September 2, 2014 All Under One Roof LGBT Center
People of all ages young and old will walk through our doors each and every day looking for a place where they can be accepted; become empowered; and find comfort, understanding, and compassion….
Monthly Archives: September 2014
WATCH: Trans Model Andreja Pejic Launches Kickstarter for Film
WATCH: Trans Model Andreja Pejic Launches Kickstarter for Film
The documentary will recount Pejic’s journey from an intern at a Serbian refugee camp to one of the world’s most high-profile trans fashion models.
Daniel Reynolds
The Carnage Continues: Catholic Schools Are Still Firing Gay Teachers
The Carnage Continues: Catholic Schools Are Still Firing Gay Teachers
It is September. The days grow a little shorter. There is that hint of fall crispness in the air. And, of course, it is back-to-school season.
And if it is back-to-school time, then it must also be time for that very sad, very sorry, and utterly needless ritual that we all wish would stop happening. I am talking about the Catholic schools that continue to fire gay teachers. These annual firings are tragic, pointless, and inflict great harm. The discharged teachers, of course, are the most seriously injured, but so are all the people associated with the schools — students, graduates, parents, and staff. The Catholic school system is diminished in the eyes of the public. And the church as a whole is made to suffer.
Motherhood and mortgages — these are the classic symbols of quiet suburban domesticity. Yet they were also the triggering events that led to the firing of lesbian teachers in Detroit and St. Louis, respectively. Barbara Webb is 33 years old and a trained chemist. She could have pursued “lucrative private-sector opportunities” but felt the calling to teach and to awaken young minds to the joys of science. In a world that is shaped increasingly by science and technology, she seems like the sort of teacher every school district would want.
And, in fact, she was quite successful at her chosen career. In her nine years at Marian High School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, she “taught advanced placement and honors chemistry,” “coach[ed] volleyball and softball, and moderat[ed] student government.” She has been in a same-sex marriage for two years and became pregnant this summer by “nontraditional” means. She has asserted that her pregnancy was the reason for her discharge: “That you can’t hide a pregnancy from the public is why I was terminated.”
Students and graduates have expressed support. As one student put it, “I think the bigger thing everyone is feeling is that we have been taught this whole time to live a Christian life and be accepting of other people and yet we go and fire one of our favorite teachers?”
News accounts suggest that support for Barbara Webb is growing. A change.org petition has been launched in support of her cause. I’ve signed it. I hope others do too.
Some 500 miles to the southwest, in St. Louis, a similar set of tragic events are playing themselves out. Over the summer, it seems, a young married couple did what newlyweds routinely do all over the nation: They applied for a home mortgage. Olivia Reichert and Christina Gambaro, however, are in a same-sex union, and they are employed by Cor Jesu High School.
When the school learned of the mortgage application, the two teachers were terminated. Anger at Cor Jesu’s decision has been steadily growing since. Students and alumnae have organized Facebook pages and engaged in other acts of protest. Graduates from as long ago as the 1970s have spoken out against the administration’s decision. And alumnae have threatened what is always the most effective form of protest: They have promised to withhold contributions.
That these events are occurring in Detroit and St. Louis should perhaps not be surprising. Both archdioceses are led by veteran culture warriors who have long expressed hostility to same-sex marriage. In April 2013 Archbishop Allen Vigneron advised Detroit Catholics who supported same-sex marriage that they should not receive Holy Communion — a position effectively answered by Francis de Bernardo of New Ways Ministry.
Archbishop Robert Carlson, who now heads the St. Louis archdiocese, has a culture-war pedigree that stretches back many years. While serving as Bishop of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in the early 2000s, he reportedly told Sen. Tom Daschle to stop identifying himself as Catholic — something Daschle refused to do. As the archbishop of St. Louis, Carlson has spoken out against same-sex marriage as recently as this summer. Infamously, Carlson also testified under oath this past June that as the chancellor of the Twin Cities archdiocese in the early 1980s, he failed to report allegations of sex abuse to the police and wasn’t even sure the acts were criminal.
Both archdioceses are experiencing demographic crises. Vigneron and Carlson both assumed their present offices in 2009. Vigneron has seen infant baptisms plunge by around 30 percent during his tenure as archbishop. The numbers under Carlson are not as catastrophic, but they are bad enough: Infant baptisms are down a little more than 12 percent in a territory that is growing in population. Do you think that these two men might come to realize that a faith of inclusion, not exclusion, might help reverse these trends? I hope so.
