City of Houston officials plan to announce Monday whether a petition submitted by opponents of the city's new nondiscrimination ordinance contains enough valid signatures to force a vote on repealing the measure this November. Opponents claimed to have gathered and verified 31,000 names, but City Attorney David Feldman said Friday many of the more than 5,000 pages fall short of legal requirements set out in the city charter. The final tally likely will be closer than many expected to the minimum threshold of 17,269 signatures, Feldman said. "There's an issue there with respect to the validity of pages," Feldman said. "But right now I don't know what the final count is." Feldman provided no numbers, but said his staff had found many invalid pages, most notably because some of the circulators who collected stacks of signatures were not qualified Houston voters, as required by law. In such cases, all the signatures the circulator gathered would be void, Feldman said. Many names on valid pages also did not belong to registered Houston voters, Feldman said, and some signatures were gathered before June 3, when the ordinance was published and the petition drive could begin.From JMG reader Mike Craig of Out & Equal Houston:
When the Houston Area Pastors Council turned in 7 boxes of petitions to the City on July 3rd, they boasted of gathering more than 31,000 valid signatures. An independent group of concerned citizens has spent the last three weeks independently reviewing each page of that repeal petition in an effort to provide additional accountability to the referendum process. This was a grass-roots effort involving more than 100 volunteers who communicated via social media and participated in a crowd-sourced effort that uncovered fatal flaws with what was turned in. Having finished this exhaustive review, the HERO Petition Review Working Group concluded that the petitioners did not, in fact, turn in enough valid signatures in order to place this issue on the ballot.Houston voters rejected similar LGBT rights bills in 1985 and 2001, but local activists are confident that they will prevail should the issue be forced to a public vote for a third time.
The petition rules are really quite simple:
- Petitions must be properly notarized.
- Petitions must have been signed & notarized between June 3rd and July 3rd.
- Petition signers must be registered City of Houston voters.
- Petition circulators must be identifiable and registered City of Houston voters.
- Petition circulators must have signed the petition, not just the notary affirmation, sometime between June 3rd and July 3rd.
Based on these simple criteria, this independent review showed only 16,499 valid signatures were turned in. Additional scrutiny can only lower that number further. A full report detailing these findings has been provided to the City Secretary, City Attorney and Mayor. While it is our hope that the City’s own determination will come to a similar conclusion, we understand that it is ultimately the legal & statutory responsibility of the City Secretary and we will abide by that office’s findings. Should the city come to the same conclusion that our group did, we fully expect the anti-HERO organizers to sue -- and likely drag us to court as well. If the city does certify the petition effort, I believe that it will be by a razor thin margin -- and as I've said before, HERO supporters will work to make sure that this effort is defeated at the ballot box if and when it gets there.
A gay Chinese man said Thursday he was suing a psychological clinic for carrying out electric shocks intended to turn him straight, as well as the search engine giant Baidu for advertising the center. The Beijing LGBT Center, which campaigns for gay rights, said it was the first court case involving so-called conversion therapy in China. China declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder in 2001. The center's executive director, Xin Ying, said some professional hospitals in China, as well as smaller private clinics, still provide conversion therapy and that the group hopes the case at the Haidian District People's Court in Beijing will lead to a ban on the therapy. Yang Teng, 30, told The Associated Press that the therapy given to him included hypnosis and electric shock and he was left physically and mentally hurt. He said he voluntarily underwent the therapy in February following pressure from his parents to get married and have a child.Local activists demonstrated outside the court today carrying a banner that read: "Homosexuality is not a disease, we don't need to be cured." A judgment in the case is expected by the end of the year.
Homophones, as any English grammarian can tell you, are words that sound the same but have different meanings and often different spellings — such as be and bee, through and threw, which and witch, their and there. This concept is taught early on to foreign students learning English because it can be confusing to someone whose native language does not have that feature. But when the social-media specialist for a private Provo-based English language learning center wrote a blog explaining homophones, he was let go for creating the perception that the school promoted a gay agenda. Tim Torkildson says after he wrote the blog on the website of his employer, Nomen Global Language Center, his boss and Nomen owner Clarke Woodger, called him into his office and told him he was fired. As Torkildson tells it, Woodger said he could not trust him and that the blog about homophones was the last straw. "Now our school is going to be associated with homosexuality," Woodger complained, according to Torkildson, who posted the exchange on his Facebook page.The school has denied the teacher's claim of homophonia - but has also deleted his post from its website. Their clunky mission statement could use some work: "Nomen Global Language Centers substantially helps students from all cultures and walks of life to excel in each aspect of their English acquisition and to obtain their goals for the future. We achieve this goal by means of qualified and experienced faculty, dedicated staff, engaging and challenging curriculum, and professional and ethical student services." (Tipped by JMG reader Joseph)
