Yet another legal atrocity

Employers can still discriminate against LGBTQ employees. At least some employers can.

We might think this sort of thing was just an historical curiosity -- but not so.

A federal appeals court on Wednesday [May 8] sided with a Catholic high school that fired a gay teacher over his plans to marry his partner, saying that the termination did not violate federal workplace protections for LGBTQ workers.

A three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals said the North Carolina school did not violate Lonnie Billard’s rights under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a federal anti-workplace discrimination law that protects against race, sex and religious discrimination.

Two members of the panel held that Billard “played a vital role as a messenger” of Charlotte Catholic High School’s faith values and said as a result, his firing was permissible under the “ministerial exception to Title VII.”

That is, a drama teacher at a school run by a religious institution has to follow and promote its line, whatever that line is. Religion trumps the full citizenship of a guy who just wanted to share the news of who he loved.

A couple of thoughts: 

1) Those artsy types are always the subversives. 

2) All of us need to be aware that our "rights" exist at the sufferance of federal judges.

After the Supreme Court decision voiding women's right to abortion, we should all know the second point.

A San Francisco treat

Tom Ammiano has given us a memoir -- titled, of course, Kiss My Gay Ass. It's perfectly wonderful; you should read it; and as far as I can figure out, the only way to obtain a copy is through that link.

Ammiano is the flaming queen who carried assassinated Supervisor Harvey Milk's gay liberation cause right up through the stuffy auditoriums of the San Francisco School Board (1990-1993), on to the Beaux-Arts corridors of San Francisco City Hall (1994-2008), and finally into the corrupt precincts of the California State Assembly (2008-2014). And never has he retreated from his allegiance to class-conscious equality for people of all races, sexual inclinations, and gender identities.

His own liberation movement put Ammiano on track to storm the halls of power -- but his memoir makes clear that performing stand-up comedy might have been his true love. The quick quip was his defense while growing up in a very hostile world for a gay man -- he writes that he "weaponized it to protect me from bullies." Later he honed his comedy as as school teacher and in comedy clubs. Whatever his credentials, the San Francisco establishment of the 1980s would have recoiled at the prospect of a gay teacher running for school board, but his comedy career was a particular target of scorn from the newspapers.

"... comedy was used against me as a weapon. But I felt like, without really articulating it, there was no reason I could not do both those things: comedy and politics. I really loved comedy. Who wrote the rules that say you have to choose?"

As a legislator, Ammiano assembled a majority of the Supervisors (that legislative body would be a city council if the City were not a county) to pass Healthy San Francisco which extended health coverage to all residents in 2007. He led passage of protections for LGBT+ civil rights in both San Francisco and Sacramento. He fought for legalizing marijuana before that notion was cool. He repeatedly sought to revise California's tax-limiting measure Prop. 13 so that big business had to pay its fair share. (That one is coming back at us this November as Prop. 15.) Ammiano has been there for every progressive effort of his generation.

Gay people of Ammiano's generation, with rare upper class exceptions, never trusted that the policeman was our friend. Calling the cops after a gay bashing might just get the victim bashed again. So when Ammiano won his seat among the city Supervisors who have some say over the police department, he found himself in a contradictory position.

"Ironically, the Police Officers Association had endorsed me in my race for Supervisor! All they asked me about was my support for unions issues and I was strongly pro-union. They didn't ask anything about policing rules or independent investigations of police shootings.

"... There was a lot of shit I had to deal with about the police. A lot of the officers were white cops who didn't live in San Francisco. ... There were a lot of raids of gay bars. They would say "you're overcrowded" as an excuse, shit like that.

"... Soon after I was elected, there were a number of police shootings in the black community. I remember going out to the community and standing and holding hands with black ministers about the shooting of some kid by the police. ... Then the cops raided an AIDS fundraiser. ... When they raided it, the cops covered their name tags so they could beat people, that was common practice.

"... I took fixing the Office of Citizen Complaints up as my cause ..."

For all Ammiano's efforts, although the SFPD may have achieved some hiring "diversity," its union still seems committed to viewing law enforcement as an occupying army restraining uppity dark skinned people and other transgressives. The struggle goes on.

Ammiano thinks of himself as a "lefty." I might substitute "radical" in this summation of what's he's learned about keeping the faith inside the halls of power:

"... It has always been [a] struggle to come from the lefty point of view in any movement. There will always be moderate people. There will always be people who sell out. There will always be people on the fence. Then there will be people who push the envelope because it's more than about just one issue or one thing -- it's about a movement."

