Order: Gay partnership foe names don’t have to be released
The names of people who signed petitions seeking to overturn Washington’s “everything but marriage” same-sex domestic partner law won’t be released publicly following a federal judge’s temporary restraining order.
Sponsors of Referendum 71 went to U.S. District Court in Tacoma Wednesday seeking the order. U.S. District Judge Benjamin Settle has set a full hearing on the matter for Sept. 3.
The names of everyone who signed Referendum-71 petitions are publicly available under open-government laws. A gay-rights group says it wants to post all the names online. But the R-71 campaign says that could lead to harassment.
Nick Handy, state elections director, said in a statement: “Referendum petitions become public records under the law once they have been turned over to us by sponsors. Our consistent practice has been to make these available upon public request. By early next week we will be in a position to make these available, and absent a court order, our intent has been to respond to public records requests in a timely way.”
Backers of R-71 turned in about 138,000 signatures Saturday. They need 120,577 valid voter signatures to qualify for the fall ballot.
Election officials suggest submitting about 150,000 signatures to offset any invalid signatures. Dave Ammons, spokesman for the secretary of state’s office, said usually about 18 percent of signatures checked turn out to be invalid.
The process of counting and verifying the signatures could go until the last week of August.
IT was a perfect party — vodka lemonade on a dock overlooking a lake, dozens of close friends, a cool misty night in the country a couple of hours north of New York.
Inside, the house spoke of a passionate interest in style, and of a committed relationship. Silhouettes of the couple who owned the house hung on a wall in the master bedroom; the couple’s nickname — Benford — was spelled out in large letters leaning against a wall in the kitchen.
But the couple, Benjamin Dixon, 31, and Bradford Shellhammer, 33, who had planned the evening as a commitment ceremony, had broken up three months earlier. Still, with airplane tickets purchased by some of the guests, a catering deposit paid and a house they haven’t been able to sell, they figured it made sense to go ahead and have a party anyway.
Their tale of lost love has a familiar arc — love sparks, then blooms; lives intertwine; moments are lost and misunderstandings creep in; eventually the two begin to live as strangers — and an epilogue that has become increasingly familiar as well, as unwanted houses become prisons rather than cocoons.
Rather than being a glossy testament to their taste and their partnership, their house in Stanfordville, in Dutchess County, is now a dead weight that entangles them and makes it impossible to move on. Having bought it and an apartment in Manhattan at the height of the real estate boom (and having made an agreement with a third partner in their lake house property not to sell it until December 2009), they are left with joint custody of two large mortgages. They are also left with two carefully decorated homes filled with one-of-a-kind accessories found on eBay and quirky furnishings by high-end designers like the Dutch collective Droog that are reminders of what came before and, Mr. Dixon said, “big reminders of what was supposed to be.”
Harry Potter himself, newly 20 year old Daniel Radcliffe graces the August 2009 cover of Attitude Magazine, the UK’s biggest gay magazine. Aside from lending his magical good looks to the cover, Daniel sat down for an interview, where he talked a lot of politics with the mag.
He said that he’s not a fan of the Conservative or New Labour parties. At only 20 years old, Daniel is not yet old enough to vote, but says that next year he will cast his ballot for Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrat party. On voting turnout, he said: see Daniel Radcliffe Attitude Magazine
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.
Wellington – A Hungarian tourist killed a 69-year-old gay man he met in a bar by beating him with a banjo and ramming the handle down his throat, police alleged when his murder trial opened in Auckland on Monday.
Ferdinand Ambach, 32, a dive master, pleaded not guilty in the Auckland High Court to murdering Ronald James Brown in December 2007.
Prosecutor Nick Williams told the court that Ambach had been in New Zealand a month when the pair met in a bar before going back to Brown’s flat in the Auckland suburb of Onehunga, the New Zealand Herald reported on its website.
A gay marriage poll released by the L.A. Times reveals that a yawning racial chasm exists over the issue. Pollsters found that a substantial majority in a sampling of 1,500 registered voters in Los Angeles — 56 percent — favored legalizing same-sex marriage, while only 37 percent opposed it. However, after parsing the demographics, vivid ethnic demarcations emerge. (See L.A. Weekly reporter Patrick Range McDonald’s extensive coverage of the growing outreach by pro-gay-marriage advocates into both the ethnic and agrarian communities of California.)
