A special investigation into how the ban can be repealed without hurting the morale or readiness of the troops is expected to be announced Tuesday by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

While the review is likely to take the better part of this year to complete, and even more time to implement, its initiation will advance President Barack Obama’s goal of repealing the ban and bring a divisive issue for the military back to the fore.

At the White House, officials continued reviewing options to repeal the Clinton-era policy that the president vowed to repeal. The administration still believes that any repeal should start in Congress and have the backing of top military leaders.

To that end, Obama and Gates planned a meeting next week to discuss, among other topics, ending “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies. The president was also likely to speak with Mullen, who has signaled he would carry out a repeal if ordered by Obama and Congress.

Lifting the ban poses some emotional questions that go to the heart of the military’s command structure and the trust relationships within military units. Among them: Will U.S. troops and leaders tolerate openly gay members in their midst? And if they don’t, what should the Pentagon do about it?

The military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was imposed by a 1993 law intended as a compromise between President Bill Clinton, who wanted to lift the ban on gays entirely, and a reluctant Congress and military that said doing so would threaten order.

Under the policy, the military can’t ask recruits their sexual orientation. In turn, service members can’t say they are gay or bisexual, engage in homosexual activity or marry a member of the same sex.

Between 1997 and 2008, the Defense Department discharged more than 10,500 service members for violating the policy.

The review to be announced this week was expected to delve into practical issues that surround changing the law: Can a soldier be forced to room with someone who is openly gay if they are the same sex? Would the military recognize civil unions and how much would it cost to extend benefits to a service member’s partner? Would quotas be imposed to ensure openly gay service members aren’t passed over for promotions?

Obama has promised to repeal the law but did little to press the issue in his first year as president. In his national address on Wednesday, Obama received a standing ovation from some members of Congress and Gates when he suggested that would change.

“This year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are,” Obama said during his State of the Union address. “It’s the right thing to do.”

While his promise is being hailed as a good start by gay rights’ activists, Obama is finding resistance in several corners. Some high-ranking military officers are reluctant to embrace the change while the forces are stretched thin at a time of two wars.

Democrats in Congress are also unlikely to press the issue until after this fall’s midterm elections.

This will probably satisfy Gates, who has long suggested that change shouldn’t come too quickly. In a speech last year at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., Gated noted that the 1948 executive order for racial integration took five years to implement.

“I’m not saying that’s a model for this, but I’m saying that I believe this is something that needs to be done very, very carefully,” he told the audience.

Original Source Text:
http://www.365gay.com/news/pentagon-starts-process-of-lifting-gay-ban/

The guy obviously is a smooth politician. He refuses to come out and say he supports the ban on gays serving openly in the military, even though his scorecard from the anti-gay Massachusetts Family Institute says otherwise.

As unsurprised as I am by a Republican not supporting LGBT rights and equality, the thing that worries me most about this type of non-commitment to an issue, is that as so many times, using the the “religious right” as an example, those who take a stand against LGBT equality, don’t do it directly, but rather they tend to blame their homophobia and/or bigotry on a higher power, or in the case of the religious right, God. Anti-gay people tend to blame their dislike of LGBT’s on things outside of their own character.  They don’t want to label themselves as a “bigot” so they rely on outside influences to pardon their intolerance.  In this case, Brown appears to be saving his “reason” to support maintaining the ban on the higher power of military leaders.

In his interview with Walters, he states he’s going to leave the decision of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” up to leaders in the field…almost as though he has a blatant disregard for the fact he serves as a Lt. Colonel in the U.S. Army National Guard.

My direct impression is Scott Brown, simply put, is a coward, not wanting to admit his stance against LGBT equality and looking for a “reason” to display his homophobia. There’s not a lot of gray area here, either you believe LGBT deserve the right to serve openly in the military or you don’t. Waiting for others to exhale your intolerance shows a lack of character and integrity. My direct impression is that Scott Brown is no different from any other anti-gay Republican politician, seeking others to blame his homophobia on. I think it’s time for Scott Brown to “man-up” and come on out of the anti-gay closet. He needs to go on record as another Republican who hates the gays. He may become a little more respectable if he’s honest.

Original Source Text:

www.gayagenda.com

35-year-old Michael Verdugo made $700 for a 15-minute porn film in 1996, but now the appearance has lost him his job.

“I don’t regret it,” says Verdugo of Rope Rituals, which he filmed at the age of 22, “It was a time in my life that I wanted to explore.”

Verdugo’s former employer says the firing has nothing to do with his sexuality but his failure to disclose on his application form that he had appeared in porn.

“This had nothing to do with Mike Verdugo’s sexuality. It had to do with his honesty. The application process to become a police officer is very arduous,” spokesperson Raelin Storey told The Miami Times.

“Discrimination is still huge in the police community. It’s just huge,” says Verdugo.

