Prop 8 trial: Defense witness says gay marriage would help children

(San Francisco) Allowing same-sex couples to get married would improve the well-being of children raised by gay parents but should not be pursued as social policy because it would further weaken marriage as an institution, the head of a private think tank testified during a federal trial challenging California’s gay …

Gay marriage law’s impact on Iowans subtle, yet powerful DesMoinesRegister.com -Gay marriage law’s impact on Iowans subtle, yet powerful

The April marriage ruling hasn’t enticed Jean and George Huffey’s two gay children to move back to Iowa from Wisconsin and Indiana, as the two parents had hoped.

Not many same-sex couples have relocated here in the two short months since the Iowa Supreme Court ruled on April 3 that both gay and straight couples have equal rights to marriage, anecdotal evidence suggests.

“It’s going to take time,” said Des Moines real estate agent Mindi McCoy, who had two same-sex clients from New York City look at properties, then decide against purchasing. “We’re still in kind of this honeymoon stage, no pun intended.”

Gay culture is sharply in focus this weekend as thousands gather to celebrate at the Capital City PrideFest in Des Moines. The Des Moines Register interviewed dozens of gays and lesbians to identify early trends since the first marriages took place April 27, including the effects on the ease of coming out of the closet, family relationships, religion, business, politics and the underground gay sex scene.

The changes in Iowa since the ruling are subtle but powerful to the individuals affected, according to both advocates and opponents.

Same-sex married couples who live here said they are already experiencing firsthand how Iowa law still treats them differently from opposite-sex couples.

Of the hundreds of same-sex Iowa couples who are now married – no state agency tracks the number of same-sex unions – some said they feel less guarded about holding hands or sharing a kiss in certain public settings.

“At your job, you don’t feel like you can’t have a picture of you and your partner up,” said Des Moines resident Justin De Vries.

Marriage seems to have been embraced mainly by same-sex couples with a history together: five years, a decade, 20 years or more. Some faith leaders have committed acts of quiet rebellion to marry them, even as their churches remain locked in debate over same-sex weddings.

“People are taking this as a very serious issue,” said Sharon Malheiro, a Des Moines lawyer. Couples are asking: ” ‘If we get married, what will the impact be? What are our obligations to each other?’ They’re not being nonchalant about it.”

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Whose Holocaust? Plan to Recognize Gay Victims at Memorial Sparks Row

A plan to memorialize gay male victims of Nazism amid a collection of memorial stones for Holocaust victims in a quiet half-acre patch of Brooklyn has provoked an outcry.

New York State Assembly Member Dov Hikind, a Brooklyn Democrat whose many Orthodox constituents include numerous Holocaust survivors, has decried the planned addition as a distortion of the Holocaust’s meaning with regard to Jews.

“It’s easy to say, let’s include everybody, let’s be universal, diversity is great,” he said. But he added, “It just isn’t fair. It diminishes and really dilutes what the Holocaust is.”

Hikind and the Holocaust Memorial Committee, steward of the tiny Holocaust Memorial Park in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn, are calling for the park’s memorial stones to be restricted to Jewish victims of Hitler. But the plan, approved by the city’s parks department, to commemorate non-Jewish victims of the Nazi regime there is proceeding thus far.

On June 9, representatives of the International Association of Lesbian and Gay Children of Holocaust Survivors, which proposed the addition, could be found combing the bayside memorial to measure unmarked stone pillars and determine if memorial text could be carved on them, association co-chair Rick Landman said.

The altercation raises a question that Jews have faced with increasing frequency: Whose Holocaust is it, anyway? Roma Gypsies, the disabled and gay men were among those also especially targeted by the Nazis. According to historians, though, only Jews and Roma were targeted for annihilation. Altogether, the Nazis are estimated to have murdered some 11 million from their coming to power in 1933 until their downfall in 1945.

Flanked by Emmons Avenue and Shore Boulevard, at the easternmost end of Sheepshead Bay, the memorial, built in 1997, consists of a tall eternal flame sculpture — engraved with a short statement on the Holocaust and the nations affected by the genocide — surrounded by two adjacent gardens of stone markers, each of which features either a paragraph or two of history or a list of victims’ names.

For $360 per engraved line, donors to the non-profit Holocaust Memorial Committee can pay to have a victim’s name printed on one of the stone markers. The registration form for this service, found on the committee’s Web site, asks donors to provide the victim’s name and a brief history of his or her Holocaust experience. The committee then meets to verify the authenticity of the proposed inscription, committee treasurer and past president Alfred Gollomp said.

Gollomp complained that in signing on to the IALGCHS proposal, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and the city’s parks department were ignoring a memorandum that gives the Brooklyn-based group control over the park markers.

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Rudnick’s ‘New Century’ is a funny time

The one-liners fly furiously in “The New Century,” Paul Rudnick’s collection of four short plays that SpeakEasy Stage Company is presenting at the Boston Center for the Arts. Once they’ve all landed, you may be left wondering whether they actually add up to much, but while they’re in the air it’s hard to do anything but laugh.

“Make remarks, not war,” declares one of Rudnick’s characters, the flauntingly flamboyant Mr. Charles. The slogan could easily decorate a banner above any of Rudnick’s outlandish but decidedly unmilitant vignettes, from Mr. Charles’s own cable-access show in Palm Beach, where he’s been banished from New York for being “too gay,” to the opening monologue by one Helene Nadler of Massapequa, Long Island, mother of three gay children.

In Helene’s case, there is an actual banner over the stage, and it reads “P.L.G.B.T.Q.C.C.C. & O.” As Helene soon informs us, this stands for “Parents of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, the Transgendered, the Questioning, the Curious, the Creatively Concerned, and Others,” and Helene is here to show us that she is the most accepting, most loving, most liberal-minded mother of all time.

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