Why being ‘born gay’ is a dangerous idea – Shamus Khan. Last month, the US Supreme Court affirmed the rights of same-sex couples to marry. The decision was a major achievement for a liberation movement that began nearly half a century ago. Throughout the struggle for marriage equality, supporters drew parallels with the oppression of African Americans, be that anti-miscegenation laws or legalised segregation. Yet one stark difference between these civil rights movements has escaped notice. African-American activists aggressively called out arguments about genetic and biological differences as legacies of racist, Nazi science.
By contrast, the marriage-equality movement has embraced biological determinism. Gay and lesbian activists have led the way popularising the idea that identity is biologically determined. The proffered perspective is that sexuality is not a choice, but a way we are born. Popular now How often do ethics professors call their mothers? How feeding children’s ambition only sets them up to fail Daily Weekly Caution fell away. Discussing Marriage | Home Page. Supreme Court strikes down Defense of Marriage Act, paves way for gay marriage to resume in California. In a 5-4 ruling, the United States Supreme Court justices strike down the Defense of Marriage Act, saying it is unconstitutional. NBC's Pete Williams reports. By Pete Williams and Erin McClam, NBC News In a pair of landmark decisions, the Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down the 1996 law blocking federal recognition of gay marriage, and it allowed gay marriage to resume in California by declining to decide a separate case.
The court invalidated the Defense of Marriage Act, which denied federal benefits to gay couples who are legally married in their states, including Social Security survivor benefits, immigration rights and family leave. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority in a 5-4 decision, said that the act wrote inequality into federal law and violated the Fifth Amendment’s protection of equal liberty. “DOMA’s principal effect is to identify a subset of state-sanctioned marriages and make them unequal,” he wrote. Lt. J. “It’s a wonderful day for America,” he said. Smith College Students Continue Fight Over “Discriminatory” Policy On Transgender Applicants. The Transgender Tipping Point. In the beaux-arts lobby of the nourse theater in San Francisco, men in deep V-necks and necklaces walk by women with crew cuts and plaid shirts buttoned to the top. Boys carrying pink backpacks kiss on the lips, while long-haired ladies whose sequined tank tops expose broad shoulders snap selfies.
About 1,100 people, many gleefully defying gender stereotypes, eventually pack the auditorium to hear the story of an unlikely icon. “I stand before you this evening,” Laverne Cox, who stars in the Netflix drama Orange Is the New Black, tells the crowd, “a proud, African-American transgender woman.” The cheers are loud and long. Almost one year after the Supreme Court ruled that Americans were free to marry the person they loved, no matter their sex, another civil rights movement is poised to challenge long-held cultural norms and beliefs. The transgender revolution still has a long way to go. “Some folks, they just don’t understand. Fixing Nature’s Mistake The Generation Gap. 'Homosexual Jim Crow Laws'? Get Real. “Christians backing this bill are essentially arguing for homosexual Jim Crow laws.” So asserts Kirsten Powers in today’s USA Today. What could justify such an assertion? Nothing.
Powers is wrong about the law. The bill in question is a religious-liberty protection being debated in the Kansas legislature. Powers isn’t alone. Jim Crow and segregation did the exact opposite. But freedom of association and freedom of contract are two-way streets. If a central argument of the LGBT movement has been the freedom to live how one chooses sexually, shouldn’t government respect the freedom of citizens to live how they choose in the marketplace?
The state’s concern for the freedom of its citizens to live out their beliefs about marriage is not unwarranted. Christian-adoption and foster-care agencies have been forced to stop providing those services because they object to placing children in same-sex households. Powers does not have sympathy for these particular business owners: — Ryan T. The NFL Will Never Be 'Ready' for an Openly Gay Player - Ta-Nehisi Coates. It doesn't matter whether the NFL wants to accept an openly gay player like Missouri defensive end Michael Sam. He's arrived, and the league will have to adjust accordingly. NFL prospect Michael Sam announced on Sunday that he was gay. For reasons that should be obvious, most pro athletes have come out either after they've retired or, as with Jason Collins, toward the tail end of their career when their prospects were in doubt. This is different: Mr. Sam, unlike his predecessors, has his professional career in front of him and a great deal of money on the line.