Movement makers are precious people. Ammiano is a San Francisco gem.

Full disclosure: yes, he's a friend. A guy like this is a lot of people's friend.

Police as part of LGBTQI celebrations?

This issue is a hardy perennial. Do we save more queer lives by bringing law enforcement along with us or by showing that we reject these racist, homophobic, violent institutions altogether?

San Diego's current Pride organization has come up with a policy statement:

A Path to Healing & Safer Communities

San Diego Pride asks the City of San Diego to stand with us in support of our Black LGBTQ and ally community. We are asking you to join us in support of the following actions as a further step towards unity.

STEP 1: Law enforcement agencies will no longer have contingents in the San Diego Pride Parade or booths in our Pride Festival. This may be reassessed after the completion of Step 4.

STEP 2: The City of San Diego will recognize the San Diego Pride Parade as a free speech event and no longer bill the organization for road closures and safety.

STEP 3: The City of San Diego will immediately adopt the #8CantWait Campaign recommendations [for police reform from Campaign Zero.]

STEP 4: Support a phased approach to policy reform recommendations centering Black LGBTQ San Diegans.

This would not satisfy me if I were a San Diegan, but it sure is a step up from what most Pride committees have chosen to do about police participation in their festivities in the last 30 years or so.

In a survey of LGBTQ resistance to police our parades festivities from June 2019, Black transfolks and gender queers led the opposition.

“Pride began as a protest, and it’s turned into a parade,” said Malkia Devich Cyril, the executive director of MediaJustice and an activist based in Oakland. “I think what’s happening now is simply a return to its roots.”

I first lost a fight about including police without even critique in what I thought was a radical gay/feminist institution in 1982. This will go until we broadly understand that the purpose of police, as constituted in this country, is not "public safety," but repression of Black people, of all people of color, and of anyone who transgresses straight gender norms.

The outrages keep coming

Next to ordering the breakup of hundreds of thousands of Salvadoran families, this may not seem the worst of the Trump/Republican regime's atrocities this week, but I want to note it here.

On Thursday there is supposed to be a Judiciary Committee hearing on the nomination of Howard C. Nielson Jr. to a lifetime appointment as a judge on the United States District Court for the District of Utah.

Who is Howard C. Nielson Jr.?

• Californians may remember him as the lawyer who picked up the defense of Prop. 8., the initiative that outlawed LGBT marriage, after the elected state government declined to represent a measure they thought unconstitutionally discriminatory. Now any of us who look to support the rule of law understand that legal representation ought to be available to any party in a courtroom. But Nielson made it part of his argument that Judge Vaughn Walker, an experienced and acerbic federal judge, who was hearing the case should have been barred because he is gay. His argument: Walker might sometime benefit from the right to get married. Much of the legal world, including the judge, found this mixing of personal identity with the law both offensive and silly. But it certainly fits with Trump's attitude to judges, as when he attacked a Chicago judge for his his Mexican ancestry.

• Nielson also comes from the clutch of Office Legal Council lawyers in the George W. Bush administration who cooked up legally spurious and morally offensive memos of allowing torture in the War on Terror. Jay S. Bybee, the lead torture lawyer, was subsequently put on the bench by GWB; the judiciary doesn't need another of these guys.

The Alliance for Justice is organizing opposition to terrible judicial nominees like Nielson.

Our petulant pseudo-monarch takes on the gay

It seems that the Cheato's tweet that he wants transfolk thrown out of the military heralds a full-court press against LGBT equality.

The Veep has been working the House, trying to outlaw use of funds for medical care for transgender service people. The House actually voted down one effort along these lines, with 24 Republicans joining all the Democrats to kill it. But apparently this one is coming back.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department jumped into a New York State lawsuit to argue that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not protect workers on the basis of their sexual orientation. The particular case may not go well; the injured party has since died, reducing its salience. But there are cogent arguments that may well reveal the absurdity pretending to separate sexual orientation from sex discrimination:

... “it would require considerable calisthenics to remove the ‘sex’ from ‘sexual orientation,’ ” as [a] Chicago court put it.

Consider the example of a gay man who’s fired for displaying a photograph of his husband on his desk. Would the employer fire a woman who featured a picture of her husband? The only difference between the two situations is the sex of the employees.

