January, 2010
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Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
Monday, Jan. 25, was not a good day for Claremont McKenna College political science professor Kenneth Miller. Appearing as an expert witness for proponents of Proposition 8, he was the defense lead-off in the federal bench trial challenging California’s same-sex marriage ban. He was originally called in to show the political clout of the LGBT community that the proponents say make court intervention unnecessary. But his testimony came off as ill informed and ill prepared under cross-examination from plaintiffs attorney David Boies.
Boies conceded Miller’s expertise in American politics but challenged his credentials as an expert on LGBT discrimination. Defense attorney David Thompson claimed he had focused on LGBT politics from the 1970s on.
Boies, however, sharply asked him what the Mattachine Society was. Miller did admitted he didn’t know what that seminal pre-Stonewall gay-rights organizations was when he was deposed earlier. Since then, he countered, he studied their role in LGBT activism. OK, Boies, continued, so who’s Allen Spears and Elaine Noble? He didn’t know.
Full Story from Edge Boston
Click here for gay marriage resources.
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Posted in defense, federal trial, Gay Marriage, marriage equality, prop 8, proposition 8, same sex marriage | No Responses »
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
The cost of the city government’s domestic partner insurance program turned out to be much less than projected, but critics say they are not mollified. Just 19 city employees signed up so their unmarried heterosexual or gay partners can receive taxpayer-funded health insurance benefits.
The cost will be $42,000 this year, said Irene Morales, a city employee who oversees insurance programs. The city had forecast that 45 employees would be eligible and that the benefit program would cost taxpayers between $128,000 and $287,000. The overall city budget is $673.9 million, of which about $35 million each year is spent on health benefits for municipal employees and their families.
But to opponents of domestic partners benefits, the issue was never just about money. Tom Brown, pastor of Word of Life Church, said a group he has helped to organize will continue trying to overturn the new benefits.
Full Story from Insurance News Net
Click here for gay marriage resources in Texas.
To subscribe to this blog, use the rss feed on the right, or use the form at right to join our email list. You can also email us at info@purpleunions.com. Or find us on Facebook – just search for Gay Marriage Watch (you’ll see our b/w wedding pic overlooking the Ferry Building and Bay Bridge in SF). We’re also tweeting daily at http://www.twitter.com/gaymarriagewatc.
Posted in domestic partner benefits, el paso, texas, tx | No Responses »
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
Hundreds of University of Colorado students gathered around the Dalton Trumbo Fountain on Monday night in a show of support for gay rights. The demonstration came before a same-sex marriage debate on the CU campus organized by the Aquinas Institute for Catholic Thought.
“I want to promote love and equal rights,” said CU freshman Alexandra Deary. “We’re here and not going away. We want our rights now.” The students waved banners, sang and carried flowers intended for picketers from the Westboro Baptist Church led by Fred Phelps. But members of the Kansas church — who, according to the church’s Web site, were going to protest against gay rights outside the debate venue — were nowhere to be found.
Westboro’s position on gay marriage includes “God Hates Fags, God Hates Fag Enablers and God Hates You all in Boulder,” according to the Web site.
Full Story from Colorado Daily
Click here for gay marriage resources in Colorado.
To subscribe to this blog, use the rss feed on the right, or use the form at right to join our email list. You can also email us at info@purpleunions.com. Or find us on Facebook – just search for Gay Marriage Watch (you’ll see our b/w wedding pic overlooking the Ferry Building and Bay Bridge in SF). We’re also tweeting daily at http://www.twitter.com/gaymarriagewatc.
Posted in boulder, co, colorado, cu, Gay Marriage, marriage equality, rally, same sex marriage, students | No Responses »
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
Today was another exciting day as the Prop 8 trial heads into the home stretch. The plaintiffs finished their case today, and defendants got started with their first witness, Professor Kenneth Miller.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys closed their case by playing excerpts from two simulcasts that were broadcast to gatherings of evangelical voters during the Prop 8 campaign. These simulcasts were sponsored and paid for by ProtectMarriage.com, the official Yes on 8 campaign organization. In the portions shown, one speaker said, “The polygamists are waiting in the wings, because if a man can marry a man and a woman can marry a woman, the polygamists are going to use that exact same argument and they probably are going to win.” Another speaker referred to a man marrying a horse, and a third speaker compared the impact of permitting same-sex couples to marry to the 9/11 attacks.