What I wish both Marian High School and Cor Jesu might also recognize is that our knowledge of same-sex attraction has shifted dramatically over the last couple of decades. Indeed, it is now fair to say that a scientific consensus has emerged that holds that same-sex attraction is a naturally occurring and totally benign variation in human sexuality. In light of this new consensus, the prudent course for school administrators is to withhold harsh judgment of these teachers’ obviously rich and fruitful relationships. Certainly, they should not have been terminated from their positions.
Significantly, Catholic leaders in other nations are now adopting this cautious, do-no-harm approach. I have in mind particularly Bishop Nunzio Galantino, the newly appointed secretary-general of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, who has called for the acceptance of gays “without taboo.” The American Catholic laity seem to agree with Galantino: Over half of American Catholics now support same-sex marriage. Modesty, prudence, the realization that science now counsels acceptance and support of gay relationships, not their suppression, should suggest that these firings must stop. Now. At once.
Rutgers Approves New Policy To Better Accommodate LGBT Students
Rutgers Approves New Policy To Better Accommodate LGBT Students
Last week, Rutgers University approved a policy that will allow students to use their preferred names instead of legal names on school documents.
HRC.org
How Long Until Fire Island Is Completely Underwater?
How Long Until Fire Island Is Completely Underwater?
Meet Joseph.
He’s concerned about climate change, and wants the upcoming UN Climate Summit in NYC to be successful. So he decided to visit “climate change ground zero.” You know, Fire Island.
Because besides being the stuff that gay dreams are made of (which can quickly turn into gay regret), it’s also a “low-lying sandbar on the Atlantic Ocean.” Which doesn’t sound good when he puts it so bluntly.
He tries to engage the locals about the impending threat of climate change, but they seem a bit preoccupied.
Like these two guys above, who have a pressing game of volleyball to get to.
Tough crowd.
Joseph does finally find a few takers, and gets the perfect response after telling them that, “This place will be underwater. Sea level rise will wipe this place out.”
“So like, we won’t be able to come here anymore?”
The video is meant to be funny, and it is. But it’s also, you know, not. And it’ll be even less funny once shit starts getting real and our coasts are underwater.
Dan Tracer
New Out US Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith Talks Debugging Bias Against Women And Minorities: VIDEO
New Out US Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith Talks Debugging Bias Against Women And Minorities: VIDEO
Megan Smith, the former Google executive and former CEO of the online LGBT community site PlanetOut who was recently selected by President Obama as the new Chief Technology Officer of the U.S., is profiled in a new video put out by Makers, a site that aggregates and shares videos of women’s stories. In the video, Smith talks about her experience growing up as a girl in the at times misogynistic world of math, science and engineering. She also speaks about her experience as a lesbian working in the tech world:
“The world is not accepting. But eventually you get to a point where you realize it’s you, this is who you are. And you have to become willing to really let go of all your most important relationships in order to be yourself. When you’re gay you come out every day because everyone assumes you’re straight. But you have to be your whole self. You just do. ‘Cuz it will kill you not to…Right now as an industry we’re working hard on understanding bias against women and minorities that has just been with us through all of history and trying to in our tech way debug that.”
In her new role, Smith will “lead Administration-wide efforts to unleash the power of technology, data, and innovation to help meet our nation’s goals and the needs of our citizens.”
Watch the video, AFTER THE JUMP…
Sean Mandell
"I am not gay, altho
Speaking Professionally
Speaking Professionally
When you talk to your doctor, can you be sure that she’s giving you her best professional advice, and nothing but? What about your lawyer? Therapist? Pharmacist? When clients seek professional advice, they want to access a specialized body of knowledge that is often obscure to the outsider and highly technical, but extremely useful. We rely on professionals’ accurate advice and best judgment for important life decisions. And we trust that by virtue of being a professional, licensed by the state and subject to malpractice liability for bad advice, they will give us good information.
But speaking professionally has become something of a battleground of late as state legislatures are attempting to tell professionals what they may and may not say.
Does the First Amendment protect professional speech? Should it? And what about regulating the professions; surely, we don’t want to do away with licensing requirements or professional malpractice liability? We wouldn’t want to protect quackery as a matter of free speech, would we? Recently, these questions came to the forefront of legal and political debate in two sets of court decisions, involving legislation on two hot-button topics: gays and guns.
A California law prohibits mental health providers from engaging in “sexual orientation change efforts,” or, less euphemistically, conversion therapy, for minors. The Federal Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld that law against a constitutional challenge, and in July the Supreme Court refused to take up the case. So the California law can now go into effect. Similar legislation in New Jersey is being challenged in federal court there. Last year, a federal district court upheld the law, and the appeal is now before the Third Circuit. Other states are likely to follow California’s lead: The NCLR #BornPerfect campaign lists seven states and the District of Columbia as actively considering conversion therapy legislation.
