Conservatives reject funding for Montreal gay festival
A gay and lesbian arts festival that was told it met all government criteria under a new tourism stimulus program learned Tuesday it was rejected for funding.
The news arrived at Montreal’s Divers-Cite a few weeks after tension swept the Conservative caucus over funding for Toronto’s Pride week, and just days before the beginning of the event.
The directors of Montreal’s Divers-Cite had actually sprung to the defence of Stephen Harper’s government earlier this month, telling The Canadian Press that the Conservatives had never treated them differently. Some in the gay community attacked them for their comments.
They had submitted a bid under the new Marquee Tourism Events Program for $155,000 to add performers and promotion to this year’s $2-million event.
Government relations and marketing director Paul Girard said bureaucrats handling his file at Industry Canada told him his application met all the criteria, and had been sent up to Minister Tony Clement’s office for final approval.
When he phoned to check on the bid Tuesday, Mr. Girard says he was told by a senior bureaucrat that the $100-million program had received so many requests, the government simply had to make a choice.
“We knew that anybody that was to be refused and didn’t meet the criteria got a quick No,” Mr. Girard said. “As time advanced, we became more and more confident.”
Paul’s sister Suzanne, the festival’s director, says the organization was completely shocked by the response. Divers-Cite has received funding from Economic Development Canada for several years, as well as Canadian Heritage.
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Globe and Mail
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Aids: Role of Gay Men in Spreading Virus Is Ignored in Africa, Study Finds
The role of gay sex in the transmission of the virus that causes AIDS in Africa has been long ignored, say the authors of a new study in the medical journal Lancet.
While most transmission of the virus in Africa is heterosexual, 19 recent studies of African men who have sex with men show that they have “considerably higher” infection rates than other adult men in their respective countries, said the authors, who were from Oxford University and research institutions in Ghana and Kenya.
These men also have less access to prevention and care; most African countries have allocated no money to gay men, and homosexual sex is illegal in 31 African countries, in four of which men risk the death penalty.
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Forced into closet by nation they serve
Wednesday in Annapolis, the United States Naval Academy welcomed the most racially and ethnically diverse class in its history: 14 percent Hispanic, 10 percent African-American – and perhaps 2 percent to 3 percent homosexual. I added that last part. No one knows how many plebes are gay or lesbian, but studies have placed the percentage of homosexual men and women serving this nation’s military in that range, with some 65,000 said to be on active duty. It’s a fairly safe assumption that a small percentage of plebes will have to keep their sexuality a secret if they want to graduate from the academy and, after that, fulfill their obligations to the country.
That’s what “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” demands.
It forces men and women serving the nation to lie about their sexual orientation or risk discharge. An estimated 13,000 men and women have been discharged under Don’t Ask in the 16 years since the law took effect. The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network says 277 of the discharges have occurred since Barack Obama became president. As a candidate, Mr. Obama pledged to end Don’t Ask. Last week, the he reiterated his support for eventual repeal of the law by Congress.
Skip Muller was a midshipman at the Naval Academy at the start of the Don’t Ask era. Prior to entering the academy, he had studied Russian at the Defense Language Institute in California.
“As an 18-year-old I struggled to understand my own sexuality, while all around me I saw people actively targeted, investigated and ejected from the military because they were homosexual,” Mr. Mullen writes on the Web site of USNAOut, an organization of gay Naval Academy alumni. “I forced myself to date women and live the lie that consumed and exhausted me for years to come.”
After graduating from the academy in 1996, Mr. Muller served two tours aboard destroyers, the second cut short by honorable discharge under Don’t Ask. See
Forced into closet by nation they serve
Baltimore Sun -
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Congressional Race in California Draws a High-Profile Cast
WALNUT CREEK, Calif. — With competitive races in Congress a rarity in California, the unexpected availability of a seat here has set off a sudden and furious chase, with at least a dozen candidates and a mélange of political styles and personal storylines.
California’s 10th Congressional District, a sprawling inkblot made up of a collection of suburbs east of San Francisco, has been represented since 1997 by Ellen O. Tauscher, a Democrat who resigned after being confirmed on June 25 to a top post in the State Department.
The field to succeed her includes the lieutenant governor, two state lawmakers, a decorated Iraqi war veteran who is openly gay and a former newspaper reporter. And that does not even include the Republican candidates in this Democratic-leaning district.
The crush of hopefuls, said Henry Brady, a professor and dean of the public policy school at University of California, Berkeley, might stem in part from the diversity of the district, which extends from the liberal Bay Area to more conservative territory inland.
“These seats don’t come available very much, and the reason is very simple: geography,” Dr. Brady said. “The Democrats are primarily on the coast, and the Republicans are in the Central Valley and the mountains, so it’s very hard to build a competitive district. But this has the potential to be one.”
