ACTION ALERT!! Mary Gray Black (Largo City Commissioner): Demand that she denounce homophobia.

From the petition:

Largo City Commissioner Mary Gray Black is up for re-election, and her opponent, 30-year old Michael Smith just so happens to be gay. In recent town hall meetings, Mary Gray Black has compared the gay lifestyle as being similar to a “drunkard lifestyle”.

Mary’s comments against her opponents sexuality was both innapropriate and completely unnecessary. Call on Mary Gray Black to apoligize for her comments and to denounce homophobia!

A petition against Michigan's bullying law

gaywrites:

In the face of Michigan’s horrid new bill condoning bullying for religious purposes, someone has started a Change.org petition telling the state government not to pass the bill.

A strange side note - the author of the petition used the text from the GayWrites post about the bill as the body of letter. And I swear it wasn’t me! Whoever did this, you’re pretty cool.

Sign the petition at the link above! 

Dan Savage wants Herman Cain to prove being gay is a choice | LGBTQNATION.com

Herman Cain wants to see proof that being gay is not a choice. Dan Savage wants Cain to prove homosexuality is a choice, and has a suggestion on how Cain can do that — “Suck my dick, Herman.”

Cain, who is running for the GOP presidential nomination, has repeatedly said he believes being gay is a choice, and challenges interviewers to “show me the science” that says it’s not.

Appearing on CNN’s Piers Morgan on Thursday, Cain said that he respects that gays and lesbians have the “right to make that choice. I don’t have to agree with it. That’s all I’m saying.” Earlier this month, Cain told “The View” co-host Joy Behar, “You show me the science that says that it’s not [a choice], and I could be persuaded.”

Now, Savage — a nationally syndicated relationship and sex advice columnist, and co-founder of “It Gets Better,” a suicide prevention project aimed at LGBT youth — wants Cain to prove that homosexuality is, in fact a choice.

Click the link above to read the full article.

Senate panel omits bullying bills from education reform | washingtonblade.com

By Chris Johnson

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Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) (Blade photo by Michael Key)

A Senate committee left out pro-LGBT anti-bullying measures from education reform as the sponsors of the legislation pledged to offer these bills as amendments on the floor.

The Senate Health, Education, Education & Pensions Committee late Thursday reported out a massive education bill known as Elementary & Secondary Education Act reauthorization by a bipartisan vote of 15-7.

But the Democratic-controllled panel didn’t vote on pro-LGBT bills that advocates were seeking to have included as part of the larger legislation — the Student Non-Discrimination Act, or SNDA, and the Safe Schools Improvement Act, or SSIA.

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), the sponsor of SNDA, and Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), the sponsor of SSIA, both offered their bills as amendments during the markup, but withdrew them before a vote could be held.

During the markup, Franken delivered a speech in which he said he feels “very, very strongly” about SNDA as he pledged to bring up the measure as an amendment on the floor.

Franken said recent stories about gay youths committing suicide after they had been bullied in school demonstrates the need for passing SNDA. One such youth, Justin Aaberg, a gay 15-year old who committed suicide last year, resided in Franken’s state of Minnesota.

“We are faced with a group of students that is facing pervasive discrimination,” Franken said. “They are being viciously harassed and bullied. They are staying home from school. They are dropping out of school. They are literally killing themselves, and our schools aren’t doing enough to stop it. And yet again, these students have nothing they can do about it. There is no law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in schools.”

April Mellody, a Casey spokesperson, said Casey also introduced his bill as an amendment, but then “made the difficult decision” to withdraw the measure because it feared it would sink the education bill as a whole.

Openly Gay National Guard Member Running For Office in Colorado | justout.com

by Ryan Prado

The positive effects of the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell have been rolling in since the official repeal date of September 20. Add the story of Brian Carroll to the collection.

Carroll is running for the newly drawn House District 28 in Colorado, and believes he is the first active National Guardsman in the country to run for office post-DADT.

“Ultimately, what this comes down to, I believe, is standing up and providing an opportunity for leadership,” said Carroll in an interview with HuffPo. “Really, the repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ provides that opportunity — not only for myself, but for so many other openly gay members of the military. This really is a historic moment, and I think the people are going to look back at this, and say, ‘This is history in the making. This is when the entire ballgame changed.’”

