Mistress Eva Lordes Adults Only 18+

Shelia Byrd

AP ABERDEEN, Miss. (March 23) — A federal judge ruled today that a Mississippi school district violated a lesbian student’s rights by refusing to allow her to bring her girlfriend to the prom, but he said he would not force the school to hold the event.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued in U.S. District Court to force the Itawamba County school district to sponsor the April 2 prom and allow Constance McMillen to escort her girlfriend and wear a tuxedo.

School officials said in court they decided to call off the prom at Itawamba Agricultural High School because McMillen’s challenge to the rules had caused disruptions.

AP
A Mississippi school district canceled prom after Constance McMillen, 18, challenged a ban on same-sex couples. On Tuesday, a judge said he would not force the school to hold the event.
U.S. District Judge Glen H. Davidson denied the ACLU’s request for a preliminary injunction. He said he’ll still hold a trial, but he did not set a date, meaning any ruling would likely come too late to have the prom when it was originally scheduled.

Davidson did say in his order that the district had violated McMillen’s constitutional rights by denying her request to bring her girlfriend and wear a tuxedo.

“We consider this a victory,” said ACLU Mississippi legal director Kristy Bennett.

But Davidson said a private prom parents are now planning will serve the same purpose as the school prom. He wrote in his ruling that “requiring defendants to step back into a sponsorship role at this late date would only confuse and confound the community on the issue.”

Ben Griffith, the school district’s attorney, said his clients were pleased with the ruling.

“What we’re looking at now is the fact that the case is still on the docket for a trial on the merits,” Griffith said.

McMillen first approached school officials about bringing her girlfriend in December, and again in February. Same-sex prom dates had been banned in the past, but she had hoped school officials would grant her request.

“I thought maybe the policy had been in place for a different reason,” McMillen testified at a hearing on the ACLU lawsuit. “I wanted to let them know how it made me feel. I felt like I couldn’t go to the prom.”

She was told two girls couldn’t attend the prom together and she wouldn’t be allowed to wear a tuxedo, court documents show. The ACLU issued a demand letter earlier this month and the district responded by canceling the event.

District officials said they felt not hosting the prom was the best decision “after taking into consideration the education, safety and well being of our students.” Superintendent Teresa McNeece said it was “a no-win situation.”

The 715-student high school is located in Fulton, a town of about 4,000 in rural, north Mississippi. The entire county school district has 3,588 students.

McMillen, who lives with her grandmother and has a 3.8 grade point average, has kept her 16-year-old girlfriend out of the spotlight at the request of the girl’s parents.

Her case has become a cause celebre since the school district canceled the prom March 10.

She has appeared on the “The Early Show,” ‘’The Wanda Sykes Show” and “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” to talk about how she is fighting for tolerance. DeGeneres presented her with a $30,000 college scholarship from Tonic, a digital media company. A Facebook page set up by the ACLU for McMillen has over 400,000 fans.

The teen has said repeatedly that gay students should have the same rights as the their straight counterparts, and while she has been praised on the national scene, her words mean little to some in Fulton.

McMillen said she encountered “hostility” from students who blamed her for the prom’s cancellation.

Days after the district announced it would not host the prom, local townsfolk posted signs on the high school reading “What happened to the Bible Belt?” and “Why would we condone this?”

Lesbian teen sues to force school to hold prom

By SHELIA BYRD, Associated Press Writer Shelia Byrd, Associated Press Writer – 2 hrs 16 mins ago

JACKSON, Miss. – A lesbian student who wanted to take her girlfriend to her senior prom is asking a federal judge to force her Mississippi school district to reinstate the dance it canceled.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi on Thursday filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Oxford on behalf of 18-year-old Constance McMillen, who said she faced some unhappy classmates after the Itawamba County School District said it wouldn’t host the April 2 prom.

“Somebody said, ‘Thanks for ruining my senior year,’” McMillen said of her reluctant return Thursday to Itawamba Agricultural High School in Fulton.

The lawsuit seeks a court order for the school to hold the prom. It also asks that McMillen be allowed to escort her girlfriend, who is a fellow student, and wear a tuxedo, which the school said also violated policy.