Still, the generals have pointed out that a tweet is not a legal order and the military should be continue to “treat all personnel with respect.” But if this nest of incompetents in the White House manages to write a legal order, they'll follow orders, of course. Litigation with follow though the courts have been deferential in allowing the military to discriminate against disfavored classes of citizens.

Lots of pundits have suggested that Cheato and the GOPers have rolled out their anti-gay policies this week to try to distract from the shitshow that is Senate healthcare repeal and from the ever widening scandal over Trump's bro-mance with Russia's Putin. The pundits are probably right. What could be more satisfying to the 25 percent of the Republican base who are real haters of human diversity than some hits against the gays?

But I'm willing to bet confidently that this is a desperation play that will backfire on the bigots. When the lens of national sympathy moves from the Midwestern white former industrial worker who fell into opioid abuse to assaults against law abiding gay couples and patriotic service people, Republicans lose every time.

When the culture wars take center stage, the country recoils from intolerance and sheer meanness. As a 70 year old dyke, few are as surprised by this as I am. I remember when we were simply "perverts," "inverts," "pansies," -- certainly not part of the body politic or even common humanity. Those days are over. We're here; we're queer; and we are not going to disappear. And most of our fellow citizens know this. They may wish we were a little less visible and so a little less disconcerting, but they are over contesting our humanity. It's the haters who want to re-stigmatize us who come out looking small.

This is not just bluster. A national election that went sour isn't going to derail our progress toward full citizenship. At the same time that North Carolina voted for Donald Trump in 2016, it replaced a Republican governor whose claim to fame was promoting an anti-trans "bathroom bill." This crap has limits and against all odds, the culture is spitting out the remnants of anti-gay hate. There will be casualties, but LGBT equality is winning. (Now if only the same could be said for the struggles of women to control our bodies and of people of color to be free of state violence ... not mention the women of color who still bear the worst multiple of all this hate.) ***

If the Cheato is going to take on our community, as far as I'm concerned he makes himself fair game for commentary on his own peculiar gender presentation. Look at this guy. I'm sure he thinks he's acting the tough dude, but what I see is a handwaving prissy queen. Check the pursed lips; the dyed hair implants. He's an out-of-shape frightened clown, not the manly man he wishes he were. No wonder he buys bimbos. The Marlboro Man would wipe the floor with this wimp -- if the Marlboro Man hadn't died of the cancer sticks he sold along with machismo. So it goes.

Who'd have thought I'd encounter this?

When I fly on planes, I read and discard outdoor magazines.

The item above appeared without comment in Backpacker, a mainstream example of the genre. They do know their audience. Once upon a (not so happy) time, we were a movement; now we're a recognized market. I can only hope that many of us know we only got here by being mighty assertive for many years. And a lot of people aren't here with us ... yet.

Love can grow larger

Newly elected Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop the Rt. Rev. Michael Curry makes a point.

Yesterday the General Convention of The Episcopal Church -- bishops, clergy and laity making like a legislature -- brought our marriage ceremonies and definitions into line with the expansive expression of love that is sweeping the land. Good for them.

According to a friends I count on to know a thing or two, the new PB explained at his press conference:

"It's marriage. It's not gay marriage. It's not straight marriage. It's marriage."

That's done, thanks to decades of patient, urgent struggle, much pain and some joy. Now can my church gets its mind and heart around other justice agendas?

Pride pushing forward

For many gay people of my generation, the annual LGBT Pride bash evokes mixed emotions, if we even attend. We remember terrifying times. We remember so many causalities among our age group who dared to flaunt forbidden love when such conduct required heedless optimism -- and who are dead. A few were gay-bashed. Sometimes the drug and alcohol abuse which can be the refuge of outcasts did them in. In this city, HIV/AIDS killed a generation. We never imagined we'd see a majority of our fellow citizens affirm that our love could be just as good as theirs. The Supreme Court's marriage decision, even though the more politically attuned among us were confident it was coming, leaves us slightly stunned. Happy, yes. But still a little disoriented.

Lots of older people carried these muddled feelings to the San Francisco city streets today, mingling with crowds -- gay, lesbian, trans, straight and whatever -- whose celebration is not complicated by such tangled memories. It was a grand day.

