Free Republic

February 12, 2004, 2:57 PM EST SAN FRANCISCO -- In a political and legal challenge to California law, city authorities officiated at the marriage of a lesbian couple Thursday and said they will issue more gay marriage licenses. The act of civil disobedience was coordinated by Mayor Gavin Newsom and top city officials and was intended to beat a conservative group to the punch. The group, Campaign for California Families, had planned to go to court on Friday to get an injunction preventing the city from issuing marriage licenses to gay couples.

BOSTON - The Massachusetts high court ruled Tuesday that only full, equal marriage rights for gay couples — rather than civil unions — would meet the edict of its November decision, erasing any doubts that the nation's first same-sex marriages would take place in the state beginning in mid-May. AP Photo Slideshow: Same-Sex Marriage Issues The court issued the opinion in response to a request from the state Senate about whether Vermont-style civil unions, which conveyed the benefits — but not the title of marriage — would meet constitutional muster. The much-anticipated opinion sets the stage for next Wednesday's Constitutional...

Gay theologian thinks same-sex marriages are only the beginning! Friday, January 30, 2004 By RICHARD N. OSTLING AP Religion Writer Americans are starting to seriously ponder gay marriage, legalized by Massachusetts' highest court, and civil unions, enacted in Howard Dean's Vermont and several cities. The issue of same-sex couples could affect the 2004 elections and is part of the Episcopal Church's ongoing split. But those moral innovations may be only the beginning. Why not legitimize threesomes and foursomes? What about bisexuals, who are attracted to both genders? And why not abolish marriage altogether? Such eyebrow-raisers are posed by Marvin Ellison,...

The real homosexual lobby Posted: February 2, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2004 WorldNetDaily.com The Democratic National Committee is counting heavily on a high turnout of homosexual voters to elect its nominee president in 2004. According to the DNC's "Pride at the Polls" campaign, "gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgendered" voters totaled 4.2 million in the 2000 campaign. That number may sound impressive at first glance. But given the fact that more than 105 million Americans voted in that presidential election, we see this special-interest group represents only a tiny 3.9 percent of voters. Add to this that homosexual activists have...

God must be confused Posted: January 9, 20041:00 a.m. Eastern © 2004 WorldNetDaily.com To listen to Howard Dean, you would have to conclude that God is confused. It's not Howard Dean who doesn't understand unambiguous statements in both the Old Testament and the New Testament on the immorality of homosexuality. It's got to be God who is confused. In his quest for the highest office in the land, the Democratic candidate said this week that his decision to sign the bill legalizing civil unions for homosexuals in Vermont was influenced by his Christian faith – a faith he recently decided to unveil...

On a National Public Radio broadcast just before Christmas, two experienced pollsters presented conflicting evidence about the public's support for a constitutional amendment that would make gay marriages illegal. A CBS News poll, reported by Kathy Frankovic, showed Americans favoring such an amendment by a 15-point margin, while a poll by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Center, reported by Adam Clymer, found Americans opposed by a 12-point margin.The issue has become especially salient after last November's ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which said that government attorneys had "failed to identify any constitutionally adequate reason" to deny lesbian and...

Another feminist propaganda movie hit the theaters during the Christmas season, proving again that the feminists are an unhappy bunch whose lifestyle leads to loneliness. The heroine of "Mona Lisa Smile(s)," Katherine Watson, played by Julia Roberts, ends up single and jobless on a slow boat to Europe after tossing aside the latest of her faithless lovers. At least her fate wasn't as grim as that of other macho-feminist movie heroines who mouthed the irrelevant silliness that women need to be liberated to make their own choices free from male domination. Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis in "Thelma and Louise"...

For the past weeks, the media have been gaga over the 50th anniversary of Playboy magazine and the "Playboy philosophy," whose guru, Hugh Hefner, began to mainstream pornography and de-couple sex from a committed marital relationship. What interested me most about this latest excuse to run pictures of almost naked women on television and of the 77-year-old Hugh Hefner in his silk pajamas, surrounded by surgically enhanced women young enough to be his great-granddaughters, was the usual media complicity in promoting a one-sided and incomplete picture of the "free love" generation (which, as it turned out, was neither free nor...

"(Planned Parenthood) object to the contention that an abstinence-only program supported by state Rep. Mark Anderson, R-Mesa, is successful. They claim that in a desperate attempt to dredge up financing for abstinence programs that Gov. Janet Napolitano gleefully axed from the state budget in June, Anderson has cooked the books on their rate of success. A Department of Health Services study has found that about 95 percent of teens who entered the program as virgins stayed that way, and that attitudes supportive of avoiding sex generally have improved among the kids." ---------------------------------------------------- Editor's note: A new voice joins Republic columnists...