The district’s decision Wednesday came after the ACLU demanded that officials change a policy banning same-sex prom dates because it said it violated students’ rights. The ACLU said the district violated McMillen’s free expression rights by not letting her wear a tux.

McMillen said she never expected the district to respond the way it did.

“A lot of people said that was going to happen, but I said, they had already spent too much money on the prom” to cancel it, she said.

McMillen said she didn’t want to go back to the high school in Fulton the morning after the decision, but her father told her she needed to face her classmates.

“My daddy told me that I needed to show them that I’m still proud of who I am,” McMillen told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. “The fact that this will help people later on, that’s what’s helping me to go on.”

The school board statement said it wouldn’t host the event “due to the distractions to the educational process caused by recent events” but didn’t mention McMillen. District officials didn’t return calls seeking comment Thursday.

At least one supporter has offered to help McMillen and her classmates hold an alternate prom.

New Orleans hotel owner Sean Cummings told The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson he was so disappointed with the school board’s decision he offered to transport the students in buses to the city and host a free prom at one of his properties.

“New Orleans, we’re a joyful culture and a creative culture here and, if the school doesn’t change its mind, we’d be delighted to offer them a prom in New Orleans,” he told the newspaper. “Concluding your high school experience should be a joyful one. One shouldn’t conclude that experience with all their friends on a negative note.”

Same-sex prom dates and cross-dressing are new issues for many high schools around the country, said Daryl Presgraves, a spokesman for GLSEN: Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, a Washington-based advocacy group.

“A lot of schools actually react rather than do the research and find out what the rights of these students are,” said Presgraves.

McMillen says she hopes her fight will make it easier for gay students at other schools facing discrimination.

“I want other kids to know that’s it not right for schools to do that,” she said on CBS’s “The Early Show.”

In 2002, a gay student sued his school district in Toronto to allow him to attend a prom with his boyfriend. A judge later forced the district to allow the couple to attend and stopped the district from canceling the prom.

U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo., said a bill he’s introduced in Congress would make it illegal to discriminate against gay and lesbian school students. He said at least 10 states have such laws, and his bill is modeled after those.

“This situation with the prom is a perfect example of why we need to protect students from discrimination. In this case it’s a prom. It other cases, it’s getting beaten up or killed,” Polis said.

The school district had said it hoped a privately sponsored prom could be held.

Southside Baptist Church Pastor Bobby Crenshaw said he’s seen the South portrayed as “backwards” on Web sites discussing the issue, “but a lot more people here have biblically based values.”

Itawamba County is a rural area of about 23,000 people in north Mississippi near the Alabama state line. It’s near Pontotoc County, Miss., where more than a decade ago school officials were sued in federal court over their practice of student-led intercom prayer and Bible classes.

By Steve Williams
On Friday, lawyers in the Perry v. Schwarzenegger Proposition 8 trial submitted their case summaries as per Judge Vaughn Walker’s request. Both sides are said to have included their most hard-hitting points, including a claim from the Proposition 8 defense that bisexuals in particular constitute a threat to marriage.

Firstly, for the plaintiffs seeking to overturn Proposition 8, California’s 2008 gay marriage ban, lawyers David Boies and Theodore Olson submitted a document in excess of 290 pages, aiming to prove that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional. From the American Foundation for Equal Rights:

“This 294-page filing is only a summary of the overwhelming evidence against Proposition 8,” said Chad Griffin, Board President of the American Foundation for Equal Rights. “The evidence proves beyond a doubt that Proposition 8, which separates Americans into unequal groups, violates the U.S. Constitution and causes incredible harm to individuals and our nation as a whole.”

The document outlines the following as the core of the plaintiff’s case:

Prop. 8 does irreparable harm to Americans
Marriage has shed discriminatory restrictions over time
Gay men and lesbians are entitled to the full protection of the 14th Amendment
There is no good reason for Prop. 8’s denial of fundamental civil rights

The summary also points out the unequal weight of testimony provided in the case. The plaintiffs in the Perry v. Schwarzenegger trial called on 16 witnesses (including Paul Katami & Jeff Zarrillo and Kris Perry & Sandy Stier, the couples who filed the original lawsuit) whereas the defendant-intervenors Protect Marriage were only able to present two witnesses after their other four dropped out ahead of the trail, claiming that they were likely to face intimidation for their stance against gay marriage.

