Q-Seattle Events: Tacky Tourist Clubs

Equal Rights Washington (ERW) has issued what they're calling an "urgent" notice for Washingtonians to their representaves about ENDA (Employment Non-Discrimination Act) legislation in the House. In this particular case, even calls to Seattle's Rep. Jim McDermott would be useful, according to ERW.

Like most (but not quite all) LGBT activist groups, ERW is opposed to the version of the bill that was passed last week by a House committee. That version (what we've been calling LGB-No-T ENDA) includes job protections for "sexual orientation", but not for "gender identity".

ERW's take:

[T]he bill being voted on (HR 3685) is a stripped-down version which does not include protection based on gender identity. Not only is this bad for transgender workers, it leaves everyone who does not conform to rigid gender stereotypes vulnerable to workplace discrimination. The original version (HR 2015) included protection based on gender identity.

Things are moving quickly and we need your help today.

At this critical juncture in the struggle for equality, we must tell Congress to do the right thing for all Americans--LGBT and straight. Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), the first openly LGBT member of Congress elected as a non-incumbent, has announced her plan to offer an amendment to HR 3685 that will restore gender identity protections. The Baldwin Amendment is our best hope to offer protection based on gender identity.

They're urging calls even to McDermott because -- although he's a usually reliable vote on the ERW-type side of most issues like this -- this particular activist v. politics issue has been more devisive.

They recommend this kind of approach:

Please call Rep. McDermott's office at (206) 553-7170. Please be polite and remember that your congressperson is not the problem. We need his leadership. The purpose of your call is to convey how important it is to you that gender identity be included in the ENDA.

When calling, feel free to use the following script outline:

Introduce yourself & then let them know why you're calling:

It is vital that the Employment Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA) include gender identity. As your constituent, I'm asking you not only to support the Baldwin Amendment, which would add gender identity protections to HR 3685 (the new version of the ENDA), but also to speak to your collegues and encourage them to support it as well. If the Baldwin Amendment fails I would ask Rep. McDermott not to support final passage of HR 3685. We would rather take the time to build support for HR 2015, the original and inclusive ENDA, of which Rep. McDermott is an original cosponsor.

Then ask the following questions:

Question 1. Is Rep. McDermott planning to vote for the Baldwin Amendment to HR 3685?

Question 2. Has Rep. McDermott decided how he will vote on HR 3685 if the Baldwin Amendment fails?

End the call with a thank you:

If you live outside of Seattle, a call to your congressman would be even more vital on this issue.

And, frankly, we'll leave it up to you to decide what you'd like to see happen if the Baldwin amendment doesn't pass and LGB-No-T ENDA comes up for a vote. But that's an issue for another day. The vote on the amendment is at least a test of where things will go with this activist dustup.

[post mirrored from seaQwa.com]

Labels: activism, ENDA, org:ERW, politics, rights legislation, state:WA

Activists from throughout Snohomish County (where Lynnwood is) and King County (where Seattle is) have come together to stage an alternative to the violently anti-gay Watchmen conference scheduled for the Lynnwood Convention Center this weekend. [Click for all of our Watchmen coverage, or here for Hutcherson coverage.]

The Sunday afternoon even will feature a gathering of speakers, including members of the clergy, and a special free screening of Inlaws & Outlaws, a local-produced documentary featuring the real-life stories of Washington LGBT people.

Everyone is welcome to participate.

Details:

Love and Pride: Lynnwood Responds to Hate

Sunday, October 21, at 3pm
Edmonds Unitarian Universalist Church, 8109 224th Street, Edmonds, Washington [get directions]

Equal Rights Washington had this to say today in a press release about the Watchmen gathering:

We're concerned about this group's activities. They have a radical agenda that seeks to roll back rights for members of the LGBT community and a record of violence is associated with the watchmen. Activists from Lynnwood along with many groups are hosting an alternative event to show support and concern for the LGBT community.

Note: Post mirrored from seaQwa.com

Labels: activism, events, religion, watchmen

David Schmader at Slog has the official announcement of an unofficial protest planned for 9:30am this Saturday, October 20, at the Lynnwood Convention Center [get directions].

Excerpts:

Yes, it is happening this weekend and NO they are NOT welcome in our community! Let?s let them know it! RAIN OR SHINE!!! LOUD and PROUD!!!

A peaceful protest is planned for this Saturday, Oct. 20, 2007. It is our goal to surround the Convention Center located at 3711 196 St. SW, Lynnwood, 98036 at 9:30 a.m. Their conference begins at 11:00 and we want to greet them as they arrive. ...

DO NOT stoop to the their level of hatred. Try not to be offensive and DO NOT be physical with any conference attendee.

DO wear bright colors and draw attention to our cause

Children are welcome (so let?s set a good example for them)

Bring banners, signs, balloons, & any creative way to express your opinion

(No website for info that we've been able to find.)

post mirrored from seaQwa.com

Labels: activism, bigotry, state:WA, watchmen

Yes, we're too late mentioning this (as we have been with just about everything) for you to get to the rally, but it's still worth noting that Seattle's activist groups have joined with almost all of their national cohorts to oppose a Congressional bargain that would move forward next week with a version of ENDA -- the Employment Non-Discrimination Act -- that would offer job protection based on sexual orientation.

The activist groups object to the legislation because it would exclude job protections based on gender identity. It's a compromise being pushed by the chamber's only out gay male member, Rep. Barney Frank, and by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi because they claim it's the only way to get the long-delayed rights bill passed.

A rally will be held this afternoon at the Seattle LGBT Center at 2pm. It's sponsored by Ingersoll Gender Center, Seattle LGBT Center, and Equal Rights Washington. Its purpose:

THIS RALLY IS FOR YOU! WE ARE MAKING OUR VOICES HEARD

Hundreds of organizations from around the country have joined the UnitedENDA.org coalition. Togeher in a matter of days we have generated tens of thousands of constituebnt contacts. The Democratic leadership is listening. Now we must prove that we can deliver votes, remained unified and educate the public about the importance of passing ENDA that includes gender identity.

This is a classic battle between activists and politicians. The politicians insist that a compromise is necessary if something important is to get done. The activists insist the the political compromise makes the whole effort meaningless.

You can pick your side on this one, but if you would like to add your voice to those of the activists, you can do it by visiting this link. which will help you send an email on the issue to your congress-critter.

Labels: activism, ENDA, Gay events, org:ERW, org:Ingersoll, org:SLGBTC, politics, rights legislation

AlterNet offers a great report today by Casey Sanchez of Intelligence Report. The extensive report begins and ends with the tragic death of a Sacramento man. In between, Sanchez ties together the international anti-gay evangelical cabal spearheaded by Lativia-based preacher Alexey Ledyaev. It's a movement -- centered in the US in Sacramento -- from which Redmond pastor Ken Hutcherson and Oregon anti-gay activist Scott Lively draw considerable support.

In addition to Lively and Robertson, Ledyaev has cultivated the support of Rev. Ken Hutcherson, the African-American founder of Antioch Bible Church, a Seattle-area megachurch. ...

One of Ledyaev's nephews saw Hutcherson speak in Seattle at a March 2006 debate on gay rights and arranged a meeting with the Latvian pastor. By the end of the year, Hutcherson, Ledyaev and Lively had teamed up with Vlad Kusakin, the editor of The Speaker, to form an international alliance to oppose what Hutcherson characterizes as "the homosexual movement saying they're a minority and that they need their equal rights."

We've mentioned Ledyaev before in posts about Hutcherson's Lativian nexus, but the Sanchez's article offers a wealth of new details, including this odd detail:

At 56, Ledyaev is still youth-oriented enough to promote his vision of global theocracy through elaborate, large-scale Christian rock operas that Ledyaev writes, directs and stars in, and which are replete with lasers, smoke machines, and spandex-clad actors in ghoulish makeup. One of the rock operas, which young Russian-speaking anti-gay activists promote on video-sharing websites, features a hero character wearing a tuxedo battling men in black tights armed with tiki torches. Over heavy-metal guitar riffs, a military-like chorus sings of "victory over the gays."

More significantly, however, the article gives details of the theological underpinnings of the pastor's homophobia:

The New Generation theology Ledyaev preaches borrows heavily from R.J. Rushdoony, the late founding thinker of Christian Reconstruction. Pastor Ledyaev's 2002 book, New World Order, calls for evangelical Christians around the world to influence the wealthy and powerful in their home countries to implement biblical law in order to stave off a supposed alliance of gays and Muslims hell-bent on destroying Christianity. ...

They took the name Watchmen on the Walls from the Old Testament book of Nehemiah, in which the "watchmen" guard the reconstruction of a ruined Jerusalem. The cities they guard over today, say the contemporary Watchmen, are being destroyed by homosexuality. ...