The lieutenant governor, John Garamendi, is considered the early favorite to replace Ms. Tauscher. Mr. Garamendi, a Democrat who had considered running for governor next year, said he opted instead for Congress in large part because of the abbreviated campaign. A primary, followed by a special election, to complete Ms. Tauscher’s term must be held within 126 days of the governor setting the date. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger issued a proclamation Friday declaring Nov. 3 the date for the special election.
“I thought, How am I going to spend two valuable years of my life?” said Mr. Garamendi, 64, who previously served as the deputy secretary of interior in the Clinton administration as well as the California’s first elected insurance commissioner. “Am I going spend two years dialing for dollars, or am I going to spend four months out ringing doorbells and campaigning person to person and the other 20 months working on issues?”
Mr. Garamendi’s principal challengers among the Democrats, some polls show, are State Senator Mark James DeSaulnier and Assemblywoman Joan Buchanan. Both were elected to their current posts last fall.
Mr. DeSaulnier, 57, is a former mayor, city councilman and assemblyman, who says his career comes in spite a devastating personal experience with politics: a scandal involving his father, Judge Edward J. DeSaulnier Jr., who was removed from the bench of the Massachusetts Superior Court and disbarred in 1972 after being accused of rigging a sentence for the Mafia. The older Mr. DeSaulnier was never charged with a crime but was disgraced nonetheless and committed suicide in 1989.
“I’ve been very affected by my father’s journey,” said Mr. DeSaulnier, who worked as a restaurateur before running for office. “And I’ve loved my public life.”
The rest of the Democratic field is not as well known, though one candidate has attracted some national attention: Anthony Woods, a 28-year-old graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and a veteran of the Iraq war who was awarded the Bronze Star for two tours of duty. Shortly after his return from combat, while at Harvard working toward his master’s degree, Captain Woods told military superiors that he is gay, resulting in an honorable discharge.
While considered a long shot for the Congressional seat, Mr. Woods would be the first openly gay black man in Congress, though he has been careful on the campaign trail to trumpet more than his sexuality.
“The first thing I talk to voters about is their priorities, universal health care and economic security,” he said. “I’m not hiding who I am, but they’re just as interested in talking about the issues as I am.”
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New York Times
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Human Rights Campaign Statement on Death of San Diego Area Sailor
The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) civil rights organization, released a statement today in the death of Seaman August Provost, 29, at Camp Pendleton in San Diego, CA. According to local media reports, the Navy and Marine Corps confirmed that a sailor’s body was found on the base at about 3 a.m. Tuesday morning. A military spokesperson confirmed that there was evidence of foul play in the killing and that the case is a murder investigation. It is also understood a “person of interest” is in custody at Camp Pendleton but has not been charged with a crime. Local activists report the victim may have been targeted because of his sexual orientation.
“Our thoughts are with the Provost family at this time as authorities work to learn what happened in the early morning hours this past Tuesday,” said Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese. “The Human Rights Campaign has confirmed Congresswoman Susan Davis has been in touch with officials at the base and is tracking the investigation. We know that every day members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community are targeted for simply being who they are. Furthermore, our gay or lesbian soldiers struggle with the extra burden of not serving openly and honestly based on the discriminatory policy of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’ As we monitor the investigation, our community must continue to raise awareness on a law that we know hurts military readiness and national security while putting American soldiers at risk.”
The Human Rights Campaign is America’s largest civil rights organization working to achieve lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality. By inspiring and engaging all Americans, HRC strives to end discrimination against LGBT citizens and realize a nation that achieves fundamental fairness and equality for all.
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Gays Step Up Efforts to Reverse Gay-as-Godless Stereotype
A groundbreaking survey about the faith lives of gay Americans that the Barna Group put out last week got surprisingly little attention. In my latest God & Country column for U.S. News Weekly, I tied the Barna survey’s fascinating portrait of gay religious life to the gay rights movement’s recent efforts to ratchet up outreach and messaging. Much of the work is aimed at reversing the gay-as-Godless stereotype.
Here’s the top:
Though he was raised in the United Methodist Church, Harry Knox knew he couldn’t become a minister in his denomination because it doesn’t ordain openly gay members. He enrolled in a seminary of the more liberal United Church of Christ but was eventually denied ordination anyway. “My whole career as an activist is an accidental ministry,” says Knox, 48, who now works at the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay rights group. “I would rather be a local pastor.”
Instead, since 2005, Knox has built HRC’s “religion and faith program,” which works to combat the stereotype of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community as antireligious. “For far too long, LGBT organizations did not put religious allies at the forefront of our efforts,” Knox says. “That’s a mistake we’re making less often now.”