The videos of these outrageous statements, made in a forum sponsored and paid for by the official Yes on 8 campaign, provided a fitting end to the plaintiffs’ case. It brought the focus back to the long history of demonization the LGBT community has faced in the public sphere– from the grim historical events described in Professor George Chauncey’s testimony two weeks ago to the themes of the Yes on 8 campaign, as shown in today’s videos and the highly inflammatory testimony of Prop 8 proponent Dr. Bill Tam. The plaintiffs have done an admirable job of laying out the case that Prop 8 was a product of the same kind of prejudice that has driven many other anti-gay laws throughout our nation’s history.
Full Story from Pam’s House Blend
Click here for gay marriage resources in California.
To subscribe to this blog, use the rss feed on the right, or use the form at right to join our email list. You can also email us at info@purpleunions.com. Or find us on Facebook – just search for Gay Marriage Watch (you’ll see our b/w wedding pic overlooking the Ferry Building and Bay Bridge in SF). We’re also tweeting daily at http://www.twitter.com/gaymarriagewatc.
Posted in defense, federal trial, Gay Marriage, marriage equality, prop 8, proposition 8, same sex marriage | No Responses »
Monday, January 25th, 2010
Gidi Grunberg at 16 fell in love with a boy at his Orthodox high school near Tel Aviv. Consumed by guilt, he transferred to a high school that was more strictly religious, hopeful that with more rigorous Torah study his attraction to men would pass.
A product of Orthodox institutions, Grunberg eventually came to accept his homosexuality during his years of mandatory service in the Israeli army. But in his private life, he found himself faced with a choice between his sexual identity and his religious community. “I prefer to be true to myself, and to accept myself, than being part of the community and living in a lie,” Grunberg told JTA. “I lost everything. I lost my friends from the yeshiva. I lost the youth movement. There was a lot of things at stake.”
With non-Orthodox religious options still a rarity in Israel, young gays and lesbians like Grunberg who grow up in traditional, highly insular surroundings typically have found that they must choose between their Orthodoxy and their sexual orientation.
Full Story from JTA
Click here for gay marriage resources.
To subscribe to this blog, use the rss feed on the right, or use the form at right to join our email list. You can also email us at info@purpleunions.com. Or find us on Facebook – just search for Gay Marriage Watch (you’ll see our b/w wedding pic overlooking the Ferry Building and Bay Bridge in SF). We’re also tweeting daily at http://www.twitter.com/gaymarriagewatc.
Posted in acceptance, gay, gay men, israel, orthodox religion | No Responses »
Monday, January 25th, 2010
Another week of the Proposition 8 gay marriage trial is over, and you know what that means! Yes, that you got four more glorious recaps of the action. BUT ALSO Jessica, your favorite lawyer ever, is back to explain everything to us laypeople!
Last time, Jessica told us about the equal protection clause. Specifically, she explained how our side is trying to prove that Prop 8 violates that clause because it discriminates based on sexual orientation.
This time around, she’ll explore Team Totally Right’s other arguments — there are several! So here we go, these are all the possible ways we could win this thing, it’s like a choose your own adventure book but a judge gets to do the choosing.
Full Story from Autostraddle
Click here for gay marriage resources in California.
To subscribe to this blog, use the rss feed on the right, or use the form at right to join our email list. You can also email us at info@purpleunions.com. Or find us on Facebook – just search for Gay Marriage Watch (you’ll see our b/w wedding pic overlooking the Ferry Building and Bay Bridge in SF). We’re also tweeting daily at http://www.twitter.com/gaymarriagewatc.
Posted in federal trial, Gay Marriage, marriage equality, prop 8, proposition 8, same sex marriage | No Responses »
Monday, January 25th, 2010
The government is facing allegations of duplicity over changes to the equality bill after a leaked document showed conflicting statements about the position of churches and other religious organisations.
Churches say the government has assured them the equality bill will preserve their “special status”, which allows them to turn down candidates for jobs as ministers or priests if they are actively homosexual, transsexual or, in the Catholic church, if they are women.
Statements in parliament have also presented the government’s position as preserving the existing law for religious organisations. “[The equality bill] will not change the existing legal position regarding churches and employment,” the leader of the House of Lords, Lady Royall, told peers recently.
But the Guardian has learned the government told the European commission it would toughen the law on religious organisations, making it harder for them to avoid equal treatment laws. A “reasoned opinion”, kept secret by the government, threatened the UK with legal action unless the grounds on which religious groups could discriminate were narrowed.