During the past year, the Watchmen have met twice in the United States, first in Sacramento, then in Bellevue, Wash. They gathered to strategize against same-sex marriage and build a political organization to fight "gay-straight alliances" in public schools and push for the boycott of textbooks that mention homosexuality in any context other than total condemnation.

The group has also convened outside America. In the summer of 2006, the Watchmen and their supporters gathered in Riga, Latvia, to "protect the city from a homosexual invasion." Gay rights activists in Europe counter that it's gays who need protection from the Latvian capital, not the other way around. ...

The Watchmen portray the battle against gay rights as nothing less than a biblical clash of civilizations. "The homosexual sexual ethic" and "family-based society" are at war, Lively proclaimed in his letter to The Washington Times. "One must prevail at the expense of the other."

That sort of militant rhetoric is standard among Watchmen followers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Speaking to his American counterparts in a Watchmen video, a Latvian anti-gay activist intones: "Your generation beat the Nazis, and our country beat the Communists. Together we will defeat the homosexuals!"

Unfortunately, it's an article well worth reading around here because we have two of the movement's leaders in our backyard.

[8:20am. Updated lede.]

Labels: activism, ken hutcherson, latvia, religion, scott lively

The 21st Annual Seattle AIDS Walk will be held on Saturday, September 29. An opening ceremony hosted (as it has been since the first walk) by KING5 News anchor Jean Enersen will begin at 9 am. The AIDS Walk will begin and end at Volunteer Park [get directions], rain or shine. The one-mile walk will take a circular route from the park starting at 10 am, heading south on the wide and hill-free pavement of 12th Ave. to Thomas St. and then north on Broadway, returning to the park via the hill at Prospect St.

The Walk is both a way to remind folks of the still-daunting needs of people living with AIDS and HIV, and a major fundraiser for the area's primary AIDS service organization, Lifelong AIDS Alliance.

Whether you'll walk as an individual or as part of a team, pre-registration on the Walk website is encouraged. On-site registration for those who prefer standing in line opens at 8 am at the park.
On its impressive event website, Lifelong provides fundraising suggestions for walkers and creates a webpage and other virtual tool for pre-registered walkers to help them solicit donations. You can walk as an individual, join an existing team, or form your own team. A wide array of non-profit groups, and ad-hoc groups, along with companies large and small have formed teams (and, remember, many of the companies will match donations raised by an employee).

If you won't be in town or can't walk for other reasons but still want to raise funds, you can sign up as a virtual walker. You'll have access to all the same fundraising tools as physical walkers. Or consider making a donation directly to LLAA or sponsoring a walker or team.

Your donations and sponsorships will go directly to Lifelong AIDS Alliance. Lifelong is a comprehensive AIDS service organization (ASO) located in Seattle, offering a spectrum of care services, advocacy, and prevention education for people in Seattle/King County.

Care programs include information and referrals, case management, nutritional support including meals and groceries, housing, and medication adherence. Our insurance program is statewide, and helps people with HIV/AIDS pay their insurance premiums. The prevention education team works with some of the highest-risk populations in our area: men who have sex with men, transgendered women, and young people.

As Lifelong is the only ASO in the Northwest with a full-time advocacy team, our national advocacy also includes work on behalf of Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska. The advocacy team works at the local, state, and national levels to ensure that legislators and policy makers consider the unique needs of people living with HIV/AIDS in their decisions.

Lifelong hopes to raise $800,000 with this year's event. According to the fund thermometor on the site, they're at 43% of the total now with pledges of over $340,000.

Labels: activism, fundraisers, Gay events, gay organization, Gay Seattle, Seattle

It has become a sure sign of fall, as G.A.Y. blog points out, when Human Rights Campaign releases the results of its annual survey of corporate policies toward LGBT employees.

The Corporate Equality Index, which this year rates 519 businesses, measures the extent to which employers protect their LGBT employees. 195 companies on this year's survey earned perfect scores on the HRC criteria compared to 138 in last year's version and only 13 on the first survey in 2002. (A larger group of employers has been rated each year.)

The Index rates employers on a scale from 0 to 100 percent on their treatment of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender employees, consumers and investors. The 195 businesses that met all of the criteria employ more than 8.3 million workers, according to HRC.

Local companies did fairly well in the survey with several companies -- Microsoft, Starbucks, WAMU, Nordstrom, REI -- getting perfect scores. Chicago-based Boeing, and San Jose-based Adobe also get perfect scores.

Seattle-based WAMU is one of a minority banking/financial services companies with a perfect score. That's more significant because only 32% of 100 rated companies in that industry achieved the top rank. Bank of America, KeyBank, US Bank, and Wells Fargo also earn perfect scores.

For the first time, Cincinatti-based Macy's joins Nordstrom as one of eight out of 11 apparel/department stores with perfect scores.

Issaquah-based Costco scored a 93 because it doesn't offer some transgender health benefits that are included in the HRC criteria.

Seattle-based Amazon.com scores an 80 because it still fails to provide protection from bias because of gender identity or expression and don't offer diversity training on that issue.

Safeco Corp. earns a 75 rating because it doesn't offer benefits, bias protections, or diversity training for gender-identity issues. 14 of the 29 rated insurance companies on the survey garnered perfect ratings, putting Safeco in the middle of the pack for that industry, but far better than AIG's 30 rating.

Federal Way's Weyerhaeuser Co. is scored at 75 because it offers a limited array of health benefits to unmarried partners of employees.

Among many law firms on the survey, Seattle's Perkins Coie is scored at 85 because it doesn't offer benefits to transgender employees and doesn't include gender identity issues in its employee handbook.

Among the 57 companies that have newly achieved a perfect score of 100 percent are: Allstate Insurance Co.(ALL), Electronic Arts Inc. (ERTS), Esurance Inc., J.C. Penney Co. Inc. (JCP), KeyCorp (KEY), Macy?s Inc. (M), Marriott International Inc. (MAR), Mastercard Inc. (MA), Waste Management Inc. (WMI) and Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO).

Although this year's version isn't yet available, HRC will eventually compile the survey results into a consumer-oriented brochure called "Buying for Equality". One company that remains firmly at the bottom in the current results is Houston-based Exxon Mobil which maintains its 0 rating -- making it one of the most hostile companies on the index. BP America and Chevron, by contrast, retain their perfect 100 ratings on this year's survey.

Cincinnati-based Kroger, which owns dominant local supermarket brands QFC and Fred Meyer, improved its score somewhat -- moving up to 75 from last year's miserable 35 rating. That score ties it with Safeway. The company that owns Albertson's -- SuperValue, Inc. -- gets a perfect score.

Labels: activism, business, equal rights

Matt Barber's job at the right-wing activist group Concerned Women for America seems to be to get mad about something and write a bleating press release or blog post about said maddening matter. His official title is Policy Director for Cultural Issues. His oddly reasoned missives turn up frequently on blogs that keep track of these kinds of things like Pam's House Blend and -- with a very different style, but similarly unrelenting focus -- G.A.Y.

We'd usually leave the tracking of the right-wing rantings to them, but one of Barber's posts popped up on our screeners because it mentioned that local coffee outfit, Starbucks. Apparently, it was a slow week for Barber after the hate crimes bill passed. So slow, that he was reduced to reading the stuff printed on his Starbucks cups. And he still doesn't like what he sees there.

Java giant Starbucks finds itself entangled in yet another brewing controversy over its "The Way I See It" campaign. Starbucks has a history of placing liberal, pro-homosexual and anti-God statements submitted by customers, celebrities and other public figures on the side of its coffee cups for customers to contemplate while they wash down a muffin with a Frappe-Mocha-whatever.

Although the company has every right to do what it wants with its cups, one questions whether it makes good business sense to intentionally alienate a large percentage of the coffee drinking public with these inflammatory political musings. Many customers with traditional values find it quite offensive. Although the company has used some religion oriented statements in the past -- such as one by Purpose Driven Life author Rick Warren -- the preponderance of politically and spiritually themed quotes that make the "cup cut" seem to represent a hard-left ideology.

I know... it's difficult to believe that a company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, would labor under such a leftist bent, but sadly, such is the case.

Yikes! Seattle! Here offers the name of our town as though the good chief's name alone is enough to get his readers riled.

Barber offers several examples of the "hard-left ideology" he found on the cups. Among them:

The Way I See It # 43 ? "My only regret about being gay is that I repressed it for so long. I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don't make that mistake yourself. Life's too d*mn short." -- Armistead Maupin, Homosexual Novelist

Barber suggests that his readers should submit their own (presumably hard-right) alternative quotations to a Starbucks website. His offering:

The Way I See It # ?? ? "Why do so many in our fallen world revile God's natural order when it comes to marriage, family and human sexuality? Why do we encourage wicked pride in a morally bankrupt, high-risk lifestyle that's anything but 'gay'? Why do we shake our fist with hate at perfect Love? Life is short -- but it's never too late for change."