Those religious allies may be more plentiful than most Americans think. A Barna Group survey out last week shows that most gay Americans lead pretty robust faith lives. While 72 percent of straight American adults describe their faith as “very important” in their lives, so do 60 percent of gays and lesbians. Almost as many, 58 percent, say they’ve made a personal and ongoing commitment to Jesus Christ.
And though they are much less likely than straights to share the beliefs of born-again Christians—which comes as no surprise, since most churches in the born-again tradition condemn homosexuality—the Barna survey found that 27 percent of gays do hold those beliefs. “Many in the Christian community assume there’s this significant gap between heterosexuals and homosexuals in terms of faith beliefs and activities,” says George Barna, the country’s top pollster on religious issues, who supervised the survey. “While there are statistically significant differences, it’s the narrow size of the gap that’s most surprising.”
The poll unleashed a torrent of hate mail, mostly from believers furious with Barna’s conclusion: that many gays are Bible-believing Christians. But more and more gay rights organizations are joining HRC in stepping up efforts to highlight the faith beliefs of many gay Americans, largely through religious outreach programs. And some religious traditions and denominations are taking steps to welcome gay and lesbian members.
Gay rights activists say that the 2004 election, when voters in 11 states passed gay marriage bans that were heavily promoted through churches, was a wake-up call. To help counter the image of the gay marriage battle as a fight between gays and religious Americans, HRC, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and other national gay rights groups quickly hired religious outreach staff.
Read the full story here.
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U.S. News & World Report
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Gates Plan May Be Beginning of the End of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — In the wake of yesterday’s unexpected Pentagon announcement about gays in the military, experts say the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy may be on the brink of irreversible change that would speed up its demise. After speaking with President Obama last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has asked military lawyers to explore how to modify enforcement of the policy in ways that are “more flexible until the law is changed.” The President Monday reiterated his intention to end discrimination against gay troops, saying he is working with Congress and the military to do so.
Christopher Neff, political director of the Palm Center, said the remarks by Secretary Gates marked the first time the Defense Secretary has made clear that the Pentagon is onboard with the President’s determination to lift the ban. “‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ is a package — both a law and a policy — that hasn’t been penetrated for fifteen years,” Neff said. “This is a crack in humpty dumpty, and it gets the ball rolling for a political solution since it gives cover to lawmakers who have been waiting for a nod from the Pentagon.”
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Study: Gays not ‘godless Christian bashers’
This breaking news in from The Barna Group — a chronicler of religious life and habits, particularly of the Christian variety: Gay folks’ attitudes about spirituality aren’t much different from straight folks. These and other “surprising insights” were in Barna’s spiritual profile of gays released Monday. In it was a bit of a political heeding for gay-bashers:
“People who portray gay adults as godless, hedonistic, Christian bashers are not working with the facts,” wrote George Barna Monday. “A substantial majority of gays cite their faith as a central facet of their life, consider themselves to be Christian, and claim to have some type of meaningful personal commitment to Jesus Christ active in their life today.”
“It is interesting to see that most homosexuals, who have some history within the Christian Church, have rejected orthodox biblical teachings and principles — but, in many cases, to nearly the same degree that the heterosexual Christian population has rejected those same teachings and principles,” Barna said. “Although there are clearly some substantial differences in the religious beliefs and practices of the straight and gay populations, there may be less of a spiritual gap between straights and gays than many Americans would assume.”
Now there will be some quibbling with a couple of Barna’s assumptions. Like how Barna pegs the LGBT population at about 3 percent of the adult population. No, he doesn’t believe in the 1-in-10 stat, but then again, LGBT population scholar Gary Gates says it’s more like 5 percent, depending how you count.
That aside, the Barnanians found that “out of the 20 faith-oriented attributes examined in the Barna study, there were just a few in which there were no significant differences between the heterosexual and homosexual populations.”
Hmm. “No significant differences between the heterosexual and homosexual”(s)? Does Donald Wildmon know about this?
One big diff, according to the study: “While seven out of every ten heterosexuals (71 percent) have an orthodox, biblical perception of God, just 43 percent of homosexuals do. In fact, an equal percentage possesses a pantheistic view about deity — i.e., that ‘God’ refers to any of a variety of perspectives, such as personally achieving a state of higher consciousness or maximized personal potential, or that there are multiple gods that exist, or even that everyone is god.”
Another diff: “Heterosexuals were twice as likely as homosexuals to strongly agree that the Bible is totally accurate in all of the principles it teaches.”