$100,000 advertising campaign to promote support for gay rights By LOU CHIBBARO Friday, December 12, 2003 A newly formed coalition of African-American gay leaders announced plans this week for a $100,000 media campaign to promote support in the black community for same-sex marriage and to fight a constitutional amendment banning such marriages. At a Dec. 8 news conference in Washington, D.C., members of the National Black Justice Coalition said their goal, among other things, is to refute claims by anti-gay groups that the majority of African Americans oppose same-sex marriage. “Do not be fooled by a few recent poll numbers...

The little-noticed alliance between gay marriage opponents and alleged terrorist sympathizers. What were these people thinking? The Massachusetts Supreme Court decision to legalize homosexual marriage in the Bay state re-ignited the culture wars. The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, perhaps the preeminent liberal Jewish organization in Washington, DC, applauded the ruling. Religious-minded conservatives, however, were horrified. They are determined to stop the gay rights movement in its tracks. At what price? JewishWorldReview.com has discovered that prominent religious conservatives — Jews, Catholics and Evangelical Christians — are allied with a radical Islamic group to stop gay marriage. Pushing a constitutional...

The Washington Post said it didn’t want to generate "a truckload of indignant letters," but it nevertheless tried to compare opposition to homosexual marriage to old laws against blacks getting married to whites. For the Post, opposing the gay agenda is tantamount to racism. The New York Times endorsed homosexual marriage as well, saying any attempt to amend the constitution to prohibit the practice would be an effort to deny "minority rights."

<p>Gays are making huge strides everywhere, but in the executive suite.</p> <p>One chilly fall day last year, Gary Osifchin trooped into a mandatory training session at S.C. Johnson & Son Inc. The privately held company, located in Racine, Wis., which was voted 2003's "all-American city" by the National Civic League, manufactures Raid insecticide and Glade air fresheners. It's the kind of place where factory workers ride to the assembly line on Harley-Davidsons, dine on local bratwurst, and chase it down with Milwaukee beer.</p>

Agent allegedly ignores vandalism, threatens pastor instead.When vandals defaced a sign outside the First Baptist Church in Gravois Mills, Mo., because it read "Homosexuality is an abomination, there is forgiveness," Pastor Ted Haynes called local law enforcement and the FBI. The vandals actually did more than just spray paint the sign. They left obscene and intimidating messages on the church's answering machine and told a church member that if the sign wasn't removed, they would remove it. "What I wanted to do was just get it on record, in case our church got burned down, because there is that possibility,"...

IRVINE, Calif., Dec. 17 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Jaguar North America today announces that it is launching an integrated marketing and advertising campaign to specifically reach gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) consumers. The Jaguar campaign is part of a comprehensive strategy developed by Ford Motor Company's Global Marketing organization. The campaign will target GLBT consumers in the New York and Los Angeles metropolitan areas. Jaguar and Ford Motor Company are actively pursuing this niche market of more than 14 million consumers, with a buying power estimated to be more than $450 billion, by developing a tailored message to speak directly...

Gays win rights as refugees HOMOSEXUALS who would have to live "discreetly" to avoid persecution in their home country might be entitled to refugee status in Australia, the High Court found in a landmark judgment yesterday. The court split 4-3 over the decision to grant an appeal by a gay Bangladeshi couple, who claimed they would face persecution if sent back home. The Refugee Review Tribunal and the Federal Court previously had ruled the men would be unlikely to face persecution if they resumed the "discreet" gay lifestyle they had lived before fleeing Bangladesh in February 1999. But in a...

Culver Pictures In an 1862 lithograph, a slave is depicted fleeing toward Canada before the Civil War.VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Heaven was the word for Canada and the Negro sang of the hope that his escape on the Underground Railroad would carry him there," the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once noted in describing the codes American slaves used in their spirituals to fool their masters before taking flight. Canada is heaven again for Lance W. Bateman and William E. Woods, two American men who were married here recently. The wedding on Aug. 31 looked like a typical Hawaiian...

<p>Miller and Solot met in an anthropology class at Brown University nearly 10 years ago. As bisexuals, both became activists for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender rights. They've been together since college and say they have a monogomous relationship.</p> <p>He does the dishes and she does the laundry. She balances their shared checkbooks and he pays the rent. They have been completing each other's sentences for almost a decade. But don't mistake Dorian Solot and Marshall Miller for husband and wife.</p>