Box Turtle Bulletin

Another Utah county passes non-discrimination ordinance

Grand County, Utah, home to Moab and the Arches National Park, has now passed an ordinance that protects its 9,000 or so residents from sexual orientation and sexual identity discrimination in housing and employment. (SL Tribune)

That means one in four Utahns, living in 10 communities from Moab to Logan, are protected from discrimination based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. Advocates for the statutes hope that groundswell of support will push the Utah Legislature to protect all Utahns.

With this decision, Equality Utah has reached its goal of ten new municipalities banning discrimination.

Salt Lake County followed Salt Lake City’s lead, and Equality Utah launched an effort, dubbed “Ten in 2010,” to increase the list to 10 by the end of this year. Grand County expedited the ordinances to ensure passage before the new year.

They are hoping to capitalize on the momentum and encourage the state legislature to ban discrimination state wide. As yet, this seems to be more of a grand hope than an achievable goal. However, much depends on the public stances of the Mormon Church, whose support secured the bill in Salt Lake City

Sen. Reid Returns Lt. Choi’s West Point Ring

Via Sen. Harry Reid’s Twitter feed: “Five months after I promised to repeal #DADT, I’m so happy to give back this West Point ring to @ltdanchoi.”

Update: Lt. Choi’s clever reaction via Twitter: “The next time I get a ring from a man, I expect it to be for full, equal, American marriage.”

Alberta, Canada Shocked To Learn Homosexuality No Longer A Mental Disorder

The American Psychiatric Association determined some thirty-seven years ago that homosexuality was not a mental disorder. Things move much more slowly in Alberta, Canada, where the province’s public health service finally removed homosexuality from its official diagnostic guide.

United Nations Restores Sexual Orientation To Resolution Condeming Extrajudicial, Summary and Arbitrary Executions

The United Nations General Assembly yesterday succeeded in restoring “sexual orientation” to a resolution condemning extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions. The category of sexual orientation had been removed last month as a result of an Arab and African proposal. Yesterday’s 93-55 vote (with 27 abstentions) approved an American proposal to reinsert “sexual orientation” back into the resolution. The resolution was then passed with 122 yes votes, none against and 59 abstentions.

The UN passes a resolution every two years condemning extrajudicial killings. The 2008 version included a reference to sexual orientation. Zimbabwe’s U.N. Ambassador Chitsaka Chipaziwa harshly condemned its re-insertion into the 2010 resolution:

We will not have it foisted on us,” he said. “We cannot accept this, especially if it entails accepting such practices as bestiality, pedophilia and those other practices many societies would find abhorrent in their value systems.

“In our view, what adult people do in their private capacity by mutual consent does not need agreement or rejection by governments, save where such practices are legally proscribed,” Chitsaka said.

Paul Canning, who has an extensiverundown of the vote, reports that one-third of African countries either supported the American proposal to reintroduce “sexual orientation” into the resolution or abstained from voting, representing a change from their votes last month removing the clause. He also notes that almost all of the Caribbean, including Jamaica, also changed their votes as well. Canning noted the Rwandan ambassador’s “yes” vote:

In the debate at the UN the most moving contribution was from the Rwandan delegate who said that a group does not need to be “legally defined” to be targeted for massacres and referenced his countries experience. “We can’t continue to hide our heads in the sand” he said.”These people have a right to life.”

This Is How You Handle A Wingnut

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) responds to right wing CNS “news” reporter Nicholas Ballasy’s question about gay servicemembers showering with straight servicemembers.

“We Are A Nation That Says ‘Out Of Many, We Are One'”: Obama Signs DADT Repeal Into Law

Today, President Barack Obama signed historic legislation which begins the process of ending the long-standing ban against LGBT people serving openly in the armed forces.

President Obama hailed the legislation as a key milestone in the civil rights struggle for LGBT Americans:

No longer will our country be denied the service of thousands of patriotic Americans who are forced to leave the military – regardless of their skills, no matter their bravery or their zeal, no matter their years of exemplary performance – because they happen to be gay. No longer will tens of thousands of Americans in uniform be asked to live a lie, or look over their shoulder in order to serve the country that they love.

…We are no longer a nation that says ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’ We are a nation that says ‘Out of many, one.’

