The Minnesota Senate today rejected Goodwin's snarky amendment to ban divorce. We appreciate the effort.
(Source)
reposted from Joe
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Via JMG: Minneapolis Vs. San Francisco
Last night's Daily Show included the below segment comparing the gay scene in San Francisco to that of Minneapolis, which recently topped a survey as the country's "gayest city." The clip includes a visit to San Francisco's legendary kink emporium, Mr. S. Leather.
Urgent Appeal via All Out:
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| Dear friend,
Amazing! In 24 hours more than 200,000 people from every corner of the world have joined our campaign calling on President Museveni to veto the Ugandan bill that could sentence lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender citizens to death. But there are just 24 hours left before it could pass the Ugandan parliament. We need to make an unmistakable impact on President Museveni when we deliver the petitions with our Ugandan allies tomorrow. Can you help out by sending this petition to your friends and colleagues? www.allout.org/uganda You can also share it on Facebook, using this link: http://on.fb.me/iNlV78 Thanks! Andre, Erika, Guillaume, Jeremy, Joseph, Prerna, Nita, Oli, Tile, Wesley and the rest of the team at All Out P.S. In case you missed it, here is the original email: *** Dear friend We have 72 hours to act: can you sign this petition to President Museveni demanding that he publicly vow to veto this hateful bill? As soon as you sign, please pass it on to everyone you know. Our best chance at stopping the bill is each other—if thousands of us spread the word we can make clear that the world is watching and we will not allow this to stand. While some conservative members of parliament have staked their political careers on this bill (3), Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni has shown himself to be sensitive to international pressure. Last year, a massive response from people around the world pushed him to stop the bill in its tracks. A broad coalition of human rights activists, including Bishop Christopher Senyonjo (4), an internationally respected religious leader and outspoken supporter of LGBT equality in Uganda, will deliver our petitions directly to the President. Will you please take a moment to speak up for what's right: This terrible bill is part of a pattern from conservatives in Uganda to marginalize pro-democracy forces - in recent weeks, opposition activists have been beaten, teargassed, jailed and even killed (5). And In the last year LGBT Ugandans have been repeatedly targeted, attacked, and murdered—like beloved activist David Kato (6), murdered just months after a local tabloid published his picture under the headline, “Uganda’s Top Homos: Hang Them.”(7). Others have been driven out of the country as refugees, and sometimes even threatened abroad by the government (8). Enough is enough. Please sign this petition to Ugandan president Museveni, demanding that he veto the bill should it be passed in Parliament--and then pass it on to all of your friends. This is so important. Thank you. All best and All Out, Andre, Erika, Guillaume, Jeremy, Joseph, Prerna, Nita, Oli, Tile, Wesley and the rest of the team at All Out PS - The bill won’t just target LGBT Ugandans - Nurses and doctors could be jailed for failing to “turn in” their patients. And neighbors would be obliged to “report gay activity.” (9) Please sign and share the petition now: http://www.allout.org/uganda SOURCES: 1a. Uganda Antigay Bill Going Forward - 6 May 2011 1b. IGLHRC Shocked at Possible Passage of Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill - 6 May 2011 2. Anti-gay activists call for passing of Bill against homosexuality - 7 April 2011 3. Americans’ Role Seen in Uganda Anti-Gay Push http://www.nytimes.com/2010/ 4a. “God Created You”: Bishop Supports Gay Ugandans, Defies Death Threats http://www.religiondispatches. 4b. Bishop Christopher Senyonjo's St. Paul Foundation for International Reconciliation 5. Uganda protests 'only the beginning,' leader says (AP) - 7 May 2011 6a. David Kato, Uganda Gay Activist, Brutally Slain 6b. EU tells Uganda to protect gays 7. Outcry as Ugandan paper names 'top homosexuals' 8. Fears for safety of Ugandan lesbian due to be deported 9. Anti-Homosexuality Bill - Original Text All Out is bringing people together in every corner of the planet and of every identity - lesbian, gay, straight, transgender and all that’s between and beyond - to build a world in which everyone can live freely and be embraced for who they are. | |