Hmm. Maupin just seems nicer, somehow.

Given the genesis of the company's name, we'd like to see this admittedly complex sentence from Moby Dick:

"There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own." -- Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Ch. 49

We suspect that Barber would feel better about Starbucks if he'd run across this Chicago "partner" described in a letter to Windy City Times. (Although the situation described appalls us.):

When I approached the counter to order my drink, an employee was sitting at a table, apparently on his break, talking to another employee who was making a drink for him. I walked up just as he was telling her that, because she is gay, she is no different from a serial killer or a child molester. The woman responded by saying that she was the way God made her and that certainly wasn't wrong in her opinion. At that point, he walked up to the counter to get his drink, looked at me, and said: "I'm just sayin' it's evil."

Labels: activism, business, link bites, Seattle

HeartStrong is a Seattle-based non-profit "established to provide outreach to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and other persons adversely affected by the influence of all denominations of religious educational institutions" and "committed to educating the public about the persecution of GLBT's and others at religious educational institutions."

The group's founder and executive director, Marc Adams, attended the late Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. Not surprisingly, he doesn't offer a warm remembrance of the pastor and political activist, but offers this personal remembrance on the group's mailing list:

Twenty years after I watched friend after friend outed and expelled from Liberty University for being gay or lesbian, I feel hope. Twenty-two years after watching my friend Denise doubled over and dissolved in tears after being kicked out of Liberty University for getting pregnant, I feel peace. Twenty-three years after watching my Old Testament Survey professor committing adultery with his sister-in-law on more than one occasion and virtually getting away with it, I feel honest. ...

I spent three and a half years as a student and employee at Jerry's university. I left during the middle of my senior year, not necessarily because I was gay, but mostly because I had begun my personal journey to wholeness and peace by challenging my fundamentalist Baptist Christian beliefs.

Over and over again, I found myself in pain for my friends. So many people that I knew struggled to survive in an environment that taught women they were to be submissive to men and gay and lesbian people that they were giving the devil pleasure by thinking about self-acceptance instead of self-hatred.

Bisexual and transgender issues were never discussed since most evangelicals do not see them as actual issues. This is mostly because they see the Bible from a male/female point of view. However, this certainly doesn't mean that bisexual and transgender people are not attending these schools.

After a few years of seeing friends and others devastated by the theology of Jerry's Thomas Road Baptist Church and Liberty University, I began to question the things that I was taught as truth. Too many tears, broken spirits and lives forced me to choose my path. I could choose to continue the legacy of hatred, intimidation and shame laid out for me or I could choose to break the chains. In doing so, I could help provide healing to those devastated not just by Jerry Falwell, but by the millions who perpetrate the same physical and emotional life-ending message of self-hatred.

I chose the latter.

And my life has never been the same.

For the first time in my life, I found personal peace which gave me the courage, in 1996, to begin the work of HeartStrong. Out of respect for my friends who committed physical and emotional suicide and out of hope for my friends still stuck in restorative therapy, I founded HeartStrong as a way to provide hope and help to the countless gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered students persecuted at religious educational institutions in the United States and around the world.

Jerry acknowledged that in a room full of people, a homosexual can pick out the other homosexual in the room. I had never heard of gaydar before but as soon as he said that, I knew I had always had it. It was one of the things that eventually helped me in my self-acceptance process.

Had I not grown up in the ridiculous home I grew up in and had I not attended Jerry's university and worked for him, I doubt I would care at all about my GLBT brothers and sisters struggling to survive in these schools. Jerry's hatred for what he calls the sin of homosexuality provided me with the inspiration and the ongoing energy needed to continue to provide hope and help to those injured by his former belief system.

His evangelical university and church was also a stepping stone for me to escape my self-hatred brought on by my fundamentalist Baptist Christian beliefs and eventually find true personal peace as a Unitarian.

Jerry Falwell taught me that the greatest thing a Christian could do to show god how much you loved him, was to die for what you believe. (Where else do we hear this theology?) Well, now that Jerry has died, perhaps others can learn how unimportant the things are that he thought were so important and how important the things are that he never was able to experience.

So, thanks Jerry, for the inspiration. It was your persecution of me, people like me and every girl I ever knew at your schools that empowers HeartStrong to help heal the scars from the wounds you inflicted.

Adams suggests that the best way to counter Falwell's continuing "legacy of being the ultimate anti-GLBT fundraiser" is to give now to his group or another that attempts to build equality and tolerance where Falwell and his followers would do the opposite.

Labels: activism, gay organization, religion

Boise-based Micron Technology, Inc. -- Idaho's largest employer -- today announced that it will adopt new workplace rules for all of its employees that ban discrimination based on an employee's or applicant's sexual orientation.

The move comes after shareholder activism by the New York City Pension Fund System, Seattle's Pride Foundation, and other shareholder groups. New York City Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr. filed a shareholder resolution at the company's annual meeting in October last year. A 55% majority of shareholders supported the resolution, an uncommonly high percentage for that kind of measure.

In a letter to Comptroller Thompson on Tuesday, Micron's vice president of human resources, Patrick T. Otte, wrote, "Following conversations with our shareholders regarding nondiscrimination in the workplace, the Micron Board today revisited its equal opportunity employment policies and came to a decision to add sexual orientation to its nondiscrimination language."

The company said in its letter that the change would make their policy consistent across all their work sites, since its California employees already have sexual orientation protections. The company was also in the process of revising it nondiscrimination policies at its Oregon site to include sexual orientation following recent changes in the state law. [Advocate]

The change represents a reversal for the major chip-maker. Last week, the company announced that its board of directors would ignore the shareholder resolution directing them to adopt the non-discrimination policy.

Despite the vote, Micron's general counsel said this month that the company would ignore the vote and not revise its policies because it feared "expanded legal liability."

The company had also been slow to announce the vote, according to an updated press release [pdf format] today from Pride Foundation.

Earlier this month, Micron Technology, a maker of semiconductors, headquartered in Boise, Idaho, disclosed a whopping 55.5% shareholder vote in favor of sexual orientation protections. This was only made public when the company filed its required 10-Q on January 16th. Management had remained curiously mute about the vote's percentage after its annual meeting last October.

The Advocate story [#] about the refusal of the Micron board to honor the shareholder vote might have put additional pressure on the company.

Another company that hasn't yet adopted non-discrimination rules, Commercial Metals, based in Irving, Texas -- a worldwide metals manufacturer -- announced a similar resolution had garnered a 43% vote, according to Pride Foundation. That company hasn't yet said what it will do in response to the vote.

Pride Foundation notes that the votes represent a changing environment.

Both instances represent an upward spiral in support for inclusive policies for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender workers. Since 2001 companies have seen percentage votes on this issue creep higher and higher, Historically shareholder resolutions on social issues usually receive votes in the 5-15% range. Only once, in 2002, Cracker Barrel, after a public outcry, significant media attention and ten years of proxies and prodding, received a vote of 58% in a year where other resolutions votes were in the low teens.

"Corporate shareholders are increasingly demanding that their companies judge workers not based on their sexual orientation or gender identity, but solely based on their qualifications and job performance," said Meredith Benton, Research Associate at Boston-based Walden Asset Management.

In its press release, Pride Foundation explained its involvement in the issue:

Pride Foundation has been a leader in this particular brand of shareholder activism. The nonprofit, which provides funding for gay and lesbian issues in the Pacific Northwest, leverages its ownership of public companies through its endowment to advance social change. The first success came in 1997, when the organization convinced MacDonalds to change its corporate policies to include sexual orientation. Since then Pride Foundation has filed numerous shareholder resolutions and has added General Electric, Wal-Mart and Emerson to its list of successes. Zachary Wright, Pride Foundation board member and chair of its Shareholder Activism Committee, represented the Micron shareholder resolution on behalf of the New York City Pension Fund, which filed the resolution this year.

"A simple change to the non-discrimination policy costs a company almost nothing, but can reduce employee turnover, help recruiting efforts, boost employee morale, and show it is in step with its industry and its competitors," said Wright. "Certainly there are solid business reasons in favor of adopting an inclusive policy, but basically we believe it is simply the right thing to do."

---
(It's a sign of the embarrassment that SOAP has brought to others that the Pride Foundation has found it necessary to post this notice on its home page.

Pride Foundation not associated with Seattle Out and Proud
In the wake of the announcement that Seattle Out and Proud, producers of Seattle's pride parade, is filing bankruptcy, Pride Foundation wants to remind the community that we are not associated with the group. Pride Foundation is a community-foundation that supports the LGBT and allied communities via grants and scholarships, and does not produce any parades.

