Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for Monday, May 14

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Colorado’s Legislative Special Session on Civil Unions Begins: Denver, CO. When the Colorado House of Representatives’ Speaker, Frank McNulty (R, HD-43, Highlands Ranch), abruptly called a recess when it became evident that a majority of the House wanted to pass a bill granting civil unions to same-sex couples in Colorado, at least 30 other bills died in McNulty’s childish tantrum. Last Thursday, Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) called a special session of the state legislature, which is scheduled to resume its unfinished work today. McNulty, who called civil unions “gay marriage on the installment plan,” says the new session is a “full reset” which gives him the power to assign the bill to a different committee or to change members of committees, tactics which could be used to kill the bill.

Outserve Capital Summit: Washington, DC. OutServe, an association of more than 5,000 actively-serving LGBT military personnel worldwide, begins its two-day Capital Summit today at the Renaissance Washington at D.C.’s Dupont Circle. The first day is dedicated to workshops and presentations on making LGBT military families stronger. The second day is dedicated to congressional lobbying with coalition partners, including The Human Rights Campaign, Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, and the Courage Campaign. You can find more information about the Capital Summit here.

P.M. Pierre Trudeau: “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation, and what’s done in private between adults doesn’t concern the Criminal Code.”

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Canada’s Parliament Votes to Decriminalize Homosexuality: 1969. In 1967, Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau introduced a large omnibus bill, The Criminal Amendment Act of 1968, in to the 27th Canadian Parliament, which, if passed, would have had far-ranging effects on Canadian Law. The bill proposed, among other things, would allow provinces and the federal government to set up lotteries, expand laws on gun possession, impose penalties on drinking and driving, regulate misleading advertising, allow abortions and contraception, and decriminalize homosexuality. In 1968 when Prime Minister Lester Pearson announced he was stepping down as Prime Minister and head of the Liberal party, Trudeau sought the party’s leadership and won. After elections that summer, Trudeau became Prime Minister and John Turner became Trudeau’s Justice Minister. Turner re-introduced the massive omnibus bill into the 28th Parliament and described it as “the most important and all-embracing reform of the criminal and penal law ever attempted at one time in this country.”

The most controversial elements of the bill, the provisions legalizing abortion and homosexuality, drew the sharpest criticism from the opposition. The government fought back amendments from Conservative and Creditiste party members to leave the homosexuality sanctions intact. MP Marcel Lambert (PC-Edmonton West) asked, “If it is right to remove the legal sanction from acts of homosexuality between consenting adults … and from certain acts between husband and wife, why do we not remove a whole gamut of offenses, including attempted suicide and other acts involving an individual only and not other human?” MP Andrew Fortin (Creditiste-Lotbiniere) claimed that homosexuality “like tuberculosis,” could be brought under control with proper treatment. MP Rene Matte (Criditiste-Champlain) found the whole debate an abomination, saying it was “almost scandalous to see representatives of the people being obliged to discuss these questions.” England had decriminalized homosexuality two years earlier, but Matte countered, “we’re not obliged to follow the decadence of England.”

Justice Minister Turner countered that the removal of homosexuality from the criminal code would merely lift “the taint or stigma of the law,” and repeated the government’s position that “areas of private conscience, private behavior had better be left to private judgment.” He also added that a law that was not enforceable was not a good law. Trudeau also rose to defend the provisions, telling reports that “there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation, and what’s done in private between adults doesn’t concern the Criminal Code.” Finally the acrimonious debate ended, and the criminal code amendments dealing with abortions and homosexuality cleared the House of Commons late on Wednesday night, May 13, 1969, by a 149-55 vote.

You can see the CBC’s archival newsclips of Trudeau speaking to reporters about decriminalizing homosexuality and other provisions of the omnibus bill here.

A diagram from 1971 of a system to deliver electric shock aversion therapy to gay men. (Click to enlarge.)

“Shock Doc” Protested at APA: 1970. Protests and demonstrations over injustices were already de rigueur when the American Psychiatric Association held its annual meeting in San Francisco in 1970. Gay advocates had long observed that the APA’s labeling of homosexuality a mental disorder served as a handy excuse to enforce widespread discrimination and legal sanctions against LGBT people in all areas of life. What’s more, psychiatry’s attempts to cure homosexuality were often physically torturous, with electric shock aversion therapy a not uncommon method. One of the stars of aversion therapy, an Australian psychiatry by the name of Nathaniel McConaghy, was in San Francisco to read a paper before the august organization. Advocates were waiting. As McConaghy coolly described the methods he used — his patients’ penises were wired to measurement devices and they were shown porn; once twinge of arousal and they were delivered powerful electric shocks — gay advocates in the crowd began shouting “vicious!” and “torture!” and “where did you take your residency, Auschwitz?”

When the moderator announced the next session, the gay advocates exploded and demanded to be heard. When the moderator refused, the meeting broke down into shouts and recriminations. One physician reportedly called for the police to shoot the protesters. Most psychiatrists left the room, but some stayed and the conversations that ensued over the next three years finally led to the APA’s delisting of homosexuality as a mental disorder.

In 1981, McConaghy was still unapologetic about his treatment of gay people. In an article he published in the journal Behavior Research and Therapy, he was still presenting the results of his electric shock experiments on gay men. He defended his work as ethical and voiced resentment over the interruption of his presentation eleven years earlier.

