San Jose’s Billy DeFrank Center embarks on ambitious fundraising campaign
For 28 years, the Billy DeFrank LGBT Community Center has been the go-to place for Silicon Valley’s diverse gay community. But on Tuesday, interim executive director Paul Wysocki sent out a desperate plea: the DeFrank Center will close its doors unless it raises $50,000 by Sept. 1. “Our government funding has ended, and in today’s economy, we can’t count on corporate support,” read a weekly newsletter that is e-mailed to supporters. “Our current income from memberships and events no longer meets even the most basic level of Center operations.” The DeFrank Center has three main programs: support services for youth, another for seniors, and an HIV/AIDS testing program. But funding for the HIV testing from Santa Clara County and for the senior program from the city of San Jose have dried up as both the county and the city struggle with their own budget deficits. The Center has cut expenses and now has an annual budget of $310,000, down from $800,000 a few years ago. Wysocki became interim executive director four months ago after former executive director Aejaie Sellers and former board President PJ Matarese were ousted amid internal power struggles over the center’s long-term vision and escalating financial problems. “I have a lot of empathy for Barack Obama,” said Wysocki. “You inherit a situation where a lot of things were done poorly.”
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/07/san-joses-bil…
Eve Pearlman: Curriculum battle lines drawn over values vs. bigotry in Alameda
A HOT TOPIC AROUND TOWN the last several months has been Alameda Unified School District’s proposed anti-bullying curriculum, which has been discussed with increasing fervor, and has turned into a referendum on gay rights. I admit I’d only been paying half attention to the debate (though my husband has been actively advocating for the curriculum’s adoption), until Tuesday night when I watched hours of testimony at the school board meeting, my heart dropping as a long line of speakers voiced their opposition to a few short lessons acknowledging the existence of gay and lesbian families. “It’s about sex!” the opponents claimed. But teaching about same-gender families is no more about sex than the words “marriage” and “husband” and “wife” and “wedding” are about sex. Yes, marriage is based in part on a sexual commitment, but we speak about husbands and wives all the time in a way in which sexuality is not the focus. To children, the word lesbian is no more about sex than the word marriage is. “But I want to teach my child about these things,” parents said. “I want to teach my beliefs to my child.” I have strong empathy for parents who want to impart their values to their children. But I do not have empathy when that “value” is that someone else is a lesser person. Imagine if the “value” in question were that women should not own property or that people could be owned by other people or that people with certain skin color should not be allowed to vote. These are not “values,” these are discriminatory prejudices.
At Tuesday’s meeting, the technique of the well-organized and coordinated curriculum opponents was to attack the series of lessons — designed to complement an already-established anti-bullying curriculum — on a number of technical grounds. “It’s not legal,” they said. “It doesn’t go far enough” or “It privileges one group over another.” But these attacks were contrived and disingenuous. Most curriculum opponents operated from what only few more frankly admitted: They don’t think gay families are the moral equivalent of their own straight families. They don’t think gay families are “OK” and they don’t want their kids being taught that they are. As many in this debate have done, all you have to do is switch the opponents’ arguments to another social group to see how undemocratic their viewpoints are. Would the district allow a student to opt out of a Black history lesson? A celebration of Chinese New Year? To leave the room any time divorce is discussed? Of course not. Religion has been used to support all sorts of atrocities past and present (as well as all sorts of good things). Because an argument is religion-based doesn’t mean that it is more right, more valid or more just. In this country, in this democracy, in this friendly city of 70,000, it is our shared value that all people are created equal — and to those parents who want to teach otherwise, well, this is not a “value.” It is bigotry. And it has no place in our community’s schools. It has surprised me that in this day and age, in the Bay Area, that some are so hostile to difference and so obsessed with other people’s sex lives. The aim of the Alameda school district curriculum is simple: to teach about reality in order to help children skillfully and respectfully navigate their diverse community. All families (the majority of families, in fact) don’t look like the Cleavers. Families have all sorts of configurations, incorporating grandparents and cousins, step-siblings and stepfathers, same gender couples and opposite gender couples. That is reality. Children should be taught what’s real.