)

Labels: activism, business, gay organization, Seattle

Here in Seattle, the activists who claim to own the name "Seattle Pride" have proudly stated for years that they've grown up and moved beyond our town's gay neighborhoods. Seattle's annual gay pride parade was moved off of Broadway on Capitol Hill and now marches through a multi-decade construction zone on Fourth Avenue downtown, following roughly the same route in reverse as the town's wonderfully tacky Seafair Torchlight Parade.

Gay and lesbian activists and businesses in Philadelphia approached things with a different perspective, working for years to define and to claim for themselves an area that they could claim as their own "Gayborhood." The efforts culminated yesterday in the installation of official street signs bearing rainbow-flag colors. Philadelphia Daily News reports, New signs make it official: We have a gayborhood:

Welcome to the "Gayborhood."

A welcoming vibe is what organizers hope to inspire when visitors see new street signage that will designate a portion of the Center City District as the city's official gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender-sensitive neighborhood.

The official "Gayborhood" extends from 11th to Broad streets, and from Pine to Locust.

"This sends a message to the region, country and world that Philadelphia is very diverse," said Councilman Frank DiCicco during yesterday's unveiling at 13th and Locust. "This is a tribute to gay people and people who aren't that they have a willingness to live and work together."

Michael Hinson Jr., City Hall's liaison to the LGBT community, and Tami Sortman of the Philadelphia Gay Tourism Caucus, joined DiCicco for the announcement.

The new street signs will feature the traditional GLBT rainbow, or "Freedom" flag underneath the usual street signs.

The rainbow design was created by San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker.

In all, 36 new signs have been installed in the community.

Four other North American cities officially designate LGBT-friendly neighborhoods: San Francisco, Chicago, Montreal and Toronto.

"The signage is an important symbol for this city," Sortman said. "The major thing is that we can use this in all of our marketing. We can say that we have a neighborhood."

The Philadelphia Gay Tourism Caucus estimates that the travel market for gay and lesbians is a staggering $54 billion. And Philadelphia, organizers say, should see a healthy share of that money, given the gay-friendly clubs, restaurants and other establishments dotting the newly designated district.

The street signs are just part of the efforts in Philadelphia to both serve the city's own LGBT populations and to attract tourist dollars to the city. For instance, the city recently funded a major study of LGBT demographics in the area. [Note: Link is to a current story in Philadelphia Gay News. Because of awkward design of the weekly's website, link will probably point to a different story after the weekend.]

"This is the first time a population-level study of homosexual and bisexual people has been conducted in Philadelphia," said Chris Bartlett, a project coordinator and head of the Gay Men's Health Leadership Academy of Philadelphia. "For the first time, we have a clearer picture of the size and some of the big characteristics of some of our diverse communities, and we are able to compare these homosexual and bisexual populations to their heterosexual counterparts."

Funded by the City of Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Foundation ? a philanthropic organization that allots funds to community groups ? the assessment was targeted toward the GLB community itself, the local and state government, local and regional foundations and businesses serving the community.

"Both the city and the Philadelphia Foundation wanted to make sure that they could appropriately target services and funding at GLBT populations throughout the city," said Bartlett. "They also wanted local, community-based organizations that serve the GLBT population to have access to these data for strategic planning and fundraising purposes. Data like these are very important because they help our GLBT populations to better understand ourselves. In addition, we can use these data to advocate for the needs of our communities. Looking at these available data sets allows the community to focus on getting answers to questions in other areas not covered by these data."

Activists there aren't ignoring LGBT populations in other parts of the area by giving focus to one neighborhood as more specifically gay, but in Seattle the activists who own the name "Seattle Pride" insisted that they needed to move the city's parade off of Capitol Hill because many LGBT folks live elsewhere in the region.

Philadelphia's recent "Gayborhood" designation is just one part of a long-running campaign by the city's gay businesses and its official tourism agency to promote the city as a destination for LGBT tourists and thereby invigorate the businesses that cater to both local and visiting

PHILADELPHIA, August 18, 2006 - As shown by its high-profile ad campaign, "Get Your History Straight and Your Nightlife Gay," and resulting coverage on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, CNN and other national media, Philadelphia has officially "come out" as a gay-friendly travel destination. The region is the place to learn about what it means to be an American by day and a gay American by night. Here, you'll find all the ingredients for a fabulous weekend getaway: a hot restaurant scene, great shopping, lively bars, clubs and cafes and a nine-block "gayborhood," as well as rich cultural attractions and historic sites.

The city's official Pride organazion prominently promotes the "Gayborhood" campaign on its website. Several other cities with official outreach to LGBT tourists, including Dallas, promote a gay-friendly neighborhood as a draw to gay and lesbian visitors. Seattle's official tourism site includes a home-page link for "LGBT Travel." The LGBT Visitors page includes this outdated reference to Capitol Hill:

The Capitol Hill neighborhood is the traditional hub of gay and lesbian culture and entertainment and hosts the annual Gay Pride Festival. However, Seattle's sizeable, progressive gay and lesbian population pervades the entire city.

The page also includes this brief reference:

Just a few blocks east of downtown, Capitol Hill's Broadway Avenue East and the Pike/Pine corridor offer affordable couture, vintage collectibles, music and art stores and plenty of fun cafes and coffee shops to cleanse a shopper's palate.

As downtown-focused activist here often point out, several cities that have more defined gay neighborhoods than Seattle has, hold their Pride events elsewhere. But in our view (which isn't shared by the Seattle-Pride-supporting hosts of this blog), it's exactly because Broadway and Pike/Pine are less defined as "gayborhoods" that the parade should have stayed up on the hill, even while the festival moved to the better facilities of Seattle Center.

The parade on Broadway and part of Pike or Pine was a way of "marking" a neighborhood -- a useful thing not because we all live there, but because it helped us to difine a small area of this larger city as uniquely our own for all the other months when the floats and marchers were not on the streets.

It's unfortunate that we all allowed a small group of folks to take that away from us.

[Update:] Just to be sure about it, we asked Philly Pride, organizers of that city Pride parade, if they march through the gayborhood or feel the need to go elsewhere in the city. Fran replied, "Our parade kicks off in the gayborhood, parades around the gayborhood, passes the oldest gay establishment in the gayborhood.

"Did I mentioned, our OutFest event in.October, is how our local gay neighborhood got the name the GAYborhood."

Good for them. We don't know if LGBT folks who live elsewhere in Phlly and Bucks County feel dissed by that, but -- somehow -- we doubt it.

Labels: activism, gay pride, Gay Seattle, Seattle Pride, tourism

[We missed this when it happened (since nobody seems to tell us anything, he whined), but it's significant to highlight even a few week's late]:

Seattle's Pride Foundation has convinced one of the nation's largest engineering/construction firms, Boise-based Washington Group International (WGI), to adopt non-discrimination policies that protect gay and lesbian workers at the company.

In a letter to Pride Foundation, dated March 19, 2007, Boise-based Washington Group International (WGI), has agreed to add sexual orientation to its nondiscrimination policies, thereby extending workplace protections to its gay and lesbian employees.

This move comes after Pride Foundation filed a shareholder resolution requesting the policy change last December. "Pride Foundation is very pleased that WGI has decided to create a fair and equal workplace for all their employees," said Audrey Haberman, executive director of the foundation. "Adopting this policy will help WGI retain a competitive advantage in recruiting and embraces diversity in the workplace, which ultimately improves employee morale and retention."

WGI, formerly known as Morrison-Knudsen, takes its name from the company's primary shareholder, Montana industrialist Dennis Washington. (His name also appears on the University of Montana's football stadium in Missoula, "Washington-Grizzly Stadium.")

WGI is a big outfit that comes in at #7 of 11 in the Fortune 500 list of construction and engineering companies. (The company's overall rank of 586 puts them out of the main Fortune 500 list.):

With approximately 25,000 employees at work in over 40 states and more than 30 countries, the company provides professional, scientific, management, and development services in more than two dozen major markets.

Here's CNBC's summary of the business:

The Group's principal activity is to provide designing, engineering, construction, construction management, facilities and operations management, environmental remediation and mining services.

Seattle-based Pride Foundation uses its large endowment to encourage change in the companies in which it invests its capitol.

Pride Foundation has been a leader in advancing social change through shareholder activism. The nonprofit, who provides funding for gay and lesbian issues in the Pacific Northwest, leverages its ownership of public companies through its endowment to ask companies to include sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression in their written nondiscrimination and employment policies. The first success came in 1997, when the organization convinced MacDonalds to change its corporate policies. Since then Pride Foundation has filed numerous shareholder resolutions and has added General Electric, Wal-Mart and Emerson to its list of successes.

Pride's next target, working with other large investers, is another major company based in Boise, chip-maker Micron. Today's Idaho Statesman story on the WGI decision says this about the Pride Foundation's pressure on the chip-maker:

Washington Group's decision comes not long after 55 percent of shareholders at Micron Technology voted in December to enact a similar change to the Boise-based semiconductor company's nondiscrimination policies. Micron's board of directors, however, opposed the change.

