Gay iPhone Radio Application from GayInternetRadioLive.com Reaches 50,000 Downloads
Atlanta, GA (PRWEB) July 20, 2009 — GLBT Radio Network, LLC announced today its customized iPhone application for GayInternetRadioLive.com (G.I.R.L.) has surpassed 50,000 downloads from Apple iTunes. The application debuted in the Apple iTunes store four months ago this week and remains listed as one of Apple’s top 100 free music applications. The wildly popular dance formatted station appeals to all dance music enthusiasts but specifically targets the GLBT demographic.
“This technology has had an enormous impact on time spent listening by more than tripling the amount of time our mobile audience spends with the station,” said Christopher Leonard, President and CEO of GLBT Radio Network. “The response has been overwhelming. To meet audience demand, we have increased our bandwidth capacity, moved our iPhone listeners to a dedicated stream server and also increased the number of concurrent seats available on the mobile stream. I continue to receive hundreds of emails and calls every week thanking us for the application.”
Unique to this iPhone application is the ability to deliver powerful branding messages with the use of colorful mobile banner advertising. When clicked, the app opens the advertised content within the application. The audio stream is not interrupted and customized web pages built specifically for iPhone browsing are displayed.” Leonard continued, “This provides endless opportunities for advertisers to provide direct response marketing such as “tap to call” and “tap to email” options while the advertisement is literally in the hands of the consumer.” Traditional in-stream audio ads, generally 10 to 30 seconds in length, blend in with the dance music format to promote gay and gay friendly businesses worldwide. It’s advertising for today’s mobile tech savvy consumer.
Some additional features include:
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GLBT Radio Network is an Internet based media company specializing in Internet only radio programming that targets the Gay and Lesbian community. For more information and advertising opportunities visit www.GLBTradionetwork.com .
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Study: Gays not ‘godless Christian bashers’
This breaking news in from The Barna Group — a chronicler of religious life and habits, particularly of the Christian variety: Gay folks’ attitudes about spirituality aren’t much different from straight folks. These and other “surprising insights” were in Barna’s spiritual profile of gays released Monday. In it was a bit of a political heeding for gay-bashers:
“People who portray gay adults as godless, hedonistic, Christian bashers are not working with the facts,” wrote George Barna Monday. “A substantial majority of gays cite their faith as a central facet of their life, consider themselves to be Christian, and claim to have some type of meaningful personal commitment to Jesus Christ active in their life today.”
“It is interesting to see that most homosexuals, who have some history within the Christian Church, have rejected orthodox biblical teachings and principles — but, in many cases, to nearly the same degree that the heterosexual Christian population has rejected those same teachings and principles,” Barna said. “Although there are clearly some substantial differences in the religious beliefs and practices of the straight and gay populations, there may be less of a spiritual gap between straights and gays than many Americans would assume.”
Now there will be some quibbling with a couple of Barna’s assumptions. Like how Barna pegs the LGBT population at about 3 percent of the adult population. No, he doesn’t believe in the 1-in-10 stat, but then again, LGBT population scholar Gary Gates says it’s more like 5 percent, depending how you count.
That aside, the Barnanians found that “out of the 20 faith-oriented attributes examined in the Barna study, there were just a few in which there were no significant differences between the heterosexual and homosexual populations.”
Hmm. “No significant differences between the heterosexual and homosexual”(s)? Does Donald Wildmon know about this?
One big diff, according to the study: “While seven out of every ten heterosexuals (71 percent) have an orthodox, biblical perception of God, just 43 percent of homosexuals do. In fact, an equal percentage possesses a pantheistic view about deity — i.e., that ‘God’ refers to any of a variety of perspectives, such as personally achieving a state of higher consciousness or maximized personal potential, or that there are multiple gods that exist, or even that everyone is god.”
Another diff: “Heterosexuals were twice as likely as homosexuals to strongly agree that the Bible is totally accurate in all of the principles it teaches.”
And in the timeliness is next to godliness (OK, and cleanliness) dept: On Monday a crew of organizations supporting same sex marriage are launching their Get Engaged Tour of California — a pump-priming tour of the state in advance of an expected 2010 ballot measure campaign expected later this year. We told you about it a while back. Faith leaders will be prominently featured on this tour, as opposed to last year’s anti-Proposition 8 campaign, when they were largely invisible.