| Our mailing address is: Purpose Foundation 224 Centre St, 6th Fl New York, NY 10013Copyright (C) 2011 Purpose Foundation. All rights reserved. |
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Via JMG: Anti-Gay Groups To Ramp Up Spending
The Colorado Independent reports that anti-gay groups are planning to dramatically step up their spending and activities through the 2012 elections. And no one is saying where all the money is coming from. The plan has already earned the endorsement of major GOP officials around the country.Anti-gay rights groups around the country will see a cash infusion over the next two years through a plan called “Ignite an Enduring Cultural Transformation.” And the groups are remaining mum about who is responsible. The campaign, which largely targets states where Republicans won control of legislatures or governorships, has garnered the support of Republican political superstars such as former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.), Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Jon Kyl (Ariz.), and Rep. Trent Franks (Ariz.). The groups intend to pass anti-gay marriage amendments, curtail abortion rights and, in at least one case, ban “transgender bathrooms.”Read the full story, which breaks down the spending plans of numerous anti-gay groups.
Family policy councils — a creation of Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family in the 1980s — have launched the Ignite plan in 15 states. Each family policy council has a three-prong plan to achieve their legislative goals over the next two years: lobbying for legislation, mobilizing pastors and social conservatives and supporting candidates that have backed their initiatives. Each group has used a stock brochure containing nearly identical wording to explain their plan and to solicit funds. In many cases, an Ignite plan was launched with an anonymous matching-grant donor.
Via JMG: NEW JERSEY: Judge Temporarily Halts Deportation Of Gay Man
A New Jersey immigration judge today temporarily halted the deportation of Henry Velandia, who is legally married to a U.S. citizen. This follows yesterday's move by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who vacated the decision to deport another gay man in the same situation.
Henry Velandia, who faces deportation to Venezuela, is petitioning to be allowed to remain in the U.S. as the spouse of U.S. citizen Josh Vandiver. Judge Alberto Riefkohl granted an adjournment of the case Friday in a Newark immigration court. At issue is who can be considered a spouse under federal law. Velandia is a 27-year-old professional salsa dancer and Vandiver is a 29-year-old graduate student at Princeton University. They were married last year in Connecticut, where same-sex marriage is legal.GetEQUAL had staged a protest against the deportation outside the Newark courtroom.
Friday, May 6, 2011
Via JMG: Brazil Approves Civil Unions
The Associated Press reports:
Brazil's Supreme Court ruled Thursday night that civil unions between same-sex couples must be allowed in this nation with more Roman Catholics than any other. In a 10-0 vote, with one abstention, the justices said gay couples deserve the same legal rights as heterosexual pairs when it comes to alimony, retirement benefits of a partner who dies, and inheritances, among other issues. The ruling, however, stopped short of legalizing gay marriage. In Latin America, that is legal only in neighboring Argentina and in Mexico City.The National Conference of Brazilian Bishops argued against the bill before the court.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Via JMG: Heather Knows Punctuation
reposted from Joe
Via JMG: Queerty Relaunches "Without Snark"
Several weeks after announcing its own demise, Queerty has relaunched this morning with the below promise. While we are committed to maintaining the best of Queerty, we also recognize that you have demanded change. In recent months the Queerty patented wit devolved into predictable snark, eviscerating everyone and everything in its path. Some of the comments simply piled on. We will maintain the independent voice at all cost, going after with a vengeance the powerful, the hypocritical and the just plain foolish. But now we’ll also strive for a better sense of journalistic balance and fairness. In other words we’re going to keep afflicting the comfortable; only now we’ll take care to comfort the afflicted as well.More on the relaunch from departing owner David Hauslaib.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
2ª Marcha Nacional contra a Homofobia - 2º Grito Nacional pela Cidadania LGBT e Contra a Homofobia
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© ABGLT - Associação Brasileira de Gays, Lésbicas e Transgêneros - 2006 ©