Despite the approval by shareholders, Micron's board is under no obligation to enact a policy.

William C. Thompson, New York City's comptroller, introduced the shareholder resolution at Micron to make the change on behalf of the New York City pensions funds. Thompson's office has persuaded dozens of Fortune 1000 companies to adopt new policies.

Jeff Simmons, a spokesman for Thompson's office, said Tuesday that Micron officials have yet to say whether they will follow the wishes of shareholders.

Micron didn't return repeated calls for comment Tuesday.

Micron's stance thus far against changing its policy has put the company in the minority of most larger publicly traded companies.

The Pride Foundation's Haberman told the Statesman that she hopes Micron's board will ultimately follow Washington Group's example.

"Our hope is that a company would make a decision based on their own philosophy and a desire to be a better and more competitive company," she said. "But perhaps a neighboring company showing they believe in it will be influential to Micron."

The Corporate Equality Index compiled by DC-based activist group Human Rights Campaign (HRC) assigns scores to various company's based on how they are treating gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender employees, consumers and investors. Neither WGI nor Micron are included on the survey, which probably means that they didn't respond to HRC's survey questions.

Other companies in the "Construction/Engineering" category -- which is where WGI would probably be placed -- score a relatively low average rating of 54. The four companies that are included in the survey -- CH2M Hill, Perkins & Will, DPR Construction, and KB Home -- have non-discrimination policies that include sexual orientation. They tend to fall down on other elements that HRC uses in its ratings. CH2M Hill is the most tolerant of the four companies with a rating of 80 (out of a possible 100).

Micron would probably be placed in the category "High-Tech/Photo/Science Equip." which is a generally more tolerant industry with an average score of 78. Ten of the 23 companies listed in that category score a perfect 100 on the HRC list. Those include Intel, Cisco, and Freescale Semiconductor. All of the 23 Micron competitors on the list include "sexual orientation" in their non-descriminaiton policies.

Labels: activism, gay organization, Idaho, Seattle

Hey, now, this is a great way for an activist group to use new technology.

Basic Rights Oregon (BRO), which is roughly comparable to ERW here (but has a much better acronym) is currently live-blogging from the statehouse in Salem on the debate on two gay rights measures. HB2007 would establish domestic partnerships in Oregon. It has passed the House and now heads to the Senate. SB2 is a non-discrimination bill similar to the one passed last year by the Washington legislature. Like the anti-bias bill here, SB 2 has a long history of being introduced in the Oregon legislature.

Having TVW around to broadcast and web-stream legislative debates makes that kind of live-bloggin a bit redundant. But still, it's good to see an LGBT activist group that recognizes that there are tools out there beyond email lists.

[via QPDX blog.]

[Update:] And the result:

(Salem, Oregon) Two bills that would extend gay rights Oregon have been passed by the House.

One bill would allow same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples unable to marry to form legally recognized partnerships. The second would include gays in Oregon's nondiscrimination law.

The Family Fairness Act carefully avoids using the term civil unions to quell criticism from socially conservative groups that the wording was too close to gay marriage - something already banned by a constitutional amendment in the state.

The bill passed on a 34 - 26 vote with three Republicans voting with the majority.
It now heads to the Senate.

The Oregon Equality Act would amend the state's non-discrimination laws to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation in housing, employment, public accommodation, education and public services statewide.

The bill passed 35 - 25.

It contains a provision that exempts churches but not private businesses they might run, such as hospitals. It was amended to cover all faith-based organizations, even if they are not aligned to a specific church.

Rep. Brad Witt (D-Clatskanie) told that house that it is unbelievable "that we are still debating elements of civil rights".

"Rational human beings do not choose lifetimes of intolerance and discrimination," he said.

Labels: activism, oregon

The Soulforce Equality Ride bus made an unscheduled lunchtime stop yesterday in Kennewick on its way from Seattle to Nampa, Idaho where activists will visit Northwest Nazarene University.

The bus and its twenty-plus rider visited Vista Youth Center, a drop-in center for "LGBTQA" youth that opened in February. On its web site, the center describes its mission this way:

We work with GLBTIQQA individuals 14-21 years old and offer unique combinations of direct service, social service, referrals. Our programs are youth-driven and based on the model of peer support and leadership.

[And we, too, have only only the vaguest notions of what the various collections of initials might mean.]

According to the Herald story, one of the riders on the Soulforce bus is from Kennewick and is inspired by the new facility in the Tri-Cities.

The bus stopped at the Vista center to show support for the facility, which opened six weeks ago to provide a haven for gay youths. Seventy young people from around the Tri-Cities have attended the center, including a crowd of 39 on April 5, said Mark Lee, executive director and founder.

Although the Soulforce Equality Ride primarily is stopping at colleges, it stopped by the Vista center for lunch Thursday in part because bus passenger Allison Eby, 29, is from Kennewick.

"Coming back with this bus and seeing this new center opening is really exciting," Eby said. "I really wanted to help bring some attention to this new center, because I think it's really important the youth have some place to go."

When she came out eight years ago, she wasn't aware of a gay and lesbian community in Kennewick, she said.

"So I think I felt pretty isolated," she said.

Because it was a daytime stop and the center doesn't usually open until after school at 3pm, most of the center's usual visitors were not there to greet the bus.

Instead, the travelers were greeted by about 20 people, including Vista Youth Center supporters, members of River of Life Metropolitan Community Church in Kennewick and a women's group from Shalom United Church of Christ in Richland.

The center depends on volunteers and contributions from local groups and churches.

The driving force behind the center is Mark Lee, 44, of Kennewick, a recent Portland transplant who spent years in the computer industry and is on the board of the nonprofit Equity Foundation.

The Oregon-based group promotes education, social justice and the welfare of LGBTQ people, according to its Web site.

When Lee moved here, he was looking for a way to become involved in the community, he said. In talking with Tri-City social service providers, he discovered there were few resources for gay youths.

He quickly found people willing to help with a youth center.

Along with volunteers..., the Benton-Franklin Health District and Planned Parenthood of Central Washington have agreed to send staff members during center drop-in times. They'll be available to provide education and give referrals.

Labels: activism, gay news, LGBTQ, Washington

The Soulforce Equality Ride western bus was welcomed to Seattle yesterday with an official proclamation from the mayor and city council.

The bus is now on its way to the less welcoming environs of BYU-Idaho in Rexburg. The bloggers on board probably haven't been able to connect to the net for their own updates on yesterday's visit. Beforehand, however, rider-blogger Jessica Kalup expressed surprise with what she was learning about the Emerald City and its large LGBT population.

The Equality Riders were in town to pierce the bubbles of two of the area's Christian colleges, Northwest in Kirkland and Seattle Pacific University on lower Queen Anne. (They did not visit Seattle University.)

Seattle is surprisingly "more gay" than my hometown Philadelphia which boasts a gayborhood and has GLBT-affirming high schools.

It is surprising that Seattle would even have schools which hold discriminatory policies. In attempting to locate Northwest University?s policy, I came across a document entitled "FAQs On Equality Ride", which specifies that "sexual intimacy is reserved for heterosexual, monogamous marriage?If a student acknowledges his or her homosexual tendency while at Northwest, he or she will not be asked to leave as long as he or she agrees to engage in ongoing dialogue with our campus ministries staff and live by our Community Life Standards."

Seattle PI writer Christine Frey reports on the group's reception at SPU.

Hundreds of students gathered Wednesday for a conversation not normally held on the Christian campus of Seattle Pacific University. The topic: homosexuality.

They crammed a conference room -- some sitting on the floor, others spilling into the hallway -- to talk with visiting gays and lesbians about sexuality and faith. ...

After the 90-minute conversation, some lingered and continued to talk. Students don't often have an opportunity to discuss such issues on campus, said Kerri Kline, an SPU senior who served as a host for the visitors. "They're curious," she said. She hopes a gay-straight alliance might form to provide a place for students to gather.

Members of Equality Ride called their reception at SPU warm and welcoming, but they emphasized that it was not a place that gay or lesbian students would feel comfortable attending because of some of its policies. Students who attend SPU agree to abide by its lifestyle expectations, which prohibits premarital sex and "homosexual sexual activities."

The activists on the bus split up to be able to visit both Northwest and SPU on the same day. The visit to the Kirkland school -- an even more securely bubbled college than SPU -- slipped under the radar of local media. Like SPU -- and unlike some of the other schools that have barred the gay Christian activists from their campuses -- Northwest welcomed the group onto campus with an official agenda of activities. Weeks prior to yesterday's visit, the school posted a FAQ about the Soulforce group.

