On the day the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell finally happened, young airman Randy Phillips came out to his father via telephone broadcasting a webcam of the event on YouTube. The airman who is stationed at the Ramstein Air Base in Germany telephoned his father in Alabama to tell him he was gay. In…
CALIFORNIA – Judge James Ware of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has ruled that the videotapes of the trial in Perry v. Schwarzenegger (now Perry v. Brown) should be made public. During last year’s trial, which ended with an historic decision finding California’s constitutional amendment stripping marriage rights from same-sex…
ARIZONA – An Arizona law that would have ended domestic partner benefits for state employees has been prevented from taking effect by the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. In September 2009, Gov. Jan Brewer signed a budget provision passed by the Arizona legislature that eliminated state workers’ domestic partner benefits by…
MARYLAND – Teonna Monae Brown, 19, who pleaded guilty last month to first-degree assault and a hate crime in the beating of transgender woman Chrissy Lee Polis, 22, at a McDonalds restaurant, has been sentenced to 10 years in prison, with five years suspended, plus three years of supervised probation. The April attack drew national…
CALIFORNIA – Gov. Jerry Brown has signed legislation that will bar the state of California from entering into contracts in excess of $100,000 with businesses and other entities that deny equal benefits to the same-sex spouses of their employees. The Equal Benefits bill (SB 117) was authored by Sen. Christine Kehoe (D-San Diego) and sponsored…
NORTH CAROLINA. – A majority of North Carolina voters oppose a Republican proposed constitutional amendment that would ban the state from recognizing same-sex marriages, civil unions or domestic partnerships. Fifty-five percent would vote against the amendment and only 30 percent would vote in favor of the amendment. The recent Public Policy Polling (PPP) survey also…
Legendary civil rights activist Robin Tyler and famed civil rights attorney Gloria Allred would like you to forget the traditional meaning of the term “pro bono” – at least for the next couple of weeks. Instead of professional services rendered free of charge, think of Pro Bono as a Dancing with the Stars (DWTS) viewing…
MISSISSIPPI – Bryan Fischer, spokesman for the anti-gay hate group American Family Association (AFA), has openly expressed support for the re-criminalization of homosexuality. On his radio show Focal Point recently, Fischer called on all fifty states to criminalize homosexuality. Fischer said, “Both of the cases that went to the United States Supreme Court that dealt…
WASHINGTON, D.C. – As scrutiny over campaign finance laws intensifies, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) has issued a memorandum detailing the National Organization for Marriage’s (NOM) unprecedented attempts to circumvent election disclosure laws, and how federal courts and state election boards continue to reject NOM’s claims – on at least six different occasions, the most…
TEXAS – A judge has told a man in Texas that he cannot leave his children in the care of his husband. The man, William Flowers, had married Jim Evans in Connecticut early in 2011 and had later moved to Texas. Flowers who had fathered three children from a previous marriage to a woman then…
