Daily Archives: January 8, 2015
Lea Michele Singing 'Let It Go' Is The Cover 'Glee' Fans Have Been Waiting For
Lea Michele Singing 'Let It Go' Is The Cover 'Glee' Fans Have Been Waiting For
It’s not time to let go of those “Frozen” covers just yet.
In anticipation of the two-hour final season premiere of “Glee,” Fox just released Lea Michele’s much-anticipated rendition of “Let it Go.” In the premiere, Michele’s character, Rachel Berry, sings the song as she works to reestablish the glee club at McKinley High School, according to EW.
After the release of “Frozen,” “Let it Go” has become a force of nature, helping singer Idina Menzel make music history as the first person ever with both a top 10 hit and a Tony Award for acting. And since Menzel plays Michele’s mom on the Fox show, it seems like a fitting way to start the final season.
The final season of “Glee” premieres Friday, Jan. 9, at 8:00 p.m. ET on Fox.
BarbWire Columnist Blames 'Demonic' Gay People For Leelah Alcorn's Suicide: LISTEN
BarbWire Columnist Blames 'Demonic' Gay People For Leelah Alcorn's Suicide: LISTEN
Gina Miller, a content editor at vile anti-gay rag BarbWire, has blamed the gay community for the suicide of transgender teen Leelah Alcorn, reports Right Wing Watch.
Late last month, 17-year-old Alcorn took her own life and scheduled a heartbreaking suicide note to be published on her Tumblr page. The page has since been removed by Leelah’s conservative Christian parents.
In a characteristically nasty but shockingly insensitive column, Miller says that Satanic forces were behind Leelah’s “deeply disturbing mental and spiritual sickness.”
She continues that anyone “in open rebellion against God’s design for human sexuality will suffer for it, and suicidal tendencies are just one of the many ill effects.”
Using the horrible, preventable death of a teenager as fuel to the “Christian” right fire, Miller goes on to claim that it is actually anti-gay activists that are the victims of Leelah’s death:
“Our freedoms are in terrible danger. The radical homosexual movement is a powerful tool of these evil forces, and it is being used in an aggressive campaign to squash our natural rights of conscience, speech, association and religion and to pervert the meaning of family and marriage.”
Listen, if you can stomach it, AFTER THE JUMP…
BarbWire is owned by bigot Matt Barber, a man so deeply involved in the promotion of hatred that he has actively supported the “work” of Scott Lively who is known for helping to spread anti-gay laws in Africa and for his book The Pink Swastika, which blamed gay people for the rise of Nazi Germany.
Dan Savage has called for Leelah’s parents to be prosecuted for abuse.
Jim Redmond
Conservative Pundit Equates Paris Terrorism With Gay 'Terrorists' in Atlanta
Conservative Pundit Equates Paris Terrorism With Gay 'Terrorists' in Atlanta
A prominent conservative pundit dedicated a significant amount of airtime on his radio show Wednesday to lamenting ‘terrorism’ — by which he meant the firing of an antigay fire chief in Atlanta.
Sunnivie Brydum
Sutton's Defense Is Indefensible
Sutton's Defense Is Indefensible
On October 6, 2014, the Supreme Court declined to hear seven cases in which federal courts of appeals had found bans on same-sex marriages to be unconstitutional. One month later, a divided court of appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in an opinion written by Judge Jeffrey Sutton, upheld the bans in Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, & Kentucky. All four groups of plaintiffs have asked the Supreme Court to review that decision, and the Court is likely to decide whether to take up those cases at its conference on January 9, 2015. There are a number of legal issues in the case, but the keys to the ruling below are the two reasons Judge Sutton gave to support the ban, which this essay argues are indefensible under whatever degree of scrutiny the Court applies.
The majority opinion of Circuit Judge Jeffrey Sutton upholding bans in four states on same-sex marriage has an aura of reasonableness to it, but when it comes to offering real reasons to justify the bans, it cannot withstand analysis. According to Sutton, there are two reasons why the bans are constitutional: (1) they encourage procreation in marriage by opposite-sex couples, and (2) they uphold traditional marriage, while allowing for future change.
