GLAAD To CNN: Stop Using Hate Groups To "Balance" Gay News Stories

GLAAD Petitions CNN To Stop Inviting Anti-Gay Guests
The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Againt Defamation (GLAAD) has created a petition in an effort to convince CNN to stop inviting what the organization deems “anti-gay” guests onto the network. In fact, GLAAD aims to fight against CNN’s inclusion of the “anti-gay industry” as a whole when it covers issues and debates relevant to gay and Civil Rights issues. According to GLAAD: For years, CNN has insisted on including the voices of the anti-gay industry whenever a topic t...

GLAAD Files Petition Against CNN
Today GLAAD, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, started a petition to try and persuade CNN producers and bookers to not bring on guests from, what they call, "the anti-gay industry." For years, CNN has insisted on including the voices of the anti-gay industry whenever a topic that involves the LGBT community has come up. It's time to speak up and tell CNN that this is unacceptable. You must login to comment. The Fox Nation is for those opposed to intolerance, excessive government...

Rainbow Sash Movement Disagrees With GLAADs Anti-Gay CNN Petition
The Rainbow Sash Movement, a national Catholic GLBT movement, has announced that it disagrees with the petition organized by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation that aims to convince CNN to stop inviting guests and commenters from the “anti-gay industry.” Here is the Rainbow Sash Movement’s full statement on the issue, emailed to us earlier today: Like most communities we are very diverse. I just read your article on GLAAD’s attempt to control who may or may n...

Kellee Terrell: NYC Department of Health Shouldn't Mix Fear and HIV Prevention
Think one part The Walking Dead, one part CSI and a dash of any anti-gay public service announcement (PSA) from the 1950s, and that pretty much sums up "It's Never Just HIV," the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene's newest PSA. In an attempt to raise HIV awareness among young men who have sex with men (MSM), this eerie and explicit PSA stresses that having HIV can make one more susceptible to developing bone loss, dementia and anal Cancer. View the PSA below: Since its Decem...

Police chief steps down over gay slurs
PALM SPRINGS, Calif., Jan. 6 (UPI) -- The Openly Gay mayor of Palm Springs, Calif., praised the Retirement of the city's Police Chief who was shown to have made anti-gay slurs during a sex sting. Chief David Dominguez decided to step down a week after his public Apology for an "inappropriate comment" that led to a municipal inquiry into Dominguez's and other officers' conduct during the Sting Operation and to complaints that the Police Department was discriminatorily targeting gays, the Los Ang...

More Conservative Groups Pulling Out OF CPAC --And Blasting Gay Inclusion
Is the annual CPAC conservative Activist conference coming undone -- with the inclusion of gays being the final straw? As we've posted before, some social conservative groups have been pulling out of the annual event, due to the inclusion of the gay conservative group GOProud. As the right-wing World Net Daily, which has been hammering away at this issue, now reports, the Heritage Foundation and the Media Research Center -- an organization that cover a variety of issues, not just social conser...

Heritage Foundation and Media Research Center Join CPAC Boycott
Back in November, the far-right American Principles Project declared that it would not take part in CPAC as long as GOProud, a conservative group which supports gay-rights, remains a participating organization. GOProud’s status as a “participating” organization prompted many Religious Right groups to Boycott CPAC, including: American Values; American Vision; the Capital Research Center; the Center for Military Readiness; Concerned Women for America; the Family Research Council;...

Gates Begins Process of Full DADT Repeal
As we all know, the Repeal of the Military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy represented only part of the story. Now, the President, in association with the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, must certify the actual repeal, which would allow gays and Lesbians to serve openly. There’s also a 30-day waiting period thrown in after certification for good measure (I believe the late Robert Byrd requested that as a condition of his initial vote for the def...

McCain Flips Again: 'I'll Do Everything I Can' To Make DADT Repeal Work
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who over the past year made himself into the Senate's most rabid opponent of repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell, has softened his tone and now says he'll do anything he can to help Repeal go smoothly. "I think I have to do everything I can to make sure that the [impact on the] morale, retention, recruitment and battle effectiveness of the Military is minimized as much as possible," McCain said on Fox Business, according to The Hill. "It is a law and I have to do whateve...

Minnesota Family Council to hold marriage amendment course for legislators
When State Legislators checked their office mailboxes Wednesday, they found an invitation to attend a Minnesota Family and Marriage Summit featuring a group that the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies as a Hate Group. The summit, to be held next week, is organized by the Minnesota Family Council and the Family Research Council and will teach legislators how to pass a Constitutional Amendment banning rights for same-sex couples. The summit includes courses for legislators such as “Bull...

More Religious Right Seminars for Elected Leaders
When State Legislators checked their office mailboxes Wednesday, they found an invitation to attend a Minnesota Family and Marriage Summit featuring a group that the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies as a hate group. The summit, to be held next week, is organized by the Minnesota Family Council and the Family Research Council and will teach legislators how to pass a Constitutional Amendment banning rights for same-sex couples. The summit includes courses for legislators such as “Bully...

'Family Research Council' Expains Boycot of Conservative Conference
In an email to supporters titled, "Sticking up for the 'C' in CPAC," Tony Perkins, president of the prominent social conservative Family Research Council, explained why his group would not attend this year's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). "FRC has chosen not to partner with a 'conservative' event that places the protection of marriage on the same plane as redefining it," wrote Perkins. "Would CPAC team up with the Brady Campaign which fights to restrict--if not abolish--the Se...