By the mid 1980’s he abandoned aversion therapy, but he kept trying to cure an illness that no longer existed. And yet somehow, his reputation remained intact. After he died in 2005, the Archives of Sexual Behavior published a memorial lauding him as a pioneer in behavioral therapy who “inspired many to pursue truth and beauty through his example.” The memorial was notable for three things: 1) it briefly mentioned his attempts to cure gay men and painted his response to the “near riot” of 1970 as heroic (“He remained a fearless champion of the application of scientific methods to the study of human sexuality.”), 2) the memorial neglected to mention his use of electric shock therapy, and 3) the memorial was unsigned.

First LGBT Civil Rights Bill Introduced in Congress: 1974. Bella Abzug, the Democratic Congresswoman in for Manhattan and part of the Bronx, was a civil rights attorney before she entered Congress. She was an outspoken supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment and opposed the Vietnam War. Her stands earned her a position on President Richard Nixon’s famed “Enemies List.” On this date in 1974, Rep. Abzug introduced the first federal gay rights bill, the Equality Act of 1974, with fellow New York City Rep. Ed Koch. The bill, which would have banned discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations, went nowhere then, and similar efforts to ban discrimination have come to naught in the 38 years since then.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Magnus Hirschfeld:1868. Known as “The Einstein of Sex,” German-born Magnus Hirschfeld was the most prominent advocate of gay emancipation in his day. In 1897, Hirschfeld co-founded the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäre Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee), whose first project was to repeal Paragraph 175, which criminalized homosexuality between men (women were unmentioned in Germany’s anti-gay code). He never succeeded in repealing the law, but the committee succeeded in gathering signatures of some 6,000 Germans calling for repeal. In 1919, he founded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science), and was widely recognized as a prolific writer and speaker on sexual minority issues. He also figured in film history, when he made a cameo appearance in the 1919 film Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others), the first film to portray a homosexual love story in a sympathetic light.

While Germany’s Wiemar Republic saw homosexuality becoming somewhat accepted in Berlin, extreme right-wing forces reacted with violence. In 1920, Hirschfeld was attacked and severely wounded in Munich after a conference, and in 1921 his skull was fractured in another attacked. From 1929, Nazis repeatedly disrupted his lectures. In 1930, Hirschfeld began a lecture tour of the United States, which was expanded to a world-wide tour. By the time he returned to Europe in 1932, conditions in Germany became so dangerous that he decided not to return. On May 6, 1933, the Nazis attacked and destroyed the Institute for Sexual Science, and on May 10, they burned its library and files, the largest of its kind in the world. Hirschfeld wandered Europe before settling in Nice, France in 1934. He died there in 1935, with his death coming also on this very same date in history.

Julian Eltinge: 1881. He was, perhaps, America’s first famous drag queen. One story has it that he first donned women’s clothing at the age of ten for an appearance in Boston. Another one suggests that his mother helped him to dress in drag at a very young age to perform in the saloons in Butte, Montana, and that his father nearly beat him to death when he found out. At any rate, he was performing onstage and touring Vaudeville after the turn of the century. Unlike most female impersonators at the time, he didn’t place farcical caricatures of women for laughs. He sought to create the full illusion of actually being a woman. He toured Vaudeville under the his last name “”Eltinge,” which gave no hint of his gender. After his act of singing and dancing, he stepped forward on stage, and in a dramatic gesture emulated later in the 1982 film Victor/Victoria, he reached up and removed his wig to the surprise of his often unsuspecting audience. He arrived on Broadway in 1907 at the Alhambra Theater, and through the next decade he was reputed to be the highest paid stage actor. He started appearing in films in 1914, and by 1920, had one of the most lavish mansions in Southern California, where he lived with his mother.

Eltinge countered rumors of his homosexuality offstage by presenting a unrelentingly masculine presence in public. He smoked cigars, was an amateur boxer, got into bar fights, and had long engagements with women. Funny though, he never married. “I am not gay,” he protested, “I just like pearls.” But by the 1930;s, his heyday was over. He gained weight and started drinking as his career took a nose-dive. He was reduced to performing in a Hollywood nightclub catering to a gay clientele, but local laws intended to contain the “homosexual menace” banned dressing in drag. Eltinge had to perform in a tuxedo alongside mannequins dressed in his outfits. He’d point to them while enacting his characters. He died in 1941, reportedly of a brain hemorrhage, although some suspect suicide. His will, dated October 13, 1938,  stated “I declare that I am a bachelor” and left everything to his mother.

You can see an early silent film from 1918 featuring Eltinge in drag here.

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?

Maggie: Part 2 of ‘The Harms of Same-Sex Marriage’

Maggie Gallagher, founder of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), has answered the question:

In states where same-sex couples have been allowed to marry, what harm has been brought to individuals or society at large?

I already knocked apart a portion of her answer here. Now I’d like to deal with this bit:

I think we’re in the early stages of seeing my primary concern, which is a transformation of the public understanding of marriage and the separation of it from its roots in the natural family…Gay marriage is not just adding a couple of people onto an existing institution. It requires re-norming the whole institution and making it serve new purposes, instead of its classic purpose across time and culture and history, which is to bring together male and female so children have a mom and a dad.

In other words, same-sex marriage will obscure the purpose of marriage. She hits this theme a lot, and I’ve previously pointed out the problems that arise when you talk about the purpose of marriage. So now let me hit something else — let me point out that her answer suggests this isn’t about marriage at all. It’s about gays.