More:

Carroll served two tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq with Army Special Forces Information Management Division, Special Operations Command and was openly gay in defiance of DADT. While abroad, Carroll specialized in building infrastructure and information technology resources in remote area.

While Carroll appears to be the first openly gay active-duty service member to run since DADT’s repeal, other gay veterans have run in the past. As Chris Geidner at MetroWeekly noted, in 1999, Steve May, then a GOP lawmaker in the Arizona state legislature and a member of the Army Reserve, came out in a floor speech in the house. The Army began discharge proceedings against him, but it eventually dropped the case and reached a settlement.

Carroll expects to face incumbent state Rep. Andy Kerr (D) in the primary, and state Rep. Ken Summers (R) on the GOP side if he makes it to the general election.

Antigay-Voting Former Governor To Announce Run For U.S. Senate | advocate.com

By Winston Gieseke

LINDA LINGLE 201110 X390 (SOURCED) | ADVOCATE.COM

Hawaii’s former governor Linda Lingle, whose 2010 veto denied the Aloha state’s same-sex couples the same protections under the law that married couples have, is expected to announce her candidacy for U.S. Senate today.

The Honolulu Star Advertiser reports that the recruitment of Lingle, Hawaii’s first female governor, will “widen the playing field for the GOP, which needs to net just four seats to overtake the Senate majority in 2012.”

After reports of her candidacy, Democrats began linking Lingle, 58, to her friend and fellow Repulican, Sarah Palin. Matt Canter, spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said in a statement, “Today marks Linda Lingle’s biggest announcement since she nominated Sarah Palin for Vice President, an event that typified Lingle’s partisan Republican approach to governing. Now Lingle wants to go to Washington to become a rubber-stamp for Mitch McConnell and the Republican party whose sole priority is to defeat President Obama at every turn.”

Read more here and here.

Belarus President Apologetic But Still Antigay | advocate.com

Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko (pictured, left) apologized today for having told gay German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle (right) “that he had to lead a normal life.”

By Trudy Ring

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle X390 (GETTY) | ADVOCATE.COM
From left: Lukashenko, Westerwelle

Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko apologized today for a homophobic remark he made to gay German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle, news agency RIA Novosti reports.

Lukashenko said he had upset Westerwelle by telling him “honestly, eye-to-eye, that he had to lead a normal life.”

“My words offended him,” Lukashenko told journalists today in Minsk, his nation’s capital. “I am still repenting my words. I wonder what made me speak up.” He did not saying exactly when he made the statement to Westerwelle, but the German official had visited Belarus last November. Lukashenko still “condemns homosexual relations,” according to RIA Novosti.

Some news sources had reported several months ago that Lukashenko, during a meeting in Minsk with Westerwelle and the Polish foreign minister, said he did not understand how two men could live together, a remark apparently meant for Westerwelle, who has a partner. Lukashenko reportedly added that he had nothing against lesbians but would send gay men to collective farms with “great pleasure.” No word on whether Lukashenko expressed regret about these statements or even admitted making them.

White House announces new LGBT liaison | washingtonblade.com

The White House officially announced on Wednesday the administration’s new LGBT liaison will be a gay former Defense Department official involved in the effort leading to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal.

Shin Inouye, a White House spokesperson, said Gautam Raghavan, formerly a deputy liaison to the White House at the Pentagon, has become an associate director of public engagement in the Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs. Inouye said Raghavan will serve “as the point of contact for the LGBT community in his new role.”

Click the link above to read the full article.

Transgender law, others go into effect

artoftransliness:

“It means I can feel I am part of the whole shebang,” said Las Vegas marriage and family therapist Jane Heenan, a transgender activist. “I am included. I am OK. I don’t feel I am such a weirdo.”

Nevada becomes the 15th state to extend the same legal protections to transgender people as it does to others on the basis of their race, creed, age, sex, religion, disability, national origin or sexual orientation.

Rick Perry Taps Antigay Activists for Florida Campaign | advocate.com

By Lucas Grindley

PAM OLSEN John Stemberger X390 (FAIR. FACEBOOK) | ADVOCATE.COM
Pam Olsen, John Stemberger

To help win him the Republican nomination, Rick Perry is joining forces in Florida with the evangelical leader who ushered in a same-sex marriage ban in that state in 2008.