There are three undisputed facts that demonstrate conclusively that those reasons cannot sustain the bans: (1) most of the benefits of marriage for opposite-sex couples are unrelated to encouraging procreation; (2) the laws also preclude civil unions or any other arrangement that confers any of the benefits of marriage on same-sex couples; and (3) the Ohio ban was applied to deny the surviving member of a marriage performed out of state the right to include on the death certificate of his husband the indisputable fact that he was “married.”
Tradition
This argument asserts that the states did no more than maintain the centuries-old tradition of recognizing that marriage is only between a man and a woman, while proceeding cautiously and leaving open the door to same-sex marriages. But if tradition were a legitimate basis for bans on certain kinds of marriages, the challenge to the ban on interracial marriages struck down in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia would have come out the other way.
Moreover, in denying the right of same-sex couples to marry, the states did much more than retain the status quo: they enshrined their decisions in their state constitutions, hardly the equivalent of going slowly. Judge Sutton also asserted that a constitutional amendment imposing a ban on same-sex marriages was necessary to prevent the state courts from doing what the Massachusetts Supreme Court did when it found the right to same-sex marriage in its state constitution. But if that is all that was intended, a much narrower amendment would do the job, either by barring state courts from hearing such claims, or adding to the state constitution a provision stating that “Nothing herein shall be construed to create a right to marriage by persons of the same sex.” Either route would have made it clear that the state legislature could end the ban, but that the state courts could not.
Second, each state also banned civil unions that would at least allow same-sex couples to enjoy benefits such as the right to adopt the partner’s children, to visit a partner in the hospital, and to file joint income taxes. Because civil unions are less than two decades old, there is no tradition at all with respect to them, let alone a tradition of excluding them from tangible benefits enjoyed by opposite-sex couples. And by amending their constitutions to forbid their legislatures from enacting laws permitting civil unions – or anything resembling them – the states went full speed ahead to deny rights and did not simply act to preserve the status quo.
Third, Ohio’s refusal to allow a same-sex plaintiff who was legally married in another state from stating on his spouse’s death certificate that they were “married,” is totally unprecedented. Ohio made no effort to show that it ever questions the asserted marital status of a deceased, let alone that it ever challenged that status. If there had been such a tradition, Ohio would surely have offered evidence that what it did here was no more than a variation of what it regularly does in completing death certificates.
In the end, invoking tradition is another way of saying, “this is the way we’ve always done it, and we have no obligation to change.” That may be an explanation of how the law got to where it is now, but it cannot provide a justification for why it should remain that way.
Encouraging Responsible Procreation
The premise of this argument is that only opposite-sex couples can cause unintended pregnancies and that a state could reasonably conclude that children produced by couples who are not married have less favorable outcomes than are children raised by parents who are married. The first is undisputed, but the second was not supported by any evidence submitted in any of the proceedings in the trial courts by supporters of the bans. In any event, the crux of the problem is with the conclusion that these facts justify denying same-sex couples the same opportunity to marry as opposite-sex couples. In making that leap, the court of appeals asserted that permitting marriage for opposite-sex couples was a legitimate means of “subsidizing” the decision to have children within a marriage, rather than outside it.
That conclusion cannot withstand analysis because the remedy – limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples – sweeps in vast numbers of people for whom no such incentive is needed or even relevant. Those include the old, the infertile, and those who have no intention of having children. It is also vastly over-inclusive because marriage confers a range of benefits – such as filing joint tax returns – that have nothing to do with procreation of children.
Nor is it reasonable to refer to marriage as a form of subsidization of a decision to procreate within a marriage. If that kind of subsidization were actually intended, it would have taken the form of cash payments or tax credits to those who give birth to children in a marriage and stay married until the children reach majority. No rational person would conclude that a one-time “payment” of a marriage certificate could possibly be appropriate compensation for what in theory is a promise to raise their children as a married couple, let alone that such subsidy can be justified for the married couples who never have children.