According to the American Foundation for Equal Rights, the summary presented by the plaintiffs also points to the fact that, during several occasions during the trial, the two remaining defense witnesses - both of whom had their status as “experts” put in question - appeared to make the case for marriage equality in spite of their apparent stance against it:

In addition to outlining the evidence presented by Olson and Boies, the document outlines the devastating admissions made by the defendant-intervenors’ witnesses that further proved our case and undermined the Proponents’; those witnesses’ lack of credentials; and evidence on the utilization of messages of pedophilia, polygamy, incest and bestiality in support of Prop. 8.

You can access the full document by going here.

Like so much of the pro-Proposition 8 side’s material, tracking down a copy of their summary for public viewing is proving difficult (if you have come across the text, please let me know).

However, reports suggest that the pro-Prop. 8 side have not included much of their witness testimony in their summary, at least not for supporting their central argument, and have instead cited research documents that, they assert, prove that “extending marriage to same-sex couples would result in a profound change to the definition, structure, and public meaning of marriage.”

However, calling on the testimony of Professor Miller, their first witness, they advance that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people do not constitute a protected class worthy of judicial intervention, and that LGBTs have political allies and sufficient political power so as not to be classed as a vulnerable group.

Using their other witness testimony provided by David Blankenhorn, the pro-Prop. 8 side are said to have reinforced that marriage hinges on gender roles of “maleness and femaleness” and that procreation is a key element to marriage. Therein, they argue that child rearing is best served by the heteronormative family unit and that this fact means that marriage must, by necessity, exclude same-sex couples.

Perhaps one of their most startling maneuvers in the defense’s summary is where they are reported to have singled out bisexual people as one of the reasons to deny same-sex couples marriage rights:

The potential harms they cited included giving bisexuals a legal basis for pursuing group marriages and unmarried fathers an incentive to abandon their children.

While a copy of the summary text itself has not been forthcoming, text from the defendant-intervenors’ original trial brief also includes this argument:

[Allowing same-sex marriage would] increase the likelihood that bisexual orientation could become a legitimate grounding for a legal entitlement to group marriage.

They did not stress this point in the trial any more than the rest of their slippery slope polygamy arguments, but it is interesting that they have returned to it here.

Under California law, “Only the marriage of a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California” as per Proposition 8 and this, the defense say, guards against the much maligned “group marriage.”

The argument goes that, should same-sex marriage be legalized once again in California, there would be a potential legal basis for a bisexual person to seek recognition for a marriage to both a male and female spouse (one man and one woman) at the same time, leading to a multi-partner marriage.

As far as I can see it, this argument is flawed as California marriage laws clearly state that you can’t enter into marriage while still married to another adult. From the California Department of Public Health website:

“To marry in California, the two parties may not be already married to each other or other individuals.”

Amending civil marriage laws to include same-sex partners does not overturn this aspect of the family code.

However, the defense appear to be arguing that once you grant equal access to marriage for same-sex couples, the next logical and inevitable step is granting multi-partner marriage, and that bisexuals would be the gateway for this.

This relies on the assumption that a bisexual would want more than one spouse because of their attraction to both sexes, and seems to infer that bisexuals are less capable of monogamy than heterosexuals, which is actually broadly offensive and blurs the line between sexuality and the useful social convention of monogamy to an extreme.

It will be interesting to see if the pro-Proposition 8 side revisit this argument as part of their closing statement, which, although as yet unscheduled, is likely to be heard in the next few months.

Go to Website

By Steve Williams

Together with the New York Times, CBS has released the results of their latest poll in which they attempt to gauge support for repealing the military gay ban ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’ Interestingly, they found that more people support letting gays and lesbians serve in the military than support homosexuals. What? It seems that, at least in the minds of some respondents, words, and the emotions evoked by those words, really can make a difference. Here’s a brief summary of the CBS poll (click here for the full article):

In the poll, 59 percent say they now support allowing “homosexuals” to serve in the U.S. military, including 34 percent who say they strongly favor that. Ten percent say they somewhat oppose it and 19 percent say they strongly oppose it.

