10.06.08
Posted in Advocate Articles, Gay Rights at 4:04 pm by pikapp44
A Church of England priest is under fire after calling for gays to be forcibly tattooed with a sodomy warning.
The Rev. Peter Mullen, who is chaplain to the London Stock Exchange, made that remark and other incendiary homophobic comments on his internet blog.
Mullen said the forced tattoos would be similar to warning placed on packages of cigarettes.
“Let us make it obligatory for homosexuals to have their backsides tattooed with the slogan ‘Sodomy can seriously damage your health,’ their chins with ‘Fellatio kills.’In another posting, the 66-year old Mullen calls for gay pride parades - which he called “obscene” - to be outlawed.
In yet another, he blasted another Church of England priest, the Rev. Martin Dudley, for blessing the civil partnership of two fellow clerics.“The Bishop of London is in a high huff, Because Dr Dudley has married a puff; And not just one puff - he’s married another: Two priests, two puffs and either to other.”
Bishop of London the Rt Rev Richard Chartres has criticized Dudley for conducting the ceremony, but chastised Mullen for the blog postings.
“While clergy are entitled to their own personal views, we recognize that the content of this text is highly offensive and is in no way reflective of the views of the Diocese of London,” Chartres said in a statement to The Evening Standard newspaper.
The paper also reported that Mullen is under investigation and may face a disciplinary inquiry over his comments.
Mullen dismisses the criticism, calling his postings “satire.”
“I wrote some satirical things on my blog and anybody with an ounce of sense of humor or any understanding of the tradition of English satire would immediately assume that they’re light-hearted jokes,” he told the paper. “I certainly have nothing against homosexuals. Many of my dear friends have been and are of that persuasion. What I have got against them is the militant preaching of homosexuality.”
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10.03.08
Posted in Advocate Articles, Gay Rights at 7:50 pm by pikapp44
Senator Biden supports providing benefits for same-sex couples.
In an Obama-Biden administration, there will be absolutely no distinction from a constitutional standpoint or a legal standpoint between a same-sex and a heterosexual couple.
Biden then moved beyond benefits to detail the rights he and Sen. Barack Obama believe gay couples should have. “The fact of the matter is that under the Constitution we should be granted — same-sex couples should be able to have visitation rights in hospitals, joint ownership of property, life insurance policies, etc. That’s only fair,” he said. “It’s what the Constitution calls for. And so we do support it. We do support making sure that committed couples in a same-sex marriage are guaranteed the same constitutional benefits as it relates to their property rights, their rights of visitation, their rights to insurance, their rights of ownership as heterosexual couples do.”
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10.02.08
Posted in Advocate Articles, Gay Rights at 1:49 pm by pikapp44
Four organizations are demanding that the Museum of Broadcast Communications retract its decision to induct Focus on the Family founder James Dobson into its hall of fame.
The groups are urging supporters to contact the Chicago-based museum to share their disapproval, and to participate in a protest against the induction.
Truth Wins Out, the Gay Liberation Network, Equality Illinois, and Soulforce issued a letter to museum organizers asking to leave Dobson out of the annual ceremony.
“It is simply unconscionable that the museum is giving its imprimatur to a demagogue who has profited from divisive and discriminatory rhetoric. If the museum wants to regain its respect and credibility, it will choose to dump Dobson,” Truth Wins Out executive director Wayne Besen said in a statement.
Aside from establishing Focus on the Family, Dobson’s work also includes founding Love Won Out, a prominent organization that claims to cure gays and lesbians of their homosexuality. At least seven scientists and psychologists have accused him of cherry-picking research results to back his teachings, according to the statement.
Dobson established Focus on the Family in the 1970s and launched a radio show after a television appearance in 1978. The internationally syndicated show has been on the radio ever since, airing on 4,000 stations around the world.
Should the museum choose to go ahead with Dobson’s induction, the ceremony will take place November 8 at the Renaissance Chicago Hotel.
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10.01.08
Posted in Advocate Articles, Gay Rights at 12:47 pm by pikapp44
A woman was granted joint custody of two children she and her former lesbian partner adopted, a Montana judge ruled Monday.
“To discriminate further because of her sexual preference in this day and age is no different than telling a person to go to the back of the bus because of her skin color,” District Judge Ed McLean wrote.
Kulstad and Maniaci lived together for 10 years, before breaking up in 2006. In that time, they adopted the children; the boy in 2004, the girl in 2006.
