Box Turtle Bulletin

Mitt Romney Endorses “New Rule” On Disrespecting American Soldier

The newly minted rule about booing an American soldier stationed in Iraq and refusing to thank him for his service has now been fully endorsed by the GOP frontrunner, Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. In this interview with the New Hampshire Union Leader, you can watch the panderer in chief in action:

Union Leader: Governor, there were a lot of chattering going on in the mainstream media about some of the goings on at the debates, including a question from a soldier in Afghanistan or Iraq who happened to be gay. Could you hear question and answer from this guy from your position on stage?

Romney: I heard the question and answer, yeah. You hear a lot, I mean you don’t hear everything going on. Obviously you’re concentrating on the people on the stage and what you’re going to say.

Union Leader: Well there was audible, to the home audience, boos from a couple of people or thirty people, I don’t know, in the audience. And I couldn’t tell from home whether you people on stage could hear the boos, and if you did hear the boos what was your reaction to them.

Romney: Actually, I think we can hear the boos, I would tell you that in these debates, there’s been a lot of booing and a lot of applause, cheering and booing, some of which I don’t agree with. Now, I have not made it my practice to scold the audience to say I disagree with this person, I agree with that person because it goes in a lot of different directions. don’t recall whether this soldier, whether people were booing his question or just booing…

Union Leader: They booed as soon as he identified as a gay person.

Romney: You have to look into that. I don’t know when they booed and I don’t know why people booed. But I will tell you, that the boos and applause has not always coincided with my own views. But I haven’t stepped in to try and say, “this one is right, this one is wrong.” Instead, I focus on the things I think I will say.

Union Leader: I ask because I think it was Herman Cain over the weekend was asked about it and he said in effect that he should have criticized whoever was booing in the audience.

Romney: That’s…I understand his thoughts.

Union Leader: But yours are…?

Romney: Look, there were people who cheered when statements were made at the Reagan library that a number of… two hundred some-odd people had been executed in Texas. I don’t know that cheering for executions is something I would agree with either, but I don’t raise my hand and say, “Please let me talk, I want to tell everyone you shouldn’t be cheering.” (laughs) We … I haven’t made it my practice to listen to the cheers and the boos and to try to the people on their expressions of their view.

But you can bet your mother’s grave that if a Democratic audience membered had booed any soldier for any reason that Romney and his cowardly cohorts would have no hesitation to condemn them in the most thunderous, righteous terms available. You can also bet your father’s grave along with it that never before has a Republican presidential candidate failed to thank a man or woman in uniform for their service, and will never again fail to do it — as long as they believe that servicemember is straight.

That’s the new rule in politics. A rule that Romney has refined a bit by by placing the disrespect of an American soldier alongside cheers for  executing 254 prisoners in Texas. Thank you Stephen Hill for your service to America.

Gay Couple Assaulted — At Church

Jerry Pittman, Jr., (left) and Dustin Lee (right)

Jerry Pittman, Jr., and his boyfriend, Dustin Lee, were attacked when they tried to go to church at Grace Fellowship in Fruitland, Tennessee:

I went over to take the keys out of the ignition and all the sudden I hear someone say ‘sick’em,'” said Gibson County resident, Jerry Pittman Jr.

Pittman said the attacked was prompted by the pastor of the church, Jerry Pittman, his father.

“My uncle and two other deacons came over to the car per my dad’s request. My uncle smash me in the door as the other deacon knocked my boyfriend back so he couldn’t help me, punching him in his face and his chest. The other deacon came and hit me through my car window in my back,” said Pittman. He said bystanders did not offer assistance. He said the deacon yelled derogatory homosexual slurs, even after officers arrived. He said the officers never intervened to stop the deacons from yelling the slurs.

The younger Pittman says that there were about twenty people standing around the front of the church when the assault took place, but no one intervened to stop the assault or call the police. He also says that the sheriff’s deputy refused to take a statement from the victims or allow them to press charges. Gibson County Sheriff Chuck Arnold said, “If I was on the scene I would not have allowed that. The deputy should not have allowed it if he did,… I haven’t talk to him but that would be out of character for my deputy to say unless they were causing a problem themselves.”

The couple later filed assault charges against Deacons Billy Sims and Eugene McCoy. The younger Pittman is also pressing charges against his father and Deacon Patrick Flatt. They are due in court today. The pastor and his wife are also going through a divorce.