“Our faith-based values require us to love our neighbor as ourselves,” said Pastor Samuel Chu, of California Faith for Equality. “Gay and lesbian people are our neighbors and they should be able to enjoy the dignity, respect and commitment that come with marriage.”
| June 22 2009 at 12:25 PM
See Study: Gays not ‘godless Christian bashers’ 5:12 PM
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/06/study-gays-no…
Gay Dems complain DNC cut off funding, drop support for Biden event
Theboard of directors of the National Stonewall Democrats are dropping their support for a June 25 DNC fundraiser with Vice President Joe Biden over, they wrote in an email obtained by POLITICO, a combination of policy slights and the claim that they’ve been cut off from traditional party funding.
In the email to Tom Petrillo, who runs the party’s substantial gay fundraising operation, the board members write:
[W]e are incredibly disappointed that the DNC has made a decision to withhold any financial support to National Stonewall Democrats this year but is in turn asking us to help raise money for the DNC in a difficult financial environment. The DNC has historically supported National Stonewall through sponsorship of the annual Capitol Champions event. This year, we did not receive any support. The DNC has traditionally provided materials for the many Pride parades and festivals around the country to help educate the LGBT community about why the Democratic Party is the Party for full LGBT equality. This year we were informed that we would not be receiving any materials or support for producing materials for the various nationwide Pride activities. These decisions were very disappointing.
We’d be remiss to also not mention that the recent legal brief of the Obama Administration defending DOMA is incredibly hurtful. The members of the Board and our membership put our hopes, our dollars and our time into ensuring the election of Barack Obama because we believed that he supported us. To now have his Administration refer to our relationships in the same terms used by our long time enemies such as Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and James Dobson hurts on so many levels. To have our committed and loving relationships referred to as the moral equivalent of incest and pedophilia is not something that any of us ever expected from this Administration considering how hard we worked to be seen and respected. For that reason alone, advocating for attendance at a fundraiser to support the Administration and the DNC, while they have not condemned this hurtful language, is not something our membership will receive positively.
The group says it’s not “boycotting” the June 25 fundraiser with Joe Biden; it just won’t encourage its members to attend.
Gay money is, historically, of outsized importance to the Democratic Party. Howard Dean, in particular, launched his presidential campaign in part on enthusiasm from gay donors about his support for civil unions, and maintained those relationships as chairman. For update see Gay Dems complain DNC cut off funding, drop support for Biden event
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Bush State Department Ignored Iraqi Gay Murders Gay City News
As concern over the killings of gay Iraqis grew in 2006 and 2007, the US Department of State appears to have done little more than develop media talking points and squabble over who at that agency should handle press interviews.
“[I]t is outrageous to see that by walking away from their responsibility to further investigate, document, and then ultimately discuss the human rights abuses with the Iraqi government, the US government missed a great opportunity to prevent the mass-scale attacks against LGBT community, which happened earlier this year in Iraq,” wrote Hossein Alizadeh, regional coordinator for Middle East and North Africa at the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), in an email.
Writing in Gay City News, Doug Ireland first broke the story in March of 2006 that Iraqi gays were being killed by death squads. Ireland and other gay press outlets continued covering the story in 2006 and into 2007, with the mainstream press offering occasional stories. The killings and the gay press reports on them have continued into 2009.
In September 2007 –– nearly two years ago –– Gay City News sent a Freedom of Information request to the State Department that sought all records “that relate to or identify homicides, assaults, or other violent acts committed against homosexual persons in Iraq.”
On May 26 of this year, the department responded, releasing two documents, totaling nine pages, that represent all the records that agency compiled from March 1, 2003, roughly the start of the Iraq War, through the date of the records request. No documents were withheld and only a small portion of the released documents was blacked out. See Bush State Department Ignored Iraqi Gay Murders
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Castro-ville: a 21st century, gay-friendly city
Mayor Julián Castro knew roughly what to expect when he agreed this week to serve as the Grand Marshal of San Antonio’s July 4 Gay Pride parade — the first San Antonio mayor to do so — and in less than 24 hours, conservative talk-radio host Adam McManus had marshalled his self-styled “Adam’s Army,” urging them via web and airwaves to bombard the new mayor with pleas to withdraw. McManus applied the same pressure to SA Police Chief William (no relation) McManus when he served in the role in 2007.
