed us what you want to do.
And I believe the country as a whole is rebuking your party. Y’all are in a death spiral.
That’s why y’all have to redistrict. That’s why y’all have to cheat. That’s why Trump had to go to Texas and say he’s entitled to five more seats.
It’s because y’all know what y’all are doing is abhorrent.
We’re letting our people die in Iran based on the false pretense that Tulsi Gabbard and Joe Kent say it isn’t real. Y’all are okay with all that. So I’m positive y’all are going to be okay with the maps.
But the beautiful thing is, the children that y’all have made and the people who are younger than y’all don’t support any of this racism that y’all want. The MAGA party is the last breath of the Confederacy, and I’ll be happy to see millennials and Gen Z bury y’all. There will be no more of your party. The midterms are going to come. Y’all are going to get wiped out.
Trump is going to get dragged out of the White House, and I’m going to love every second of it, because y’all loved every second of the suffering that he caused to everybody in this country and worldwide.
We’re starving Cuba. We bombed Nigeria. We’re holding Zimbabwe, Zambia hostage for their minerals. We don’t want to give them aid support. The pro-lifers who say all life is special, y'all are letting kids die of AIDS.
What part of your Bible says that? Point out the scripture. I think everybody would love to see it. And we would love to see y'all in the midterms.
– Marshan Camese May 12, 2026
In closing, the first few minutes of the video below shows the exchange between Marshan Camese and Republican Senator Blake Miguezafter Camese delivered his speech. It’s been described as an “epic takedown and last laugh” on Camese’s part.
I established The Wild Reed in 2006 as a sign of solidarity with all who are dedicated to living lives of integrity – though, in particular, with gay people seeking to be true to both the gift of their sexuality and their Catholic faith. The Wild Reed's original by-line read, “Thoughts and reflections from a progressive, gay, Catholic perspective.” As you can see, it reads differently now. This is because my journey has, in many ways, taken me beyond, or perhaps better still, deeper into the realities that the words “progressive,” “gay,” and “Catholic” seek to describe.
Even though reeds can symbolize frailty, they may also represent the strength found in flexibility. Popular wisdom says that the green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm. Tall green reeds are associated with water, fertility, abundance, wealth, and rebirth. The sound of a reed pipe is often considered the voice of a soul pining for God or a lost love.
On September 24, 2012,Michael BaylyofCatholics for Marriage Equality MNwas interviewed by Suzanne Linton of Our World Today about same-sex relationships and why Catholics can vote 'no' on the proposed Minnesota anti-marriage equality amendment.
"I believe your blog to be of utmost importance for all people regardless of their orientation. . . . Thank you for your blog and the care and dedication that you give in bringing the TRUTH to everyone."– William
"Michael, if there is ever a moment in your day or in your life when you feel low and despondent and wonder whether what you are doing is anything worthwhile, think of this: thanks to your writing on the internet, a young man miles away is now willing to embrace life completely and use his talents and passions unashamedly to celebrate God and his creation. Any success I face in the future and any lives I touch would have been made possible thanks to you and your honesty and wisdom."– AB
"Since I discovered your blog I have felt so much more encouraged and inspired knowing that I'm not the only gay guy in the Catholic Church trying to balance my Faith and my sexuality. Continue being a beacon of hope and a guide to the future within our Church!"– Phillip
"Your posts about Catholic issues are always informative and well researched, and I especially appreciate your photography and the personal posts about your own experience. I'm very glad I found your blog and that I've had the chance to get to know you."– Crystal
"Thank you for taking the time to create this fantastic blog. It is so inspiring!"– George
"I cannot claim to be an expert on Catholic blogs, but from what I've seen, The Wild Reed ranks among the very best."– Kevin
"Reading your blog leaves me with the consolation of knowing that the words Catholic, gay and progressive are not mutually exclusive.."– Patrick
"I grieve for the Roman institution’s betrayal of God’s invitation to change. I fear that somewhere in the midst of this denial is a great sin that rests on the shoulders of those who lead and those who passively follow. But knowing that there are voices, voices of the prophets out there gives me hope. Please keep up the good work."– Peter
"I ran across your blog the other day looking for something else. I stopped to look at it and then bookmarked it because you have written some excellent articles that I want to read. I find your writing to be insightful and interesting and I'm looking forward to reading more of it. Keep up the good work. We really, really need sane people with a voice these days."– Jane Gael
"Michael, your site is like water in the desert."– Jayden