Via JMG: "Untraditional" Households On Rise
These demographic nuggets appear in a Miami Herald story about just-released census data:
Preliminary census numbers show that unmarried partners made up 6.5 million, or nearly 6 percent of U.S. households. Those figures include roughly 581,300, or a half-percent of households, composed of same-sex unmarried couples. Measured by shares, the District of Columbia ranked highest for same-sex unmarried households at 2 percent. [snip] The decreases in traditional families were seen in 42 states plus the District of Columbia, while the remaining eight - Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Colorado, Texas, North Carolina and Georgia - saw increases. Those eight states generally have a higher number of either immigrants or Mormon residents. In contrast, non-family households made up of single people such as seniors living alone, or opposite-sex or same-sex partners without children, jumped 13 percent to roughly 38 million. Married couples with no kids, which include younger couples and older empty-nesters, rose 9 percent to more than 32 million.Married opposite-sex couples with children now make up fewer than 20% of households, an all-time low. Cue the cries of "the end of American culture."
Via JMG: 61 Years And They Still Can't Marry
Via press release from Freedom To Marry:
reposted from Joe
“Richard and John are the quintessential New York couple. They met at Juilliard and have spent most of their lives together here,” said Evan Wolfson, Founder and President of Freedom to Marry. “They are still obviously so deeply in love after 61 years and yet after all those years of commitment, being there for one another through the ups and downs of life, they are still being denied the one thing they want most – the freedom to marry in New York. It is time to change that. After 61 years together, haven't they waited long enough?”
New! Share this on Facebook: Share15
reposted from Joe
Via AmericaBlogGay: Known "hate group" contacting Burger King, Boost Mobile, Subway and Taco Bell - interesting to see if those companies do the bidding of a hate group
A project of a known "hate group," the American Family Association, is asking Burger King, Boost Mobile, Subway and Taco Bell to stop advertising on GLEE because the show is just too positive about its portrayal of gay kids. No need to link to the AFA's alert - these companies know the hate group is targeting them.
At some point, you have to tell hostage takers - especially ones who are avowed bigots (and anti-semites too) on the wrong side of history - especially ones that are running officially-designated hate groups - to take a hike. Ford did that to this same hate group a number of years ago (when Joe and I led a successful campaign beating the AFA at their own game). Ford simply told AFA to take a hike. Burger King, Boost Mobile, Subway and Taco Bell should do the same.
PS Those companies need to read the background on AFA before deciding. They're not just dealing with "Christian conservatives." They're dealing with extremists whose homophobic and anti-Semitic words would shock Americans of every stripe. These are not the kind of people you want your brand associated with.
Via AmericaBlog.gay: Never Again: Yom HaShoah and the Rosa Winkle
Never Again: Yom HaShoah and the Rosa Winkle
The internationally recognized date comes from the Hebrew calendar and corresponds to the 27th day of Nisan on that calendar. It marks the anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. In Hebrew, Holocaust Remembrance Day is called Yom Hashoah. When the actual date of Yom Hashoah falls on a Friday, the state of Israel observes Yom Hashoah on the preceding Thursday. When it falls on a Sunday, Yom Hashoah is observed on the following Monday.Of course, along with Jews, homosexuals were also considered the enemy of fascist Nazi Germany and were made to wear the "Rosa Winkle" or "Pink Triangle" in German.
The pink triangle (German: Rosa Winkel) was one of the Nazi concentration camp badges, used to identify male prisoners who were sent there because of their homosexuality.[1] Every prisoner had to wear a downward-pointing triangle on his or her jacket, the colour of which was to categorise him or her by "kind". Other colors identified Jews (two triangles superimposed as a yellow star), political prisoners, Jehovah's Witnesses, "anti-social" prisoners, and others the Nazis deemed undesirable. Pink and yellow triangles could be combined if a prisoner was deemed to be gay and Jewish (see German concentration camp chart of prisoner markings image).May we never cease to honor our victims and vow NEVER AGAIN and to NEVER FORGET.