The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, October 4

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Florida Hospital Dumps AIDS Patient: 1983. Twenty-seven-year-old Morgan MacDonald had been treated at Shands Hospital in Gainsville, Florida, since July for various opportunistic infections because of AIDS. When his state Medicaid benefits ran out, the private teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Florida ordered MacDonald out. Early on the morning of October 4, Shands hospital doctors stuffed $300 into his pocket, loaded him onto a Lear Jet with a doctor and a nurse, and shipped him off to San Francisco and dumped him at the offices of the city’s AIDS Foundation. The nurse and doctor walked out and left the volunteer staff to figure out what to do with him. He’s condition was so bad, he was unable to lift his head. The AIDS foundation was able to get MacDonald admitted to San Francisco’s General Hospital where his condition continued to worsen.

San Francisco General’s Dr. Mervyn Silverman was furious. “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” he told reporters. “It’s unconscionable to do this to a patient, especially a patient in serious condition.” A Shands spokeswoman claimed that MacDonald didn’t need hospital treatment, but outpatient treatment instead, and said that shipping him off to San Francisco — even though he came to them from Vero Beach, Florida — was “a real humanitarian thing to do.” They also claimed that MacDonald was ambulatory when he left Shands, and that he worsened sometime after leaving. “AIDS is a disease where your condition changes,” the Shands spokeswoman said. San Fransisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein denounced the dumping and demanded that Florida Gov. Bob Graham investigate. A Florida Health Department official would later admit, “We are having problems in Florida because medical professionals are reluctant to provide care because they know so little about AIDS. We are seeing people take any opportunity within the law to avoid providing care.” The state, however, found no evidence of legal wrongdoing. MacDonald died in San Francisco, a medical outcast, sixteen days later. San Francisco General sent Shands Hospital a bill for $6,627.12, which Shands refused to pay.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir: 1942. When she became Iceland’s first female Prime Minister in 2009 following more than a year of public protests over Iceland’s handling of the financial crisis, he broke yet another important barrier by becoming the world’s first open lesbian head of government. The LGBT community around the world cheered, but Sigurðardóttir had no time for celebrations. She had her hads full with the collapse of the island nation’s entire banking system and the stock exchange losing some 90% of its value. She renegotiated Iceland’s payment of bank deposits to holders in Netherlands and Britain — much to the outrage of Icelandic taxpayers — and her government launched several criminal investigations of the banking collapse. Under her stewardship, Iceland’s economic free-fall has been halted, and investors are beginning to return. Iceland has also been working on joining the E.U. since June 2009, which has also helped boost investor confidence.

Jóhanna has been in a Registered Partnership with Jónína Leósdóttir since 2002. When Iceland enacted its marriage equality law in 2010, Jóhanna and Jónína became among the first to convert their legal partnership into a marriage.

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?

Gays Are Evil

So says National Organization for Marriage’s new honcho John Eastman:

Those fighting for traditional marriage can feel beaten down by the culture at large. Do you feel that victory for traditional marriage is possible?

Evil will be with us always, and it requires constant vigilance to defeat. I look at it as a litigator and an educator. There will always be threats to institutions grounded in human nature by those who think human nature doesn’t define limits. We need to be involved in the immediate defense of threats against marriage, but also take a long-range view by educating the next generation about the importance of the issues we’re confronting.

And so does Focus On the Family’s Glenn Stanton:

All sexual sin is wrong because it fails to mirror the Trinitarian image, but homosexuality does more than fail. It’s a particularly evil lie of Satan because he knows that it overthrows the very image of the Trinitarian God in creation, revealed in the union of male and female.

And yet Focus On the Family’s Tim Daly complained to CNN that it’s unfair to say Focus hates gay people:

But do we, as Webster’s defines “hate,” feel “intense hostility and aversion” to gays and lesbians? Do we regard them with “extreme dislike or antipathy”? Unequivocally not.

Uh huh.

[via Good As You]

New Rule: Some Soldiers Are Less Worthy of Respect and Thanks Than Others

Christiane Amanpour: Let me start by asking you some of these questions. We’ve just seen what President Obama said last night about that incident at the Florida debate, where there was booing in the audience when a gay soldier started to speak. Nobody said anything. You didn’t, Rick Santorum, none of the others did. Do you wish you had said something, intervened at that moment?

