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Tuesday, Jul 08, 2008
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National News |
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| National News | |
| CALIFORNIA SUPREMES
TO HEAR MARRIAGE CASE The California same-sex marriage case will be heard by the state Supreme Court on March 4. The justices will then have 90 days to issue their ruling. The case is a consolidation of several lawsuits challenging state law that limits marriage to opposite-sex couples. Plaintiffs include the city of San Francisco, Equality California and same-sex couples. In 2005 and 2007, the state Legislature passed bills to legalize same-sex marriage, the only times any U.S. legislature has done so. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed both bills. California has a domestic-partnership law that grants registered Gay couples all state-level rights and obligations of marriage, but the plaintiffs view domestic partnership as a separate and not-fully-equal institution. Meanwhile, anti-Gay activists are collecting voter signatures to try to put initiatives on the November ballot that would amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage or both amend the constitution and undo the domestic-partnership law. A constitutional amendment would trump laws passed by the Legislature and, amendment proponents believe, override any state court rulings legalizing same-sex marriage. But since the marriage case itself is based on constitutional claims, "it is not clear that amending the state constitution would moot the case," said Shannon Minter, lead lawyer for the Gay side. "It would create a conflict between different constitutional provisions and raise other complex procedural and substantive issues," Minter said. Massachusetts is the only U.S. state that has legalized same-sex marriage. Along with California, five other states have same-sex partnership laws that extend all or nearly all state-level rights and obligations of marriage: Connecticut, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Oregon and Vermont. In addition, Maine, Hawaii, Washington and the District of Columbia have laws that extend limited spousal rights to same-sex couples. HILLARY: I DO TALK ABOUT GAYS Hillary Clinton has questioned the widespread notion that Barack Obama talks about Gay issues in front of non-Gay crowds more than she does. "I find it ironic, since Sen. Obama had his gospel tour with ['ex-Gay' Donnie] McClurkin, that he and his supporters would take credit for that," Clinton told the Washington Blade February 10. "I talk about Gay issues frequently," she said. "I've been a longtime friend of the Gay community - I've been talking about these issues since 1999 when I first ran for Senate and went on record as the first major candidate to say we're going to repeal 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell.' I talk about ending discrimination all the time." Obama came under fire in some Gay circles for including McClurkin, a Christian minister and Grammy Award-winning gospel singer, in a South Carolina campaign tour last October. McClurkin has called homosexuality "abnormal" and said he was "broken" until he abandoned his Gayness to please God. Clinton also told the Blade that, if elected, she will become the first U.S. president to march in a gay pride parade. ROVE SAYS HE DOESN'T KNOW IF STEPDAD WAS GAY Former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove told high-school students in Connecticut February 11 that he doesn't know if his late stepfather, Louis Rove, was Gay. Citing published accounts, a student at Choate Rosemary Hall prep school asked Rove if his stepdad's sexual orientation played a role in Rove's political decisions as the architect of George W. Bush's election campaigns. Those decisions included instances of capitalizing on anti-Gay sentiment and opposition to same-sex marriage to pull certain Republican voters to the polls in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. Rove said he didn't know if his stepdad, who died in 2004, was Gay, adding, "I miss him a lot," according to The Hartford Courant daily newspaper. However, several reports have claimed that the elder Rove was openly Gay in Palm Springs in the later years of his life. In the October 15, 2006, New York Times, for example, columnist Frank Rich wrote: "Every one of his [Karl Rove's] Bush campaigns has been marked by a dirty dealing of the Gay card, dating back to the Lesbian whispers that pursued Ann Richards when Mr. Bush ousted her as Texas governor in 1994. Yet we now learn from The Architect, the recent book by the Texas journalists James Moore and Wayne Slater, that Mr. Rove's own (and beloved) adoptive father, Louis Rove, was openly Gay in the years before his death in 2004. This will be a future case study for psychiatric clinicians as well as historians." MUSTO PRAISES JANE FONDA FOR SAYING BANNED WORD Gay Village Voice columnist Michael Musto has praised actress Jane Fonda for using the word "cunt" live on NBC's Today show February 14. Discussing her role in the play The Vagina Monologues, Fonda said: "Well, it wasn't that I wasn't a big fan. I hadn't seen the play. I live in Georgia, OK? I was asked to do a monologue called 'Cunt.' And I said, 'I don't think so, I got enough problems.'" Writing on the Voice's Web site February 14, Musto said: "Not since Janet Jackson's fake tit popped out of her whore outfit and destroyed a whole generation has there been such a televised outrage! In case you haven't heard, Jane Fonda ignored all civilized codes of decency on the Today show this morning and proved herself to be the syphilitic heathen I've always known her to be! In discussing The Vagina Monologues with a suitably mortified Meredith Vieira, Jane slipped out the vilest, most barbaric emission since she announced that she was Hanoi Jane. She said a word that is so coarsely repellent I can't even bring myself to repeat it for fear it will corrupt my own millions of impressionable fans and turn them into unpaid sex workers! You see, the J-word said the c-word and this little f-word was absolutely...thrilled, actually! "Bless you, Jane! I love the fact that you said cunt on national TV. Let's hope this becomes cunt-agious and all the other Oscar winners start spouting it too." After Fonda's appearance, Vieira apologized to viewers. "We were talking about The Vagina Monologues and Jane Fonda inadvertently said a word from the play that you don't say on television," Vieira said. "It was a slip and obviously she apologizes, and so do we." With assistance from Bill Kelley |
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| picture top: Michael Musto; picture middle: Jane Fonda; picture bottom: Shannon Minter | |
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