Originally intended as a badge of shame, the pink triangle (often inverted from its Nazi usage) has been reclaimed as an international symbol of gay pride and the gay rights movement, and is second in popularity only to the rainbow flag.[2]
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Via 365Gay: Corvino: What the Bible doesn’t say
04.22.2011 9:00am EDT
I confronted this problem recently after a talk I gave in rural Pennsylvania, when fielding comments from two audience members from opposite sides of the debate.
The first cited Romans 1, where St. Paul claims that because people had “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles,” God gave them over to “degrading passions,” so that the women exchanged “natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error” (Romans 1:26-27).
I personally don’t accept the authority of scripture, as I explained in my talk. This is the same Paul who several times tells slaves that they must obey their masters, even harsh masters (see Ephesians 6:5, Colossians 3:22, 1 Timothy 6:1, Titus 2:9-10, and 1 Peter 2:18). He gets some stuff clearly wrong.
But I also pointed out that the audience member was reading quite a bit into the text.
Paul is addressing a specific group of people—first-century Romans—about a specific group of people: Gentiles who engaged in idolatry. He states that the latter’s same-sex passion is a sign and consequence of their rejecting God in favor of images of “man or birds or animals or reptiles.” To read his discussion more broadly as a general claim about all homosexual acts is to supply information that isn’t there.
It’s also to attribute a blatantly false claim to Paul, since most homosexuality doesn’t stem from idol worship, and most idol worship doesn’t lead to homosexuality.
After I finished making these points, a second audience member chimed in:
“And besides, Jesus never said a single word about homosexuality,” he said. “That silence speaks volumes.”
No, it doesn’t.
Gently I responded, “We need to be careful about reading things into silence. Jesus doesn’t say anything about Ponzi schemes either. But Bernie Madoff is still an asshole.”
“Sure,” he replied, “but that’s not something that existed at the time. Same-sex relationships did exist, and the fact that Jesus chose not to mention them is significant.”
I really don’t think so.
Perhaps Jesus chose not to mention them because he thought their wrongness was obvious. Perhaps he had bigger fish to fry (so to speak).
Or perhaps he did mention homosexuality, but his comments got lost among the scores of competing gospels that never made it into the Biblical canon. We just don’t know.
What we do know—or should—is that reading messages into the Bible is a tendentious and potentially dangerous game.
Sure, the first audience member was doing that for anti-gay purposes, and the second one was doing it for pro-gay purposes. But they were both doing it: reading their own biases into the text, and then using the text as validation for those biases.
And by the way, slavery certainly existed in Jesus’ time, yet Jesus failed to condemn slavery (in the texts that we have). Does his relative silence there speak volumes, too?
I don’t like picking on my allies. I’m sure some readers will think, “If such beliefs make liberal Christians feel better, why not let them slide?”
Because the gay-rights battle isn’t freestanding, that’s why. It’s tied into other debates about freedom, religion, rationality, the role of government, the justification of moral norms, and so on. It’s not only our conclusions that matter, but also how we arrive at them.
The very same license that allows one person to assert that Jesus’ silence on homosexuality “speaks volumes” allows another to assert that Paul’s commentary on certain pagans demonstrates the wrongness of all homosexual acts. It lets people read something into the text that isn’t there, and then to attribute that supplied message to God Himself.
The danger in this process is that it lets people think that they have infallible backing for their fallible prejudices.
We know what this mistake looks like when our opponents do it. We shouldn’t validate the mistake by committing it ourselves.
John Corvino, Ph.D. is a writer, speaker, and philosophy professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. Read more or watch clips from his talks at www.johncorvino.com.
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