Maniaci, who is now married to a man, says she and her husband should raise the children as they see fit because Kulstad was neither an adoptive parent nor a biological relative. She was represented by an attorney from the conservative Alliance Defense Fund.
Montana law does not address adoption by same-sex couples, but allows step-parents (legal or assumed) to adopt children.
“By acknowledging Kulstad as a parent, the court today recognized that it would be both cruel and against established Montana law for her children to be denied the parental love and support Kulstad has shown them since they entered her home,” Kulstad’s attorney Susan Ridgeway said in a press release.
Sixty three percent of Montana voters approved a ban on same-sex marriage in 2004.
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09.30.08
Posted in Advocate Articles, Gay Rights at 3:03 pm by pikapp44
Richard Grenell was appointed spokesperson for the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations by President Bush more than seven years ago and became the longest-serving public servant to hold that post.
But when it came to having his partner of six years listed alongside the spouses of other U.N. diplomats, his dedication to the job didn’t carry much weight with the State Department.
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09.29.08
Posted in Advocate Articles, Gay Rights at 2:34 pm by pikapp44
A proposal by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to expand federal protections for health care workers’ religious beliefs could threaten the care that patients receive, several organizations are arguing.
LGBT people are at particular risk if the proposed “provider conscience” regulation goes into effect, the groups assert, because the rule would allow workers, on the basis of their faith convictions, to refuse care to patients.
“Existing law already protects workers against religious discrimination,” Lambda Legal senior counsel Jennifer C. Pizer said in a statement. “The law requires ‘reasonable accommodation’ of religious beliefs — and that’s a fair approach because religious freedom matters a lot. But the changes that HHS proposes are so broad, vague, and confusing that they risk inviting health workers with antigay beliefs to refuse treatment and otherwise to discriminate against very vulnerable patients.”
Rebecca Fox, director of the National Coalition for LGBT Health, says the proposed regulations will affect more than just gay people. “HHS’s proposed regulations will have a negative impact on health care for the majority of Americans,” Fox said in a statement.
“In a country where so many people struggle to access quality health care, HHS is creating another barrier. These regulations would be particularly harmful for LGBT Americans, many of whom already struggle to find and afford respectful, good-quality medical care.”
In August, HHS secretary Mike Leavitt unveiled the proposed regulation, saying in a statement that the new rule would allow health care professionals to “practice according to their conscience.”
He continued, “Doctors and other health care providers should not be forced to choose between good professional standing and violating their conscience. Freedom of expression and action should not be surrendered upon the issuance of a health care degree.”
Other critics of the measure include 13 state attorney generals, who argue it will limit access to abortion and birth control for victims of sexual assault.
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09.26.08
Posted in Advocate Articles, Gay Rights at 2:43 pm by pikapp44
San Francisco-based Levi Strauss & Co. said Thursday that it will co-chair with Pacific Gas & Electric a group designed to encourage opposition to California’s gay marriage ban within the business community.
According to the Associated Press, the move is in step with the philosophy of Levi Strauss, the first Fortune 500 company to ever offer health benefits to the domestic partners of gay employees.
In July, public utilities company PG&E donated $250,000 to the No on 8 campaign. Levi Strauss has pledged $25,000 to Equality for All, the coalition leading that campaign, company spokesman E.J. Bernacki told the AP.
The companies’ support for marriage equality was met on Thursday with a vow of support for the No on 8 campaign from the Valley Industry and Commerce Association, a business advocacy group in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles. The organization’s board voted “by a significant margin” to oppose the ballot initiative, said President Stuart Waldman. “The most eloquent argument we got from an employer is they spend so much on human resources dealing with different benefits under domestic partnership rules versus married employees,” he said.
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09.25.08
Posted in Advocate Articles, Gay Rights at 3:21 pm by pikapp44
A new study from the Williams Institute at UCLA has found that providing domestic-partner benefits to federal employees in a same-sex relationship would add $43.5 million to the federal budget in the first year of coverage and about $675 million over the course of the next decade.
The Senate Committee of Homeland Security and Government Affairs held a hearing Wednesday morning on the bill that would provide DP benefits to federal employees, the Domestic Partnership Benefits and Obligations Act. Committee chairman Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a sponsor of the bill, was expected to reference the report’s findings during the hearing, thereby entering them into the record. GOP senator Susan Collins of Maine also helped organize the hearing.