But the numbers differ when the question is changed to whether Americans support “gay men and lesbians” serving in the military. When the question is asked that way, 70 percent of Americans say they support gay men and lesbians serving in the military, including 19 percent who say they somewhat favor it. Seven percent somewhat oppose it, and 12 percent strongly oppose it…

(This poll was conducted among a random sample of 1,084 adults nationwide, interviewed by telephone February 5-10, 2010. Phone numbers were dialed from random digit dial samples of both standard land-line and cell phones. The error due to sampling for results based on the entire sample could be plus or minus three percentage points. The error for subgroups is higher.)

The poll also found a similar trend when asking whether “gays and lesbians” should serve openly in the military as opposed to asking whether “homosexuals” should serve openly in the military, with a difference of 58 percent to 44 percent showing support respectively. The article notes that, regardless of the term, support for gay and lesbian people in the military has risen since 1993 when the ban on openly gay service members was introduced, although support has waned when compared to data they gathered the past year.

The distinction between “gay and lesbian” and “homosexual” has also been highlighted in an ABC/Washington Post poll, in which there were several questions regarding gay rights, including a couple that also attempted to measure support for repealing the military anti-gay policy ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’

The results of the poll suggest a higher rate of support than the New York Times poll, with nearly three quarters of the people questioned saying that they favor the inclusion of “homosexual” service personnel.

However, the ABC poll also details that in past surveys they have sometimes used the terms “gay and lesbian” rather than “homosexual” to ask those same questions. Is this just semantics or could this lead to an important difference? ABC and the Washington Post thought it was worth making a note of, so this may at least indicate that the terms are no longer thought of as completely synonymous.

Here’s a bit of detail on the interesting demographics demonstrated in the ABC poll from the Washington Post’s summary:

The poll also reveals several sharp demographic divides. Men (65 percent) and seniors (69 percent) are far less likely than are women (84 percent) and young adults (81 percent under age 30) to say that gays should be allowed to serve if they have disclosed their sexual orientation. Knowing a gay person makes a big difference: Among those who say they have a gay friend or family member, 81 percent support allowing gay people to serve openly, compared with 66 percent who say they do not know someone who is gay.

The poll was conducted by telephone Feb. 4-8 among a random national sample of 1,004 adults, including users of both conventional and cellular phones. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points.

I notice that in the summary, the Washington Post have mostly used the words “gay” and “gays.” Other than the age and political leanings of the writer, which may play a role in word choice, is there a meaningful difference between the terms “homosexual” and “gay and lesbian” for the wider population? Well, from my perspective as a gay rights advocate, I think there is a subtle bit of psychology going on here, but to see it properly I think you might have to take it to contrasting extremes.

In the course of blogging about LGBT related news stories and political developments, I read through hundreds of articles from dozens of websites. Some of the sites I regularly go to are pro-gay and tend to only use the terms “gay and lesbian” or the familiar “LGBT,” and variations thereof.

Other sites that I visit are, however, decidedly less supportive, and although there is the often heard term “the gay agenda” banded about, more prevalent are terms like “the radical homosexual movement,” “the homosexual political movement,” “the pro-homosexual lobby,” “the homosexual extremists” and, my personal favorite, ” the radical homosexualists” [sic].

To my mind, the word “homosexual” has a very clinical cadence to it, and the emotions it seems to invoke appear to stem from the not too distant past when homosexuality was still thought of as an affliction and a mental disorder. There’s also an inherently androcentric core to the word “homosexual.” Of course, it can be used to refer to both gay and lesbian people, but I’d wager that the word “homosexual” is mostly used in reference to gay men, especially when utilized by social and religious conservatives. Moreover, it probably carries notions of sex and, by extension, anal sex or sodomy, which is usually one of the central pillars of disgust threaded throughout most prejudiced material.

Interestingly, Wayne Besen over at Truth Wins Out comments on the first CBS/New York Times poll with a slightly different take. He draws our attention to the recent touting of the term “Same-Sex Attraction” or “SSA” by groups such as the American Family Association and The National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). In his commentary on the issue, Besen writes:

We should not help our enemies by adopting their language, which is specifically designed and employed to portray us as freaks with a problem that needs to be fixed. SSA — much like STD — sounds like you have a disease that can be cured by running to the local doctor for a shot the pharmacy for a prescription or the shrink for a session.

