GLBTQ: Combined Gay News Headlines (T5T-1)

GRATUITOUS SKIN — We've never quite seen a pool exit like this one from Edilson Nascimento. And paired with photog Jeremy Kost's view-from-the-top Polaroids? Everybody's gonna get wet. (And yes, this is the seventh time we've see Edilson on this blog. More here.) CONTINUED Â» CONTINUED Â» Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us Tagged: Edilson Nascimento, gratuitous [...]

"There's not a seething, bubbling hunger to see straight stars impersonating homosexuals," says former New York Post film critic and right-wing-y radio host Michael Medved of Sherlock Holmes. ""I think they're just trying to generate controversy . . . They know that making Holmes and Watson homosexual will take away two-thirds of their box office. [...]

SOUNDBITES — "When it gets down to the heart of the issue, I failed these kids. I failed these kids because I spent 10 years as an openly gay man doing nothing, saying nothing and living complacently while these groups and/or individuals continued to actively pursue demonizing LGBT people (or again, the action of [...]

Imagine you’re sitting in your local GLBT center, relaxing on a couch enjoying the company of your fellow queers when a person dressed in black enters through the door, pauses for a moment then pulls out a gun and kills two people and injures fifteen others. Horrific, yes? Well this is exactly what happened in [...]

REVIEW: “Celebration” by Madonna. Written by Madonna and Paul Oakenfold. Reviewers around the world are hurling the word “calculated” into the mix when reviewing “Celebration.” Some say that Madonna is desperate for a radio hit, and this is a scud missile of a single. I could not agree and disagree more. Yes, this single is an utter calculation. [...]

What could there be to report only 3 days into what will be a 2 to 4 week process? A hopeful trend but BIG NOTICE: a hopeful trend does not get you off the hook of preparing for the ballot! Let this just be a puff of fresh air in your ballot preparation sails. Promise? Good! now you may proceed. :)

A review of the basics:

If the referendum qualifies, Washington state voters supporting the new domestic partnership law will need to vote APPROVED on the November ballot.

137,689 raw signatures were submitted.

120,577 validated signatures are needed to qualify the referendum for the ballot.

The break point comes when either 17,113 signatures are invalidated or 120,577 signatures are validated.

Here is a summary of the daily tallies:

Totals:

Date	Checked	Accepted	Invalid	Duplicates	No Match	Not Found	Missing	% Invalid
31-Jul	5,646	4,991	655	7	41	592	15	11.34
3-Aug	5,856	5,096	760	16	40	682	22	12.98
4-Aug	5,815	4,980	835	22	69	732	12	14.36
17,317	15,067	2,250	45	150	2,006	49
Average:								12.98

Duplicates, No Match, Not Found and Missing are subcategories of Invalid, and are defined as: No Match - no match of petition signature with what's on file; Not Found - not found on voter registration database; Missing - listed on the database as registered voters but missing a signature on the database. nbsp;The Secretary of State checks back with the counties for signature cards on file for Missing signatures, so some Missing may eventually get shifted back from Invalid to Accepted.

UPDATE: The Secretary of State has created a special Referendum 71 webpage. Starting Wednesday, August 5th, you can find the daily results from the validation process there.
There's been quite a bit of blogging the past few days about just which number best represents the cushion provided by the 17,112 extra raw signatures that were submitted. Because 17,112 is 14.19% above the target of 120,577 valid signatures, 14% is the figure against which daily invalidation rates are frequently measured. However, as Goldy explains, "the actual maximum invalidation rate beyond which the measure fails to qualify for the ballot, the signature cushion divided by the number of signatures submitted, is 12.43% (17,112/137,689).". So 12.43% is the golden number against which the daily or cumulative invalid rate should be compared. Consider that the invalid rate after the first three days of sampling was 13%, and that cushion of 12.4% isn't looking so cushy at the moment.

Here is the humble barometer I'm using. NUmbers valid on 8/4/2009 only.

	Approved	Invalid
Break point	120,577	17,113
Category total	15,067	2,250
% towards break point	12.50	13.15

Of course WE ARE NOT OUT OF THE WOODS YET. There may still be batches of squeaky clean signatures yet awaiting the validation process. Or enough Missing signatures may be "found" and moved into the Accepted category. On the other hand, we should expect to see the frequency of duplicates increase as we expand the known signature universe. So the jury is still out. All I know is that we definitely cannot let ourselves get lazy and lulled by wishful thinking and some early favorable results, but it is nice to chew over something hopeful as we keep to the grindstone to prepare to win at the ballot.