[Adam McManus is also urging his listeners to protest the public library’s Pride month programming, which includes a screening of Milk. His website, somewhat hysterically, insists on adding “homosexual” in front of any GLBT-related items, as in “San Antonio Homosexual Pride Parade,” and “Stonewall Homosexual Democrats” – in honor of which we’re changing this week’s cover tag, “San Antonio’s Gayest Newspaper,” to “San Antonio’s Homosexual Newspaper.”]“I knew that it would be controversial,” Castro told the Current via phone this morning. He estimates that he has received 80-90 emails opposing his participation, many of them echoing the radio host’s recommended talking points. “But to [Adam McManus’s] credit … they have been very polite, very respectful.”
See Castro-ville: a 21st century, gay-friendly city
San Antonio Current
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China Internet filter challenged in rights uproar
A Chinese lawyer has demanded a public hearing to reconsider a government demand that all new personal computers carry Internet filtering software, adding to uproar over a plan critics say is ineffective and intrusive.
Li Fangping, a Beijing human rights advocate who often embraces controversial causes, has asked the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to allow hearings on the “lawfulness and reasonableness” of the demand, which takes effect from July 1 and was publicized only this week.
“This administrative action lacks a legal basis,” Li wrote in a submission to the ministry that was sent to reporters by email on Thursday.
“Designating that the same software must be installed in all computers affects citizens’ rights to choose.”
Li’s demand, and denunciations of the plan from Chinese rights groups, have expanded a public battle over the “Green Dam” filtering software, despite a state media effort to promote the software as a welcome way to prevent children being exposed to pornography. See China Internet filter challenged in rights uproar
Washington Post
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Woman breaks the law, serves as a surrogate for single gay brother
A WOMAN is due to give birth to a child for her gay brother after impregnating herself with donor sperm from a third party - an act that is illegal in her home state of Queensland.
At the centre of the startling story, the homosexual man says pregnancy tests taken last month have proven that his sister is carrying what will become his first child.
The man, aged in his mid-twenties, said his older sister, who has two teenage children herself, agreed to carry a child for him earlier this year and became pregnant after being artificially inseminated with another man’s sperm.
It is not known if the child, due to be born early next year, will know the identity of its biological mother. It will not have interaction with the biological father.
“I understand that my own situation is a little different to what people would normally hear about,” the man told news.com.au in an email. See Woman a surrogate for single gay brother
NEWS.com.au
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Poll: CA split on same sex marriage/Ballot measure for 2010
Just as another New England state greenlit same sex marriage Wednesday, a new California poll released Wednesday found that Californians are roughly split on same sex marriage. (”When asked, ‘Do you strongly favor, somewhat favor, somewhat oppose, or strongly oppose allowing same — sex couples to be legally married,” 47 percent say favor and 48 percent say oppose. The poll was taken before last week’s CA Supreme Court decision affirming Proposition 8.
So dead even, in margin of error terms, said co-pollster David Binder.
“I’m not suprised,” said Charles Sheehan, co-director of the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club. “It’s better than we were last fall.”
The poll was comissioned by a group of same sex marriage supporter groups as a way to help them figure out their next steps — like when to ask voters to vote again on the issue. Here’s what Binder and co-pollster Amy Simon found:
The 2012 Option:
“Higher turnout because of presidential election. But the pollsters “the additional voters that will come to the polls in a Presidential election are divided in their view of marriage for same-sex couples. Voters that will only turn out in a 2012 scenario are divided between younger voters who strongly support same-sex marriage and older Anglo, Latino and African American religious voters who are opposed to marriage for sameâ€sex couples.”
“While our modeling does indicate that 2012 will provide an extra 1-2 points of support for a marriage equality ballot measure, this difference may be impacted by many other factors in the larger political landscape at that time,” say the pollsters.
The 2010 Option: “It is likely that the Democratic nominee for Governor in 2010 will be an advocate of marriage equality, which would provide a high level spokesperson for the issue. In 2012, there is more uncertainty about the stance that President Obama may have on a marriage equality ballot measure during his expected re-election campaign.”
Nonetheless, reps from some of the groups anticipated to lead the next same sex marriage ballot initiative sound like they’re leaning toward 2010. Polls conducted by both Equality California and Courage Campaign have overwhelmingly said their supporters want to go to the ballot in 2010. Over the next month — in an effort called the “Get Engaged Tour” — organizations supporting same sex marriage will ask their members their preference.
| June 03 2009 at 04:54 PM
See Poll: CA split on same sex marriage/Ballot measure for 2010 …
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Prayer Service on the EVE of Decision Day – Monday, May 25 Grace Cathedral (1100 California Street San Francisco), 7:00 – 8:30 pm
PROP 8 DECISION DAY IS ON MAY 26, TUESDAY!