Many people would say that we shouldn’t get caught up with labels, and to an extent I do agree with that. But look at how SSA has been packaged to sound like a mental disorder. The message behind that is clear: Homosexuals are diseased, mentally unstable and in need of treatment. Similarly, the word “homosexual” still seems to carry that same tone of affliction with it.

The real proof of this subtle distinction, I think, is to be found in the “ex-gay” movement. Wayne Besen himself has been fighting the lies of the “conversion therapy” advocates for years. They believe that you can cure homosexuality. That issue aside, notice that they don’t call themselves the “ex-homosexual movement.” It doesn’t sound quite as warm and fuzzy, does it?

Earlier in the week, I wrote about how Parents and Friends of Gays and Ex-Gays (PFOX) are pushing their ex-gay material into schools. This is an excerpt from their website, which is typical of their fliers and published material too (emphasis mine):

PFOX is not a therapeutic or counseling organization. PFOX supports families, advocates for the ex-gay community, and educates the public on sexual orientation. Each year thousands of men, women and teens with unwanted same-sex attractions make the personal decision to leave homosexuality. However, there are those who refuse to respect that decision. Consequently, formerly gay persons are reviled simply because they dare to exist! Without PFOX, ex-gays would have no voice in a hostile environment…

This text is so ripe with the distinction between “gay” and “homosexual” it’s almost as though there’s a science to how it was written. Notice that the bad old gays have SSA and it is inferred that they have chosen to give in to their “homosexuality,” while those that PFOX are trying to court are in fact referred to as “gay” so that they can, in turn, become “ex-gay?”

This is fascinating to me because the subtle distinction of terms seems to be pervasive and firmly ingrained, and, while I’m not quite convinced that the CBS poll indicates this phenomenon outright, it does at least open the door to this wider discussion.

So what do you think? Should we pay closer attention to the words we’re using, and perhaps even more importantly, the words that others are using about us? Do you think words really have the power to effect the way we feel about a certain group of people? Or do you think that labels aren’t as important as the CBS poll suggests, as it is, after all, just one poll? Have your say below.

By: David Gibson

While the world knew the late John Paul II as a cheerful, globe-trotting pontiff — a “happy warrior,” as one biographer put it — in private the Polish pope used to whip himself with a belt and spend entire nights prostrate on a bare floor in the quest for spiritual growth, according to a new book based on accounts from those closest to John Paul.

Msgr. Slawomir Oder, who is leading the church investigation that will decide whether John Paul should be declared a saint, told a Rome news conference on Tuesday that the pope, who died in 2005, used self-mortification “both to affirm the primacy of God and as an instrument for perfecting himself.”

A man a great physical vigor, John Paul, born Karol Wojtyla, often used a belt to flagellate himself, Oder said, and did so throughout his life as a bishop in Poland as well.

“As some members of his close entourage in Poland and in the Vatican were able to hear with their own ears, John Paul flagellated himself,” the priest writes in a book that draws on the sworn testimony of the 114 people who were close to John Paul and who testified before the tribunal investigating his cause for sainthood. “In his armoire, amid all the vestments and hanging on a hanger, was a belt which he used as a whip and which he always brought to Castel Gandolfo,” the papal retreat where John Paul spent the summer.

While self-mortification evokes images of an unhealthy and medieval spirituality — or, more recently, the masochistic albino monk portrayed in “The Da Vinci Code” — the practice, or at least the principle, has never disappeared. Pope Paul VI, who died in 1978, and Mother Teresa, were among the more prominent Catholics known to have used what is a called a cilice, a band usually worn around the thigh with prongs pointing inward. A cilice is the modern version of the hair shirt, though it is not quite as gruesome as it sounds. And those who flagellate themselves usually do with a small rope or cord using light lashes that are mostly symbolic.

“In reality, they cause a fairly low level of discomfort comparable to fasting,” Father Mike Barrett, an Opus Dei priest, said back when “The Da Vinci Code” film was making waves. “There is no blood, no injury, nothing to harm a person’s health, nothing traumatic.”

In other words, no harm, no foul. But that doesn’t mean practices beyond fasting aren’t frowned upon in contemporary Catholicism — they are — or that the reports of John Paul’s habits of self-mortification aren’t going to make waves. They are, in part because of ongoing debates over the meaning of redemptive suffering. As far back as 1984 John Paul wrote in an apostolic letter, Salvifici Doloris, (On the Christian meaning of human suffering), “Suffering, more than anything else, makes present in the history of humanity the powers of the Redemption.”