The former officer, who owns his own interior design company, is now suing the police department for discrimination and wrongful termination.

Original Text Source:

www.www.samesame.com.au/news/international/

Courtesy of Democrats.org:

Today our nation will commemorate the life and work of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

Over 40 years ago, Dr. King’s words inspired Rep. John Lewis to join the civil rights movement — and sparked an amazing journey.

This year, Rep. Lewis has recorded a short message about what Martin Luther King Day means to him — and to all Americans.

Watch Rep Lewis’s message and share it with friends and family.

Source Text:

www.gayagenda.com

From NPR:

While on the campaign trail, Barack Obama made hundreds of promises. And throughout the president’s first year in office, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Web site PolitiFact has tracked each one of those commitments.

Just before Obama took office, PolitiFact combed through campaign documents, speeches and debate transcripts to see what promises he had made. They found more than 500 individual promises and put each of them into a database to be monitored closely.

They found 91 promises have been fulfilled, 33 compromised on, 87 stalled and 14 broken. The remaining promises are designated as being “in the works.”

Source Text:

www.gaygenda.com

The West Wing

Source Text:
www.queeried.com

Online Gay Marriage

The number of states where gay marriage is legal will rise to five on January 1st 2010 as New Hampshire joins Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa and Vermont. This means that there is now one more option for gay and lesbian couples who want to marry out of state, but two Michigan State University professors believe they have come up with an even better option – that states offering same sex marriage should allow couple to obtain a marriage license online, wherever they are based in the country.

Saying that they believe marriage laws need to be more flexible in meeting the needs of both the couple and the state, Adam Candeub, who is working on the theory alongside fellow law professor Mae Kuykendall, said “states should formalize in their laws what they’ve always been doing in smaller degrees in specific areas, which is, allow people outside their states to use their laws”.

Source Text:

www.gayagenda.com

Purple identity

Here’s a simple, yet perhaps effective method of gaining equality. Visibility is key and the more people who realize they actually know (and maybe even love) someone who is LGBT, the faster acceptance and inclusion will come to our community.

According to a post on news-journalonline:

Experts estimate 5-10 percent of the population is gay.

Assuming that’s about right, there should be somewhere between 25,000 and 50,000 gay people walking around Volusia County.

Because they don’t slap on special nametags when they go out or announce their sexual orientation as a standard greeting, they blend in.

But Gordon Phillips has come to believe more visibility could be a good thing, and the Holly Hill man is vice president of a new group that’s fighting to gain more of a voice and more rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

“If every one of us were purple, we would have had our equal rights already,” said the 65-year-old Phillips. “Blacks got their equal rights because they couldn’t hide.

“We need to stop hiding. Some of my closest friends are not out. We’re close to as big of a minority as blacks were, but only about 35 percent of us are out.”

Source Text:

www.gayagenda.com

Anisse Parker

In what started out as a horse race, but ever slowly and steadily during the night, Houston City Controller, Annise Parker pulled out a win over her opponent Gene Locke, a former city hall attorney.

Parker becomes the first “out” mayor elected to the city hall of a major metropolitan city in the United States. Parker who never ran on the “gay card” instead ran a clean campaign based on her experience and what she hopes to do for the city and its citizens as mayor of Houston.

With 100% of the votes tallied at the time of this writing, Parker won 52.8% to 47.2% over Locke. Just after 10 PM (CT) Locke stood before his loyal supporters, thanked them, and gave his concession speech in which he called on all citizens of Houston for unity and to support the new mayor of Houston, the 50th mayor of that city.

Parker has been winning elections for 12 years, so while many across the United States have made an issue of Parker being “out”, it seems not to have been a problem up to and including this past November general election, where because of a close vote count, caused Saturday’s runoff election.

Source Text:

www.gayagenda.com

Just Married

Last Wednesday, as the New York State Senate voted down a bill that would have legalized same-sex marriage in New York, they were, in essence, voting to require discrimination in the State of New York. That they did it, in part, with the guiding hand of the Catholic Church–who called the defeat, incredibly, “a victory for the basic building block of our society”–only serves to outline both the violation of principle that constitutes religious meddling in U.S. law, and the wider question the measure raises: Why on earth is something as basic to our democracy as full civil rights coming up for a vote at all?

Much like the ham-fisted revision of California’s constitution that took place earlier this year, in which some 52% of voters, via Proposition 8 (call it “Prop Hate”) were able to gut the Golden State’s constitutional protection of equal rights by disallowing legal marriage for its gay and lesbian citizens, the New York ruling throws the greater movement for civil rights in this country back by some forty years, certainly at least to 1967, when it was still illegal in most states for inter-racial couples to marry, because of so-called “anti-miscegenation” laws. This Wednesday’s vote made a very similar kind of legal discrimination mandatory in the State of New York.

Source Text:

www.gayagenda.com