In that sense he will be challenging a deep and discrepant mythology of who is capable of inflicting violence and who isn't. Imagine if he's the guy next to me and, you know, I get dressed, naked, taking a shower, the whole nine, and it just so happens he looks at me. The mythology Jonathan Vilma endorses will not fade through vague endorsements of "tolerance," lectures on "acceptance," nor any other species of heartfelt magic.
Www.kslegislature.org/li/b2013_14/measures/documents/hb2453_01_0000.pdf. Anti-Gay Jim Crow Comes to Kansas. He might be 80, but former lieutenant governor Richard Ravitch, out with a new memoir, has the same gleam in his eye—and he’s still warning of crises. Andrew Cuomo, call your office. The man who rescue helped rescue New York City from bankruptcy in the 1970s says New York is in deep financial trouble again. And this time, it’s the whole state that’s in deep. Dick Ravitch, the longtime New York power broker and financial guru, can smell it when smiling politicians proclaim their governments’ budgets fully balanced. Releasing a memoir, Ravitch, 80, is trying to shake people by the lapels once again, with the next generations in mind. “While a generous society can and should provide the necessities of life to its poorer citizens,” he writes, “we owe it to ourselves to be honest about the costs.”
Too much of this nation, he said, is eating its own seed corn, to use one of his folksy analogies. Here are some statistics to back him up: He saves his biggest criticism for local leaders. Www.kslegislature.org/li/b2013_14/measures/documents/hb2453_01_0000.pdf. What The Hell Just Happened In Kansas? The bill that just overwhelmingly passed the Kansas House of Representatives is quite something.
You can read it in its entirety here. It is premised on the notion that the most pressing injustice in Kansas right now is the persecution some religious people are allegedly experiencing at the hands of homosexuals. As Rush Limbaugh recently noted, “They’re under assault. You say, ‘Heterosexuality may be 95, 98 percent of the population.’ They’re under assault by the 2 to 5 percent that are homosexual.”
Discrimination is horrible. The remedy for such a terrible threat is, however, state support for more discrimination. If the Republican Party wanted to demonstrate that it wants no votes from anyone under 40, it couldn’t have found a better way to do it. It’s a misstep because it so clearly casts the anti-gay movement as the heirs to Jim Crow. If you were devising a strategy to make the Republicans look like the Bull Connors of our time, you just stumbled across a winner. It sure doesn’t.
Concord students choose transgender student as homecoming king. After Ray Ramsey was crowned Concord High’s homecoming king last weekend, after the cheers from the crowd and hugs from friends, he walked over to his dad. Standing there, his dad grabbed him by the shoulders, looked him in the eye and said, “I am so proud of you.” “And I just lost it,” said Ray, recalling the moment. For Ramsey, his family and all of Concord High, this year’s homecoming was one for the history books. That’s because Ramsey, a senior, is the first transgender student to be elected by fellow students as Concord High royalty.
“He’s just been through a lot, and he’s just a really strong person,” said Anna Robert, the homecoming queen and Ramsey’s good friend. Ramsey, now 17, told his family and friends that he was interested in girls when he was in eighth grade. Even when he was a kid, Ramsey dressed like a boy and acted like one. “I don’t know why, but I remember saying that, and thinking back now it’s an accurate description,” he said. City To Boost Police Presence In Response To Wave Of Anti-Gay Attacks. NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) — Concern and fear have been on the rise amid a spike in anti-gay violence in Manhattan, including a cold-blooded killing in Greenwich Village over the weekend.