Second, the bans also apply to civil unions between same-sex couples. By definition, same-sex couples do not need an incentive for responsible procreation, but the desire to reward opposite-sex couples for procreating responsibly cannot justify a ban on the wholly separate status of civil unions. If the ban did not extend to civil unions, same-sex couples would still not receive the “subsidy” of being able to say that they are married, although they would be able to receive the other benefits of such a status. However, the inclusion of the ban on same-sex civil unions further demonstrates that the procreation subsidy theory cannot support that aspect of the ban, yet there is no other justification offered to sustain it.
Finally, in Ohio (and not disclaimed by any other state or Judge Sutton), the prohibition extends to denying the surviving member of a same-sex marriage the right to have the status of the relationship with his deceased spouse listed on the death certificate as “married,” which is a description of what lawfully occurred in another state. There could not possibly be any connection between encouraging opposite-sex couples in Ohio to procreate within a marriage, and refusing to allow same-sex couples married outside of Ohio to state on the death certificate of one member of a couple that they were married. Indeed, that application of the ban on same-sex marriages is the proverbial thirteenth stroke of the clock, making all that came before suspect, not just as applied to death certificates, but to civil unions and same-sex marriage itself.
When all of the rhetoric is stripped away, the ban on same-sex marriages cannot be justified by the reasons given by Judge Sutton. Unless the courts are willing to sustain the prohibitions on same-sex marriages based on no more than “it’s OK because we say so, even if we have no reasons to support it,” these bans cannot survive.
HRC Takes Action Against Saks Fifth Avenue for Undermining LGBT Equality
HRC Takes Action Against Saks Fifth Avenue for Undermining LGBT Equality
In response to outrageous anti-equality position and undermining their own corporate LGBT equality policies, HRC suspends Saks’ Corporate Equality Index score
HRC.org
Ellen Page Has Two Choice Words For Antigay Politician Honored By The Queen: “F*%# That”
Ellen Page Has Two Choice Words For Antigay Politician Honored By The Queen: “F*%# That”
Canadian out actress Ellen Page has expressed her outrage over a recent royal honoree.
Queen Elizabeth II is 88, so it’d be understandable for her judgment to slip here and there, but then there’s also that thing (you know the one) when you’re the Queen where you have a whole staff of smart people around you to help out with all that medal-giving and knighting.
So it is perhaps baffling why the Queen decided to honor Northern Irish politician Maurice Mills, a man with a record of saying things like the spread of AIDS in Africa is the result of the “filthy practice of sodomy.” Not to be confused with the sounds of sodomy, also an Irish phenomenon.
Ellen fired off this tweet:
“The Queen honored a politician who blamed Hurricane Katrina & AIDS on LGBT people: t.co/XoemvNNz1w pic.twitter.com/dYn21wIZuD” fuck that
— Ellen Page (@EllenPage) January 5, 2015
It’s since been retweeted over 4,300 times, and Mills issued the following response in the News Letter:
“I welcome the scrutiny of anybody.
These people are making judgment on a person when they haven’t a clue about his background or what the position is.
I’m not getting into a mix about that. My position is taken from the word of God and I’ll obviously not be moving from that, it’s as simple as that.
I said this could be a warning, just as God has done countless times through the ages.”
It’s ironic that he was recognized on the “New Year’s Honours” list. It’s 2015 — time to stop throwing around language like “AIDS is a warning from God to quit all that gay stuff,” and expect to be taken seriously by the world.
We’re with you on this one, Ellen.
Dan Tracer
News: App Store, Betty White, Ansel Elgort, Vermont, Mariah Carey
News: App Store, Betty White, Ansel Elgort, Vermont, Mariah Carey
Right Wing Watch digs into a new report examining the “organized assault on sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) in Europe from the Catholic hierarchy and its conservative allies.” Involved in these efforts is none other than NOM leader Brian Brown.
New record: During the first week of January, consumers spent half a billion dollars on apps and in-app purchases from Apple’s App Store.
