Seize the Moment: Stop New Anti-LGBT Laws in Their Tracks and Replace Them with Real Protections for LGBT People
As the momentum builds toward a United States Supreme Court decision in favor of nationwide marriage equality, the LGBT community in recent weeks has faced an onslaught of proposed or newly enacted state laws aimed at encouraging government officials, businesses, individuals and other organizations to refuse to serve LGBT people. Some of these laws specifically identify LGBT people as their target; others appear neutral on their face but, in fact, are intended to discriminate against LGBT people, other minorities, and women. These recently passed laws deeply disturb us, but the opposition that businesses, local governments, and millions of Americans have given to these laws is truly heartening. This impassioned and broad based support for LGBT equality gives our community and the majority of Americans who support us the momentum and opportunity finally to demand that Congress and state legislatures across the country enact laws that protect LGBT people from discrimination in all aspects of our lives. We must seize the moment.

The circumstances surrounding Indiana Governor Mike Pence’s signing that state’s law and the events that unfolded thereafter have provided the nation telling evidence of the real intentions of those behind these types of legislation: political gain at the expense of LGBT people. Governor Pence, who has long opposed equality for LGBT people in areas such as employment protections, marriage, and military service, revealed again his lack of support for LGBT equality multiple times in his now infamous interview on ABC television’s This Week. When the Governor signed the bill, he surrounded himself with known leaders of statewide anti-LGBT groups.

The national political strategy behind many of these laws is not new and is an attempt to exercise political power by trying to instill unfounded fear that ensuring equality for LGBT Americans will somehow impinge on American’s freedom of religion. Frank Schubert and Jeff Flint, the campaign managers for the 2008 Yes on Proposition 8 campaign that took away same-sex couples’ freedom to marry in California, explained in a 2009 Politics Magazine article how this fear-based strategy was a key component of their campaign. Shubert and Flint stated that in developing the Yes on 8 campaign they “strongly believed that a campaign in favor of traditional marriage would not be enough to prevail” and that “passing Proposition 8 would depend on [their] ability to convince voters that same-sex marriage had broader implications for Californians and was not only about the two individuals involved in a committed gay relationship.” They reported they “probed long and hard in countless focus groups and surveys to explore reactions to a variety of consequences [their] issue experts identified.” Shubert and Flint came up with the message: “Tolerance is one thing; forced acceptance of something you personally oppose is a very different matter.” They focused on three areas to manipulate voters as to this imagined “conflict of rights,” one of which was “religious freedom.”

With nearly 60 percent of Americans supporting marriage equality according to a March 2015 Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, many opponents of equality are attempting to fabricate a threat to religious freedom now, as Shubert and Flint did in California in 2008. For decades, opponents of equality have attempted to use whatever message and strategy they have found effective to raise money, to motivate their base, or to scare voters. These tactics are political at their core and shift over time as Americans come to reject each one of them.

The same type of strategy based on a fabricated threat to religious freedom is also being employed to undermine women’s lives. For example, laws of this type have already been used to enable some large businesses and organizations to impose their owners’ religious views regarding contraception on women employees’ medical decisions. Indeed, Indiana’s recently enacted law invites individuals, businesses, and other organizations to refuse to serve any person simply based on what the individual or business claims is their religious view. The law could subject women, LGBT people, and millions of other Americans to discrimination and exclusion from vital services.

The outpouring of outrage at recent laws passed in Indiana and other states reveal that a majority of Americans embrace LGBT equality and want a nation where people do not have the door slammed shut on them because of who they are or whom they love. An Indianapolis businessperson developed a sign for store windows that states “This Business Serves Everyone,” and the “We Serve Everyone” campaign has gone national since. A 2013 poll by Third Way and the Human Rights Campaign revealed that 69 percent of Americans believe business owners should not be allowed to refuse services to lesbian or gay people. Last year, pressure from a broad coalition of individuals and businesses who support equality forced conservative, then-Arizona Governor Jan Brewer to veto a similar bill in Arizona.

We as Americans from many diverse backgrounds must not let up now and insist that Congress and state legislatures across the country enact wide ranging protections for LGBT people. And we look to the United States Supreme Court in the marriage equality cases to be decided this June not only to rule in favor of the freedom to marry nationwide but to recognize full equality under the Constitution for LGBT Americans.

John Lewis and Stuart Gaffney, together for nearly three decades, were plaintiffs in the California case for equal marriage rights decided by the California Supreme Court in 2008. They are leaders in the nationwide grassroots organization Marriage Equality USA.

www.huffingtonpost.com/stuart-gaffney/seize-the-moment-stop-new_b_6994872.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

Michigan Watches Indiana for More Than Basketball

Amidst the drama in Indiana yesterday, Michigan governor Rick Snyder told press that he would veto a stand-alone so-called Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
HRC.org

www.hrc.org/blog/entry/michigan-watches-indiana-for-more-than-basketball?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss-feed

Missouri GOP Attempting to Pass Indiana-Style 'Religious Freedom' Bill for College Campuses

Kyler Geoffroy

www.towleroad.com/2015/04/missouri-gop-attempting-to-pass-indiana-style-religious-freedom-bill-for-college-campuses.html

Mormons set to gather in Salt Lake City to learn news, get guidance at biannual conference
More than 100,000 Mormons will descend on Salt Lake City this weekend for the faith’s biannual conference to listen to spiritual guidance from leaders and to learn about church news.

www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2015/04/03/mormons-set-to-gather-in-salt-lake-city-to-learn-news-get-guidance-at-biannual/

Indiana RFRA Fuss Shows Where the Real Mainstream Now Runs

The light-speed legislative “fix” for Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act is a gobsmacking, humiliating defeat for the religious far right, and a stunning, couldn’t-be-predicted demonstration of where the mainstream now lies on LGBT rights.