Referendum 71 voters will be asked to approve or reject the domestic partnership law.

REFERENDUM 71
Ballot Title
Statement of Subject: The legislature passed Engrossed Second Substitute Senate Bill 5688 concerning rights and responsibilities of state-registered domestic partners [and voters have filed a sufficient referendum petition on this bill].
Concise Description: This bill would expand the rights, responsibilities, and obligations accorded state-registered same-sex and senior domestic partners to be equivalent to those of married spouses, except that a domestic partnership is not a marriage.
Should this bill be: Approved ___
Rejected ___
Ballot Measure Summary
Same-sex couples, or any couple that includes one person age sixty-two or older, may register as a domestic partnership with the state. Registered domestic partnerships are not marriages, and marriage is prohibited except between one man and one woman. This bill would expand the rights, responsibilities, and obligations of registered domestic partners and their families to include all rights, responsibilities, and obligations granted by or imposed by state law on married couples and their families.

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NOTE FROM PAM: This is great news. For a good look at all of the announced candidates seeking to unseat Richard "Bank Run" Burr (North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall, former State Senator Cal Cunningham, Chapel Hill Mayor Kevin Foy, and attorney Kenneth Lewis, who is profiled by Jake below), see Senate Guru's post on the race. (In the "it's a small world department," I was Kevin Foy's co-worker back in 1989-1990ish at the Forest History Society in Durham). We need to see where all of these candidates stand on LGBT issues; as we all know, now-U.S. Senator Kay Hagan dodged the LGBT media and our issues during her race.

Kenneth Lewis is the first candidate to declare on the democratic side of the 2010 senate race here in NC.

http://www.kennethlewisforsenate.com/main.html

I've learned about his campaign largely from BlueNC.com & so I wanted to share a clip from their story:

"Can he win?

The Lewis for Senate campaign is about more than having a compelling personal story or a long history of community service. Kenneth has a realistic idea of the energy and time it takes to run a statewide campaign. He has experience raising money and proved he can raise money by pulling in $109,000 in 21 days. Instead of waiting to see who else might jump in, he stepped up to lead early and he committed to a strong, viable campaign by taking the step to hire Joe Trippi, a pioneer in internet fundraising and messaging."

Kenneth also answered some of my lgbt equality questions about DADT, ENDA, and marriage equality.

Follow me below the fold to see his answers.

In answering user submitted questions I'm not sure that the full text of the questions were relayed. They are certainly pary paraphrased in the response.

http://bluenc.com/record-senate-candidate-kenneth-lewis-part-2

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell?

I’m a firm believer that we should not discriminate against people. That’s part of my core belief structure. We have men and women of all sexual orientations serving in the military. The idea that we would remove an officer or anyone because of his or her sexual orientation is abhorrent to me.

Employee Non-Discrimination Act?

I have not read the Employee Non-Discrimination Act, but I will repeat that I do not believe we should discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation.

Civil Marriage?

I understand people and their religious beliefs and I respect that very much and I would not want to do anything that infringes upon someone exercising their religion, but with respect to government actions and as a society of people who have a variety of faiths and non-faiths, I do not believe we should discriminate.

My follow up on BlueNC was this:

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It looks like we have a pro-equality candidate on our hands that I could be proud to support. If I read him correctly he is for repealing DADT, he would likely support ENDA once he reads it (& I fully hope & expect he will take the time to either read it, or at least familiarize himself with it since he is answering questions about it publicly), and he supports civil marriage equality.

On that last part about marriage equality I would have preferred him to be more specific. He said he doesn't support discrimination which is a hard answer to read because it is the answer everyone gives.

1) Anti-Marriage Equality people can say "I'm anti-discrimination" and what they mean is they are that because they say gay people should equally be allowed to enter into a heterosexual marriage as everyone else.

2) Civil Unions separate but equal people can say "I'm anti-discrimination" because they emphasize the word "equal" in separate but equal.

3) Marriage Equality supporters can say "I'm anti-discrimination" because they truly are, even if they do add in a stipulation that they wouldn't support any law requiring churches to perform marriages or ceremonies they disagree with.

