Film documents Mormon role in gay marriage debate

(Salt Lake City) Reed Cowan’s reasons for making a film about the Mormon church’s activism against gay marriage in California are personal.

Himself gay and Mormon, Cowan clashed with his family over his sexual orientation and the beliefs of their faith, but it was a conversation between him and a sibling …

Behind the news: A new Mormon stand on gays?

It looked like a stunning reversal: the same church that helped defeat gay marriage in California standing with gay-rights activists on an anti-discrimination law in its own backyard.

On Tuesday night, after a series of clandestine meetings between local gay-rights backers and Mormons in Salt Lake City, the Church of Jesus …

Gay marriage fight, `kiss-ins’ smack Mormon image

(Salt Lake City) The Mormon church’s vigorous, well-heeled support for Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in California last year, has turned the Utah-based faith into a lightning rod for gay rights activism, including a nationwide “kiss-in” Saturday.

The event comes after gay couples here and in San Antonio and El …

SF City Attorney ready to lend a hand in federal gay marriage case

Dennis Herrera, San Francisco’s City Attorney petitioned a U.S. District Court Judge Thursday to allow San Francisco to intervene as a party plaintiff in a constitutional challenge to Proposition 8, the voter-approved amendment that bans gay marriage in California. The federal lawsuit was filed in May on behalf of two California couples. San Francisco lead the legal battle that resulted in the May 2008 ruling in favor of gay marriage that was later overruled by Prop 8. “We are long overdue to put anti-gay discrimination on trial based on the facts,” said Herrera in a statement. “The San Francisco City Attorney’s Office has the experience and expertise to aggressively assist in doing precisely that.”See City Attorney ready to lend a hand in federal gay marriage case The San Francisco Examiner

* Tags = gay men gay news lesbian news transgender bisexual

Published by

Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/07/sf-city-attor…

California gay marriage fight goes to Chinatown

The path to gay marriage in California may start in Chinatown.

After a double defeat at the voting booth and in court, gay advocates are reassessing their plans to push for legal same-sex marriage in the most populous U.S. state.

The new drive, focused on getting the issue on the ballot again as soon as November 2010, is more personal and reaches farther beyond the liberal confines of San Francisco’s Castro or Los Angeles’ gay heartland West Hollywood.

Lost in the 2009 election wreckage for gays was the marriage campaign’s relative success in Asian communities, which have swung toward support of same-sex marriage at a faster rate than the rest of California and have become a model for other groups.

Asian Americans have been building grass-roots support in Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Filipinotown for four years. Gays, lesbians and straight allies have talked about the often-taboo topic of homosexuality, set up booths at festivals, harangued non-English language media to change coverage and lobbied elected officials for support.

“What we felt we had to do is talk to people who aren’t on our side. So that’s why we do these crazy things like walk through the streets of Chinatown as part of the New Year’s Parade. That’s why we go out to festivals from Little India to Little Tokyo and talk to complete strangers,” said Marshall Wong, co-chair of Asia Pacific Islander group API Equality.

See

California gay marriage fight goes to Chinatown

Reuters

* Tags = gay men gay news lesbian news transgender bisexual

Published by

Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/06/california-ga…

Pete Wentz and Ashlee Simpson tape their mouths to defend gay marriage

Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz and his wife Ashlee Simpson-Wentz have posed for a portrait for California’s NOH8 campaign, which seeks to overturn the state’s ban on gay marriage.

In the portrait, Ashlee holds a wedding veil and the couple appear with duct tape over their mouths to symbolize the silencing of the gay community’s voices on the matter.

The couple have been outspoken supporters of overturning Proposition 8, which bans gay marriage in California. They also took part in a protest in Hollywood last month when the California Supreme Court upheld the ban on same-sex marriage. See Pete Wentz and Ashlee Simpson tape their mouths to defend gay marriage

NME.com

* Tags = gay men gay news lesbian news transgender bisexual

Published by

Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/06/pete-wentz-an…

Gay Marriage in California

To the Editor:

Re “Ruling Upholds California’s Ban on Gay Marriage” (front page, May 27):

How distressing to hear that Proposition 8 was upheld in California! For years, I have been asking what the downside of gay marriage is, and I have yet to hear a logical response.

Most often I hear that marriage between same-sex couples demeans or destroys the sanctity of marriage and/or family. I wonder, then, why we don’t ban divorce or unhappy marriages! It seems to me that a loving marriage between any two people does more to endorse and protect the sanctity of marriage than a joyless opposite-sex marriage.

There is no downside to a love-filled union. Gay or straight, marriage should be celebrated, not banned.

Laure Dunne
Norwalk, Conn., May 27, 2009 See Gay Marriage in California New York Times * Tags = gay men gay news lesbian news transgender bisexual

Published by

Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/05/gay-marriage-…

Video: The Defensers

We shot this short film to protest the passage of Prop 8, the ban on gay marriage in California. It was amazing how many people volunteered their time to help out with it. There’s more info up on the “Educate Against Prop 8″ facebook site:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Educate…

Written and Directed by Keith Hartman
Produced by: John Carrozza, Keith Hartman, Doug Prinzivalli
Assistant Director: Blake Edward Frahm
DP: Aaron Torres
Editor: Mike Justice

See * Tags = gay men gay news lesbian news transgender bisexual

Published by

Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/05/video-defense…

Global video mashup for International Day Against Homophobia & Transphobia 2009 hits the Internet

359 people from 48 countries take part in massive global web video project to mark the IDAHO 2009

A global project to create a public awareness video for the International Day Against Homophobia & Transphobia (IDAHO) on May 17 has attracted the participation of 359 people from 48 countries across six continents around the world. The groundbreaking project is a joint undertaking of the Paris-based IDAHO Committee and the social network Gays.com, attracting 50,000 people to its website within a month.