And in the timeliness is next to godliness (OK, and cleanliness) dept: On Monday a crew of organizations supporting same sex marriage are launching their Get Engaged Tour of California — a pump-priming tour of the state in advance of an expected 2010 ballot measure campaign expected later this year. We told you about it a while back. Faith leaders will be prominently featured on this tour, as opposed to last year’s anti-Proposition 8 campaign, when they were largely invisible.
“Our faith-based values require us to love our neighbor as ourselves,” said Pastor Samuel Chu, of California Faith for Equality. “Gay and lesbian people are our neighbors and they should be able to enjoy the dignity, respect and commitment that come with marriage.”
| June 22 2009 at 12:25 PM
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National Gay and Lesbian Task Force applauds Census Bureau’s plan to count married same-sex couples
Task Force staffers have been meeting with officials from the White House, Census Bureau and Commerce Department to press for this policy reversal
WASHINGTON, June 20 -The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force applauds reports that the U.S. Census Bureau will count married same-sex couples in the 2010 census, reversing an earlier decision made under the Bush administration. Previously, same-sex couples only had the option of checking off ‘unmarried partner,’ which will remain an option. The Task Force has played a leading role in getting the Census Bureau to change course. Task Force staffers have been pressing for a reversal of the discriminatory policy in meetings that started in late 2008 with the Obama transition team, continuing later with officials from the White House, Census Bureau and Commerce Department.
tatement by Rea Carey, Executive Director National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
“This is a huge win for our community. Our community and allies stood up and refused to allow same-sex marriages, our
families and our children to be rendered invisible in the picture of our country provided through the census.
“After months and months of pressure through the grassroots campaign we waged and our in-person meetings with administration officials, the U.S. Census Bureau has reversed policy and will be accurately counting the thousands of same-sex couples who have worked so hard to have their love and commitment recognized.
“This gives us hope that we will also be able to get the federal government to include lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the data and reporting on other critical issues, including those having to do with our health, economic issues, safety and life circumstances. As a married person myself, I look forward to filling out the census form, knowing that my family will be counted accurately.
“We would like to thank Gary Gates of the Williams Institute for his years of work and for partnering with us to educate the administration on this critical issue of visibility for our community.”
The Task Force’s work leading to this victory
The Task Force has been working for months to secure a reversal of the discriminatory policy.
* Task Force staff met with Obama transition team members to educate them about this critical issue, and to provide concrete ways for them to make this change.
* Task Force staffers, including Executive Director Rea Carey and Policy Institute Director Jaime Grant, have been pressing for a policy change in meetings that started in late 2008 with the Obama transition team, continuing later with officials from the White House, Census Bureau and Commerce Department.
* In February, the Task Force Policy Institute convened 20 leading lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights organizations to meet with top census outreach officials. In this meeting, the groups collectively refused to engage in community outreach on the census until the anti-marriage policy was reversed.
* The Task Force partnered with the Williams Institute to provide officials from the White House, Census Bureau and Commerce Department with research essential to making this change.
* The Task Force undertook a major grassroots campaign to both educate the public on this issue and to apply pressure to the administration.
* The Task Force worked with key elected officials to provide them with
information so they could write letters to Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and
the incoming director of the Census Bureau to advocate for change.
* The Task Force is part of a coalition of researchers and advocates
crafting a community education campaign to launch following the change of
policy.
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Marriage fight looms IN mAINE
Opponents and supporters of gay marriage are laying the groundwork for a tough summer political campaign that experts say will put Maine in the national spotlight.
Organizers of an effort to overturn a new law legalizing same-sex marriage in Maine have hired the California public relations firm that ran the successful Proposition 8 campaign that overturned same-sex marriage there.
And supporters of same-sex marriage, who oppose the people’s veto effort, have hired a seasoned Maine political strategist who ran the successful Maine Won’t Discriminate campaign in 2005. That campaign fought a people’s veto of Maine’s gay rights law.
Maine became the fifth state to legalize gay marriage in May, when the Legislature passed a bill and Gov. John Baldacci signed it into law. Opponents, led by the Catholic church and other clergy, immediately began the campaign for a people’s veto, which would ask voters to overturn the law.
Organizers of the people’s veto are attempting to collect 55,087 signatures of registered Maine voters to put the question on the ballot. The same-sex marriage law would take effect 90 days after the Legislature’s June 13 adjournment. But if the veto effort collects enough signatures before then, the law’s implementation would be stayed.
At least five political action committees have been formed to help raise funds to support the people’s veto effort. Two have been formed to oppose a people’s veto.
According to the latest filings with the state Ethics Commission, most haven’t raised money. But one, StandForMarriageMaine.com, has raised $60,000 from the National Organization for Marriage. The next filing deadline is July 15.
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