The argument that protecting Metro government’s gay employees would force the private sector to follow suit is all backward, supporters of a new anti-discrimination measure say.
Around the country, 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies’ anti-discrimination policies include sexual orientation or gender identity. In Nashville, some of the city’s largest private employers — http://www.vanderbilt.edu/“>Vanderbilt University and http://www.hcahealthcare.com/“>Hospital Corporation of America — put similar policies into place.
Against that landscape, the new measure’s supporters say, it should have a better chance of passage than a similar one proposed in 2003. But opponents say following the private-sector pack isn’t the way to go.
“Just because someone else does something doesn’t mean it’s right, and we learned that when we all took off from kindergarten,” said David Fowler, a former state senator and president of the http://www.factn.org/“>Family Action Council of Tennessee. “So unless we are going to act like lemmings and just blindly do what everybody else is doing, we need to stop and think before we make this a law.”
The city already has protections based on race, sex, religious affiliation and national origin in place, Fowler said, and protection based on sexuality is incongruous. He also said such a law could expose the city to lawsuits by people who feel it was broken.
At a press conference last Friday, GLBT activists and union leaders marked the one-year anniversary of the Manchester Hyatt Boycott, launched last year in response to hotel owner Doug Manchester’s $125,000 contribution to qualify Proposition 8 for the ballot.
“For over a year we have urged San Diegans, Californians and Americans to boycott the Manchester Hyatt because of Manchester’s contribution to Proposition 8 and onerous workloads for the hotel’s housekeepers,” said Cleve Jones, a national gay leader and former aid to slain San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk. “The hotel’s own people have admitted to losing over $7 million in business due to the boycott. This boycott has truly shown the power of our reenergized community and the alliance between the gay community and labor.”
Proposition 8 eliminated the right of same-sex couples to marry in California. Boycott organizers also committed to continue the boycott and expand its scope.
“One of our goals for the next year will be to take the boycott to the next level – global,” said Fred Karger, founder of Californians Against Hate. “We will ask travel planners and tour operators throughout the world not to book meetings and room nights at the Manchester properties. We will put up a virtual bright yellow caution tape around Manchester’s hotels, and ask people not to cross it.”
The boycott has drawn increasing media attention and picked up steam since it began. Early on, several groups announced that they would move or cancel events at the hotel. Recently, the American Association of Justice, a trial lawyers group moved its entire convention out of the Manchester Hyatt to San Francisco to honor the boycott. At a recent gay and lesbian travel exposition, a hotel spokesperson confirmed that the boycott has cost the hotel more than $7 million.
At the July 17 press conference, organizers unveiled more than just a new approach. They came with a new logo and visual aid – bright yellow caution tape reading “Do not cross. Do not support bigotry and discrimination.” Organizers say the caution tape is intended as a reminder for individuals throughout the country not to patronize the hotel.
“We want to send a very simple message to all those planning to travel to San Diego that the Manchester Hyatt Boycott is on and stronger than ever,” said Human Relations Commissioner, Nicole Murray-Ramirez. “The unions, hotel workers and gay community started this fight together and we intend to finish it together.”
AT A HEARING at the State House last week, supporters of a bill to ban discrimination on the basis of gender identity and expression outlined the myriad barriers that confront transgender people – those who are born male but live as females, or vice versa. Unlike those whose religions or sexual orientations expose them to discrimination, transgendered people might not be able to avoid the issue when applying for jobs, apartments, or loans. The truth may become evident from a check on a Social Security number or a search of credit reports.
Transgender advocates aren’t looking for sympathy. The goal of the legislation, introduced by Representative Carl Sciortino, is to give transgender residents of Massachusetts space to live without discrimination or violence. The bill responds sensibly to a real problem, and deserves to pass.
Transgender people don’t make the transition lightly; many, though not all, undergo gender-reassignment surgery. The case of Dana Zircher, profiled recently by the Globe’s Bella English, underscores the difficulty of the process, even when individuals have supportive families and employers. Zircher, a software designer and a parent, has undergone a divorce, surgery, and 350 hours of electrolysis.
Instead of addressing the complexities of actual people’s lives, though, opponents are trying to undermine Sciortino’s legislation by calling it a “Bathroom Bill.’’ The difference between a transgender woman and a man who wants to infiltrate a ladies’ room is perfectly obvious, at least to anyone who is not deliberately obfuscating the issue. The difference would surely be obvious to police officers and judges. Thirteen other states, including Vermont, Maine, and Rhode Island, and dozens of cities, including Boston and Cambridge, already forbid discrimination against transgendered people – and public washrooms are as safe as ever.
Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, a sexual sitcom, opens with a pair of breeders in bed. A youngish married couple, Ben (mumblecordeon Mark Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore), confess they’re too tired to procreate that night and then confess their mutual relief. As if in response, the doorbell rings at 2 a.m. and Ben’s long-lost college buddy, Andrew (Blair Witch Project survivor Joshua Leonard), stumbles in from deepest Mexico. Anna, who has never had the pleasure, watches the unexpected bromantic action with grim incredulity. Aggressively loud, demonstrative, and hairy, Andrew is a credible representation of Ben’s id.
Reuniting an uptight married man with a footloose old pal, Shelton’s third feature offers a (much) more extreme version of Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, also a sort of buddy movie, also shot in the Pacific Northwest. In this case, the lost weekend is steeped in sexual anxiety. Friday night, Ben has to retrieve merry Andrew from a house called “Dionysus” — home to a bi cutie (the director herself) and an omnisexual assortment of roisterers. No orgies, but plenty of stoned dancing. Anna, who has prepared her signature pork chop dinner, sits home alone. She stews; Ben gets stewed. Prompted by news of an amateur porn festival — sponsored by a local alt-weekly — Ben finds himself proposing to costar with showoff Andrew in a mad art project, dude-on-dude action, totally straight, yet somewhere “beyond gay.” Maybe they’ll be famous. The only problem: Just who is going to bone whom?
Having thus invested its protagonists in a game of “chicken,” played to justify their respective life choices, Humpday delivers some excellent situation comedy. The scene where Andrew and Anna have a get-acquainted drink and Andrew inadvertently exposes Ben’s boastful lie that his wife has signed off on their “project” is pure Honeymooners. (Bang, zoom, straight to the moon!) Ben can’t tell Anna why he wants to have sex with Andrew, only that it’s very, very important to him. And, terrified that Ben might think he really did have a yen, Andrew can only sigh, “I wish I was more gay.” Of course. Just as Brüno is more of a comment on celebrity culture than the love (or hate) that dare not speak its name, Humpday is actually less a queer comedy than a satiric view of macho. Appreciative as Shelton may be of her dudes, she has another agenda. Each in his own way, the guys have been freaked by a manifestation of assertive female sexuality — although the term “pussy-whipped” is never used.
As westerners revel in designer lattes and cappuccinos, impoverished Ethiopian coffee growers suffer the bitter taste of injustice. In this eye-opening expose of the multi-billion dollar coffee industry, Black Gold traces one man’s fight for a fair price.
THE STORY
Multinational coffee companies now rule our shopping malls and supermarkets and dominate the industry worth over $80 billion, making coffee the most valuable trading commodity in the world after oil.
But while we continue to pay for our lattes and cappuccinos, the price paid to coffee farmers remains so low that many have been forced to abandon their coffee fields.
Nowhere is this paradox more evident than in Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee. Tadesse Meskela is one man on a mission to save his 74,000 struggling coffee farmers from bankruptcy. As his farmers strive to harvest some of the highest quality coffee beans on the international market, Tadesse travels the world in an attempt to find buyers willing to pay a fair price.
Against the backdrop of Tadesse’s journey to London and Seattle, the enormous power of the multinational players that dominate the world’s coffee trade becomes apparent. New York commodity traders, the international coffee exchanges, and the double dealings of trade ministers at the World Trade Organisation reveal the many challenges Tadesse faces in his quest for a long term solution for his farmers.
The Georgia Supreme Court tossed out part of a Fayette County court’s decision that kept a divorced gay father from allowing his children to interact with his gay friends, according to a ruling today from the state Supreme Court.
In the ruling, Justice Robert Benham wrote the high court acknowledges that trial courts have the discretion to “limit a parent’s exposure of the children to certain people, if it can be shown that the children would be adversely affected.”
In this case, the Supreme Court justices rejected Fayette County Superior Court Judge Christopher Edwards’ ban on having the gay father bring his gay friends around his children. Edwards has been nominated to fill the a seat on the state Supreme Court after Chief Justice Leah Sears steps down at the end of June.