It includes the question "What happens to a student who 'comes out' while at Northwest?" and offers this answer:

If a student acknowledges his or her homosexual tendency while at Northwest, he or she will not be asked to leave as long as he or she agrees to engage in ongoing dialogue with our campus ministries staff and live by our Community Life Standards. The Student Community Handbook covers a wide variety of lifestyle commitments, not just the issue of homosexuality.

... which, of course, shows why the activists on the buses are visiting. An anonymous local blogger who posts about the Seattle visit says it well:

I?m certainly not the biggest supporter of activism in general. Perhaps, living in Berkeley for five years jaded me too much to what I perceived as counterproductive, ineffective activism. However, what these folks are doing seems so important. The views regarding homosexuality held by the religious right are far more damaging to those glbt people trapped within that world than those of us on the outside (despite lots of political action for things like a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage).

Also: A Portland blogger gives an in-depth report on the Soulforce visit to George Fox University, a Quaker school in Newberg, Oregon.

[Update:] And one more: Here's a great report about what's inside the bubble from a gay alum of SPU:

during most of my time at Seattle Pacific University, my sexual orientation wasn't exactly a secret. My partner and I had been profiled in OUT Magazine shortly before I returned to finish my degree in 1998. ...

Although the "official" campus policy on same sex orientation was draconian, I never experienced any direct hostility from either my professors, or other students-At any time.

I did encounter ignorance on a regular basis, but that's why we expose ourselves to learning-to overcome our blindsides. ...

Yet, regardless of the openness I found on the student level, I was always aware that the attitudes of the administration and the alumni could be an entirely different matter. Some of my profs expressed fear of rocking the boat. They worried about jeopardizing their careers at the university if they were to be more outspoken or progressive.

For an institution of higher learning to foster such a climate of fear certainly on the surface runs contrary to their constant mantra espoused by the university's President to "Engage the Culture." ...

Great post. Read it all.

Labels: activism, Gay, LGBTQ, Seattle

Busloads of mostly gay and largely Christian activists have been visiting Christian colleges throughout the country for a month to talk to students and faculty about LGBT issues on campus. They call themselves "Equality Riders" and are sponsored by the gay Christian organization Soulforce. The group's website summarizes the group's purpose:

In 2006, during the inaugural Equality Ride, participants traveled to nineteen schools and engaged students, faculty, and administrators in conversation about the damaging effects of homophobic doctrine, the false notion that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender identities are sick and sinful. This year, the journey continues with fifty young adults going to thirty-two Christian colleges and universities.

Most of the publicity that's been generated by this year's ride -- which is operating with one bus visiting colleges in the east and another visiting western colleges -- has come from colleges that have barred the Riders from their campuses and sometimes had them arrested.

But another, less publicized response has come from students at many of the same colleges and even from administrators at other Christian schools.

A press release from the west coast Soulforce bus tells of the group's reception last week at two California colleges:

At Fresno Pacific University, administrators collaborated with the Equality Riders on the westbound bus to create a setting for meaningful dialogue. On April 3rd, Equality Riders participated in classroom discussions and gave presentations on topics such as "Progressive Theology" and "In God's Image: Identity and Scripture." Over meals, Equality Riders talked with concerned faculty who wanted to learn what they could do to make Fresno Pacific a safer learning environment for LGBT students.

The Fresno Pacific student handbook states that "the university is opposed to homosexual, premarital and extramarital sexual relations." But while FPU Director of Communications Diana Bates Mock affirmed that the institution's views had not changed, she acknowledged that "there is a better appreciation for listening to each other."

Previously, at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, where an LGBT student group has already been working towards official recognition, Equality Riders found similar opportunities for genuine dialogue. Although the Pepperdine student handbook identifies "homosexual conduct" as grounds for discipline, Equality Riders were invited to lead the prayer at a prayer service in which Riders, students, and faculty joined hands.

A similarly tolerant reception is expected when the Equality Riders visit Seattle Pacific University on Wednesday, April 11. Jonathan Hilbrands is coordinating the visit from the western bus. He reports on the Ride website

Soulforce is working closely with the school administration to develop a schedule of events that would provide a unique forum for the conversation about homosexuality, faith and society.

SPU has posted a itinerary for the visit on its website. The activists from the bus will be officially welcomed to the school at 8 am by the dean of students, assigned "student hosts" and given name tags. They'll be given several chances to interact with students and faculty throughout the day, including scheduled breakfast, lunch, and dinner meetings; a worship service; a lengthy dialog session in the afternoon at the Student Union Building; and a "Open Campus Forum and Q&A" in the late morning.

The forum features a speaker from Soulforce -- Haven Herrin, co-director of Equality Ride -- who will present a talk called "Genesis: Beyond the Binary." SPU Professor Frank Spina will present "An Old Testament Scholar's Reflections on Human Sexuality." The (probably) contrasting 30-minute lectures will be followed by an open question and answer period for faculty and staff.

In other words, both SPU and Soulforce are approaching this visit as an educational opportunity for the campus, much as Fresno Pacific and Pepperdine did the week before.

SPU student body president Bethany Krumm, quoted in today's PI story, symbolizes that attitude. She told PI reporter Christine Frey that she plans to meet with members of the Equality Ride, but isn't yet sure of her position on homosexuality. She noted that college is a time to explore such issues.

"I'm still working that out," she said. "I'm really interested in hearing what's going to happen with the forum ... what this looks like and deciding where I stand on the whole issue."

Those interested in joining the dialog at SPU can register through the Soulforce website.

Even at Baylor University, where the administration barred Soulforce activists from talking with students on campus, the visit has had a significant effect, according to a report in the student paper there.

Almost two weeks after Soulforce Equality Ride's stop in Waco, the Baylor campus is still feeling its effects.

This time, it's in the form of an online student petition protesting Baylor's statement on human sexuality.

Addressed to President John Lilley, the petition reads, "We, as students, recognize Baylor as a Christian University, and place an utmost importance on love and acceptance. We find Baylor's attitudes, actions and policy on homosexuality to be offensive, bigoted, and antiquated and wrong.

"Our goal is to have a University that is tolerant of sexual minorities. We feel that spiritual superiority and judgment does not further our Christian message, but degrades it. Fueling attitudes of fear and hatred towards those of homosexual orientation is wrong, regardless of how one feels about how the Bible interprets homosexual practice."

Also see: This week's SGN has an great story by "contributing writer" Liz Meyer on the Riders:

almost all of the bus riders represent that still seemingly incongruous convergence, the place where "Queer" meets "Christian." Evangelical Christian, even.

Kourt Osborn, a young Transgender man riding on the West Coast bus, acknowledges that many view "Queer" and "Christian" as mutually exclusive.

"A lot of fundamentalist Christians, and some certain members of my family, would say there's a paradox there," says Osborn.

He also concedes that, for him at least, identifying as Queer takes precedence in some ways.

"If someone was like, 'Pick one,' I would definitely pick being Queer, because that's just who my friends are. I don't really say I'm Christian and Queer, I say I'm Queer and Christian."

See also: Last week's post here summarizing a Michigan gay paper's story on a gay and a lesbian student as Spring Arbor University (SAU) in is suprisingly relevant to the SPU visit. SPU might share the "bubble" that the students at SAU describe because it's a closely related institution. Along with five other schools, both SAU and SPU are members of the Association of Free Methodist Educational Institutions.

A complicated story about a doctinal/tenure dispute at another of the seven Free Methodist schools offers this simple (and overly simplified) summary of the denomination:

A denomination with 77,000 members in the United States, the Free Methodist Church of North America traces its origins to 1860, when its leaders separated from the main Methodist body because they believed it had strayed from the basic teachings of John Wesley, its founder. In breaking away from their parent church, the Free Methodists, in common with members of the other groups that constituted the nineteenth-century Holiness movement, emphasized Wesley's doctrine of sanctification-the "second work of grace," a postconversion process of moral and spiritual development. Like other contemporary Holiness groups, such as the Wesleyan Church, the Church of God, the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the Salvation Army, and the Church of the Nazarene, the Free Methodist Church belongs to the National Association of Evangelicals, a defining organization for American evangelicalism.

One of the other schools in the association offers this bit of history about the universities and colleges:

Free Methodist founders were mostly educated leaders and they wanted strong educational opportunities for youth from the beginning, believing that God does not place a premium on ignorance. (Hogue, History, 305) Therefore, nine Free Methodist educational institutions dotted America from east to west before Greenville College became the tenth Free Methodist school in 1892.

Labels: activism, gay news, Gay Seattle, religion, Seattle

We posted this Daily Show clip last week by the show's rising star, Jason Jones, because we thought it was funny.


[link to part 1] [link to part 2 (above)]

But if we'd looked at our feeds that day, we would have noticed that something odd was happening to the "ex-gay" "therapist" featured in Part 2 of the clip. The self-described "psychotherapist and educator" Richard Cohen was disappeared from the web sites of two "ex-gay" activist groups that had previously served as his organizational cover.