See, in 2009 over 110,000 women aged 55 and older got married. That accounted for 5.1% of all marriages that year. The birth rate of women in this group is so small that the Census Bureau and the CDC don’t even report it. For these women, “the” purpose of marriage is not procreation, not about bringing together moms and dads. And by the way, when women in this group do conceive, it’s generally through an egg donor, so even that is contrary to Maggie’s repugnant, repetitive rhetoric about marriage uniting children with “their own mother and father” (that is, repugnant to adoptive parents, at least, who apparently cannot count their children as “their own”).

Now, that 5.1% figure is a bit higher than the 4.1% of adults willing to tell the government they’re gay or bisexual (which itself is different from the fraction who actually are gay or bisexual, but we’re concerned here with people willing to go on the record, as marriage requires).

So this is what Maggie needs to resolve:  We’ve got two groups, both of whom wish to marry, neither of whom can conceive on their own. According to Maggie that’s a bad combination. Yet she’s willing to let them marry as long as they’re not same-sex couples. At this point it takes some real tap dancing to avoid the idea that it’s really just all about gays.

Still, I invite Maggie to explain.

A preemptory note: Our opponents have two common responses to this:

• It would be a terrible invasion of privacy to investigate the fertility of an opposite-sex couple before granting a marriage license! If you hear this, then ask: “So if we could somehow know their fertility, you’d be fine with denying them marriage?” You’ll likely get back something about not wanting to deal in hypotheticals (which are entirely within the realm of possibility!), and that means they’re not willing to follow their reasoning to its logical conclusion.

• We don’t define laws according to the exceptions. In other words, opposite-sex infertile couples are merely “exceptions” that the law can’t be bothered to address. To begin with, what a dismissive insult! Can you imagine telling a heartbroken couple who has struggled and failed to conceive: We would take away your marriage rights but we simply can’t be bothered. Further, it’s not true; the law carves out exceptions constantly — consider killing as murder vs. self-defense. But most of all, if we don’t base laws on exceptions, then why do our opponents spend millions trying to rob one small exception — one small group of couples — of their marriage rights simply because they cannot conceive on their own?

So be ready for those responses. You’re likely to hear them, and they’re easy to deal with.

Here’s another way of seeing how ridicu-ludicrous Maggie’s statement is. She warns us away from making marriage “serve new purposes.” Presumably she means something other than just uniting two people of the same sex — something more than “just adding a couple of people onto an existing institution.” No, Maggie’s new purposes consist of that which goes beyond marriage’s “classic purpose…which is to bring together male and female so children have a mom and a dad.”

Do you believe that? If so, then imagine this conversation between Maggie and a new NOM intern:

Intern: Hey Maggie, get this: in 2009, more than 30,000 women aged 65 and older got married.

Maggie: No, that can’t be. That’s ridiculous. I should fire you.

Intern: Fire — wait — what?

Maggie: You’re trying to fool me into believing that 30,000 elderly women thought they could procreate!

Intern: But I didn’t — wait — what?

Maggie: Because that’s the only reason they would marry.

Intern: The only — wait — what?

Maggie: Why else would they marry?

Intern: Um…because that’s what people in love do? When they want to build a life together? As one?

Maggie: Nonsense. That would be an entirely new purpose for marriage!

Intern: It would?

Maggie: It’s so obvious, only a fool would need that explained.

Intern: Can you explain it?

Maggie: Oh…

Intern: Oh?

Maggie: Oh…you are so fired!

Personally, I don’t believe this conversation would ever happen. I don’t think Maggie, confronted with a 65-year-old bride, would find herself baffled. She wouldn’t investigate whether this woman thinks she can conceive. And Maggie’s head wouldn’t explode at the prospect of a new purpose for marriage. I bet Maggie would congratulate this woman on having another go at happiness.

As long as she’s marrying a man.

Maggie also offered this as a harm of same-sex marriage:

You see the idea and the ideal that children need a mother and father beginning to be redefined as the equivalent of a racist or mean or hateful idea. That’s on top of the problem of the silencing or the — which I’ve already talked about — the way religious institutions and religious people who in good conscience can’t treat same-sex unions as marriages begin to be treated as pariahs.

As you recall, I’ve written already how Maggie herself shares responsibility for this quandary. At that time, I promised to write more on it, but others anticipated me by pointing out the circular nature of her argument: Legalizing same-sex marriage is bad because it makes people who are opposed to same-sex marriage officially bad. So let me take a moment and extend that a bit.

First, Maggie is wrong in her circular argument. Legalizing same-sex marriage doesn’t mean the government is calling opponents bigots; after all, the government hires Jewish military chaplains, but that doesn’t mean it’s designating as “bigots” anyone who thinks Christ is the only path to salvation. As I’ve written before, compare these two statements:

If the statement on the left is correct, then so is the one on the right. Government neutrality is not an accusation of “bigotry.”

But there’s another response to Maggie’s argument. Suppose you spin it around like a hula hoop and turn it against her. During NOM’s ill-fated bus tour across the country, Brian Brown staked NOM’s worth on the character of its supporters. These are the same supporters who have a hard time commenting on NOM’s blog without speaking of abomination and perverts. So if we hijack NOM’s reasoning, we can say that same-sex marriage must be legalized; anything else would reinforce the idea of gays as abominable perverts who shall surely be put to death.