John Stemberger, president of the Florida Family Policy Council, which claims about 65,000 Floridians as its followers, is now part of Perry’s “leadership team” and will serve as cochairman of his effort to win a straw poll in the state. Perry also named Pam Olsen to the team. She is on record as warning that same-sex marriage and ordination of gay priests could lead to floods, fires, and tornadoes.

Stemberger’s endorsement has been featured in a mailer to voters. As the former state chairman of the Florida4Marriage.org campaign for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, Stemberger argued that gay parents are inferior to straight ones.

“A super majority of Floridians believe, and the research clearly indicates, that children do best when raised by a mom and a dad,” he said in 2007, spreading false information that was most recently debunked quite publicly by Sen. Al Franken during a Senate hearing on the Defense of Marriage Act.

Tom Minnery of Focus on the Family, which works with the Florida Family Policy Council, had claimed during his testimony that a 2010 government study proved opposite-sex parents offer the best environment for raising children.

“Isn’t it true, Mr. Minnery, that a married, same-sex couple that has had or adopted kids would fall under the definition of a ‘nuclear family’ in the study that you cite?” asked Franken.

“I would think that the study, when it cites a nuclear families, would mean a family headed by a husband and wife,” Minnery replied.

“It doesn’t,” Franken replied flatly, to laughs. “The study defines a nuclear family as one or more children living with two parents who are married to one another, and are each biological or adoptive parents to all the children in the family. And I frankly don’t really know how we can trust the rest of your testimony if you’re reading studies these ways.”

Stemberger toldTheMiami Herald that he’d opted to endorse Perry over Michele Bachmann after trying to “determine who’s viable.”

“Perry is not a perfect candidate,” he said. “We only had one perfect candidate and we crucified him 2,000 years ago.”

Click the link above to watch the video.

Chris FitzsimonTall tales on anti-gay bill; Burr’s politics on FEMA

House Speaker Thom Tillis told a town hall in Wilmington Thursday that the anti-gay marriage amendment approved by the General Assembly last week wasn’t really that big of a deal. Gay marriage is already illegal Tillis said, adding that “all we’ve done is put the question to the people.”

That’s one of the most offensive quotes of the week and this has been a week of awfully offensive statements.

All you’ve done is put the question to the people? Hardly. You have decided to allow the majority of North Carolina voters to decide on the rights of a minority. You have as Rep. Ray Rapp said during the House debate, “unleashed the culture wars” in North Carolina.

For the next eight months, there will be plenty of more speeches about how gay people are an abomination and are going to hell, statements made this week by supporters of the amendment at events sponsored and attended by House leaders, who have yet to condemn the remarks.

Someone should have asked Tillis if he agreed with his top lieutenant, House Majority Leader Paul Stam who has compared being gay to incest and pedophilia.

“All” Tillis and his colleagues have done is demonize human beings who live in North Carolina and threaten to rip the state in half to appease their narrow-minded fundamentalist base.

One more note about Tillis’ nonchalance about the anti-gay amendment. The importance of the subject of the amendment has overshadowed the outrageousness of the process that was used to approve it.

No one saw the final language of the bill that passed until a House committee met to discuss it. That meeting was not announced until just 15 minutes before it started. Not one member of the public was allowed to testify before the committee, not even law professors with vital information about the real consequences of the way the amendment was worded.

And that was in the House. The Senate held no committee meeting at all, just a debate on the floor.

Bills designating the official state livermush festival received more discussion from this General Assembly.

McCrory endorses discrimination

Former Charlotte Mayor and Republican gubernatorial candidate Pat McCrory, who spends almost every waking moment running for governor, didn’t say much publicly about the absurd anti-gay amendment.

But Laura Leslie with WRAL-TV asked him what he thought and McCrory of course said he supported the amendment banning gay marriage and does not support legal recognition of same sex couples.

That means that McCrory, like Tillis and his other fellow Republicans in the General Assembly, wants to weaken domestic violence protections and cut off benefits for same-sex partners of employees of the nine local governments in North Carolina who have entered the 21st century and recognized the committed relationships of their workers, straight and gay.

That’s quite a campaign theme McCrory’s got going there, less health care for workers, fewer protections for victims of violence, and second-class citizenship for many North Carolinians.