David Keene: Full steam ahead for CPAC
Earlier this afternoon, I spoke with David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, about the Controversy surrounding the inclusion of GOProud at CPAC and the subsequent Boycotts from a handful of social-conservativism organizations, most prominently the Family Research Council.  Keene discussed the Controversy at length, as well as the revelation that the ACU had initiated a Probe into possible embezzlement that got aired in part because of the boycott over GOProud’s inclusi...

Capt. Owen Honors Getting Support From Former USS Enterprise Sailor Who Is Also Gay
I first learned about the trumped up "Scandal" involving Capt. Owen Honors of the USS Enterprise the other day, watching the video posted at This Ain't Hell. Later that day, I saw that Capt. Honors had been relieved of command by the Navy for the videos, which were made at least four years ago and (obviously) intended as comedy and morale boosters. Tonight, a former USS Enterprise sailor, who is also gay, is coming out in support of Capt. Honors (WTKR h/t Skye via Twitter). Former Petty Officer...

What Does Anti-Christian Even Mean?
It's really not shocking that far Right Wing Christians truly believe that the government exists to take away all of their freedoms as Christians. Witness the writhing over the Religious Freedom of Military chaplains being breached by the Repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Now, to prove that growing threat to Religious Freedom (especially Christian religious freedom), Dr. Gary Cass at the web site Defend Christians has come out with his top ten "Anti-Christian Acts of 2010." Coming it at number on...

The Honors List
The proponents of a lax Military professed shock this week at an illustration of it, after news reports emerged that the inaptly named naval captain Owen Honors had participated in "raunchy and ribald" videos aboard ship. The odd admixture of relativism and rigidity that now defines Political Correctness in the Military guaranteed his firing, though it took public exposure several years after the event to trigger the termination. Obviously, Honors has dishonored himself. But it is not at all cle...

Good for gays, necessary for New Mexicans
Forget the ideology. For a few moments, set aside your belief that I chose to be a raging “Homosexual” whose only mission is to convert your Children, and I’ll set aside my belief that you’re a bigot whose misunderstanding of the Constitution is matched only by your religious hypocrisy. Let’s just forget about all that. Instead, why don’t we talk about something we can all agree on. New Mexico needs jobs, and all of us - gay or straight - could use...

Simon Deng: The Walk for Freedom for South Sudan
On Sunday, January 9th, 2011, the people of Southern Sudan - Christians and animists, or practitioners of native faiths - will have the chance to vote to form an independent nation. The election was stipulated in a 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement brought by the Bush Administration that ended a 22-year Civil War between Sudan’s mostly Muslim North and the country’s mainly Christian South. A vote for independence will mean Secession from Sudan’s Muslim Extremist go...

Philip N. Cohen: Mother No More?
North Carolina's Supreme Court voids "second-parent" adoptions by homogamous couples. Related Topics, by Judy Shapiro, calls my attention to a very aggressive anti-gay-parent ruling by the N.C. Supreme Court, which retroactively voided the adoptions of same-gender spouses. The decision, in the case Boseman v. Jarrell, went beyond the couple at hand to undo existing adoptions in which an adoptive parent joined a biological parent and shared parental rights, much like step-parents may do. The pu...

Gramps McCain's next new updated position: he'll do everything to make DADT repeal work
Where do you even begin? The man flip-flopped then opposed Repeal all the way up until it passed, leading the paranoid charges about readiness and morale. The Hill: McCain signaled that he had made peace with the lame-duck bill to do away with the Military's ban on Openly Gay and Lesbian service members, of which he had been an outspoken critic. "I think I have to do everything I can to make sure that the [impact on the] morale, retention, recruitment and battle effectiveness of the military...

MAJ. Andrew Olmsted On Gays In The Military
by Gary Farber. Major Olmsted is no longer with us; he died a hero. Doctor Science wrote a superb post in the last week of December on DADT and Rape Culture, which didn't get remotely the attention it deserved, because, of course, it was just after Christmas, and before New Year's, in America, according to the majority calendar. Spirited debate did result in comments, and the debate, while tedious and understandably offensive to many, nonetheless had many comments I thought worthwhile....

Irene Monroe: Say what? Lesbian priests marrying each other!
All couples like to bring the New Year in on a loving note. And what better way for two Lesbian priests of the Episcopal Church to demonstrate their commitment to each other than in holy matrimony. Before a jubilant crowd of 400 guests on New Year's Day, the Rev. Mally Lloyd, former pastor at Christ Church in Plymouth, and now a ranking official of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, married the Rev. Katherine Ragsdale, dean and president of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass...

Capehart: Sarah Palin fails to lead on gay equality
Sarah Palin is getting some mileage out of retweeting a pro-don't ask, don't tell Repeal message from Tammy Bruce. "I'm focused on economic issues, and you may have noticed I was being quiet about DADT because that's not our most pressing issue," the Openly Gay radio host tweeted Monday. "...But this hypocrisy is just truly too much. [Enough] already -- the more someone complains about the homos the more we should look under their bed." So, I guess we're supposed to presum...

McCain reverses position on DADT
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Thursday that he would work to help implement the Repeal of the Military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, despite his opposition to that Legislation. McCain signaled that he had made peace with the lame-duck bill to do away with the Military's ban on Openly Gay and Lesbian service members, of which he had been an outspoken critic. "I think I have to do everything I can to make sure that the [impact on the] morale, retention, recruitment and battle effectiveness...

McCain Vows to Make DADT Work
Now that Congress has repealed Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell (DADT), seems that John McCain has changed his tune a bit, vowing to make Repeal work: Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Thursday he would work to help implement the Repeal of the Military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, despite his opposition to that Legislation. McCain signaled he had made peace with the lame-duck bill to do away with the Military’s ban on Openly Gay and Lesbian service member...