The benefits for federal employees would include family health insurance, pension and survivor benefits, and relocation expenses for families who are transferred. For State Department employees abroad, it would also include access to anti-terrorism and language training, medical facilities, and evacuation services. “Adding partners to health care coverage is the most expensive part of the bill,” said study coauthor Naomi Goldberg, the Peter J. Cooper Public Policy Fellow at the Williams Institute.
“But the cost increase of $43.5 million in year one is only 0.4% of total health care expenditures, a tiny fraction that is consistent with the experience of the thousands of private employers offering domestic-partner benefits.” More than 30,000 employees with same-sex partners would benefit if Congress enacts this bill, according to the study
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09.24.08
Posted in Advocate Articles, Gay Rights at 9:58 am by pikapp44
Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign is reportedly launching a “Faith, Family, and Values Tour” next week that will include Catholic legal scholar Douglas Kmiec as one of the campaign’s surrogates. Kmiec wrote an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle this summer in which he urged support for passing California’s marriage ban, Proposition 8.
The Christian Broadcasting Network is reporting that the Obama campaign next week will kick off “Barack Obama: Faith, Family, and Values Tour,” designed to woo the votes of left-leaning Catholics, progressive Evangelicals, and some conservative mainline Protestants. If LGBT people find the tour eerily reminiscent of the South Carolina gospel tour the campaign arranged last year with antigay “ex-gay” gospel singer Donnie McClurkin, their instincts may not be far off.
CBN names Catholic legal scholar Douglas Kmiec as one of the religious surrogates who will hit the road stumping for Obama. Kmiec wrote a June 13 op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle supporting California’s Proposition 8, the ballot measure to ban same-sex marriage, titled “On Same-Sex Marriage: Should California Amend Its Constitution? Say ‘No’ to the Brave New World.” Kmiec’s first two sentences in the piece read, “The California ballot initiative intended to set aside the state supreme court’s judicial invention of same-sex marriage deserves public support. Maybe it is enough to say, as many do in conversation, that it merely re-secures a millennia of tradition and common sense.”
In the op-ed, Kmiec says the state supreme court ignored the separation of church and state in its ruling and argues that allowing gay marriage serves to separate the institution of marriage from procreation.
He concludes his op-ed: “When carefully assessed, the acquisition of unnatural reproductive means often advances the interests of the very affluent through a libertarian exercise that would threaten all hope of democratic equality. In a depopulating world, the claim that there is a universal right to marry regardless of gender becomes a frightening ally of a claimed universal right to access to genetically engineered children. People should reject this claim by returning traditional marriage to its rightful place.”
Kmiec’s views run counter to those of Obama, who voiced his opposition to Proposition 8 in a letter addressed to San Francisco’s Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club. “I oppose the divisive and discriminatory efforts to amend the California constitution, and similar efforts to amend the U.S. Constitution or those of other states,” the Illinois senator wrote.
Contacted by The Advocate for comment, Obama campaign spokesperson Shin Inouye confirmed CBN’s report, reiterated Obama’s support for LGBT rights, and echoed the theme of diversity that Obama often trumpets himself.
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09.23.08
Posted in Advocate Articles, Gay Rights at 1:39 pm by pikapp44
Steven Spielberg and his spouse, Kate Capshaw, followed in the footsteps of Brad Pitt and chipped in a $100,000 donation to fight Proposition 8, the constitutional marriage amendment that would take away the rights of gays and lesbians to marry in California.
“By writing discrimination into our state constitution, Proposition 8 seeks to eliminate the right of each and every citizen in our state to marry regardless of sexual orientation,” the couple said in a written statement released Monday. “Such discrimination has NO place in California’s constitution, or any other.”
Despite a recent spate of celebrity gifts to defeat the ban, backers of the measure are still winning the money game, outraising the ‘No’ on 8 campaign $17.8 million to $12.4 million, according to Tuesday’s LA Times.
Financial backing is critical to the ability of both sides to air ads promoting their position, with weekly spots costing anywhere from $3.5 million to $5 million in order to ensure state voters view them 7 to 10 times.
Alongside the cash injection from the entertainment industry, the LA Times reports that San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom will attend a $5,000-per-person New York fundraiser Thursday with Gov. David Paterson, a long-time supporter of marriage equality.
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