04.04.07
Posted in Advocate Articles, Gay Rights at 1:29 pm by pikapp44
On Tuesday, NCAA president Myles Brand announced he was working to address same-sex discrimination against LGBT coaches and players.
“What the NCAA can do is make sure all people are treated respectfully whatever their sexual orientation,” Brand said.
The announcement comes in the wake of last month’s resignation Penn State women’s basketball coach Rene Portland, who quit after a 27-year tenure that included numerous accusations that she discriminated against lesbian players.
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04.02.07
Posted in Advocate Articles, Gay Rights at 4:57 pm by pikapp44
Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D) has reversed an order imposed by his Republican predecessor that saw the marriages of 26 out-of-state same-sex couples set aside.
After same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts then-Gov. Mitt Romney invoked a 1913 law that said marriage licenses could not be issued to couples whose weddings would be illegal in the states where they lived.
Four counties refused to abide by the old law, enacted at a time when interracial marriage was illegal in most of the country and not used for decades. Twenty-six gay couples were married in those jurisdictions before Romney ordered the attorney general to prosecute the local clerks.
Romney then ordered the marriages not to be registered in the state’s vital records.
Last year the Massachusetts Supreme Court upheld the law in a case involving same-sex couples from neighboring states but questioned whether couples from Rhode Island and New York were excepted because those states do not have specific legislation banning gay marriage.
It sent the question back to a lower court.
Before the court heard arguments New York’s highest court ruled marriage was legal only for opposite-sex couples. The lower court later ruled that gay and lesbian couples from Rhode Island could marry in Massachusetts.
Gov. Patrick has ordered the Department of Public Health to bind and index the 26 marriages.
Kyle Sullivan, a spokesperson for Patrick said the governor believed Romney’s action to be without legal justification.
But it does not mean same-sex couples from across the country can immediately go to Massachusetts and obtain marriage licenses.
“The 1913 law remains in effect,” Sullivan told 365Gay.com. It would take passage of a repeal of the old law by the legislature for out of state gay marriages to be legal, with the exception of same-sex couples from Rhode Island.
Meanwhile, a proposed amendment that would end same-sex marriage in Massachusetts is headed for a vote in a joint session of the legislature later this year.
To amend the state constitution a joint session of the House and Senate must approve a proposed amendment in two consecutive sessions of the Legislature then put the issue to voters. Only 50 votes in the joint session are needed for a proposed amendment to advance.
The measure was advanced in a stormy joint session in January.
Gov. Patrick opposes the amendment.
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