Present at the signing ceremony was former Marine Staff Sargent Eric Alva. He was the first American to be injured during the invasion of Iraq when he stepped on a land mine and lost his leg in the explosion. As he was recovering at Bethesda Naval Hospital, he was visited by President George Bush, first lady Laura Bush, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, none of whom knew that he  was gay.

Also present at the signing ceremony was Lt. Dan Choi,who was discharged last summer from the New York National Guard under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” More recently, he has been recovering from a breakdown due to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, brought on by his service in Iraq and compounded by stress over his public advocacy for DADT’s repeal.

President Obama hailed the law, saying it will “strengthen our national security and uphold the ideals that our fighting men and women risk their lives to defend. Noting that LGBT Americans have fought bravely in every war since the Revolution, Obama applauded the additional sacrifices that they made because of the burden of serving in silence. “None of them,” he added, “should have to sacrifice their integrity as well.”

The Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act of 2010 specifies that the 1993 Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell legislation will become stricken from the law sixty days after the President, Defense Secretary, and the Joint Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces certify to Congress that the Defense Department has “prepared the necessary policies and regulations” to allow LGBT members to serve openly, and that those policies are “consistent with the standards of military readiness, military effectiveness, unit cohesion, and recruiting and retention of the Armed Forces.”

No further action by Congress is called for in the Act’s language, but for the time being, DADT is still the law of the land. Active LGBT servicemembers are urged to remain circumspect in disclosing their sexual orientation.

Repealing DADT is more than just a matter of ending discharges and accepting gay applicants. The Pentagon Study that was released three weeks ago identified numerous regulations which will require revisions. Many of these regulations touch on such matters as deployment, off-base and on-base housing, family hardship considerations, family bereavement, sexual harassment, workplace nondiscrimination, and many other personnel policies. This is in addition to training and policy communications which will need to take place throughout the ranks of the armed services.

Given the scale of the report’s recommended policy changes to accomplish DADT repeal, some observers believe that it may take as long as a year to fully implement the changes needed to support DADT’s ultimate repeal. Based on historical precedent, I would agree with that assessment. When President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981 in 1948 ordering the racial desegregation of the armed forces, it took the military more than three years to fully implement the order. Integration for personnel stationed in Korea, Okinawa and Japan didn’t occur until the end of 1951.

But that integration occurred against much greater opposition throughout the military and in American society as a while. DADT repeal is expected to go much more smoothly. Three quarters of Americans support repealing DADT, while the Pentagon’s study found that 70% of military personnel believe that having a gay service member in their unit will have a positive, mixed, or no effect on the unit’s ability to “work together to get the job done.” In an interview with the Advocate’s Kerry Eleveld, President Obama said, “My strong sense is [implementation] is a matter of months… Absolutely not years.” Obama repeated that pledge during his signing ceremony this morning. He said that the service chiefs are  “committed to implementing this change swiftly and efficiently,” and he vowed, “We are not going to be dragging our feet to get this done.”

McCain Joins FRC Against DADT Repeal – The Politics of Slander Are Now His Values

In 2000, back when Sen. John McCain was still a voice of reason and conscience for the Republican Party, he famously attacked the “self-appointed leaders” of the religious right, saying “the politics of division and slander are not our values.” But things change over the course of a decade. The Family “Research” Council, whose mastery of division and slander have landed them on the SPLC’s very short list of anti-gay hate groups, has announced that McCain will be working with them to figure out how to roll back repeal of DADT.

I’ve [Tony Perkins] already been in conversations with Hill leaders about holding hearings in the New Year, as well as statutory and legislative oversight steps that can be taken to turn back aspects of the repeal and slow down–if not stop–the rest. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and others will be working with FRC to put a strict evaluation process in place. We want to ensure that the Pentagon is monitoring the effect of this radical change on the men and women in harm’s way. One way to do that is demanding specific measurables–like tracking the sexual assaults, dips in recruitment and retention, combat distractions, and more.

In other words, FRC will be up to their usual dirty tricks with fake statistics, and Sen. McCain will be all too happy to support them. That’s a far cry from 2000, when McCain traveled to Virginia Beach — Pat Robertson’s back yard — to denounce the very same thing that FRC has turned into an art form:

I recognize and celebrate that our country is founded upon Judeo- Christian values, and I have pledged my life to defend America and all her values, the values that have made us the noblest experiment in history. But public — but political intolerance by any political party is neither a Judeo-Christian nor an American value.

The political tactics of division and slander are not our values. They are corrupting influences on religion and politics, and those who practice them in the name of religion or in the name of the Republican Party or in the name of America shame our faith, our party and our country.

Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right.

McCain’s stirring call to decency came about after he had been attacked in a vicious smear campaign orchestrated by the religious right during the South Carolina primaries. When he was the victim of those attacks, he mustered righteous indignation and refused to take those attacks quietly. But now that those attacks are against gay people, well…

Ed. Dept. begins to investigate bully schools

For years Seth Walsh was bullied. For years his mother tried to get the Tehachapi Unified School District to protect him. Finally, in September Seth could take it no more and ended his life.

And, in response, Federal education officials are looking into the circumstances leading to Seth’s death. (Press-Enterprise).

The probe was launched in response to a complaint from Seth Walsh’s mother that Tehachapi Unified School District employees failed to adequately address the years of bullying that preceded her son’s death last Sept. 28, spokesman Justin Hamilton said.

Seth’s mother Wendy Walsh said U.S. Department of Education investigators spent two days in Tehachapi last week interviewing students, teachers and administrators. She said she contacted them when her son, who hanged himself from a backyard tree on Sept. 19, was still hospitalized in a coma.

The school may be among the first to discover that America is sick of reading about children being bullied to death and that old “boys will be boys” attitudes can no longer cover incompetence, callousness, or tolerance of anti-gay bullying.

In late October, the Education Department’s civil rights division responded by reminding school districts and universities they could face administrative penalties and even lose federal funding if they fail to take concrete steps to counter anti-gay harassment about which they knew or “reasonably should have known.”

I think few doubt that the Tehachapi Unified School District reasonably should have known that their campuses were torture to students who are gay or perceived to be gay.

ROTC welcomed back

Much to the disappointment of some conservative commentators, ROTC is now being welcomed back onto some campuses. It turns out that ‘Liberal Ivy-Tower Elites’ don’t actually hate the military or the country or all that is good and pure, after all. They really meant it when they said that the reason that ROTC was banned from campus was due to their anti-gay discriminatory policies.

Who knew?

We already told you that Harvard is looking forward to a renewed relationship with the military. They are not alone. (Fox)

Other elite schools, including Columbia and Stanford, also hinted that they now would be willing to extend open arms to the military.

“We now have the opportunity for a new era in the relationship between universities and our military services,” Columbia University President Lee Bollinger said in a written statement.
…
Richard Levin, president of Yale University, said the school is “eager” to begin discussions about lifting the ban on ROTC.

Well, there goes one grousing point.

Mormon Church now LIKES the gays

In 2008 the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (The Mormons) declared war on the gay community. They probably didn’t intend to, and they certainly didn’t want it to be known, but nevertheless that year the Mormon leadership decided that it would throw the church’s weight and political influence into the battle to deny marriage equality in California.

And they won. Proposition 8 passed.

But this success has proven to be a pyrrhic victory, one that threatened to set back much of the church’s public image campaign. Having spent decades on a message that Mormons make good neighbors, suddenly they were painted as haters and destroyers of happiness.

And the church discovered – to what must have been their amazement – that people in California are more suspicious of Mormons than they are of gays. While they may not have favored marriage, they were disturbed at the idea of a California proposition being funded and controlled from Utah by a church that many still see as a cult.

And then the church took a series of missteps in public confrontation with gays. Efforts to paint gay people as deviants that had to be slapped down (how dare they kiss in this Mormon-owned park) only gained sympathy for gay folk in the public eye. And even members revolted when a leader declared that gay people must choose to be gay because Heavenly Father wouldn’t have made them that way.

I’ll admit that it has been amusing to see the panic and meltdown over gay issues since the church’s involvement in Prop 8 was exposed. But it has also been encouraging that there are obviously many in the Mormon Church who have been awakened by the scandal and who are seeking to act admirably.

And some are really seeking peace, a detente, and if not agreement then at least a cease fire. It shows up in some amusing ways. (ABC)

ABC 4 News has learned that the Church invited several prominent gay leaders to its Christmas concert this weekend, including Oscar winner Dustin Lance Black.

Black, a screenwriter, won an Oscar for the movie, “Milk.”