Herman Cain: Well the thing that’s being overlooked is that in the heat of of debate when you have exactly sixty seconds to answer any question, you know, taking the time to try to figure out why they were booing. I happen to think that maybe they were booing the whole “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal more so than booing that soldier. But we didn’t know that. So that was not the time to try and decipher why were they reacting that way.

Amanpour: But you don’t think that you probably should have said something like, audience, you know please, a little bit of respect?

Cain: I did not have that luxury because I was not in control. I was not moderating.

Amanpour: In retrospect, would you have done something given the controversy it’s …

Cain: In retrospect, because of the controversy it has created and because of the different interpretations that it could have had, yes, that probably… that would have been appropriate. But at the moment, it was not the focus on the people on that stage, I can assure you.

I can assure you that the focus of the people on the stage at that very moment was the shocking (to them) visage of a patriotic American soldier who is in Iraq right now, who announced to them that he was gay and asked, in essence, what were they going to do about it. And every one of them froze. When you go back to the video, you find that even Sen. Rick Santorum, to whom the question was directed, stumbled a bit before he regained his footing and confirmed he would kick soldiers like him (but not that particular soldier, he hastened to add later) out. The rest stood there mute — dumbfounded, more like it — at the image of a gay soldier in Iraq.

Later that night, former Utah Gov Jon Huntsman, Jr. mustered the courage to call the incident “unfortunate.” It took an entire news cycle before Santorum apologized — sort of — on Fox News for not speaking up or thanking the soldier, only to walk it back on ABC. New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson said he was embarrassed at the intolerance, an embarrassment that took him more than a day to express after leaving the stage.

For decades since the Vietnam debacle, it has become a political maxim that any time a politician meets an American soldier, the very first thing to tumble out of his mouth is effusive thanks for that soldier’s service. Stories of Vietnam vets returning home to boos and worse were used by politicians on the right to shame politicians on the left into proving their patriotism by supporting the troops no matter what. Politicians on the left responded by doing exactly that. Granted, some of the expressions were more heartfelt among some than others, but no one was going to be caught out in that political faux pas. But no one was going to out-thank or out-praise those soldiers’ sacrifice and dedication to American freedom more than politicians on the right.  That was the rule. A rule so hard you could bet your paycheck on it and always beat the market.

Until now. We now find that there is an escape clause to that rule. When it’s a gay soldier, no thanks are required. No defense of against booing (or worse, should the situation arise?) is needed. An instinct that had been ingrained into Republican politicians so thoroughly they could reflexively salute a soldier in their sleep suddenly evaporated with the uttering of two words: I’m gay.

It took ten days and three questions by a persistent Christiane Amanpour on a low-rated Sunday talk show before Cain finally conceded that maybe — “probably” — saying something to quell the boos would have been appropriate — with all of it in the past tense and a reluctant passive voice. And he came to that only after explaining that there were maybe some good excuses for booing a soldier because now — new rule! — it’s okay to boo under certain circumstances.

But of course, there’s still nothing about thanking that soldier. Cain’s protest that they only had sixty seconds and, besides, he wasn’t “in control” rings hollow. Cain felt no compunction about jumping in at other points in the debate to say something he felt had to be said. It takes less than four seconds to say “thank you for your service” — a phrase so stock in Republican politics that it’s inconceivable that the thought of saying it didn’t cross someone’s mind on that stage. Even if it was just, “Gee, if only he were straight I’d be thanking him.”

The Daily Agenda for Monday, October 3

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Congressman Arrested For Soliciting a Teen Male Prostitute: 1980. Rep. Bob Bauman (R-MD) had a history of voting for anti-gay bills in Congress. He voted twice to deny federal funds to lawyers dealing with gay rights itsues, and he backed a “family protection bill” that would have explicitly legalized discrimination in housing and employment based on sexual orientation. He was one of the brightest stars of the far right, serving as chairman for the American Conservative Union.  But on this date in history, Bauman was arrested by D.C. police for “soliciting sex from a sixteen-year old boy.” It turns out he had a habit of cruising gay bars in Washington, D.C., a habit he blamed entirely on alcohol. A judge bought his story and accepted his not guilty plea in exchange for entering a six-month alcohol rehabilitation course. Voters in his district didn’t buy it though. Despite a the Ronald Reagan-led Republican landslide in November, Bauman lost his Congressional seat, and his wife walked out the following June.