But of course that’s ridiculous. Just as ridiculous as Maggie’s notion that we must ban same-sex marriage to keep people from saying mean things about its opponents.

Send Mom some hyacynths

On May 9, 1914 President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation declaring the first national Mother’s Day. JC Leyendecker painted the above Bellhop with Hyacinths for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post and established the tradition of sending flowers on Mother’s Day.

The Daily Agenda for Sunday, May 13

Mom and me. And by the way, I wish I could find curtains like those!

TODAY’S AGENDA:
What, You Can’t Pick Up A Phone? Today is Mother’s Day. Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!

Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Bergen, Norway; Brussels, Belgium; Chisinau, Moldova; Maspalomas, Gran Canaria; New Hope, PA and Uppsala, Sweden.

Other Events This Weekend: Boston Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Boston, MA; Beach Bear Weekend, Ft. Lauderdale, FL; Big Horn Rodeo, Las Vegas, NV Paradise Festival, Oahu, HI.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
“Cambio de Sexo” Premieres: 1977. Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s death in 1975 brought a new permissiveness in Spanish film-making, and Catalonia-born director Vicente Aranda probed the limits in what was acceptable in a still-conservative society. Cambio de Sexo (“Change of Sex”), which debuted on May 13, 1977 to critical acclaim, starred Victoria Abril as José Maria, a shy, introverted teenager living in the outskirts of Barcelona. Bullied and harassed by his schoolmates, José is expelled from his school. His father tries everything to “cure” him of his effeminate mannerisms, including, in a pivotal scene, taking him to a strip club in Barcelona. But unbeknownst to his father, one of the acts in the strip club is a pre-operative transgender. The father, clueless to the situation and determined to see his son lose his virginity, insists that José goes home with the stripper. Let’s just say the entire experience is revelatory as José understands that he was actually meant to be a girl. But the movie is more than just a story of the teen’s metamorphosis into a young woman. The transgender theme served as a reflection of the larger social changes which were just beginning to overtake Spain.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Bea Arthur: 1922. After serving thirty months in the Marine Corps as one of the first members of the Women’s Reserve. Her enlistment officer wrote that she was “officious — but probably a good worker — if she had her own way!” That description would be a good description of the characters she would portray on television. After working on and off Broadway, she landed the breakout part as Maude Findlay on Norman Lear’s groundbreaking sit-com All in the Family. The Maude character was Edith Bunker’s cousin who was the polar opposite of bigoted Archie Bunker. That 1971 episode led to her own spin-off in 1972, Maude. As the theme-song said, she was “uncompromisin’, enterprisin’, anything but tranquilizing.” The series tackled women’s liberation, menopause, drug and alcohol addiction, and spousal abuse. In one memorable two-part episode which aired two months before Roe v Wade, Maude decided to terminate a late-life pregnancy with an abortion. Maude ended in 1978. After a few other roles in television and the movies, she landed the role of Dorothy Zbornak in the hit series Golden Girls. Between Maude and Golden Girls, Arthur became an LGBT icon. The Advocate in 1999 asked her why she thought that was. “You play strong, honest people,” she said, “and gays buy it because it’s real and it’s slightly anti-establishment.” She was certainly real. Also she was on Broadway in Mame. You can’t forget that.

Armistead Maupin: 1944. He was born in Washington, D.C. but grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. He began working as a newspaper reported in Charleston, S.C. before he moved to San Francisco in 1971 to work for the Associated Press, In 1976, he released the first installment of his Tails of the City serials. first in a now-defunct Marin County newspaper and later in the San Francisco Chronicle. Those columns were re-worked into a series of books in 1978. In 2007, Maupin married his husband Christopher Turner in Vancouver. During a trip to Australia in 2011, Maupin and his husband were denied the use of a restroom at a saloon in Alice Springs where they were having lunch. The bartender told them to go across the street because their rest room was reserved for “real men.” “So we did what real men do and crossed the street to the visitor’s center where we filed a complaint,” Maupin wrote. “Impressively we received an e-mail apology from the bartender that afternoon. Fair dinkum, mate. Next time don’t [expletive] with the poofters.”

Alan Ball: 1957. Screenwriter, director, actor and producer Alan Ball was born in Atlanta George and graduated from Florida State University with a degree in theater arts. He has written two films, American Beauty (for which he won an Oscar for best original screenplay) and Towelhead. He is more familiar to television audiences for his role as creator, writer and producer of the HBO drama series Six Feet Under (for which he won an Emmy in 2002) and True Blood, a series that has been seen as a paper-thin allegory for the LGBT community. Ball has called the comparison “kind of lazy”, adding “I just hope people can remember that, because it’s a show about vampires, it’s not meant to be taken that seriously. It’s supposed to be fun.”

Ball not only has to contend with critics, but last year he and his partner, actor Peter Macdissi, got tangled in a legal tussle with their neighbor, Quentin Tarantino, who filed a lawsuit claiming that the pair’s collection of exotic birds constantly emit “blood-curdling” and “pterodactyl-like screams” each day which have disrupted Tarantino’s work as a writer.

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?

CNN Revisits “Sissy Boy Syndrome”

The proposed California Bill to place restrictions on Sexual Orientation Change Efforts (SOCE) by licensed therapists provided the hook last night for CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 to revisit last summer’s series “The Sissy Boy Experiments”:

You can read our original investigation on Kirk Murphy’s story here. Following this segment, Anderson Cooper interviewed Ryan Kendall and Dr. Jack Drescher about SOCE and the proposal in California. Unfortunately, CNN has not posted video of that interview.