My hope is he meant option 3, and reading into his other answers on being firmly anti-discrimination I feel like that is the best way to read that, but I can't be sure. I hope he will clarify at some point in the future.<ure.

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He may not be fully informed on lgbt equality issues, but in the core of his answers it sounds like he "gets it"... it sounds like he understands that discrimination is unacceptable regardless of the minority being targeted, and I think that very underlying principle answers my questions in far more depth than the words that were written. I'm glad he took the time to answer my questions there. I usually have to corner democratic candidates at public event Q&A's to ask them lgbt equality questions. It has certainly become a tradition of mine to not let any democrat run for US Senate in my state without answering such questions... as Kay Hagan can personally testify to.

Lastly I'll add a few links. What good is a diary if it doesn't have a few actionable items?

Click here to donate. As with all campaigns early donations count for the most when the campaign is trying to get off the ground. And solid fund raising may be this guys initial claim to fame in democratic circles in NC, so maybe we can help out with that.

Click here to sign up for his e-mail contact list & stay informed about the campaign.

Click here if you are potentially interested in volunteering.

It's an open thread! Pleeeeease feel free to chat, blogwhore, and link-share in the comment thread...

So below is what my cartoon sockpuppet Bookworm Bob & I have been looking at so far this week.

• San Francisco Chronicle's U.S. take on detained journalists hypocritical:

While demanding that North Korea release two Bay Area reporters sentenced to prison, the United States has detained a Reuters cameraman without charges in Iraq since September - one of numerous foreign journalists jailed while covering U.S. military actions.
In the world community, where Washington periodically assails other nations' press crackdowns, the U.S. detentions have opened the government to accusations of promoting a double standard.
Since 2001, the United States has jailes jailed 13 foreign reporters in Afghanistan and Iraq for at least several weeks as suspected terrorists or insurgents, and many others for shorter periods, said the Committee to Protect Journalists, an organization of media representatives. None has been charged or given a trial to confront the evidence against them, the group said.
Neither the committee nor other critics say the U.S. treatment of the foreign journalists has affected its ability to negotiate with North Korea for the release of Euna Lee and Laura Ling, the Current TV reporters captured on March 17 and later sentenced to 12 years in prison...

According to the article, Reuters cameraman Ibrahim Jassam was arrested at his family's home south of Baghdad in September, and is still being held in custody.

Our government, which does business in we, the people's name, certainly appears to be hypocritical about detaining reporters in we, the people's name.

• Los Angeles Times' piece on a Snowball fights in New Orleans:

I drive alongside the grassy slope of the Mississippi River levee and turn east at Magazine Street, traveling past Audubon Zoo toward downtown. It's a narrow, bumpy street shaded by giant oaks, their roots upending great chunks of sidewalk. But nobody seems to mind. This is New Orleans.
I'm on a quest to find the best snowball in a city filled with stands. Don't mistake a snowball for a snow cone. The former is soft like powder snow, the latter crunchy like hard pack. Fluffy snowballs are served with a straw and a spoon and brim with vividly flavored syrups with names such as wedding cake, hurricane and nectar. Each stand has dozens to choose from. Another difference: With a snow cone, you can suck the flavor right out of the mouthful of ice. Not so with a snowball. The flavor and snow become one indivisible creation...

Best Homer Simpson impression I can muster: Mmm. Delicious fluffy snowballs.

• San Francisco Chronicle's Oakland's Parking Rage Buries Budget Feats:

Over the past year, Oakland's city councillors slashed the size of city government, cut 350 city employees, sliced their own budgets by 20 percent, took 10 percent pay cuts and persuaded powerful city unions to swallow up to 10 percent wage concessions as they reduced budget gaps of $144 million.
And they've saved services residents cherish, leaving all libraries open at least five days a week, shuttering no major programs and even, with the help of the mayor, increasing the number of cops to a historic high in one of the most violent cities in America - leading to a 13 percent decline in the city's most serious crimes.
Yet, the figures provoking citizen outrage are 50 cents and 2 hours. They represent the increase in hourly parking meter rates to $2 and the extended time, now until 8 p.m., that meters are enforced.
Council members had some 35 public meetings on the now-$400 million budget, but they've found themselves taken aback that the complexity of the budget process has gotten buried in protests over parking...

Yeah. Parking fees are often just one more thing I can't afford -- I get the anger.

• Crooks & Liars's Real Time New Rules: We've let this 'Birther' garbage gather for too long: