Metro is playing catch-up, say supporters of gay protections
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.
See Metro is playing catch-up, say supporters of gay protections
The Tennessean
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Alameda parents debate lessons addressing gay slurs, bullying
Hundreds of people showed up at City Hall on Tuesday night to express their support — or concerns — about the Alameda Unified School District’s proposed lessons to address slurs and bullying against gays.
So many people showed up to speak that police and fire officials had to clear much of the crowd out of City Council chambers, where the public hearing to discuss the lessons was held. A second hearing is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Monday, May 18 at a location to be announced.
School Board President Mike McMahon said he had 200 speaker slips from people who wanted to be heard on the issue. The school board — minus Trustee Neal Tam, who was absent — heard three and a half hours of testimony on the curriculum on Tuesday.
Supporters of the curriculum said it’s a tool desperately needed by teachers to combat anti-gay slurs and bullying that starts as early as kindergarten. It’s not about sex, they said, but about offering positive images of gays and their families who are members of the community but invisible inside school walls.
The consequences of not addressing the bullying or offering such positive reinforcement is dire, they said: Statistically, gay youth are much more likely to skip school, abuse alcohol and drugs and commit suicide than their straight peers.
Alameda parents debate lessons addressing gay slurs, bullying
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Berlin Memorial To Gay Victims Of Nazis Vandalized
Berlin’s memorial to gay victims of the Nazis has been vandalized for the second time in four months.
Berlin police say a window on the outside of the memorial has been broken, probably with a stone.
The window allows visitors to see inside the concrete memorial and view a video of a same-sex couple kissing
The memorial in Berlin’s Tiergarten park was inaugurated in May and suffered similar damage to the same window in August.
A protest held after that attack to denounce intolerance and homophobia drew more than 100 people including Berlin’s openly gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit.
See Berlin Memorial To Gay Victims Of Nazis Vandalized
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US stalls signing UN gay rights statement
International gay rights groups expressed concern that the U.S. had not yet signed a proposed statement this week calling on the United Nations and countries throughout the world to condemn discrimination and persecution based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
The statement, proposed by France on behalf of the European Union, was scheduled to be presented to the U.N. General Assembly in New York next week. More than 50 countries have signed the statement. Photo: Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, UN Photo/Mark Garten. See US stalls signing UN gay rights statement Washington Blade
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US stalls signing UN gay rights statement
International gay rights groups expressed concern that the U.S. had not yet signed a proposed statement this week calling on the United Nations and countries throughout the world to condemn discrimination and persecution based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
The statement, proposed by France on behalf of the European Union, was scheduled to be presented to the U.N. General Assembly in New York next week. More than 50 countries have signed the statement. See US stalls signing UN gay rights statement Washington Blade
Photo: Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, UN Photo/Mark Garten
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