On the BART train home from the gargantuan civic party, I noticed this tableau and ad. There's a pill called PrEP these days that protects uninfected people from the HIV virus, if they take it every day. Since that kind of rigorous health regimen is hard to sustain -- who does anything every day? -- the San Francisco Health Department via a program called Bridge HIV is looking for additional reliable methods to deliver the drug to protect sexually active people. Where better to recruit pharmacological volunteers than on the Bay's transit system?

One of the enduring consequences of the AIDS crisis that so decimated our community is that this appeal to ordinary people for help with expanding the science is now a more conventional practice.

Here's a good Center for Disease Control video about the PrEP drug. Knowledge is still power.

What is PrEP? from Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis on Vimeo.

Supreme Court gets it right

Nobody gets to vote on anyone's marriage any longer!

It's sad to see the Republican presidential scrum defaulting to the position that marriage equality should have been decided state by state. There's a history to that sort of appeal:

• When the more populous and prosperous section of the nation turned against slavery in the 1840s and '50s, Southern slave interests turned to state nullification and then secession preserve their property in human beings.

• Having lost their war for slavery, the same forces claimed "states' rights" for their imposition of segregation and disempowerment on their Black populations.

• When the Black civil rights movement rose up against continuing repression in the 1950s and '60s, Southern governors claimed "states' rights" to exempt their region from providing equal opportunity and justice under law.

"States' rights" has been the last recourse of those who reject the full inclusion of all of us in the national experiment.

We might imagine and even hope that federalism could be something other than a shield that protects privilege and inequality. But that is not how our history has worked.

Ireland votes on same-sex marriage today

Gotta say for the Irish, they have great ads.

The polls look good. Some developments are just jaw dropping. The collapse of the influence of the Roman Catholic Church on that island in the wake of sex abuse scandal is a terrible witness what misuse of authority can do to legitimacy. Rulers take note!

UPDATE: There are some very happy gay folks and friend the day after in Ireland.

What's so scary about same-sex marriage?

Our right-wing fellow citizens are in a panic. This goes beyond the crackpot fear that U.S. military maneuvers this summer are a cover for a coup by Obama. They are also scared that the Supreme Court may rule to legalize marriage equality: Texas is seriously preparing to defy the court.

Nobody has ever been able to show how gay marriage hurts the marriages of heterosexuals; what's fueling the anxiety?

Seems crazy, but the reporting of Sarah Posner at Religion Dispatches helps make it explicable. She recounts this discussion during oral arguments on the case now before the court:

... Justice Samuel Alito asked Solicitor General Donald Verrilli whether the tax-exempt status of religious colleges and universities who opposed same-sex marriage would be in jeopardy should the Court hold for the plaintiffs. Verrilli hedged, saying he’d have to know more details to answer the question, but conceded that that it would “be an an issue.”

This exchange was enough to incite panic among conservative evangelicals.

They've been down this road before. As I learned (and discussed) from Randall Balmer's history of Jimmy Carter's brief ascendancy, the glue that brought together ring-wing activists with conservative Christians in the late 1970s was that the I.R.S. yanked the tax-exempt status from Bob Jones University. The school had refused to end racially discriminatory practices such as its ban on interracial dating.

Today's conservatives fear that if gay people are recognized as having full civil rights, we'll expect and receive similar protections. The fact that they are protected under the First Amendment from being forced to perform religious marriages for us does nothing to reassure them. They want a "right" to discriminate in all aspects of life without fear that doing so will have any cost to them.

Posner found a legal expert who pointed out that the Bob Jones case had not led to widespread I.R.S. efforts to ensure that groups enjoying the privilege of non-profit status did not practice racial (or gender) discrimination.

There hasn’t been another Bob Jones -- not because religious organizations don’t refuse to serve or recognize religious beliefs inconsistent with their own, but because the IRS has given them wide latitude to do so. Every day religious organizations likely refuse to serve members of the public who do not adhere to their religious beliefs.

Still, conservatives are seriously worried. They want an unconstrained freedom to call us perverts and to discriminate against us -- and they are losing that.

Marriage arguments quibble

San Francisco florists see opportunity

I hadn't been paying much attention to the marriage equality arguments before the Supremes this week. Oh sure -- 14 states are hold-outs and many, many gays and lesbians still live with diminished legal rights as a result. And in many of the states where gays can legally get married, we can still be fired for our sexual orientation. (We also have no protection against employment discrimination under federal law. Thank the Republican Congress.) There's still a lot of legal cleanup to be won.

But full equality is on the way, court or no court. As Linda Greenhouse says "reality has outpaced doctrine, and the court’s only role is to catch up."