Decision Day is on Tuesday, May 26!!!
From the CA Supreme Court website: “The California Supreme Court has announced that it will issue an opinion in three cases challenging the constitutionality of Proposition 8 at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, May 26, 2009. (Strauss v. Horton, S168047; Tyler v. State of California, S168066; City and County of San Francisco v. Horton, S168078.) Tuesday at 10 a.m., the opinion will be available on the California Courts Web site at this link: http://www.facebook.com/l/;http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/opinions/.”
You are invited to the following events:
1. Prayer Service on the EVE of Decision Day – Monday, May 25
Grace Cathedral (1100 California Street San Francisco), 7:00 – 8:30 pm
The night before the announcement of the CA Supreme Court’s decision, we invite the Bay Area community to come for an evening of songs and meditation that will center our hearts on peace, healing and understanding.
2. Service/Blessing on Decision Day – Tuesday, May 26
St. Francis Lutheran Church (152 Church St. San Francisco, across from Castro Safeway), 8:30 – 9:15 am
The morning of the decision, we invite the Bay Area community to come for encouraging music and words from community leaders, testimonies from married couples and blessings for those who will be doing civil disobedience. We will march in a procession from the church to Civic Center Plaza. Some people will join the march from the LGBT Center on Market and Octavia.
NOTE: We request clergy to come in their religious garb as appropriate for their tradition. Please come at 8:00am to prepare.
CONTACT: Rev. Roland Stringfellow at rstringfellow@clgs.org
3. Circle of Care – Tuesday, May 26, Civic Center Plaza
If Proposition 8 is upheld, we will surround those who are willing to be arrested in civic disobedience as we sing, and move aside as they are arrested.
Marriage is not just a nice idea for some. To deny it is a form of bashing. On Decision Day, a group of people will participate in civil disobedience if the Supreme Court upholds Prop 8. In partnership with an interfaith group of clergy, we’ll do a peaceful street blockade with the message SEPARATE IS NOT EQUAL!
We’re looking for people to participate in this action with us, and for friends who will support us as peacekeepers and legal observers. For more information, please email action@onestruggleonefight.com.
SPONSORED BY:
Bay Area Coalition of Welcoming Congregations
California Faith for Equality
Congregation Sha’ar Zahav
Fellowship of the Rainbow
Progressive Jewish Alliance
Jewish Mosaic - The National Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity
California Council of Churches
Colage
The Fellowship
Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco
Freedom in Christ Church of San Francisco
Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies of Pacific School of Religion
Equality California
Marriage Equality USA
Unitarian Universalist Legislative Ministry California
Glide Memorial United Methodist Church
Grace Cathedral
St. Francis Lutheran Church
One Struggle, One Fight
Nueva Vida Ministries
The Society of Franciscan Workers
API Equality
PANA Institute of Pacific School of Religion
Network on Religion and Justice for API LGBTQ
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House adds same-sex benefits provision for U.S. diplomats to budget proposal
Congress has inserted a provision into the State Department authorization budget that would require the State Department to confer the same benefits to same-sex partners as it does to married couples.
Congressman Howard Berman, Chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, included the provision in the Foreign Relations Authorization Act for Fiscal Years 2010 and 2011 (H.R. 2410) to “end the long-standing practice of excluding the committed partners of Foreign Service officers from the benefits routinely provided to the spouses and children of officers serving abroad.” The provision now must make its way through the budget process, including the conference committee where many-a-well intentioned proposal hits the chopping block. But in this case, it would be hard to imagine that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is lead by Chairman John Kerry and the moderate republic ranking member Richard Lugar, would do anything to strip out this provision.
This would be progress. For too long, gay and lesbian diplomats have had to chose between their families and their service. “I’m happy that efforts to redress these discriminatory policies are being undertaken,” emails Michael Guest a former Foreign Service officer currently affiliated with the Center for Global Equality. “This is all about ensuring the safety, effectiveness and equal workplace conditions for those who serve our country abroad, and for the families who accompany them on those assignments.” Amen!
House adds same-sex benefits provision for U.S. diplomats to budget proposal
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/05/house-adds-sa…