In 1986, he wrote his memoir, The Gentleman from Maryland, not because he wanted to tell his story but because he was broke. He wrote that his downfall was orchestrated by the Carter administration, House Speaker “Tip” O’Neill and a Maryland senator who considered him a potential rival. As for himself, he told one interviewer, “I still don’t like being gay. If I had my druthers, I wouldn’t be gay.” Bauman is now an attorney for the Sovereign Society, a group which provides expatriation services for Americans looking for offshore tax havens.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Jake Shears: 1978. He was born in Arizona, but grew up north of Seattle on San Juan Island. When he turned fifteen, he sought out Dan Savage for advice on whether he should come out to his parents. Savage gave him what he later called the worst advice he has ever given:

And after he told me everything I was like: “Oh, they know. They’re just waiting for you to tell them. You should tell them. Just come out to them. They’re waiting. They’re ready.” And he came out to them and they didn’t know and it was a big disaster and they threatened to pull him out of school and they were really angry and so he called me. I had a radio show and he called me and I got him off the air and got his mother’s phone number and called my mother and gave my mother Jake’s mother’s phone number and had my mom call him mom and yell at her. And it helped, but yeah, I gave him so really shitty advice.

(Savage now says that “not everybody is in a position where that is wise or safe and we have to tell these gay teenagers to take a cold, hard look at who their families are and where they live before they take that step.” But this isn’t about Savage, it’s about Shears.) When Jake was nineteen, he traveled to Lexington, Kentucky to meet up with a former classmate, and that’s where he met Scott Hoffman (a.k.a Babydaddy). They hit it off immediately, and that turned into Shears’s second great turning point in his life. They move to New York the following year, where they immediately immersed themselves into the city’s gay nightlife. In 2000, they formed the Fibrillating Scissor Sisters and began performing in underground clubs. When Ana “Ana Matronic” Lynch joined the duo in 2001, they dropped the word “Fibrillating” from their name and began performing as the Scissor Sisters. They were soon joined by Derik “Del Marquis” Gruen on lead guitar and Patrick “Paddy Boom” Seacor on drums, the band’s token heterosexual. In 2002, th band cut a single, “Electrobix” which proved to be less popular than its B-side, a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Comforably Numb.”

That got the attention of major record labels, and by 2003 they were recording for Polydor. They proved popular in Britain, but their success in America was thwarted by conservative radio programmers and Wal-Mart, then the largest music seller in the country. Wal-Mart, in particular, objected to the song “Tits On the Radio,” which they described as a “snarling, swaggering attack on conservatism,” and demanded the band record a “clean” version. The band refused.

Their latest album, Night Work, came out in 2010, includes vocals by Kylie Minogue and a spoken word segue by Ian McKellen. Later that year, Shears contributed a video to Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” project, where he talks about the abuse he suffered in high school after coming out, and how he channels those memories into his energetic performances today. Australians will get a chance to see some of that energy later this year, when the Scissor Sisters kick off their Australian tour on New Year’s Eve in Melbourne.

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?

The Daily Agenda for Sunday, October 2

TODAY’S AGENDA:

AIDS Walks Today: Dallas, TX; New Glasgow, NS; New Hope, PA; Phoenix, AZ; Portland, OR and Turo, NS.

Pride Celebrations Today: Ashland, OR; Belgrade, Serbia Canceled!; Dallas, TX (Black Pride); Ft. Worth, TX and Jacksonville, FL.

Also Today: Gay Days at Disneyland, Anaheim, CA; Out On Film, Atlanta, GA and Rainbow Festival, Phoenix, AZ.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Federal Panel Urges Decriminalizing Homosexuality:1969. A fourteen-member panel of doctors, lawers, and social and behavioral scientists led by UCLA’s Evelyn Hooker released a report urging the United States abolish all laws forbidding private same-sex relationships among consenting adults. The panel found, “Homosexuality presents a major problem for our society largely because of the amount of injustice and suffering entailed in it not only for the homosexual but also for those concerned about him.”