When I do glance through the coverage, I can still be surprised by inane commentary coming from supposedly informed sources. In particular this, from Jeffery Toobin:

Justice Anthony Kennedy gave voice to an issue of real concern when he mused, toward the beginning of the argument, about just how quickly the country was changing, and about the part the Supreme Court should play. “One of the problems is, when you think about these cases and the word that keeps coming back to me, in this case, is ‘millennia.’ ” By that, Kennedy meant that the definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman has been around for thousands of years. “This definition has been with us for millennia. And it’s very difficult for the Court to say, ‘Oh, well, we know better.’ ”

What Kennedy is saying -- and what Toobin passes on without correction -- is simply hogwash.

"Marriage" in the form Kennedy seems to be thinking about is maybe a couple of hundred years old. If that. Heterosexual pair bonds have obviously existed as long as there have been humans. We have ancestors. But these people organized themselves in all sorts of arrangements because "marriage" is a construct that people use to regulate kinship, economic and cultural relationships. In Kennedy's "millennia," "marriage" has frequently served dominant males to establish paternity and power -- and had little to do with either exclusive pair bonding or the wants of individual participants (especially female individuals.) Among the working strata of most human societies (and that's just about everyone) "marriage" has been a productive economic unit within which people toiled in separate (and usually unequal) spheres.

The cozy couples of Kennedy's imagination are mostly a modern western European invention. It's very human of us that we are inventing some additional forms.

Indiana legislation: I wuz wrong

Okay, I was wrong. Indiana has proved that legal advocacy organizations do have to use their precious resources on the fight to preserve the elementary principle of public accommodations law: if you are open to the public, you have to serve everyone equally, whether you like them or not, even if your "religious principles" say they are unclean. This is not really about flowers or cakes, this is about whether owning a business confers a right to practice active discrimination among potential customers.

Writing about Indiana's phony "religious liberty" law, Jonathan Capehart reminds readers that gay people do still need protection from the arbitrary entitlements enforced by business owners.

If you think such discrimination against same-sex couples is theoretical, just take a listen to this outrageous radio interview with an Indiana restaurant owner who said his name was Ryan on the “Kyle & Rachel” show of Indianapolis late last week. “I understand people’s lifestyles and what they want to do, but I don’t want them bringing that into my place of business and make my other people that are there uncomfortable,” said Ryan, who also proclaimed himself to be a Christian. But what kind of Christian would do what he said he did when asked if he ever discriminated against gays?

“I have discriminated,” he said. “I have not really closed early, but I have said something is broken in the kitchen so that I couldn’t serve them.” When the incredulous radio host Rachel Bogle asked whether he was okay with doing such a thing, the owner replied: “I feel okay with it because it’s my place of business. I pay the rent. I built it. It’s all my money and my doing so it’s my place. I can do whatever I want with it. They can have their lifestyle and do their things on their own place or have people that want to be with them in their type of place not my type of place.”

But by the day, we see more and more big national businesses recoiling from the swarm of hornets the Republican legislature and Governor Pence have unleashed on Indiana. They don't want any part of legalized discrimination. They operate in a wider world where all kinds are included; they can't survive in some Hoosiers' bleached Christian hideaway.

And the pressure is working. And as of Tuesday, even Pence is asking his legislature to "clarify" that their new law does not enable discrimination. We'll see how that goes.

Note however, this developing turn away from legalized bigotry came only when the holding actions of legal advocacy groups were joined by hordes of screaming gay folks, our numerous friends, more and more major media, and then by the businesses that have to deal with us. Sometimes it takes a mobilized crowd ...

Good simple explanation of the legal issues here. Terrific history of "religious freedom" legal maneuvering here.

H/t the Weekly Sift for the graphic.

Lovable counts

View image | gettyimages.com

Two years ago when working on a California campaign to end death sentences, I had the opportunity to work with representatives of the state's Roman Catholic bishops. These men -- who had just recently successfully trashed my kind in an anti-gay marriage campaign -- were serious allies to the campaign. They organized in parishes to get initiative petitions signed; used Catholic media to push the proposed measure; and enjoined priests to educate the faithful.