Romney Talks Marriage at Liberty U, With a Shout-Out to Rick Santorum

Gov. Mitt Romney gave a shout-out to Sen. Rick Santorum during today’s commencement address at the late Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, VA:

The power of these values is evidenced by a Brookings Institution study that Senator Rick Santorum brought to my attention.  For those who graduate from high school, get a full-time job, and marry before they have their first child, the probability that they will be poor is 2%.  But, if those things are absent, 76% will be poor.  Culture matters.

As fundamental as these principles are, they may become topics of democratic debate.  So it is today with the enduring institution of marriage.  Marriage is a relationship between one man and one woman.

Those were just two of Romney’s applause lines today, the second one earning him an standing-O. By the way, when I typed that last sentence, I miss-typed “applause” and my spellcheck suggested changing it to “appease.” My iMac may be trying to insert its own commentary into this post, but I think it’s not as smart as it thinks it is. Not if the AFA’s Bryan Fischer is any indication:

GOP Pollster: Time To Evolve

Jan van Lohuizen is a Republican pollster who worked on President George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign. He is also the GOP’s Daniel reading the writing on the wall when he sent memo out yesterday to Republican operatives with an overview of poll numbers on marriage equality and suggestions on how the GOP should address same-sex marriage if it wants to stay relevant. You can read the entire memo here.

Van Lohuizan notes that through 2009, the uptick in support for same-sex marriage was at a rate of about 1% per year. Beginning in 2010, there was a noticeable elbow in the curve, with support for marriage equality increasing by approximately 5% per year on average. And while that support is greater among Democrats and Independents than Republicans, support is growing in GOP ranks as well, with a majority of registered Republicans supporting a growing list of protections for gays and lesbians.

Van Lohuizan has a come up with a list of talking points which he thinks that Republican candidates ought to adopt if they want to stay relevant, beginning with:

“People who believe in equality under the law as a fundamental principle, as I do, will agree that this principle extends to gay and lesbian couples; gay and lesbian couples should not face discrimination and their relationship should be protected under the law. People who disagree on the fundamental nature of marriage can agree, at the same time, that gays and lesbians should receive essential rights and protections such as hospital visitation, adoption rights, and health and death benefits.”

This is somewhat similar to Gov. Mitt Romney’s talking points following President Barack Obama’s announcement that he supports full marriage equality. The main difference is that Romney reiterates his opposition both to marriage equality and to civil unions which would approximate marriage equality. Van Loguizan’s suggested talking points addresses neither. But he does explain to the GOP under the guise of another talking point why the party is going to have to change it’s approach to gay people sooner rather than later:

“As more people have become aware of friends and family members who are gay, attitudes have begun to shift at an accelerated pace. This is not about a generational shift in attitudes, this is about people changing their thinking as they recognize their friends and family members who are gay or lesbian.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Rick Santorum has some very different advice for Romney. Santorum told an Arknsas television station that Romney needed to “tep up and take advantage of a president who is very much out of touch with the values of America.”:

“Hopefully Governor Romney will continue to stand tall for his position on this issue and understand how detrimental it would be for society for it to have this changed,” Santorum also told the Arkansas station.

“Governor Romney has to talk about his values,” he added. “That’s the most important thing.”

AFA’s Bryan Fischer expands on that advice here.

The Daily Agenda for Saturday, May 12

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Mitt Romney Gives Commencement Address at Liberty University: Lynchburg, VA. Following in the well-worn footsteps of John McCain, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan (not to mention Glenn Beck), presumptive GOP presidential nominee Gov. Mitt Romney will deliver the commencement address to the late Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University today.

The school’s decision to extend the invitation to the Mormon nominee sparked a backlash among some students, requiring Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. to intervene and explain that the “purpose of having a prominent Commencement speaker is not to promote the speaker or his views but rather to inspire and challenge the graduates and showcase Liberty and its mission.” Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, said that if Romney emphasizes his views “about how every child has a right, a God-given right, to have a mother and a father, and you can’t separate the financial malaise we are in from the moral malaise,” then he should do just fine. Given Obama’s embrace of marriage equality and revelations of Romney’s own gay-bashing incident in high school, his speech today will certainly be closely watched. The commencement ceremony begins today at 10:00 a.m. EDT.

Pride Celebrations This Weekend:Angers, France; Bergen, Norway; Brussels, Belgium; Chisinau, Moldova; Maspalomas, Gran Canaria; New Hope, PA; Northhampton, MA and Uppsala, Sweden.

AIDS Walks This Weekend: Ohunquit, ME and Stockton, CA.

Other Events This Weekend: Boston Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Boston, MA; Beach Bear Weekend, Ft. Lauderdale, FL; Big Horn Rodeo, Las Vegas, NV Paradise Festival, Oahu, HI.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Time Magazine Reports on the First Gay Students Group: 1967. “Equal rights” was a common catchphrase on college campuses in 1967 as students across the country became politically engaged in issues of racial equality and women’s rights. Time magazine reported on another group that had formed to protest discrimination and injustice when Columbia University recognized the Student Homophile League, making the campus the first major university in the country to offer recognition to a gay rights student group. Getting the group officially recognized was a challenge; in 1967, no gay or lesbians students felt that it was safe to come out:

The University Committee on Student Organizations at first denied the league recognition, since it refused to name its organizers The dozen interested students then shrewdly enlisted eight officers of other campus organizations, all presumably heterosexual, to sign as sponsors, under a university rule that their names need not be made public. The committee then decided that it had no legal reason not to grant the group official status.