Said Louis-Georges Tin, founder of the IDAHO committee, “We are overwhelmed and, at the same time, humbled by this torrent of enthusiastic support that has poured in from all four corners of the world since we kickstarted the video project in April. People have made the effort to go to such places as the Statue of Liberty, the Great Wall of China, the Sydney Opera House, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Merlion, the Petronas Twin Towers and the Eiffel Tower to shoot their video, contributing to the spectacular visual feast you see in the mashup.”

In April, members of the global LGBT community were invited to step out in front of the camera and in their own language introduce themselves, state where they are from and how proud they are to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. The result is a video that sends the powerful message that LGBT individuals are present in every country, every society and every corner of the world. Participants submitted videos in all of the world’s key languages, including Afrikaans, Arabic, Cantonese, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Tamil and even American Sign Language.

In addition to the groundswell of support from local communities from around the globe, renowned celebrities, activists, politicians and web personalities have also participated in the project. These include (in alphabetical order):

Ali Hili: Gay Iraqi activist now living in exile in London and founder of the Iraqi-LGBT group
ANT: Host of VH1 reality series Celebrity Fit Club and U.S. of ANT on MTV’s LOGO channel
Lizzy the Lezzy: Animated lesbian standup comedy character with a cult following on Youtube
Michael Buckley: Celebrity host of the entertainment show What the Buck, the 5th most subscribed comedy channel of all time on Youtube
Michael Kauch: German member of parliament and coordinator of the gay and lesbian policy for the Free Democratic Party
Stephen Williams: British Liberal Democrat member of parliament for Bristol West

Said Kenneth Tan, spokesperson for Gays.com, “Much has been said about Stonewall 2.0 and netroots activism since the Proposition 8 vote against gay marriage in California. This project was made possible only by the Internet, and we believe there are a limitless number of opportunities for the LGBT community to harness the power of the Internet to educate, raise awareness, promote equality, and to debunk myths. We have been honoured to partner with the IDAHO Committee in the execution of such an amazing project.”

Prior to the launch of the video, Gays.com announced that it experienced a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack which began at approximately 3.50am Hong Kong time on May 15, 2009, causing the entire website to be inaccessible.

A distributed denial of service attack occurs when a multitude of systems attempt to flood the bandwidth or resources of a targeted system with illegitimate website requests. The flood of traffic by these requests cause the Internet bandwidth of the attacked site to be consumed to such an extent that the website is inaccessible to other legitimate users.

Said Kenneth Tan, Gays.com spokesperson, “The timing of this DDoS attack on Gays.com is by no means a coincidence. We have been working for weeks on this high profile video campaign together with the Committee for the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia. The final product of this campaign, a public awareness video, was going to be launched on the campaign site at http://gays.com/idaho on Sunday. This is a well-timed, well-orchestrated assault by a large botnet with tens of thousands of PCs sending requests to our site. Engineers with our Internet Service Provider remarked they have never seen an attack of this intensity before. We deplore these unscrupulous actions by an organised group to harrass, intimidate and silence us for what we are doing.”

Added Tan, “Our technical staff are now working round the clock to restore services to legitimate users. In the meanwhile, we are going through our access logs, gathering information through various mechanisms and connecting the dots to identify the origin of the attacks. We will be working with law enforcement officials to bring the cyberterrorists to justice.”

The video “IDAHO 2009: One Voice, One Message, Heard Around the World” is now accessible at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2Rp8ep_ezE

The Committee for the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHO) is a network of activists, present in over 50 countries, who seek to promote the idea of an international day against homophobia and transphobia. This day has been recognized officially by a number of governments around the world and provides an opportunity for the LGBT movement across the world to unite in a powerful demonstration of collective visibility.

Gays.com was designed for members of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community as the world’s first LGBT social networking website that designed for real people with real names an real world connections. The site aims to build an authentic social environment that helps people maintain their relationships with people they actually know. Launched in May 2008, Gays.com is headquartered in Hong Kong with a development team spread between Shanghai, China and Bielefeld, Germany.

Tags = gay men gay news lesbian news transgender bisexual

Published by

Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/05/global-video-…

Gay marriage supporters vow to file second complaint over Mormon …

The money war over Proposition 8 shows no signs of letting up.

Opponents of the measure, which banned gay marriage in California, said today that they plan to file a second complaint with the state alleging the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints deliberately did not disclose its financial contributions to the Yes on 8 campaign.

Californians Against Hate already filed one complaint with the California Fair Political Practices Commission, sparking an ongoing investigation of whether the church violated campaign finance laws. The church has repeatedly said it did not violate any rules and was not trying to hide how much the church gave.

Records released last month show the church donated about $198,000 to the Yes on 8 case.

“I’m calling this Mormongate,” Fred Karger, founder of Californians Against Hate, told the Associated Press. “I think there’s been a massive coverup.”

See Gay marriage supporters vow to file second complaint over Mormon …

Los Angeles Times – CA,USA