Full Story from The Guardian
Click here for gay marriage resources.
To subscribe to this blog, use the rss feed on the right, or use the form at right to join our email list. You can also email us at info@purpleunions.com. Or find us on Facebook – just search for Gay Marriage Watch (you’ll see our b/w wedding pic overlooking the Ferry Building and Bay Bridge in SF). We’re also tweeting daily at http://www.twitter.com/gaymarriagewatc.
Posted in catholic, churches, discrimination, england, equality bill, gay, lesbian, special status, uk, united kingdom, women | No Responses »
Monday, January 25th, 2010
Katherine used to be Miguel. Olin had a girl’s name. And in October, Robert Ira Schnur, 70, became Roberta Iris Schnur, a Manhattan retiree with magenta lipstick and, she noted the other day, chipped silver nail polish. “I wasn’t like other men,” she said.
Theirs are among hundreds of names a Manhattan court has changed over the last few years for transgender New Yorkers. That tally, specialists in the relatively new field of transgender law say, may make the borough’s workaday Civil Court one of the country’s biggest official name swappers — male names for female, vice versa and ambiguous.
Changing a name might seem like a minor matter for those who are changing their gender identities and, for some, facing challenges like finding knowledgeable doctors, trying hormones and experimenting with painful hair-removal procedures. But many who have gone through the switch say a name change sends an important message to the world, a message solidified and made official with a court’s approval.
Full Story from the San Francisco Sentinel
Click here for gay marriage resources.
To subscribe to this blog, use the rss feed on the right, or use the form at right to join our email list. You can also email us at info@purpleunions.com. Or find us on Facebook – just search for Gay Marriage Watch (you’ll see our b/w wedding pic overlooking the Ferry Building and Bay Bridge in SF). We’re also tweeting daily at http://www.twitter.com/gaymarriagewatc.
Posted in gender, identity, name, name change, trans, transgender | No Responses »
Monday, January 25th, 2010
Supporters of domestic partnership rights said their massive 825 page bill could be introduced Monday in Santa Fe during the regular session. Todd McElroy of Equality New Mexico , an organization supporting the bill, said it will give unmarried couples, gay or straight, the same rights and benefits as married couples.
“Those are the property rights, rights of inheritance, medical decisions making, and those sorts of things that are automatically bestowed with a marriage license,” McElroy said. Last year’s domestic partnership bill , which died in the Senate, was only 11 pages.
McElroy said this year’s bill has grown so much because it spells out the more than 300 rights given to married couples in the state.
Full Story from KRQE
Click here for gay marriage resources.
To subscribe to this blog, use the rss feed on the right, or use the form at right to join our email list. You can also email us at info@purpleunions.com. Or find us on Facebook – just search for Gay Marriage Watch (you’ll see our b/w wedding pic overlooking the Ferry Building and Bay Bridge in SF). We’re also tweeting daily at http://www.twitter.com/gaymarriagewatc.
Posted in domestic partnership bill, legislative session, new mexico, nm, senate | No Responses »
Monday, January 25th, 2010
With the landmark Supreme Court case Perry v. Schwarzenegger receiving heavy media coverage, the battle for gay marriage has been receiving serious media attention. Arguing Equality, a recently released interactive web book by author Seth Woodard Persily, closely examines prominent arguments against gay marriage and offers clearly explained counter-arguments based on logic and law.
Arguing Equality closely examines prominent arguments against gay marriage and offers clearly explained counter-arguments based on logic and law. Persily presents Arguing Equality as a guide to fully understanding the public and political concerns voiced by those in opposition to same-sex marriage and how such concerns ultimately obstruct basic human rights.
Chapter by chapter, the Arguing Equality website sheds light on what many individuals consider the “be-all and end-all” arguments of the gay marriage debate, revealing logical incoherencies, a surprising history of gay marriage across continents and cultures, and contradictions inherent in opposing gay marriage when viewed in light of fundamental freedoms of religion and the separation of church and state.
Full Story from PRWeb
Click here for gay marriage resources.
To subscribe to this blog, use the rss feed on the right, or use the form at right to join our email list. You can also email us at info@purpleunions.com. Or find us on Facebook – just search for Gay Marriage Watch (you’ll see our b/w wedding pic overlooking the Ferry Building and Bay Bridge in SF). We’re also tweeting daily at http://www.twitter.com/gaymarriagewatc.
Posted in arguing equality, book, Gay Marriage, marriage equality, same sex marriage | No Responses »