Too bad all this did very little to influence the outcome. In California as in the rest of the U.S., a majority of Catholics seem to support the death penalty. In California as in the rest of the U.S., racial and ethnic identities are stronger predictors of opposition: Blacks (historically Protestant) and Latinos (mostly Catholic) show majorities against. In my campaign role, I discovered polling that suggested that, among all Catholic positions on social issues, opposing the death penalty is the one on which ordinary people in the pews are most likely to break with their hierarchs.

Now Catholics have a pope who is affirming unequivocal opposition.

“Today the death penalty is inadmissible, no matter how serious the crime committed,” Francis wrote in a detailed argument to the president of the International Commission against the Death Penalty, based in Madrid.

The pope said capital punishment “contradicts God’s plan for man and society” and “does not render justice to the victims, but rather fosters vengeance.”

Francis added that executing a prisoner can no longer be justified by a society’s need to defend itself, and he addressed two issues prominent in the American context: He declared that the death penalty “loses all legitimacy” because of the possibility of judicial error, and he said “there is no humane way of killing another person.”

The article from Religion News Service quoted here goes on to remark that U.S. Catholic conservatives "chafed at the abolition pleas." After quoting some of the objectors who point out that historic Catholic teaching includes considerable wiggle room in which to approve the death penalty, it asks:

What will this pushback mean for the Catholic Church in the U.S., and for Francis’ popularity? Probably not much.

Like bishops who pick and choose which people should have their human rights affirmed, ordinary Catholics have a history of picking and choosing when to agree with their leaders.

But it can't hurt that a loveable pope has taken up the cause. Loveable counts when convincing people of new possibilities. My kind knows that.

The ACLU must have better things to do ...

Eventually I came to understand that being able to marry in the eyes of the state was something that LGBT people needed in order to be full citizens with full civil rights. And we're getting there. (We're also getting there in religious institutions which seems much more important to me, since that is where we affirm our partnerships in the context of community.)

But I am damned if I am going to put energy into fighting for the right to buy wedding cakes and flowers from vendors who feel a need to distance themselves from gay marriages.

The New York Times reports:

... refusals by the religious merchants — bakers, florists and photographers, for example — have been taking place for several years. But now local governments are taking an increasingly hard line on the issue, as legislative debates over whether to protect religious shop owners are overtaken by administrative efforts to punish them.

... In Colorado, where Mr. Phillips, 58, owns and operates a small bakery called Masterpiece Cakeshop, the State Civil Rights Commission determined that Mr. Phillips had violated a state law banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in places of public accommodation. ... In New York, an administrative law judge fined Cynthia and Robert Gifford $13,000 for declining to rent their upstate farmhouse, which they often rent out for heterosexual weddings, for the wedding of two women. ... There have been more than a half-dozen other instances of business owners, most citing their understanding of Christian faith, declining to provide services for same-sex weddings.

... The cases are largely being fought, and some say fueled, by two legal advocacy organizations: the American Civil Liberties Union, which supports same-sex marriage, and the Alliance Defending Freedom, which opposes it. ...

I understand that we queers probably do have valid claims under public accommodation laws: if you are operating a public business, you can't go choosing not to sell your goods to some people while offering them to others.

But please -- do we really need to fight for our equal right to consume? In general, the sums that people seem to feel they must spend on weddings are a little gross. We're just starting in on this -- do we have to adopt the worst of straight customs? (Probably yes.)

But the hard-pressed nonprofits that fight for legal rights must have better places to use their resources than fighting for wedding props. If they want to serve our community, let them litigate for better rights at work and for transgender people who often lag LGB folks when it comes to equal protection of the law.

Another step forward for gay people worldwide

Barcelona, Spain

I continue to be amazed by the rapid progress being made toward full rights for LGBT individuals. Just today, the stodgy International Olympic Committee added us to their list of people who should be treated as people.

The committee ... approved the rewording of its Principle 6 on nondiscrimination to include sexual orientation — a move that followed the controversy over Russia’s law against gay “propaganda” ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

... The new Principle 6 clause says the Olympics should be free of discrimination “of any kind, such as race, color, sex, sexual orientation, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”

“This is a pivotal moment for equality in sport,” said Andre Banks, executive director and co-founder of international gay rights group All Out.

New York Times

Evidence that this is a strange country

This chart, from Vox, illustrates a paradox. Thanks to the Supremes deciding not to engage with the rapidly expanding set of legal decisions allowing same-sex marriage in state after state, there are now 8 states where LGBT people can legally get married -- but where you can then be fired for being gay.

Those states are in white on the map: Idaho, Indiana, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia.