The other case that made the national news and invited impassioned commentary involves a Florida law that prohibits doctors from inquiring about firearm ownership as a matter of course. The Federal Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit upheld that law as “a legitimate regulation of professional conduct.” Doctors may want to give parents advice about childproofing a home, for example. But doctors may not ask about guns in some instances, even if they might think it’s relevant, if the state says it’s not. (Though the court notes that “if good medical care clearly requires inquiry — for example, in case of a suicidal patient — the physician will know that inquiry is relevant and thus not barred.”) As the dissent points out, doctors and the state have “different definitions of ‘relevant.'”
So how should we think about these instances in which the state tries to determine what professionals may say to their clients, or where state legislatures determine what is relevant or irrelevant information? Surprisingly, there is no generally accepted theory of professional speech, and leading scholars are hotly debating the issue.
They raise a number of very important points. Robert Post, the dean of the Yale Law School, argues that doctors are subject to medical malpractice liability for bad advice, and the First Amendment provides no defense. So doctors’ rights are limited in that regard. Professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School notes that the First Amendment should apply when the state tries to silence politically unpopular views. And Professor Vikram Amar of UC Davis reminds us that the professions have always been subject to licensing.
But something crucial is missing from the debate: a deeper appreciation of the historically self-regulating nature of the professions on questions of substance, and the role of individual professionals in relation to these professional communities. To get a better conceptual handle on professional speech, I suggest that we should think about the professions as knowledge communities, that is, communities whose primary reason for existence is the generation and dissemination of knowledge. The individual professional is the conduit to pass on this knowledge to the client.
What the California conversion therapy law and the Florida gun law have in common is that the state tells professionals what they can say. But there is a fundamental difference: In the California case, the legislature codified the professional standard by relying on findings of professional groups, such as the American Psychological Association and others. In the Florida case, by contrast, the state legislature did exactly the opposite. While the American Medical Association and other professional groups have determined that asking about guns is relevant as a professional matter, the state legislature substituted its own judgment. But when we think about the professions as knowledge communities, we ought to be highly skeptical of state interference with professional insights.
Licensing schemes and the imposition of certain educational requirements remain as important as ever. Determining what it takes to be a professional does not involve the state in deciding what the professional is allowed to say. Protecting professional speech also doesn’t mean we have to do away with professional malpractice liability: the benchmark for sanctioning “unprofessional” speech is exactly the same body of knowledge that the First Amendment should protect. And the First Amendment, accordingly, does not protect “unprofessional” speech. As long as the professional gives the client good advice, as a matter of what is defensible professional knowledge, the client gets exactly what she needs. And it’s not for the state to decide what is relevant or irrelevant, accurate or inaccurate. The First Amendment should protect the professional’s and the client’s interests in relevant and accurate communication of the knowledge community’s insights when a professional speaks.
The GOP Platform Committee Should Watch This Republican’s New Marriage Equality Campaign Ad
Man Attacks Sleeping Gay Roommate With Hammer Because He “Can’t Live With” Gays
Man Attacks Sleeping Gay Roommate With Hammer Because He “Can’t Live With” Gays
18-year-old Connor Huntley
A 21-year-old man who tried to murder his gay roommate with a claw hammer has been sentenced to 14 years in prison, the BBC reports.
According to a police report, 18-year-old Connor Huntley was found alive in his Margate, England apartment last May after his roommate, 21-year-old Joseph Williams, called police to report that his roommate had died.
Fortunately, his roommate was not dead.
When police arrived, they discovered that Williams had delivered one severe blow to Huntley’s head with a hammer while he slept, simply because Huntley was gay and Williams “did not know if he could live with him.”
Charged with attempted murder and causing grievous bodily harm with intent, Williams has been detained under the Mental Health Act since.
Though Huntley survived the attack, he was left with a severe brain injury and a depressed skull fracture. The extent of his injuries are not detailed, but Huntley’s family insists that he has been handed “his own life sentence” through the ordeal.
The BBC also reports that the men were “not the obvious flatmates,” because they had been paired together by their landlord. A neighbor told reporters that a week before the attack, Williams had informed him that he intended to harm Huntley.
Speaking after the verdict was delivered this week, Huntley’s family released the following statement:
Whilst Connor is making slow but steady progress from this horrific ordeal, we feel he has been handed his own life sentence by this hideous act. No one deserves to be so viciously attacked in such an evil manner, regardless of race, age, gender or sexuality.
Connor’s head injuries are detailed in the x-ray scan below:
Photos: Kent Police
Matthew Tharrett