Another aspect to the newsworthiness of the latest reports stems from the fact that the late pope clearly took self-mortification so seriously.

In Oder’s book, “Why He’s a Saint: The Real John Paul II According to the Postulator of His Beatification Cause,” he writes that after spending a night lying on a bare floor with arms outstretched, Karol Wojtyla would mess up the covers of his bed so his staff wouldn’t know what he’d been doing. And as pope, John Paul — who had a serious sweet tooth — would fast rigorously during Lent and lose several pounds. He would also fast before ordaining priests or bishops.

Many Christians who practice self-mortification do in imitation of, or solidarity with, Christ’s suffering on the cross, and in the book, Oder says John Paul believed that he was doing what St. Paul professed to do in the Letter to the Colossians: “In my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ.”

“It’s an instrument of Christian perfection,” Oder said in response to questions about how such a practice could be reconciled with Catholic teaching that holds that the human body is a gift from God

John Paul’s rough penance is not exactly shocking to those who knew him or knew of his affinity for traditional piety and practices, and the discipline he brought to everything in his life. Indeed, the reports are likely to boost a canonization that is already a safe bet. (There are reports that he will soon be beatified, the final stage before official sainthood.)

Still, word of John Paul’s penitential practices was so eye-opening that it overwhelmed other newsworthy elements in the book, such as the revelations that in the ambulance on the way to the hospital he forgave the gunman who shot and nearly killed him in May 1981, and that he at first thought the assassin was sent by the Red Brigades, the left-wing radicals who terrorized Italy in the late 1970s and 1980s. When the trail of clues from the shooter, a Turk named Mehmet Ali Agca, appeared to lead to agents from the Soviet bloc, John Paul reportedly confronted then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

The other news from the book is the extent to which John Paul weighed resigning should he become incapacitated. No pope in modern times has ever resigned or retired. There have long been rumors that John Paul, who eventually succumbed to complications from a debilitating Parkinson’s-like disease, had left a letter of resignation in the event of his incapacitation. As Catholic News Service reports, Oder’s book contains letters that John Paul prepared in 1989 and in 1994, offering the College of Cardinals his resignation in case of an incurable disease or other condition.

In the 1989 letter the pope wrote that should he be unable to carry out his duties, “I renounce my sacred and canonical office, both as bishop of Rome as well as head of the holy Catholic Church.” In the 1994 letter the pope said he had spent years wondering whether a pope should resign at age 75, as other bishops must. But he decided against retirement, and there is still a vigorous debate among canon lawyers as to whether a pope can in fact resign and whether the College of Cardinals would have been able to accept the pope’s resignation.

In the end, all of the revelations about flagellation and such may be more of an unfortunate distraction from the testimony of the pope’s final years, when he struggled against a growing paralysis but continued to write and travel and appear in public and show the zest for life he always had — a kind of self-mortification that was also a powerful public witness for those who were similarly aged or infirm.

The crisp, chilly air and the turning leaves. Nature is going into sweet slumber. You can feel the change in the air. Pumpkins, Mums and candy corn are plentiful. In the cycle of life, fall has come. Time of Samhain or Halloween approaches. The veil between life and death is becoming thinner. Time to think of our dearly departed. Time to reflect on death.

Not long ago this time of year was when fattened farm animals were killed for food. Their meat would get you through winter if you were lucky. We are now spoiled by grocery stores which have plenty of food year round. We have forgotten a time when all our food came from our own land and farm. A drought could cause be tragic in those days. Literally a matter of life or death. Life was harder and scarier then.

Many TV channels are having horror movies on. We love to be scared for those two hours but able to turn the TV off. To be able to lock our doors and be safe. To sleep in heated rooms with comfy beds. I think its in our primal DNA to always be prepared, to be fearful of the unknown. A fear of not being able to provide for ourselves and our family. A primal fear of death and suffering. As we feel that first chill of Fall, I think many feel that primal urge to survive a bit more deeper. Maybe because we are keenly aware of the real horrors in the world.

Mistress Eva Lordes