“The blanket prohibition against exposure of the children to members of the gay and lesbian community who are acquainted with husband is another matter,” says today’s opinion. “There is no evidence in the record before us that any member of the excluded community has engaged in inappropriate conduct in the presence of the children or that the children would be adversely affected by exposure to any member of that community.”
n a scene which appears to have been lifted straight out of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a group of Christians in Wisconsin has launched a legal claim demanding the right to publicly burn a copy of a book for teenagers which they deem to be “explicitly vulgar, racial [sic], and anti-Christian”.
The offending book is Francesca Lia Block’s Baby Be-Bop, a young adult novel in which a boy, struggling with his homosexuality, is beaten up by a homophobic gang. The complaint, which according to the American Library Association also demands $120,000 (£72,000) in compensatory damages for being exposed to the book in a display at West Bend Community Memorial Library, was lodged by four men from the Christian Civil Liberties Union.
Their suit says that “the plaintiffs, all of whom are elderly, claim their mental and emotional well-being was damaged by this book at the library,” and that it contains derogatory language that could “put one’s life in possible jeopardy, adults and children alike.”
“The word ‘faggot’ is very derogatory and slanderous to all males,” the suit continues. “Using the word ‘Nigger’ is dangerously offensive, disrespectful to all people. These words can permeate violence.” The suit also claims that the book “constitutes a hate crime, and that it degrades the community”.
“They’ve filed a claim against the city of West Bend and the city has to decide if it is valid,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, acting director of the ALA’s office for intellectual freedom. “Their insurance company is evaluating the claim, but I would be very surprised if they found any merit in it … Should they find any merit in this claim, we would certainly support the library in fighting it.”
The legal challenge follows a lengthy campaign by some West Bend residents to restrict access to teenage books they deemed sexually explicit from library shelves, which was eventually thrown out at the start of June.
“Obviously we were really pleased with the outcome to that – there was a unanimous vote to keep the books in the library and we thought the matter should be over,” said Larry Siems, director of the Freedom to Write programme at PEN America.
Siems said there was clearly “a bit of theatre” in the lawsuit which followed. “They’ve filed a lawsuit which has little possibility of going forward legally, and they’re asking for damages which include the right to burn a book. It does seem more to gain publicity than a real serious challenge.” But, he said, PEN remained very concerned about the impulse behind the claim. “This is a group of people trying aggressively to rid the library of these books and that’s very serious – it needs to be fought.”
The claimants, he said, “have a right to continue to express their views, and this in a way is a creative attempt to express those views”. But it’s “also a dangerous game when you’re talking about something like book burning, calling on the law to burn books. It’s certainly completely un-American, and if they paused, I think they would agree.”
It was not possible to reach the Christian Civil Liberties Union for comment.
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
MoxieQ, the first mobile-centric gay entertainment publisher, today announced its official launch as a mobile and online entertainment destination with a gay sensibility. MoxieQ was founded by two pioneers in the mobile advertising industry — Heidi Lehmann, co-founder of Third Screen Media (which was acquired by AOL in May 2007) and Kim Olson, a founding member of the Sprint Mobile Media Network. The service appeals to the more than 16 million, $712 billion-spending members of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) community as well as other consumers who want the gay perspective. The Premier Gay Mobile Entertainment Destination The publisher debuted its editorial talents at the GLAAD Media Awards in New York, March 28th and in LA, April 18th, where MoxieQ media personalities Ryan and Caroline, formerly of Clear Channel’s Pride Radio, conducted red carpet interviews with celebrities including Suze Orman, Tyra Banks, Judith Light, Kathy Griffin and Wilson Cruz. The GLAAD awards recognize accurate and fair LGBT portrayals and news content in the media. “We are proud to share our TV ‘Gayed’ weekly guide to what’s LGBT on TV and outstanding LGBT-inclusive commercials from GLAAD’s online ad library with MoxieQ as they bring important and entertaining content to our community on the go,” said Neil Giuliano, President of GLAAD. Leading Brand and Celebrity Partners MoxieQ partners include a number of leading LGBT celebrities and brands: BRAVO’s “The Fashion Show” personality and underwear designer Andrew Christian, DishMiss, Gay Cities, GLAAD, LOTL, Ryan and Caroline, Under the Pink