On March 31, writer David Robinson described on the Ex-Gay Watch blog the odd disappearance of Cohen from sites that had been primary proponents of his controversial "therapies."

Over the past couple of days, The National Association for the Therapy of Homosexuals (NARTH), and Parents and Friends of Gays and Ex-Gays (PFOX), have quietly removed all traces of any affirmation of Richard Cohen. PFOX has removed all references to him entirely, while NARTH has left only historical events which included his name - all his articles are gone and his books no longer appear in their online bookstore.

We missed the post along with mentions of it by Pam Spaulding and others. Fortunately, though, the virtual versions of the paper gay press is out there to catch -- a week or two later -- things that fall through the quickly-revolving blog cycle. Bar Area Reporter rehashes the purging in this week's issue:

As recently as last year Cohen had been president of Parents and Friends of Gays and Ex-Gays, whose slogan is "supporting the right of homosexuals to choose change." PFOX believes that individuals can change their sexual orientation and has paid for a series of controversial billboards promoting that idea.

The name of the anti-gay group was chosen as a twisted alternative to the pro-gay group Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.

Cohen had been expelled from the American Counseling Association in 2003 for violating its code of ethics. He continues to offer counseling in Maryland without a license.

One of the most recent of his frequent media appearances was a "Diagnosis Mystery" segment on The Daily Show, on March 20. Words cannot describe how hysterically bizarre the segment was.

Two days after the segment aired, Cohen sent out a fundraising appeal for his International Healing Foundation. In it he said he did such media appearances "in an effort to reach people who would normally never hear our message."

He called The Daily Show experience "the most degrading experience I've ever had in the media. I unknowingly allowed myself to be manipulated and coerced by the producer and the host. I take full responsibility for this mistake." He accused the program of taking comments out of context and making him look like a fool.

The Daily Show segment appears to have been too much for Cohen's ex-gay allies.

Even before Cohen's former sponsors had purged references to him, another "ex-gay" group, Exodus International, which claims to be the largest organization in that "movement," had criticized Cohen:

Randy Thomas, vice president of Exodus International, is rightly embarrassed by Richard Cohen?s appearance on the Daily Show:

The guy on the video announces Richard as the foremost expert on "healing the gay" or something like that. Richard is not the foremost of anything except making a spectacle of himself and completely misrepresenting the larger "ex-gay" movement. He is not a part of Exodus and apparently not willing to take our private feedback and accountability to heart.

But if the Daily Show appearance was finally just too much for Cohen's fellow activists, there were plenty of other bizarre appearances by the man before that:



On ABC's Jimmy Kimmell On CNN's Paula Zahn

Truth Wins Out founder Wayne Besen who appeared on the same Daily Show report as Cohen details his downfall in a syndiated column that appeared this week in several papers, including SGN.

The wheels began to fall off the car when I got a tip that Cohen had been kicked out of the American Counseling Association in 2002. He managed to hide this career suicide from the public until I informed the media in 2005.

With his counseling career in ruins, Cohen turned to the media as his only channel to attract new clients to his "healing" seminars. However, his act that played so well at the NARTH convention made him look like a quack to mainstream Americans. On his appearance on CNN's Paula Zahn Now earlier this year, Cohen actually performed his tennis racket routine to the guffaws of million of viewers. He made a further buffoon of himself on ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live where boxer George Foreman looked as if he wanted to give him a left hook. He further disgraced his image on Showtime's Bullshit, starring comedians Penn and Teller.

However, Cohen's "jumping on Oprah's couch moment" came on his appearance with me on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart . To prove he was heterosexual, Cohen belched and cursed and when he was feeling the heat, he got up in the middle of the interview to "shake it off."

Cohen's antics were even more than PFOX and NARTH could take and they heaved him overboard, purging their websites this month of his kooky books and articles. The largest ex-gay group, Exodus International, even put out a statement saying they do not endorse the counselor's work.

But taking his name off the websites may not be enough to get Cohen and his bizarre techniques off the cable news shows. He appeared as part of a long documentary about "Conversion Therapy" on Australian network ABC. Although the documentary was probably taped months ago, CNN International re-aired it recently. Raw Story has the video. Snippets of the documentary showed up again this Friday on Anderson Cooper 360.

Labels: activism, celebrities, news bites, TV, youtube

SAU is our own little enclave, it seems disconnected from the rest of the world, including Jackson. We are a little happy conservative place where nothing happens, or if anything bad or dirty happens, it is swept under the rug. Everything in SAU is good. It's this whole psychological mind screw."

That's how Drew Hinkle, a gay student at Spring Arbor University in Jackson, Michigan, describes the school to Michigan's gay newspaper Between the Lines.

Another student interviewed by the paper asked them not use her real name. They call her "Jamie" in the story. She agrees with Hinkle about the isolation of the school:

The more classes I take, the more I hear about, even the professors will mention the bubble, that it makes SAU a safer place. That it's not penetrated by the outside world. They don't allow anything they believe to be non-Christian to stay in the bubble. They pretty much exile them off the campus.

Not surprisingly, Jamie said she'll be leaving SAU after this school year.

Julie Marie Nemecek, a professor and administrator at the private school will also be leaving SAU in June. Unlike Jamie, Nemecek's departure isn't through choice, but also reveals something about the bubble.

The Washington Blade's excellent online edition carried this wire report about Nemecek's termination in early February:

Christian university fires transgender professor
Complaint filed with EEOC

JACKSON, Mich. (AP) Feb 5, 7:58 AM
A private, Christian university is firing a transgender professor who began appearing as a woman on campus in 2005.

John Nemecek, 55, who goes by Julie Marie Nemecek and often wears a wig and dress, is fighting the dismissal by Spring Arbor University, which takes effect June 1.
The ordained Baptist minister has filed a discrimination claim with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

"I have worked hard for this university, have been praised for my performance, and I have done nothing immoral or sinful," Nemecek told the Jackson Citizen Patriot for a Sunday story.

Officials at Spring Arbor, which is affiliated with the Free Methodist Church, declined to comment to the newspaper. They said in a statement released by a public relations firm: "We expect our faculty to model Christian character as an example for our students."

Faculty who "persist with activities that are inconsistent with the Christian faith" may be fired, the statement said. In their response to Nemecek's EEOC complaint, college officials said the Christian mandate is critical to Spring Arbor and is protected by civil rights laws.

[See update below]

Both Drew Hinkle and "Jamie" told BTL that the "Christian mandate" at their school made the process of coming out doubly difficult. Hinkle told the paper that coming out to his friends and family had been emotionally wrenching. "I pretty much emotionally broke down," Hinkle said. "I can't keep hating myself like this, living two lives. There was no more choice I couldn't keep the secret anymore."

Jamie described a kind of oppressive heterosexuality at the school:

Jamie says the expectation of heterosexuality was suffocating. "It is the main goal of the students at Spring Arbor to come out of there with a wedding ring or an engagement ring. It was ridiculous. It pissed me off," she says. "Its put in your head that college is the main place you will find someone to be with for the rest of your live and you do not find them then your chances are more slim then they were before."

Jamie will leave SAU for a public college, but Hinkle says that he will stick it out at the school.

"I see it as a sign of -- for me, personally -- of defeat," Hinkle says of his plans not to leave the institution. "It would be like I gave up."

And accepting defeat, in Hinkle's mind, is tantamount to abandoning other LGBT students. Students he says have no voice. "I know that there are students in situations like where I was before I came out, was very effected by the homophobic community I was in and perpetuated by SAU. I had to find those kids and help them find their way out."

Both Jamie and Hinkle confirm that as many as four students may have attempted suicide in the past calendar year as a result of sexual identity crisis. That could not be confirmed by phone calls to Jackson's Foote Hospital, the closest hospital to the university or by SAU officials. In fact, SAU officials refused to return phone calls and emails seeking comment on the issue of LGBT students at Spring Arbor.

Supporting those students is key to both students. So important to them, in fact, they gave these interviews at great risk to their own academic careers at the university.

"I just hope that anyone who reads the piece that feels like they can't be themselves even around their friends, that they know it's not OK to feel that way. It's not OK to feel like you are wrong. You are not wrong. It's different but not wrong," Jamie said. "I think people shouldn't have to feel like the feelings they have or the relationships they have are wrong, even in God's eyes."

This great report in Between the Lines sheds useful new light on several different stories that have recently been moving over the various gay news wires. SoulForce, a group of Christian gay activists, have been traveling around the country on a bus, stopping at schools like SAU to pierce the bubble at each.

We've sometimes read about their exploits as a kind of spring-break protest tour. They often get themselves arrested while making their "statements" and and what they call "relentless nonviolent resistance." In the process, they generate local news stories accompanied by a flood of press releases and self-made videos.