While declining to identify himself or other members by name (“We would be losing jobs for the rest of our lives”), the league’s chairman insists the group is educational, not social, and “plans no mixers with Harvard.” So far, Columbia students seem little interested in joining. Shrugged Sophomore Elliot Stern: “As long as they don’t bother the rest of us, it’s O.K.” The league’s biggest problem will probably be its self-imposed secrecy. As some students asked: How do you treat them equally when you don’t know who they are?

[Thanks to a BTB reader Rob for providing a copy of this report.]

California Decriminalizes Homosexuality: 1975. Efforts to repeal California’s Sodomy law began in 1969 when San Francisco Assemblyman Willie Brown introduced what became known as the Brown Bill into the lower House. He reintroduced the bill every year until its passage in 1975. That year, the bill advanced through the House only to run into trouble in the Senate. The vote stood at a 20-20 tie when Senate Majority Leader George Moscone (who later became mayor of San Francisco) locked the chamber’s doors until Lt. Gov. Mervyn Dymallyin could fly in from Denver to deliver the tie-breaking vote. Gov. Jerry Brown signed the bill into law when it finally reached his desk.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Katharine Hepburn: 1907. Star of Morning Glory, The Philadelphia Story, The African Queen, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Lion In Winter, and On Golden Pond among countless others, she holds the record for the most Best Actress Oscar wins — four out of twelve nominations. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut, the daughter of suffragist Katharine Martha Houghton (who co-founded Planned Parenthood) and Dr. Thomas Hepburn, a urologist from Virginia. He insisted that his daughters learn to play tennis and golf, to ride and to swim, an activity she especially enjoyed. She attended Bryn Mawr College where she earned a degree in history and philosophy. She also earned a suspension for smoking and breaking curfew: after dark, she would swim naked in the college’s “Cloisters” fountain.

Her background and drive are what make Hepburn widely admired today, but she was very unconventional and controversial in her day. She disdained makeup and often went to interviews dressed in men’s suits, saying they were more comfortable. She was straightforward, outspoken, and unabashedly intellectual, earning her the nickname, “Katharine of Arrogance.” She was also fearless. While filming The African Queen on location with Humphrey Bogart and director John Houston, she asked to go along when the two went big game hunting. Houston described her as a “Diana of the Hunt” who was able to shoot with the best of them. She recognized no limits. “I can remember when walking as a child, it was not customary to say you were fatigued. It was customary to complete the goal of the expedition.”

Bruce Voeller: 1934. Where to begin? He was a tireless gay rights advocate who co-founded the National Gay Task Force in 1973 and served as its director until 1978. He was a talented biologist, having studied biochemistry, developmental biology and genetics. That put him on the front lines as a researcher for a new disease that others started calling Gay-Related Immune Disorder (GRID), a name that he challenged for its medical inaccuracy. It is Voeller who is credited for giving the new disease the more accurate name of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).

Voeller had married Dr. Kytja Scott Voeller, whom he met in grad school. Together they had three children. He came out in 1964 when he was 29, and the resulting divorce was messy. Voeller had to fight all the way up to the Supreme Court to gain child visitation rights. By then, he was heavily involved in the resurgent gay rights movement. He was among the founders of the Gay Activists Alliance in 1969 and served as its third president. But where the GAA was more interested in street activism, he sought to bring gay activism into the mainstream of political discourse. In 1973, he left the GAA and founded NGTF (later, NGLTF), and built it into a nation advocacy organization. As NGTF director, he attended a historic White House meeting in 1977 with thirteen other LGBT advocates to raise awareness about discriminatory laws and policies.

In 1978, Voeller left he NGTF and established the Mariposa Education and Research Foundation to conduct human sexuality research. Among his concerns was that books, papers, and other ephemera on the LGBT movement was easily lost or destroyed, posing a danger that LGBT history itself would vanish. So he created a network of volunteers to search for and gather as much as possible, and that extensive collection was donated to the Cornell University Library in 1988. With the advent of AIDS, Voeller returned to his biologist’s roots and the Foundation shifted its focus to reducing the risks of sexually transmitted diseases. His 1989 study warned that mineral oil lubricants caused rapid deterioration of latex condoms, leading to a shift to water-based sexual lubricants. He pioneered the use of nonoxynol-9 as a spermacide and topical virus-transmission preventative,, and he studied the reliability of various brands of condoms in disease prevention. The results of that study even appeared in Consumer Reports, making the information widely available and accessible to the public. He was conducting studies on viral leakage for the (then) recently approved “female” condom when he passed away in 1994 of an AIDS-related illness.

Jared Polis: 1975. Polis earned his fortune when he founded American Information Systems, an Internet access, web hosting and application service provider. He also co-founded an online greeting card company and an online florist. After selling those companies during the height of the dot-com bubble, he used his wealth to found the Jared Polis Foundation in 2000, with the mission to “create opportunities for success through education and access to technology.” The foundation has refurbished and donated more than 3,500 computers each year to schools and other non-profits. He also founded two charter schools for at-risk students, and another school for older immigrant youths. He founded another school in Denver to serve youth who are homeless or living in unstable conditions.