Caucasian voters favor legalization by a huge 68 percent margin, with 27 percent opposing it. The breakdown among African Americans is substantially, if not quite completely, reversed: 54 percent oppose gay marriage, with 37 percent supporting it. (Conflicting points of views in the local African American community have been glimpsed on the L.A. Sentinel‘s opinion page, with lesbian commentator Jasmyne A. Cannick for gay marriage and conservative columnist Firpo Carr condemning it.)
Meanwhile, the Times reports that Latinos are evenly split, with 45 percent supporting and 46 opposing same-sex weddings. It is the swing Latino electorate that advocates on both sides will seek to win over in an anticipated 2010 ballot rematch of Proposition 8. See
A Canadian filmaker has made a movie for Gay Pride Week featuring football players getting waterboarded with rainbow-colored underwear covering their noses and mouths, Towleroad reports. The movie is called “No Safe Words,” a reference to S & M culture, and director Noam Gonick said he intended to make a political point by using the waterboarding imagery. Canadian gay lesbian news source xtra.ca spoke to Gonick about the film: The military, says Gonick, “uses homoerotic, aggressive acts to harm victims and act as a contagion to society in general.” And, he says, it turns us on. “Conquest is not only about territory, or oil, or puppet dictatorships,” he says. “It’s sexual, too.” Gonick says the film is supposed to draw an analogy to the “conformity” of the gay community. “It’s about us and who we’ve become,” he says. “We’re willing to do anything to get the approval of the state.” Watch a clip from the film: @ Football Team Waterboarded To Make “Political Point” In Gay Pride Film
The expansion of legal gay marriage across New England could deliver an economic windfall by attracting a youthful “creative class” of workers to a region with an aging population. In the past year, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine have joined Massachusetts, which in 2004 became the first U.S. state to allow same-sex weddings, in blessing gay and lesbian weddings. That makes the region the first in the United States where same-sex couples can move from one state to another while retaining marriage benefits. New arrivals include John Visser and Nick Keffer, who recently moved to Hartford, Connecticut, from Raleigh, North Carolina. They plan to wed later this month. “The sole, only reason why we moved was because it was now legal for us to get married here,” said Visser, 42. “No other reason whatsoever other than marriage equality. We were perfectly happy in North Carolina.” New England has long burnished an image of tolerance. Early European settlers in the 17th-century escaped religious persecution, although they imposed their own stern doctrines and sometimes expelled dissenters. Later, the region led the right for the abolition of black slavery. Five out of the region’s six states now endorse gay weddings after New Hampshire legalized same-sex marriage on Wednesday, leaving Rhode Island as the sole holdout. The spread of gay marriage could serve as a recruiting tool for universities, health care companies and financial services firms that dominate the region’s economy, experts said. “It will be a selling point when it comes to trying to lure people with same-sex partners who are being wooed for a job,” said M.V. Lee Badgett, a University of Massachusetts economist See New England economy could see gay-marriage boost Reuters
It wasn’t until she was 16 years old, when she’d left her Pashtun family in Peshawar for an elite school where the teachers were nuns, that Minot realized she was gay.
“I found out when I dated my literature teacher [a nun],” she said. “I got an A.”
It is virtually unheard of in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan for a lesbian to be willing to discuss her sexuality openly, especially a lesbian who is also Pashtun. The Taliban, who are overwhelmingly Pashtun and were born in Pakistan’s northwest tribal areas near Peshawar, have pushed walls of bricks on top of gay Afghans.
But Minot, now 42, who asked that only her nickname be used because of societal stigma, sat recently in jeans and a T-shirt in the Pakistani city of Lahore, confidently talking about her sexuality, her girlfriends and her attempts to be with men.
“I have been with men, two men,” she said. “But that was to get the confusion out of my mind. Since then,” she said, pausing, “happy and gay.”
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.