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/05/eve-pearlman-…
Souter proves a gay rights surprise
Deb PriceSouter proves a gay rights surprise
When David Souter was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1990, gay-rights groups quickly lined up to oppose him: Three years earlier, as a state judge he had signed onto an advisory opinion saying nothing prevented New Hampshire from banning gay adoption. But once on the court, Souter stepped into the shoes of civil rights giant William Brennan and quietly grew into them. What a joyful surprise Souter’s nearly two-decade run turned out to be. Using his intellectual gifts and good heart, Souter helped produce a warming trend, enabling the court to begin moving away from four decades of icy treatment of gay men and lesbians. Thanks to Souter, the court turned a major corner in 1995, when a unanimous opinion that he wrote for the court finally used the respectful term “gay.” Souter’s ruling also spoke respectfully of Massachusetts’ gay-rights law, igniting the hope that major breakthroughs would come soon. The first–Romer v. Evans–came the very next year. Souter voted with the majority in ruling gay Americans have a right to equal protection of the laws. He also voted with the majority in the landmark Lawrence v. Texas decision, which in 2003 declared gay Americans have a right to sexual privacy. In between, Souter wrote a gay-friendly dissent to the 2000 ruling allowing the Boy Scouts to ban gay scoutmasters. And, in a 1998 signal that the court was not undercutting Romer, Souter signed onto an unusual statement by Justice John Paul Stevens stressing that the court’s refusal to hear a challenge to a sweeping anti-gay amendment in Cincinnati “is not a ruling on the merits.” Within his own chambers, as my co-author Joyce Murdoch and I documented in “Courting Justice: Gay Men and Lesbians v. the Supreme Court,” Souter reacted respectfully when one of his law clerks came out. Souter hired another clerk who was a gay-rights scholar. Souter, appointed by a Republican president, added a parting gift: By choosing to retire when a gay-supportive Democrat will pick his successor, he likely ensured the court will continue its trend toward reading gay rights into the Constitution’s promises of equality. Obama offered a hint at what Souter’s replacement may look like when he said two years ago that he’d appoint justices with the “empathy to recognize what it’s like to be a young, teenaged mom … to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old.” More recently, Obama vowed to “seek someone who understands that justice” affects whether people feel “welcome in their own nation.” That kind of Souter replacement would maintain what’s now believed to be a 5-4 split in favor of basic gay rights. She — or he — will join the court’s progressive wing amid a sea change in public attitudes and legal rights for those of us who are gay. Knowledge of that “real world” could prove helpful: Unless Congress finally addresses two pressing injustices, the court might hear challenges in the next few years to the bans on openly gay soldiers and on federal benefits for same-sex married couples, notes gay law scholar Arthur Leonard. Souter’s replacement hopefully will feel a special kinship to him, as he did to Brennan. Even when ruling against a specific gay group in 1995 — declaring that forcing organizers of Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day parade to let an Irish-American gay group participate would violate the First Amendment — Souter was careful not to suggest the court agreed with anti-gay prejudices. Thank you, Justice Souter, for making gay Americans feel more welcome in our own nation. dprice@detnews.com (202) 662-8736 |
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| Find this article at: http://www.detnews.com/article/20090506/OPINION03/905060314/Souter-proves-a-gay-rights-surprise |
See Souter proves a gay rights surprise The Detroit News
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/05/souter-proves…
Look On The Bright Side, You Aren’t Mrs. Ted Haggard
These are truly terrible times. You may have been laid-off. You may have been on the receiving end of a lay-off rumor. You may have been arrested for cooking meth in the home you share with the future son-in-law of the future of the Republican Party.
Cheer up, little clown. At least you aren’t Gayle Haggard.
Remember this lady? Her husband, former Evangelical pastor Ted Haggard, admitted to having sex and meth with a male prostitute. Ted was removed from his position at the influential New Life Church, then kicked out of a de-gaying program and is now trying to sell insurance in Arizona. The couple, who have five children, are still married. Explains Gayle:
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I know to restore the honor to our children is to help restore honor to their father. |
Yes, it’s easy to snicker. Ted is participating in a documentary in which he says he never claimed to be straight. Gayle’s snotty statement above implies that gay people are without honor. We normally love to luxuriate in the hypocrisy of Christian homophobes like Gayle, but today, our feelings about her are a strange mix of schadenfreund and empathy.
Schadenfrempathy, if you will.
See Look On The Bright Side, You Aren’t Mrs. Ted Haggard
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2008/12/look-on-brigh…
