Tag Archives: LGBT rights

NGLTF’s Rea Carey On New Fed Benefits

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Obama’s Benefits Memorandum

The White House has released details of the president’s memorandum granting some benefits to gay federal employees. Obama will make the announcement at a 5:30pm news conference today. In an Oval Office event later today, President Barack Obama will sign a Presidential Memorandum on Federal Benefits and Non-Discrimination. The Memorandum follows a review by the Director of the Office of …

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12 House Reps To Cosponsor ENDA

Washington Blade reports that seven Democrats and four Republicans have signed on as cosponsors of Barney Frank’s transgender-inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which Frank has announced he will introduce next week. Both other openly gay reps Tammy Baldwin and Jared Polis are cosponsors. The lead GOP cosponsor is Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. In 2007, Frank’s version of ENDA without transgender protection …

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Dan Savage Has A Different Idea About LGBT Civil Disobedience

Dan Savage isn’t for or against the March On Washington, saying, “I’m officially agnostic: if people want to march, they can march.” But he offers up an additional or alternate idea for a protest that he thinks could have a great impact – and it would only require 730 people. Here’s the idea: one gay or lesbian couple—a couple currently …

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DNC Fundraiser Turning Into PR Disaster

Yesterday I posted a message from noted activist David Mixner, who says he will not attend next week’s Democratic National Committee $1000/head fundraiser at the DC Mandarin Oriental. Since then, other well-known LGBT folks such as blogger Andy Towle, Empire State Pride Agenda head Alan Van Cappelle, and former Clinton aide Richard Socarides have all announced they will not attend. …

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Georgia Supreme Court: Kids Can Visit Gay Dad’s Friends

The Georgia Supreme Court has rejected a lower court’s ruling that the children of a divorcing couple could not have any contact with the (now openly gay) father’s friends. The ruling was hailed by gay rights groups who said the decision focuses on the needs of children instead of perpetuating a stigma on the basis of sexual orientation. The state …

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ObamasPlanForGayRights.com

Check out the Obama’s Plan For Gay Rights site.

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Solmonese Writes To Obama

Human Rights Campaign head Joe Solmonese has written a lengthy letter to the president decrying last week’s DOJ brief opposing the repeal of DOMA. It reads, in part: As a matter of constitutional law, some of this brief does not even make sense: DOMA does not discriminate against homosexuals in the provision of federal benefits…. Section 3 of DOMA does …

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Top Obama Gay John Berry: It’s Going To Be A Long Time On LGBT Rights

John Berry, the director of the Office of Personnel Management and the president’s highest ranking openly gay appointee spoke to the Advocate’s Kerry Eleveld after his speech at DC Pride yesterday (which I heard). Berry, who said he was speaking with the authorization of the White House, outlined a four-point list of LGBT rights that the Obama administration hopes to …

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Anchorage Hears Gay Rights Bill

As a noisy anti-gay crowd outside waved signs saying “Truth is not hate!,” the Anchorage, Alaska city Assembly heard public arguments on their proposed bill to outlaw discrimination against gays for housing, employment, and finance. Opponents were dressed in red, which has become the signature color for anti-gay hate. Allison Mendel, an attorney, told the Assembly, “I want to be …

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DOJ Moves To Dismiss DOMA Challenge

The Department of Justice has filed a motion requesting the dismissal of a DOMA-related federal marriage equality case which calls for states to recognize the legality of same-sex marriages from other states. (Important: this is unrelated to the coming federal case from Ted Olson and David Boies.) The motion, filed late Thursday, argued the case of Arthur Smelt and Christopher …

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Gay Marriage: Tipping Point?

You’ll have to embiggen this graph from FiveThirtyEight to make sense of it. Jeff Lax and Justin Phillips put together a dataset using national opinion polls from 1994 through 2009 and analyzed several different opinion questions on gay rights. Here I’m going to talk about their estimates of state-by-state trends in support for gay marriage. In the past fifteen years, …

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U.S. State Department Condemns Anti-Gay Violence In Iraq

The U.S. State Department has issued a statement condemning the torture and murders of gay men in Iraq and has begun discussions on the issue with the Iraqi government in Baghdad. “In general, we absolutely condemn acts of violence and human rights violations committed against individuals in Iraq because of their sexual orientation or gender identity,” State Department spokesman Ian …

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Holland: Schools May Ban Gay Teachers

In what some say is evidence of the increasing influence of Muslims in the Netherlands, a leaked letter from the country’s Council Of State advises that the nation’s state-funded religious schools are allowed to fire gay teachers. The Council of State, the highest advisory body to the Dutch government, says religious schools can exclude gay teachers if they behave in …

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No Discount: Gay Family Told “You’re Not A Real Family” At Idaho Water Park

A lesbian couple and their three foster children were denied the family discount at an Idaho water park after employees told them that they weren’t entitled to one because the state doesn’t consider them a real family. A local hot pool is getting even hotter after a family was denied a reduced admission price for families because the parents were …

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NGLTF On The March On Washington

I’ve asked some major LGBT rights organizations to issue a statement saying whether they support the proposed March On Washington in 2009. The National Gay & Lesbian Task Force’s executive director Rea Carey responds: “The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force has long held that equality begins at home and that power is built from the ground up. We have …

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HomoQuotable – Chris Crain

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you. HRC and the Democrats have been promising (with no plan to deliver) passage of a hate crime law and Employment Non-Discrimination Act for more than a decade, including before the 2006 election, and yet we are still expected to be satisfied by these same civil rights crumbs for the entire first year that Democrats …

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First Major Pride Event For China

China is seeing its first ever major gay pride event beginning today in Shanghai. What organizers bill as “Shanghai’s first ever PRIDE festival to celebrate Shanghai’s diverse and quickly growing LGBTQI community” starts this weekend (Sunday June 7). It includes a busy week of activities through Sunday June 14, culminating with an all-day-all-night festival on Saturday, June 13. Although the …

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PhoboQuotable- Deacon Keith Fournier

“Some maintain that same sex attraction is a genetic predisposition. This is disputed. Even if it were the case, that does not give homosexual activity any more of a claim to being given a special civil rights status. Should we really give disordered appetites civil rights status under the law? Let’s consider an absurd example. I have struggled most of …

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Rhode Island: Bury Him, Don’t Marry Him

Although they resolutely continue to block any recognition of gay relationships, the Rhode Island legislature is poised to approve a bill giving gays the legal right to arrange for the funerals of their partners. The bill, which gives the surviving partner precedence over the deceased’s biological family, was unanimously approved in the RI Senate yesterday and now moves to the …

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