About existing anti-gay laws on the books, the panel noted, “There is evidence to indicate that entrapment is not uncommon, that existing laws are selectively enforced, and that serious injustice often results.” The report added, “Many homosexuals are good citizens, holding regular jobs and leading productive lives. The existence of legal penalties relating to homosexual acts means that the mental health problems of homosexuals are exacerbated by the need for concealment and the emotional stresses arising from this need and from the opprobrium of being in violation of the law.”

At the time the report was issued, homosexuality was a criminal offense in every state except Illinois. Between 1971 and 1980, twenty-two more states would descriminalize homosexuality. But progress slowed with the onset of the AIDS hysteria, when only fifteen states and the District of Columbia removed their anti-homosexuality statutes from the books between 1981 and 2003, when Lawrence v. Texas finally struck down anti-gay laws nationwide.

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?

Obama Blasts GOP For Failure To “Stand Up For the Men and Women Who Wear The Uniform”

In remarks before a gathering of the Human Rights Campaign, President Barack Obama blasted Republicans for standing silently on stage while audience members booed a gay American soldier during a GOP debate last week. Six candidates — Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Texas Rep. Ron Paul, pizza magnate Herman Cain, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich — have maintained their silence for more than a week. Obama called them out:

We don’t believe in a small America. We don’t believe in the kind of smallness that says its okay for a stage full of political leaders, one of whom could end up being the President of the United States, being silent when an American soldier is booed. We don’t believe in that. We don’t believe in standing silent when that happens. We don’t believe in them being silent since.

You want to be commander in chief? You can start by standing up for the men and women who wear the uniform of the United States, even when it’s not politically convenient.

We don’t believe in a small America. We believe in a big American, a tolerant America, a just America, an equal America that values the service of every patriot. We believe in an America where we’re all in it together and we see the good in one another. And we live up to a creed that is as old as our founding, “E Pluribus Unum” — out of many, one. And that includes everybody. That’s what we believe. That’s what we’re going to be fighting for. I am confident that’s what the American people believe in. I’m confident because of the changes we’ve achieved these two and a half years, the progress that some folks said was impossible.

Gay Teacher Cleared of Allegations of Unfairly Punishing Anti-Gay Student

When earlier news reports a week ago mentioned that a Ft. Worth high school student had been suspended for telling a classmate that he believed that homosexuality was wrong. On September 22, Fox News reported it this way:

Holly Pope said she was “absolutely stunned” when she received a telephone call from an assistant principal at Western Hills High School informing her that her son, Dakota Ary, had been sent to in-school suspension.

“Dakota is a very well-grounded 14-year-old,” she told Fox News Radio noting that her son is an honors student, plays on the football team and is active in his church youth group. “He’s been in church his whole life and he’s been taught to stand up for what he believes.”

And that’s what got him in trouble.

Ary’s German teacher, Kristopher Franks, was put on paid administrative leave on the following Monday. An offiicial with the teacher’s union says that the leave was unrelated to the incident with Ary, and after a week-long investigation by the Fort Worth Independent School District, Franks was cleared of any wrongdoing and he returned to work Friday. Meanwhile, Ary and his mother called on Liberty Counsel to fight Ary’s in-school suspension on the grounds that Franks had violated Ary’s right to freedom of speech. And it turns out that the story that Ary’s mother had been telling to every media outlet who would listen was likely exaggerated:

Ary said in  media interviews that he made the comment quietly to a classmate sitting next to him in response to a discussion going on in the class at the time.

But Franks told friends shortly after the incident that there was no discussion involving homosexuality at the time, and that Ary made the comment loudly while looking directly at Franks.

Franks also told friends that the comment was only the latest in an ongoing series of incidents in which Ary and a group of three of his friends have made anti-gay comments to and about him.

Franks told friends that the harassment by Ary and his friends began several weeks ago after Franks, who also teaches sociology, posted on the “World Wall” in his classroom a photo, taken from the German news magazine Stern, of two men kissing. The photo was ripped off the wall and torn in two at some point during Ary’s class, and Franks told friends he believes that Ary or one of his friends tore up the photo.

During a later sociology class students upset that the photo had been torn up replaced it with a hand-drawn picture, and another student then covered that picture with a page bearing a hand-written biblical scripture from Leviticus calling sex between two men an abomination.

Franks told friends that since that incident, Ary and his friends had continued to make derogatory and harassing comments.