Saturday, at the LDS Church’s Christmas concert, he and a handful of Utah gay activists were VIP guests.
…
ABC 4 News is also being told that the Church has met previously with both Black and Bastian, one of the founders of WordPerfect.

This, reportedly, to get more information about gay issues.

I’m not ready to forgive the church for the damage they did in my state. It truly was an act of selfish bullying and it will take more than a Christmas concert invitation to a select few before I see this institution as other than a committed enemy of my civil rights and freedom.

But it does give me hope. Maybe the church has learned a lesson.

There is a strong likelihood that there will be a proposition on the 2012 ballot to reverse Proposition 8, and if the Mormon Church doesn’t want to pay for half of the advertising and 80-90% of the volunteers, then our chances are significantly increased.

Four Hasidic Jews protest DADT repeal

Sometimes you just have to marvel at how people can miss the obvious. (LoHud.com)

Braving the cold weather, four men from the Hasidic Jewish community in Monsey picketed Monday afternoon just outside of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to protest gays serving openly in the military.

Solomon Diamant, one of the protesters, said they were appalled by the Senate vote that ended the 17-year-old “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

“Only God can establish what’s wrong and what’s right. We cannot uproot his rules,” Diamant said. “The whole LGBT agenda is evil,” using the abbreviation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.

Darned right! This is a Christian Nation, based on Christian Principles, and we should live according to what God has set out in the Bible! The whole Christian Bible.

Oh… that wasn’t what you meant?

Focus On the Family on DADT: “It’s Too Late To Care Now”

Yes, that petulant schoolyard retort wasn’t an Onion headline, but CitizenLink’s. The Focus On the Family house organ posted this commentary by Bill Spencer, a retired Air Force colonel who is now a Focus employee:

I ask you, fellow citizen, after Saturday’s vote, would you give your life for our Senate? Would you give your life for our president? Or, would you go home to your family? Sadly, you know the answers already. If you never made a phone call or never entered the debate on this issue, it’s too late to care now.

Why Fox didn’t run first-person gay soldier stories

Fox News runs a lot of military stories. Their pro-military reporting has made them a welcome sight on bases around the world and they often have access that is not as ready (or perhaps even as desired) by other news outlets.

One thing they also had over the past year was a steady stream of gay soldiers wanting to tell their story. But they did not choose to tell that story. Embedded reporter Dominic Di-Natale tells us why.

Oddly, it wasn’t resistance on the part of network execs. Nor was it hostility to the political efforts to lift the ban. Rather, according to Di-Natale, it was a matter of logistics and timing. The entire article is an interesting read and suggests to me that implementation may be less difficult than the handful of elderly retired veterans would have us believe.

(The Gay Soldiers that Wanted to be on Fox)

Truth is it’s a new layer of resilience both sides are now obliged to acquire. Straight soldiers will need to assimilate. And gay soldiers will need thicker skins, too, because as open as they will now be allowed, frank, confrontational responses will come from those with firm convictions against them.

But if each serviceman and woman remembers, as they must, it’s mission first, soldier second, I believe over time the military will be better balanced and, yes, stronger.

Uganda’s “Kill The Gays” Bill May Be Voted On In February

That’s according to an interview conducted by Grove City College professor Warren Throckmorton with Stephen Tashobya, the chair of the Ugandan Parliament’s Legal and Affairs committee last Friday. Tashobya said that he expects the bill to come up sometime after February 18, which is when Parliamentary elections will be held. He didn’t give a specific timetable, however:

Ideally, what we are trying to do is to ensure that we clear all the bills that are before the committee before the end of this Parliament in May. I am not in a position to say we are going to handle it in this time framework, but we are trying to get out all of the bills by the end of May, including that one [the Anti-Homosexuality Bill].

Warren has the details.

Gay Zimbabweans Arrested

Two men in Zimbabwe have been arrested this week and charged with sodomy, after being caught “in the act” by their landlady, according to New Zimbabwe. Nigel Ruredzo, 28, and Shine Njawara, 29, pleaded guilty before a Bindura magistrate. The two were caught when the house’s owner and another tenant were awakened by “strange noises” coming from the room. The trial is scheduled for December 29. Homosexuality is illegal in Zimbabwe under a law that was carried over from colonial times. Conviction brings a penalty of up to three years’ imprisonment.