You can almost see the bumper sticker now, “McCrory for Governor, because you deserve less.”

Thanks a lot Senator Burr

North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr was one of 38 Republican U.S. senators who voted against a bill last week that would have provided additional money for the Federal Emergency Management Agency so it can help people in North Carolina suffering from the damage inflicted by Hurricane Irene.

Burr said he needed to see spending cuts before he would support giving FEMA the money.

Thank you Sen. Burr for putting your political philosophy ahead of helping the people you represent who need assistance now, not after some partisan Washington bickering.

200,000 Against Sally Kern | advocate.com

By Neal Broverman

SALLY KERN X390 (FAIR) | ADVOCATE.COM

The Human Rights Campaign helped spark a campaign that has sent 200,000 emails to Oklahoma state legislators and the governor calling on them to condemn hateful remarks by antigay state representative Sally Kern.

Kern has steadfastly stood behind her 2008 remarks where she said gays were more dangerous than terrorists. She most recently made similar statements on August 31 to Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality:

“Every day our young people, adults too, but especially our young people, are bombarded at school, in movies, in music, on TV, in the mall, in magazines, they’re bombarded with ‘homosexuality is normal and natural.’ It’s something they have to deal with every day. Fortunately we don’t have to deal with a terrorist attack every day, and that’s what I mean.”

The HRC is calling upon Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin and other state leaders to make a public statement condemning Kern’s remarks — so far no one has taken the offer. In the interim, their in-boxes are getting flooded.

Bachmann: Anti-gay bullying ‘not a federal issue’ | gayagenda.com

Bachmann

Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann (Washington Blade file photo by Michael Key)

Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann is coming under fire for saying anti-gay bullying in her district isn’t a problem for the federal government.

At a rally in Costa Mesa, Calif., on Friday, Minnesota resident Alex Lemon asked Bachmann what she intends to do about the rash of anti-gay school bullying in her district, according to CBS News.

Bachmann reportedly offered a brief response: “That’s not a federal issue.” The GOP presidential hopeful moved on to the shake hands with the next rally attendee.

A U.S. House member who represents Minnesota in Congress, Bachmann has become associated with the issue of anti-gay bullying because of the rash of teen suicides in her congressional district. Over the past two years, nine youths have committed suicide in the Anoka-Hennepin school district, the largest in Minnesota. At least four suicide victims were victims of bullying because they were gay or perceived to be gay.

In July, the National Center for Lesbian Rights and the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit against the district on behalf of students who say they experienced harassment and violence as a result of an anti-gay environment. The Education and Justice departments are also investigating the district over the issue.

Minnesota resident Tammy Aaberg met with Bachmann’s staffers on Thursday in her Waite Park, Minn., district office to urge the lawmaker to speak out against bullying. Aaberg’s 15-year-old son, Justin, hanged himself in July 2010 after being subjected to anti-gay harassment.

Fred Sainz, vice president of communications at the Human Rights Campaign, said Bachmann’s remarks at the rally demonstrate “her ignorance and why she’s not worthy of the presidency.”

“Two bills to make schools safer for all kids are pending before Congress and in just a few days, the White House will host a second summit on the issue,” Sainz said. “It most certainly is a federal issue.”

Legislation pending before Congress known as the Student Non-Discrimination Act and the Safe Schools Improvement Act aims to stop the bullying of LGBT students in schools. President Obama has yet to endorse either of these bills.

But the Obama administration has interpreted existing federal law prohibiting schools from discriminating on the basis on gender to apply in some circumstances to LGBT youth. Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibit harassment based on gender.

Additionally, the White House held a bullying summit in March. Next week, the Education Department is hosting its second annual bullying prevention summit at the Washington Hilton Hotel in D.C.

Bachmann has an extensive anti-gay voting history as a member of Congress and has taken anti-gay positions in her pursuit of the White House. She backs a U.S. constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriage and has pledged to reinstate “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” if elected president.

The lawmaker co-owns with her spouse, Marcus Bachmann, a faith-based therapy center that has been revealed in engage in widely discredited “ex-gay” therapy aimed at turning gay people into being straight. The clinic has reportedly been the recipient of at least $137,000 in Medicaid funds since 2005. Bachmann has refused to answer questions about this practice at her clinic or whether federal funds have subsidized it.

View Source at Washington Blade – Gay News