Franks reportedly has been the target of anti-gay comments for at least two years, and that Franks’s car was vandalized in one incident. Meanwhile, Liberty Counsel, members of whom have been implicated in the kidnapping of Isabella Miller-Jenkins and who teach law students at Liberty University to choose “God’s law” over “man’s law,”  is trying to turn Ary’s anti-gay harassment into its newest cause célèbre.

Serb Authorities Cancel Belgrade Pride

Serbia’s Interior Minister Ivaca Dacic announced yesterday a total ban for Sunday’s Pride parade in Belgrade, along with all other public events planed for the weekend. Citing last years violence by anti-gay nationalists and skinheads, another government official cited planned violence by “hooligans” and said that Serbia’s National Security Council ordered police to cancel the event due to “extremely serious security threats”. Goran Miletic, the Pride parade’s organizer, condemned the move as a capitulation:

“We are shocked,” he said. “With this the state capitulated … a democratic state should be able to guarantee two hours of security to its citizens.”

Serbian Riot Police follow as the 2010 Gay Pride Parade moves along a street in Belgrade.

Interior Minister Dacic said that more than 100 police officers were injured in rioting that broke out during last year’s march. Those riots caused widespread damage throughout Belgrade, and the headquarters of the ruling Democratic Party was burned. Dacic estimated that as many as 5,000 security personnel would be needed to protect this year’s Pride.

Serbia has run into several obstacles in its bid to join the European Union, including relations with its former Yugoslav neighbors, ongoing disputes over Kosovo, and concerns about Serbia’s commitment to protecting human rights. Opposition leader Cedomir Jovanovic said the ban “demonstrates the government’s cowardice and weakness.”

The Daily Agenda for Saturday, October 1

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Conference on Teen Suicide: New York. The second event of a four part series titled “More than a Monologue: Sexual Diversity and the Catholic Church,” will examine the epidemic of teen suicide. Participants in this segment, will examine “will examine where Catholic educational institutions are getting it right, where they need to be better, and where their complicity in the wounding of young LGBTQ persons is unacceptable.” Dan Savage will give the keynote address. Other speakers include Robert Goss, theologian and author of Jesus ACTED UP: A Gay and Lesbian Manifesto; Patrick Cheng, Assistant Professor, Historic and Systematic Theology, Episcopal Divinity School; Fred Roden, Associate Professor of English, University of Connecticut; and Winnie Varghese, Episcopal priest and former Chaplain, Columbia University. The conference takes place today from 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. at the Union Theological Seminary at 3041 Broadway in New York.

Human Rights Campaign National Dinner: Washington, D.C. President Barack Obama will be the keynote speaker at the HRC’s 15th annual National Dinner this evening. This will be his second appearance at the HRC shindig, having spoken at the event in 2009. Since then, we’ve seen the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and a significant evolution, as it were, in the Obama Administrations decision to drop its defense of the “Defense of Marriage Act” in federal court. The speech will be carried live on Sirius/XM OutQ 108.

AIDS Walks This Weekend: Amherst, NS; Chicago, IL; Dallas, TX; New Glasgow, NS; New Hope, PA; Phoenix, AZ; Portland, OR; Tulsa, OK; Turo, NS; and Wilmington, DE.

Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Ashland, OR; Ashville, NC; Belgrade, Serbia Canceled! Cumbria, UK; Dallas, TX (Black Pride); Ft. Worth, TX; Jacksonville, FL; Johannesburg, SA and Moab, UT.

Also This Weekend: Gay Days at Disneyland, Anaheim, CA; Out On Film, Atlanta, GA and Rainbow Festival, Phoenix, AZ.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Denmark Begins Registering Partnerships: 1989. Axil and Eigil Axgil made world history when they became the first gay couple to enter into a Registered Partnership in Copenhagen, after 40 years together. The Axgils, who had been living under the same surname (an amalgamation of their given names) for 32 years, were among ten couples registered that day when Denmark became the first country in the world to provide legal recognition for same-sex couples. While the new law provided many of the rights and obligations of marriage, Registered Partnerships remained a second class institution by omitting adoption rights, artificial insemination availability, or religious wedding ceremonies in state-run Lutheran Churches. In 1996, Registered Partnerships were extended to Greenland. Several bills which would provide full marriage equality have been debated in the Folketing over the past several years, with the most recent bill being rejected by the ruling coalition in June 2010, but the Folketing did decide to extend adoption rights to Registered Partnerships a month later.

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?