When he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for Colorado’s Second District in 2008, he was the first openly gay man to be elected as a freshmen (all the others came out while already in office). He is also the first openly gay parent in Congress. As congressman, he has been a tireless advocate for LGBT equality. In 2011, he launched the Fearless Campaign, dedicated to “empowering our political leaders with the moral courage it takes to vote fearlessly on the politically charged issues of today, regardless of the perceived political risk.”

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?

Watch Out LaBarbera, You’ve Got Competition.

UPDATE: I’ve removed the above video after learning the following:

A video of a woman testifying against the anti-discrimination ordinance at the Lincoln City Council this week went viral, but her family says she is diagnosed with schizophrenia and shouldn’t be taken seriously. Jane Svoboda, 52, made several bizarre and disjointed statements during her five minutes of testimony at Monday’s meeting.

..Svoboda lives at an assisted-living facility in Lincoln and is listed as a protected person, according to court documents. Her brother, Patrick Svoboda of Ogallala, is her conservator because she is incompetent, the documents say.

Odder still, but also touching:

It wasn’t the first time Svoboda has testified before the council. She also is a registered lobbyist at the Capitol. She usually speaks twice a month during the council’s open mic sessions, where citizens can talk for up to five minutes on any topic. The council sits patiently until she is done.

Whatever else is happening there, that alone says a lot for Lincoln.

I’m rather ashamed of myself that it didn’t occur to me that Svoboda was mentally ill. I saw my best friend from grade school succumb to schizophrenia during high school, and from that experience I’ve learned to spot it in others, ususally. But for some reason, I didn’t see it here. I should have, and I apologize.

Although I still say LaBarbera has competition.

In Other News, Irony Just Walked Out Into The Woods To Shoot Itself

Karl Rove appeared on Fox News to accused President Brack Obama of using same-sex marriage for political gain.

Well, There Were Those Rumors About Perry…

The Hill:

An adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign defended the candidate’s “kind impulses” on Friday, pointing to his treatment of Texas Gov. Rick Perry during recent GOP debates as proof.

I really hate to use an overworked cliché of saying they just don’t get it, but it looks to me that they don’t even care what the issue is all about. Except that it somehow looks bad. The problem is they’re making it worse:

“The real question here is is Mitt Romney a bully? And the answer is no,” (Romney advisor Kerry Healy) said. “Mitt Romney is absolutely, as his other friend from high school said, he doesn’t have a vicious bone in his body.”

Friend, singular. As opposed to seven who have come forward to talk about the assault.

The Daily Agenda for Friday, May 11

Kirk Murphy

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Sissy Boy Experiment to Air on AC360: CNN. Last night, I received an email message from Maris Murphy Ehlers to say that she has learned that CNN has scheduled another airing of The Sissy Boy Experiment, last year’s series on the sexual orientation change therapy that her brother, Kirk Murphy, underwent at UCLA while only four years old. Kirk was treated by a young grad student by the name of George Rekers, who would go on to become a prominent anti-gay activist and proponent of the ex-gay movement — and who fell from grace after returning from a European vacation in the company of a rent-boy who he hired to lift his luggage. We had fun with that for weeks, not knowing all along that Kirk Murphy, who was Reker’s most famous success story and on whose case studies Rekers built his career, had killed himself in 2003.

I don’t have the details of when the series will air, except that it will be sometime during AC360, beginning at 8:00 p.m. EDT.  Meanwhile, you can read about Kirk Murphy’s experience of ex-gay therapy at the hands of George Rekers in our original report, What Are Little Boys Made Of?

Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Angers, France; Bergen, Norway; Brussels, Belgium; Chisinau, Moldova; Maspalomas, Gran Canaria; New Hope, PA; Northhampton, MA and Uppsala, Sweden.

AIDS Walks This Weekend: Ohunquit, ME and Stockton, CA.

Other Events This Weekend: Boston Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Boston, MA; Beach Bear Weekend, Ft. Lauderdale, FL; Big Horn Rodeo, Las Vegas, NV Paradise Festival, Oahu, HI.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Valentino: 1932. The Italian designer set the fashion bar in the 1960s, when he became a favorite designer for such celebrities and taste-makers as Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, Jane Fonda, Audrey Hepburn, Cate Blanchett, and Princess Margaret, many of whom were also his personal friends. Jackie Kennedy wore Valentino when she married Aristotle Onassis in 1968, and in a testament to his enduring style, he was the most-worn designer at the 2007 Oscars. It’s likely he would have repeated that achievement in 2008 if he hadn’t chosen to retire that year.

Valentino and his partner, Giancarlo Giammetti, have been the ultimate power couple in the fashion world for more than 50 years, with Giammetti serving as his business partner from very nearly the time they first met in 1960. In the documentary film Valentino: The Last Emperor, Valentino estimated that if one were to add up all of the time the two men have spent apart, it would not amount to more than eight weeks.

Billy Bean: 1964. The former outfielder and left-handed hitter for the Detroit Tigers, Los Angeles Dodgers, and San Diego Padres made headlines in 1999 when he became only the second baseball player to publicly come out, three years after his retirement from baseball. It was a long struggle to get there. As a closeted pro athlete, he struggled to juggle his secret and his career. He divorced his wife in 1993 and secretly moved in with his first lover. When his lover died of AIDS, Bean didn’t attend the funeral because he was too frightened that his secret would be revealed. “Why was it so impossible to think that a baseball player could grieve for a man?” he later reflected. “That was a terrible, terrible decision I made.”