More struggles ahead.

LGBT employees: what not to ask

DiversityInc -- a website that seems to aspire to give businesses advice on how to manage "diversity" -- has published a list of "6 things not to say to LGBT employees."

I'm feeling snarky, so here's a lifelong lesbian's commentary. I am fortunate in for a very long time not having needed to worry about what an employer thought about my sexuality or gender presentation. The list isn't terrible, but it begs for plain speaking.

• 1. “Wow. I never would have guessed that you’re [gay, lesbian, bi, or transgender]! The recipient of this remark will either think you are dumb as a post or abysmally rude. Or both.

• 2. “Is one of you the husband and one the wife? I don’t get it.” I'm going to confess I'm tolerant of this one (if the questioner didn't have power over me.) I almost find it endearing. When people really don't know anything about gay people, I suspect this is what goes on underneath all the other cultural baggage. Better to out with it and then we can learn about each other from there.

• 3. To a transgender person: “What’s your real name? What did you used to look like?” More rudeness. The person's real name is what they tell you it is. They are who they are. None of your damn business.

• 4. “Your lifestyle is your business. We don’t need to talk about it here.” This one means that I make the speaker nervous. Get over it.

• 5. “It’s too bad you’re gay.” "It is too bad you are straight." How do you like that question?

• 6. “I have a friend who’s [gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender] that you should meet.” Oh for goodness sake ... that's akin to the question I've sometimes gotten while traveling in far away places: "what's the weather like in the United States?"
  
  I may, or may not, have something in common with another gay person -- the permutations are close to endless and may or may not have anything to do with our both being gay.

We're just people.

Human Rights Campaign undermines struggle for rights, again

The elite gay lobbying outfit has covered itself with shame (again) by endorsing Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins over challenger Shenna Bellows. Bellows is a human rights campaigner; she doesn't play along to get along.

I'm not a Mainer, but the best selling author Stephen King is. Here's why he's supporting Bellows over Collins:

It’s been almost 20 years since Maine had a Democratic representative in the U.S. Senate (George Mitchell, if you’re keeping track). The smart money says we won’t elect a Democrat this year, either, but this is a case where I hope the smart money is wrong.

... Sen. Susan Collins is considered a moderate who compromises a lot. Sounds good, but when it comes down to casting votes that serve Mainers, she always seems to end up with her Republican colleagues, led by Mitch McConnell — the hardline block that shut down the government last year and has since neglected many urgent issues (including better care for our veterans) in a near maniacal effort to repeal an Affordable Care Act that is already working.

Moderation is fine, but only up to a point. It’s not helpful to Mainers when Collins continues to vote on the wrong side of policies that matter most.

Collins supports the Patriot Act, and has repeatedly voted for its renewal. She has repeatedly voted to authorize (and legalize) NSA spying. Shenna Bellows advocates repeal of the Patriot Act, and so do I. Obviously we need to keep an eye out for terrorists on American soil, but in the age of drones and mega-surveillance, it’s way past time to restructure this thing. And although Collins claims the NSA spying program is fair, it looks to me too much like a doorway to that world George Orwell wrote about in 1984.

Bellows supports raising the minimum wage. Collins opposes it, which makes me roll my eyes in exasperation. A $10.10 per hour wage in an America where gasoline costs $3.65 a gallon — and where a great many Maine workers have to travel long distances to their place of employment — seems fair to me. The idea that 10 bucks an hour will flatten the economy is basically an idea promulgated by rich greedheads who don’t want to pony up what’s fair to hard workers who are struggling to make ends meet.

Collins supports the Keystone Pipeline. This just makes me sigh, but not because of the pipeline per se. It’s where it comes from. This is tar sands oil, and according to the National Wildlife Federation, it’s “one of the dirtiest, costliest, and most destructive fuels in the world.” It lays waste to fragile ecosystems, emits more of the pollutants associated with global warming when burned, and creates lake-sized reservoirs of toxic waste. It’s a lethally short-sighted quick fix, and the supporters of the Keystone are its enablers.

There's lots more, but you get the gist. Read King's complete letter at the Bangor Daily News.

Gay pride in San Francisco

Harvey Milk's stamp has hung over City Hall's main atrium for the last month. I don't usually put pictures of myself on this blog, but here's an exception: that's my friend Dana and I (in red) plotting a little after a legislative hearing, as snapped by Michael.