Carpet and Witeck Combs Communications. “I am excited to have my products featured in the ‘Daily Briefs’ section of MoxieQ,” said Andrew Christian. “My viewers and customers are young, hip, and on the move which means the mobile channel is a primary way for them to discover new products. MoxieQ is a perfect match for us to expose our latest designs directly to our target consumer.” For Advertisers Targeting the LGBT Community MoxieQ exclusives deliver sassy, short-form content such as Test your Gay IQ, Psychic Snacs (“gay” horoscopes), Ask Mr. Moxie, “Bite, Sip and Buy” recommendations for gay and green businesses, and up-to-the-minute Gay Weather. “The LGBT and LGBT-friendly demographics are a perfect fit for both mobile and advertising, with an audience that is increasingly looked to by the mainstream consumer as trendsetters with tremendous influence and insight into what is hot and cutting-edge,” said MoxieQ founder and CEO Heidi Lehmann. “MoxieQ is designed to provide both a primary source of entertaining content and interactivity with a gay twist and an extremely targeted environment for brands who want to reach this valuable community.” MoxieQ is designed to appeal to the gay community and people who want access to fun and irreverent gay themed content, games, and “in the know” advice and insights. The destination is ad-supported with future revenue models to include premium, syndicated and online content. MoxieQ Media is available now on the mobile phone at: http://m.moxieq.com or on the web at www.moxieq.com. About MoxieQ Media, Inc. Based in New York City, MoxieQ is an entertainment and advocacy site with a gay sensibility. It features original, syndicated, and user generated content, formatted for mobile phones and the PC. MoxieQ’s unique mix of information, games, recommendations, audio, video and interactivity, captures the irreverence and trendsetting perspective of this hip and influential demographic. Through MoxieQ, Fortune 500 brands will be able to reach the LGBT market directly. For more information, visit us at http://m.moxieq.com or www.moxieq.com.
By mid-afternoon, authorities reportedly had someone in custody in connection with the murder of Wichita abortion doctor George Tiller at his church on Sunday morning.
So far, we know nothing about the suspect. Though the motive for the crime we can all surmise in light of the vitriolic campaign that has been waged against Tiller for more than two decades by anti-abortion groups.
And if we’re right about that, then we already know the identities of his accomplices.
They include every one who has ever called Tiller’s late term abortion clinic a murder mill.
Who ever called Tiller “Tiller the Killer.”
The groups who spent decades fomenting hate toward a man who simply believed that he was serving a purpose by being one of the few doctors in the country performing late-term abortions.
Hate. Not heated opposition. Not strong disagreement.
But blind hatred.
The kind of hate that would prompt some maniac to take a gun into a church and shoot a man to death in front of friends and family.
His accomplices know they have blood on their hands, which might explain why they were quick to issue statements today expressing disapproval of Tiller’s murder.
Among them, the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue.
“Operation Rescue denounces the killing of abortionist Tiller,” read the headline of a new release posted on that group’s website.
Those words drip with hypocrisy.
After all, it was Operation Rescue that coined the nickname “Tiller the Killer.” It was Operation Rescue that was most responsible for ratcheting up the heated rhetoric toward Tiller over the past two decades.
The group issued the following statement today:
“We are shocked at this morning’s disturbing news that Mr. Tiller was gunned down. Operation Rescue has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see him brought to justice. We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning. We pray for Mr. Tiller’s family that they will find comfort and healing that can only be found in Jesus Christ.”
Shocked? Are any of us really shocked that it would come to this after the many years of demonizing one man?
Certainly the group’s founder, Randall Terry, didn’t seem shocked when he issued a statement that, I would suggest, provides a truer sense of how the anti-abortion movement saw today’s events:
”George Tiller was a mass-murderer. We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God. I am more concerned that the Obama Administration will use Tiller’s killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions. Abortion is still murder. And we still must call abortion by its proper name; murder.
Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers according to the Law of God. We must continue to expose them in our communities and peacefully protest them at their offices and homes, and yes, even their churches.”
I’d suggest that if anyone is in need of salvation right now it’s the anti-abortion movement in Kansas and across the nation.
As Terry’s statement makes clear, the same bullet that killed George Tiller also shattered the moral underpinnings of the movement that inspired its firing.