Betty White wins People’s Choice Awards, gets escorted to the stage by Captain America.
Meet the former policeman who launched Blued, China’s biggest gay dating app.
Tina Fey’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt starring Ellie Kemper gets a Netflix release date.
By a 110-69 vote, Vermont’s state legislature has reelected Peter Shumlin as governor over Republican challenger Scott Milne. Lawmakers were forced to select the governor after no candidate received more than 50 percent of the popular vote back in the November general election.
The Cosby Show‘s Phylicia Rashad claims she was misquoted saying “forget these women” in reference to Bill Cosby’s accusers.
Bo Obama enjoys the winter wonderland on the Rose Garden.
Michelangelo Signorile isn’t buying Jeb Bush’s “softened” tone on gay marriage. “Bush’s newly-fashioned statement was meant not to scare off younger voters, suburbanites, and some wealthy fiscal conservative donors, while still dog whistling to the Christian right with the “safeguard religious liberty” bit — three words we will hearad nauseum in the 2016 presidential race.”
Angelina Jolie met the Pope at the Vatican screening of Unbroken.
Actor Khan Bonfils, best known for his work on Star Wars Episode I and several James Bond films, has died after collapsing at a play rehearsal for Dante’s Inferno in London.
Check out this timeline of important event in LGBT equality in 2014.
Ansel Elgort is one of the new faces of Prada. We approve.
A deranged Florida father has been arrested on murder charges after tossing his 5-year-old daughter off a Tampa-area bridge.
The gay owners of Salt Lake City’s The Queens’ Tea (who were married on the first day of Utah’s marriage equality last year) are being forced to close their business to cover the legal fees after a Seattle company with a similar name filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against them.
Will Mariah Carey follow in Britney’s footsteps and perform a concert residency in Las Vegas this year?
Kyler Geoffroy
Gay Brother of 'Conscious Choices' Minister Speaks Out
Gay Brother of 'Conscious Choices' Minister Speaks Out
The minister who this week told NPR his story of rejecting his attraction to men has a gay brother, Dexter, who’s faced tremendous anguish in the face of his family’s anti-LGBT beliefs.
Stevie St. John
www.advocate.com/politics/religion/2015/01/08/gay-brother-conscious-choices-minister-speaks-out
'Imitation Game' Writer Slams 'Fact-Checking' Films As Misunderstanding Of Art
'Imitation Game' Writer Slams 'Fact-Checking' Films As Misunderstanding Of Art
Despite strong reviews, both “Selma” and “The Imitation Game” have been scrutinized by history buffs because of the factual accuracy, or lack thereof, within their narratives.
In a conversation with HuffPost Live on Wednesday, “Imitation Game” screenwriter Graham Moore stressed that these films, being pieces of art, should not be expected to fulfill the role of historical text.
“When you use the language of ‘fact checking’ to talk about a film, I think you’re sort of fundamentally misunderstanding how art works,” he explained. “You don’t fact check Monet’s ‘Water Lilies. That’s not what water lilies look like, that’s what the sensation of experiencing water lilies feel like. That’s the goal of the piece.”
Rooted in “the true events that really happened,” according to the film’s director, Morten Tyldum (also on HuffPost Live), the Golden Globe-nominee for Best Picture was crafted to offer a unique perspective into the mind of British computer pioneer Alan Turing rather than a glance at his life’s timeline.
“A lot of historical films sometimes feel like people reading a Wikipedia page to you onscreen, like just reciting ‘and then he did that, and then he did that, and then he did this other thing’ — it’s like a ‘Greatest Hits’ compilation,” Tyldum said. “We wanted the movie to be emotional and passionate.”
“Our goal was to give you ‘What does Alan Turing feel like?'” he continued. “‘What does his story feel like? What’d it feel like to be Alan Turing? Can we create the experience of sort of ‘Alan Turing-ness’ for an audience based on his life?'”
Watch more from HuffPost Live’s conversation with Graham Moore and Mort Tyldum here.
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