More than defeat, it was political jiu jitsu: all the force and passion that had impelled the RFRA forward suddenly got turned against its proponents, to devastating effect.  A law that was intended as a consolation prize for the faction that lost the fight on gay marriage has now become evidence of how far outside the mainstream – even the mainstream of Indiana – that faction actually is. 

On top of it, the controversy has made it more likely that Indiana will get a statewide LGBT rights bill next year.  The state’s largest newspaper is behind it, as are the mayor of Indianapolis and much of the business community.

The new fix forbids using RFRA for the main reason its most ardent proponents wanted it: to gain religiously motivated exemptions from laws in Indianapolis and other cities that forbid discrimination in employment, housing, and places of business on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.  As the religious right’s losing battle against homosexuality enters its final phase, Indiana’s RFRA has been declawed.  It will no longer be a cudgel for the culture war.  Indeed, arguably it is now the most progressive of all 20 state RFRAs.

RFRAs can potentially be used to challenge almost any state or local law or practice – from building codes to prison regulations to school curricula – on the grounds they violate someone’s exercise of religion.  We can debate whether or not it’s wise or fair to give special rights – that is, accommodation over and above what the Constitution’s Free Exercise Clause requires – to religious practitioners.  But the point is, from its actual language, there was no reason to think Indiana’s RFRA was only about gay rights. 

Except, for its key proponents, it was.  Governor Mike Pence ineptly tried to claim otherwise, and looked foolish, if not dishonest.  But to know the truth, all you had to do was read what the web sites of groups like the Indiana Family Institute and  Advance America had been saying for months.  A florist who claimed her “relationship with Jesus Christ” prevented her from arranging some “twigs or sticks in a vase” for a gay customer’s wedding has become the heroine of this movement.  The law of the RFRA was more complicated than many people understood, but the anti-gay politics were not.  

The Indiana legislative fix smoked out this truth.  According to the Heritage Foundation, the fix “amounts to nothing less than a wholesale repeal” of RFRA.  And according to the group led by Eric Miller, who was an honored guest at Pence’s bill signing, RFRA will be “destroyed” if “Christian” businesses can’t use it to turn away homosexuals. 

Finally, some candor.

For a long time, groups like Miller’s traded on the perception that they represented the mainstream.  But Miller and his colleagues overreached, and the RFRA controversy demonstrated that they are actually on the fringe.  

As recently as a generation ago, gays and lesbians were widely despised: fired from government employment, arrested for their private sexual conduct, openly demeaned by politicians.  Most Americans reported unfavorable attitudes toward them. 

But today, the NCAA and NASCAR (and you can’t get any more middle-American than those) leap to disassociate themselves from right-wing religious groups who have become obsessed with scapegoating gays for their own declining support and relevance.  Their fleeting success with Indiana’s RFRA was a briefly encouraging paroxysm for groups that have otherwise “begun to seem like the enemy in Sun Tzu’s Art of War—exhausted, bewildered, devoid of hope or spirit.”

That’s now more true than it was a week ago.  We have seen the mainstreaming of outrage against the very idea of anti-gay discrimination.  Contrary to the sputtering of Tea Party lunatics, support for gay rights is not a matter of “LGBT Activist Fascists” intimidating politicians and business leaders.  Gays and lesbians, by themselves a small minority, do not have that kind of power.

The movement for LGBT rights has succeeded, instead, due to an extraordinary mixture of rational persuasion, empathy, friendship, family bonds, and economic self-interest.  And the Indiana controversy specifically has been about (mostly) heterosexual business, religious, and civic leaders, politicians, and cultural icons recognizing that they have gay friends, customers, family members, congregants, co-workers, and employees whom they don’t want to see treated as second-class citizens.

While groups like the Family Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom sink into tantrums of frustration and victimization, we can see that the RFRA controversy was worth having, because it demonstrated where the real mainstream now runs.

www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-sanders/indiana-rfra-fuss-shows-w_b_6997014.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

PHOTOS: Furry Pups Do It Doggy Style In Seattle

Things once again got pretty ruff at Arf!, Seattle’s monthly night of kink, fetish, bath house disco and sleazy dance tunes. Special guest this month: L.A.’s magical and muscular James Cerne, who will return to town to DJ for Pride in June. Hopefully Seattle can persuade him to move up to the Pacific Northwest for good. Hint, hint, James.

Check out some photos from the puppy pile below and see the full gallery at GayCities.

Photo credit: Matt Baume

Graham Gremore

feedproxy.google.com/~r/queerty2/~3/HycUx1Ma6Gg/photos-furry-pups-do-it-doggy-style-in-seattle-20150403

Indiana Pizzeria Owner Who Refuses to Cater Same-Sex Weddings Has A Message for 'The Gays' – VIDEO

Kyler Geoffroy

www.towleroad.com/2015/04/memoriespizzafox.html