His 2003 book, Going the Other Way: Lessons from a Life In and Out of Major League Baseball, chronicles the ups and downs of his life as a gay man and baseball player. He is currently a real estate agent in Miami.

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?

Another reason Obama’s evolution matters

Ten years ago, objection to same-sex marriage was – for most people – genuine. It may have generated from nothing other than unfamiliarity, mild prejudice, or just confusion, but for the most part it was not contrived or cynical or pandering.

Change is difficult and humans seem to have a blind instinct to defend “how things are supposed to be”. Considering that friends can have red-in-the-face, top of your lungs “discussions” about whether landing on “Free Parking” is supposed to pay out the money collected from “Chance” cards in Monopoly, it should be no surprise that decent people objected to changing what marriage “is supposed to be”.

But that was ten years ago. And despite the blustering of the professionally indignant defenders of (their own) religious freedom, the horizon is clear and the future is no mystery. Equality is coming, not on little cats feet like the fog, but galloping at breakneck speed. And there’s a good reason why.

Gay marriage was new. And odd. And a contradiction to what the terms were understood to be. It was like chocolate cereal or raw fish or women wearing slacks or smart phones. It just took getting used to.

But once the “new” wares off, real objections have to be considered. I won’t eat coco-puffs, but sushi isn’t so bad and after years of dragging my feet, I finally discovered that I can’t live without an iPhone.

And, as we all know, there aren’t many valid objections to same-sex marriage. Either you believe that the instinctive fears about drastically changing society have merit (that we just haven’t yet discovered) or you don’t. And as more people came to know gay folks, these concerns seem less likely.

Which brings me to my point: Mitt Romney doesn’t believe that letting gay people marry will harm society – or certainly not more than other things he puts up with. And he is fully aware that his views harm gay people and are unfair, unconstitutional, and a violation of the American ideal. He knows that. Other than a few truly insane people (Hello, Lew), they all do. They just don’t think that hedonistic sinners who defy God and social convention should have any claim on fairness, constitutionality, and the American ideal.

And furthermore, they know that the American public has little tolerance right now for blatant homophobia (other than, perhaps, in North Carolina). While ten years ago it might have been acceptable to laugh at the homos playing house, now that doesn’t fly. And the truth probably is that a huge chunk of politicians who vote against the American principles of equality couldn’t care less if gay people marry. They are just selling a product and pandering to a (rapidly shrinking) base.

But until yesterday, those who oppose equality had the perfect out. They didn’t have to look bad. They didn’t have to seem unreasonable. They didn’t have to appear to be motivated by less-than-admirable prejudices.

They could just say (and I know you all are as sick of hearing it as I am), “I don’t think people should be stopped from visiting loved ones in the hospital, but I don’t support gay marriage. My position is the same as President Obama’s.”

Not any more, it isn’t, Bubba. Not any more.

Why Obama’s Support for Marriage Equality Matters

Since President Barack Obama’s historic statement yesterday endorsing marriage equality, other Democratic leaders have stumbled over each other to make sure everyone knows that they, too, support the right of gay couples to marry. Chris Geidner ran down the list:

What this means, yes, is that all of the elected leaders of the national Democratic Party now support marriage equality.

…Outside of Congress, the heads of the Democratic National Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee do as well. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) at the DNC, Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) at the DCCC and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) at the DSCC all have been supporters of marriage equality.

All three groups — the DNC, DCCC and DSCC — have sent out emails in support of the president’s position in the day since his announcement in an interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts.

There is still some question as to whether a plank on marriage equality will make its way onto the Democratic platform this summer. But it is safe to say that this raises the bar considerably. Welcome to the twenty-first century.

A “Pack of Dogs”

Another eyewitness to Gov. Mitt Romney’s scissors assault has come forward:

“It’s a haunting memory.  I think it was for everybody that spoke up about it…  because when you see somebody who is simply different taken down that way and is terrified and you see that look in their eye you never forget it.  And that was what we all walked away with,” said Phillip Maxwell, who is now an attorney and still considers Romney an old friend.

“I saw it with my own eyes,” said Maxwell, of the anecdote first reported by the Washington Post.  Maxwell said Romney held the scissors helping to cut the hair of a student, John Lauber, who was presumed to be gay and who had long hair. “It was a hack job… clumps of hair taken off.”

Maxwell said he held the boy’s arm and leg, describing he and his friends as a “pack of dogs.”

…”When I saw the look on his (Lauber’s) face,  it was a look I’ll never forget,” said Maxwell. “When you see a victim, the sense of trust betrayed in this boy who was perfectly innocent for being different.”

“This was bullying supreme,” he said.

I gotta say, Romney must have been a real douchebag in high school for so many of his fellow classmates to be so willing to come forward to describe what happened nearly five decades later. These memories are indelible to them, and yet we’re supposed to believe that Romney doesn’t remember?

As for whether Lauber was assaulted because he was gay:

Maxwell said, “We didn’t know that word in  those days… but there were other words that were used. We weren’t ignorant, we just didn’t use the current names for things.”

The shame is not so much that an eighteen-year-old kid in 1965 organized a “pack of dogs” to go after Lauber. There is shame in that, even then, but the shame now is that a 65 year old grown man running for president would laugh it off — and yes, he laughed when he claimed he didn’t remember pinning a student down and cutting his hair with scissors.