As CBS 2’s Dick Brennan reported Monday, the latest victim, 32-year-old Mark Carson, was shot and killed early Saturday morning by a man who first called him and his partner “f***ots” and asked if they were “gay wrestlers.” Now, the community is rallying against hate, and police are increasing patrols in some neighborhoods – in the wake of five anti-gay attacks in the past two weeks. “We’re angry, and we want our leaders to lead and change the situation,” said Jordan Friedman of the West Village. An Angry Community Rallies In Response To String Of Anti-Gay Attacks WCBS 880's Alex Silverman Reports Hundreds of people gathered Monday evening for a rally against hate at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, at 208 W. 13th St.
“Everybody’s talking about hate,” Doug said. Threats And Lies, And 'Who I'm Supposed To Be' Note: This segment contains strong language that may not be appropriate for all audiences. Nathan Hoskins told Sally Evans the story of how his mother tried to scare him out of being gay, during a visit to StoryCorps in Lexington, Ky. StoryCorps hide caption toggle caption StoryCorps Nathan Hoskins told Sally Evans the story of how his mother tried to scare him out of being gay, during a visit to StoryCorps in Lexington, Ky.
StoryCorps Nathan Hoskins knew from an early age that he was gay. But when he was growing up in rural Kentucky, his mother took extreme steps to convince him otherwise. "When I was in sixth grade, I had met a good friend and he wasn't interested in girls," Hoskins, who's now 33, tells his friend Sally Evans. "I asked him for it, and he said it was so special that he mailed it," he says. As Hoskins rode the school bus home, he tried to think of ways to intercept the card. "But when I got off the bus, Mom had already checked the mail," he says. "Oh yes, oh yes. Serving In Silence, Before 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'
Hide captionDenny Meyer spoke about serving in the Navy as a gay man at StoryCorps in New York City. StoryCorps Denny Meyer spoke about serving in the Navy as a gay man at StoryCorps in New York City. This weekend, gay pride celebrations will mark the first year since the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell," the law that banned gays from serving openly in the U.S. military. Denny Meyer, 65, is a veteran who served in the Navy during the Vietnam War. During a recent visit to StoryCorps, he remembered what it was like to be both gay and a sailor in the late 1960s.
"In those days, we served in silence. And not one day passed when you didn't worry that you were going to be found out," he says. Meyer served in the Navy from 1968 to 1972. "When men are at sea, they horse around. "So, unintentionally, I got a reputation as the straightest guy around," Meyer says with a laugh. "The officers called me in. After that incident, another episode put a scare into Meyer. Denny Meyer. Column: Same-sex marriage is an equality issue. “[T]he freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”
Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. at 12 (1967) Generally speaking states get to decide who can marry. For example, New Hampshire, along with eight other states and Washington, D.C., have passed laws that recognize same-sex marriage. Under current federal law, my friends in same-sex marriages do not receive the veterans benefits (including pensions and survivor entitlements), protective tax treatment on income, estates, gifts, and property sales, or federal employee benefits – both civilian and military – that heterosexual married couples do. Thankfully, marriage is also a constitutional matter. The question for our generation, and now for the U.S. This issue has made its way to the U.S. The first case is Hollingsworth v. While these cases differ in many respects, they are about a fundamental constitutional guarantee. In Romer v. (Erin B. Rights Clash as Town Clerk Rejects Her Role in Gay Marriages. Battle doesn’t belong at national level.
The U.S. Supreme Court recently heard arguments in cases involving the federal Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, and California’s Proposition 8, a state constitutional amendment adopted by referendum to ban marriage between homosexual couples. The major question that all of us should be concerned about is not how California or the Congress wants to define marriage, but where such decisions should be made. The nub of the issue is federalism, the concept that we are a nation of states that met in Philadelphia and created a federal government. We sometimes forget that it is not the national government that created the states but the other way around. The states differ from the federal government because only states have what is called “general police power,” which includes most of the activities citizens are involved in at a state or local level.
Laws relating to speeding, zoning, planning, adoption, abortion and marriage have always traditionally been up to the states to decide. The U.S. Marriage as Purposeful Institution. The Conservative Case For Gay Marriage - Newsweek and The Daily Beast.