That's being unkind, of course. Their protests are no doubt noble and admirable. But, it's been our experience that activists of just about any stripe are supremely capable of stating the nobility and all-consuming importance of their own cause and don't need much help from the likes of us. Soulforce is no exception.

But it hasn't been all that clear to us who or what the ultimate aim is of the bus-tour protests. Do they think they're going to change the minds of the future right-wing conservative leaders by disrupting things at the colleges where they're learning to become future right-wing conservative leaders and followers?" If that's their hope, it doesn't seem to be working.

But the stories of Jamie and Drew in the SAU bubble remind us that the activists on the Soulforce buses might manage to pop the bubble of other colleges for at least a moment to give those few Jamies or Drews at the other schools a chance to see that they're not alone.

According to anti-gay activist Gary Randall, Soulforce is scheduled to be in this area on April 11 to stage a protests within the bubbles of Seattle Pacific University and Northwest University in Kirkland.

On the other hand: The Advocate published its "College Guide for LGBT Students" in August before the current school year. It lists Tacoma's University of Puget Sound as one of the top twenty gay-friendly campuses in the country.

[Update:] After mediation, SAU and the transgender professor, Julie Nemecek, have agreed to a settlement of the discrimination suit she had filed against SAU. She will be "looking for other employment."

[See a digest of current gay news stories, feeds from prominent gay blogs, and a link list of local gay papers on our Squidoo Gay news page.]

Labels: activism, coming out, Gay, gay news, religion

We're seeing a new round in the matter as a few of the newspapers constrained to follow with slow paper-based publication schedules have weighed in on the ongoing battle about whether HRC effectively executes its mission as the self-proclaimed "largest civil rights organization working to achieve gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender equality." (A good example of many sides of the debate's first round can be found in this Slog post from last week by Eli Sanders and its many comments.)

IN Los Angeles magazine weighs in with a new summary that includes some significant new criticism from California activists along with snippets of an interview with HRC Executive Director Joel Salmonese [links via QPDX].

If sustained, there is a possibility that the contentiousness could damage the credibility of the 27-year-old LGBT institution. Ask former CBS News anchor Dan Rather about the Wild West blogosphere's ability to erode an established reputation. ...

"HRC is like the George Bush White House -- it's so insular. There's no internal dissent," a prominent gay Democrat told IN Los Angeles magazine.

"HRC is like George Bush's White House," another influential gay politico told IN separately. "You have to be in lock-step like a cult or else there's anger and retaliation. It's a bullying 'us-against-them' mentality."

"I'm just automatically suspicious," said yet another gay Democrat. "I do not trust them."

A number of LGBT politicos interviewed by IN asked for anonymity because of their association with HRC. They described a "love-hate relationship," recognizing the need for a powerful, strategic lobbying group to represent the LGBT community on Capitol Hill and applauding some of HRC's work, but they're still angry over old wounds and distrustful of political strategies. ...

Solmonese explained HRC's creativity in helping the LGBT community despite congressional hostility, and their largely invisible work "in places that HRC has not traditionally been," such as Birmingham, Ala., where LGBT people fear for their safety and job security.

"In the last five years, we have been in an incredibly defensive mode with this Congress," Solmonese said. "And twice in the last five years, with an incredibly unfriendly Congress, we have had to marshal all of our forces to stop the Federal Marriage Amendment."

One "real achievement" was the provision put into Pension Protection Act enabling same-sex couples to leave one another their 401(K)s, tax-free, penalty-free.

"I thought this was a thrilling victory for our community, and I'm flummoxed sometimes when people sort of shrug their shoulders and say, 'Ah, incrementally,'" Solmonese said. Five or six years ago "[we looked] at the fact that we can't move forward in this Congress ... [and said] let's look out across the country and figure out where else we can go to make change ... It's going to be a while until we can pass legislation to safeguard people in the workplace. We'll go to the workplace and do it."

He doesn't note that groups like Seattle's Pride Foundation had been working on these issues for years before HRC started its "Corporate Equality Index."

Duncan Osborn, editor of New York's Gay City News, gets nasty in an editorial this week that calls the blogger critiques of HRC from Chris Crain and Andrew Sullivan "particularly idiotic." He sets up and easily dispatches several straw dogs to (mis)represent the critiques.

The Washington Blade reported last week that HRC, with an annual budget of $34 million, paid just over $26 million to buy and renovate its headquarters. The agency is saving about $1 million a year in rent and I have no doubt that the value of that building has increased since HRC bought it in 2002. Buying that building was a very smart move.

I called guidestar.org, a Web site that archives data on charities and non-profits, to ask about the Solmonese salary. Among 43 "civil rights, social action, advocacy" groups with annual budgets over $5 million ranked by guidestar.org, the average chief executive salary was $228,233.

"It sounds like a quarter of a million for an organization of that size is reasonable," a guidestar.org spokesperson said. ...

When an ad with disturbing content that many people saw as anti-gay is seen by tens of millions of Americans, HRC should do nothing. So ignore the message that is widely disseminated and focus on the one that is barely audible.

Then when some anti-gay bigot like Coulter insults us and is cheered by her right-wing toadies, HRC should respond, but it must first run its remarks by the gay commentariat to be sure that it has maintained ideological purity.

Got it. Perhaps one of these critics will explain to the community what this incoherent, thoughtless strategy will achieve, but I doubt it. They are too busy whining.

Finally, let's consider Andrew Sullivan and Chris Crain and their complaint that HRC is too cozy with the Democrats. These are the same Democrats who took control of the House and the Senate in last November's elections. Now Chris recently moved to Brazil so he may have missed the election results and Andrew is a Brit so he may not understand what those results mean.

Certainly the Democrats are not perfect, but they are far better on gay issues than the Republicans and, after years in the minority, Democrats are now in charge in both chambers of Congress. HRC made a big bet last year with its political donations. It backed far more Democrats than Republicans. Obviously, it bet on the right team.

Crain, with his new blog is no longer constrained by paper schedules and responded quickly here.

My central criticism of HRC, should Osborne choose to actually address it, was that the organization under Jacques and now Solmonese has aligned itself too closely with the Democrats, treating the interests of the movement as secondary to those of party, when they conflict.

That is and has been his central point, but he has taken off on several tangents in making it. It's still a good and valid point. HRC exec Salmonese should not have said in a Boston speech (one that's often cited by Crain) that HRC wanted to be seen as an interest group in the Democratic Party.

The current editor of the Washington Blade weighs in with a Solmanic editorial urging a truce in the battle.

Sullivan and others have faulted HRC for failing to successfully lobby Congress to pass pro-gay laws. Some of that is deserved, some is not.

HRC provided the Blade with a list of its accomplishments, which include: successful campaigns to defeat the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2004 and 2006; the inclusion of gay provisions in the 2006 Pension Protection Act; the successful effort to defeat anti-gay adoption bans in Missouri, Georgia and Ohio; and the donation of $1 million to MassEquality.

This list is lacking, of course. But just as it is unfair of HRC to take all the credit when something goes right, it?s equally unfair to assign it all the blame when things go wrong. The reality is that no significant gay rights legislation was going to pass the Republican-controlled Congress of recent years. And even now, if the Democratic Congress passes the long-suffering Employment Non-Discrimination Act, there is no indication that President Bush will sign it.

He admits that the bloggers might be right that HRC should take step away from internal Democratic Party politics, but suggests (as do both Sullivan and Crain) that only Democrats offer any real hope to pass pro-gay legislation.

But none of that history changes the dynamics of the modern Republican Party, which has been hijacked by religious conservatives.... It's hard to cultivate relationships with Republicans when they take their marching orders from Jerry Falwell and James Dobson.

HRC and the Democratic Congress have a short window to accomplish a lot, most importantly passage of ENDA. Failure to achieve that will expose HRC to much more damning criticism than it has so far encountered.

In the meantime, gay rights advocates across the political spectrum should declare a brief truce and focus on the shared goal of passing ENDA rather than continue to engage in "Gotcha!" finger-pointing and name-calling. There will be time for that after the votes are counted.

They do have a short window, but the Democrats have learned that they must leave the curtains on that window open to the Net Roots in all of its many, often nasty, forms. HRC can't close its own windows to that new world. They'll have to learn to deal with "gotcha!" finger-pointing, name-calling, and multiple irrelevant tangents as a new gay roots develops that is not as willing as much of the print gay press has been to simply regurgitate HRC's self-congratulatory press releases.

A local angle: The quarter-million salary given to Salmonese probably brings a smile to pioneer Seattle activist Charles Bryden who was an early champion of "professionalism" in LGBT activism. At a time when most gay activist groups in the country depended entirely on time given by volunteers, Bryden urged them to hire professional staffs to guide the volunteer efforts. He was briefly hired as executive director of what's now called NGLTF, The Task Force. He urged the group to provide just the kind of competitive salaries that are now offered to staff by HRC, NGLTF, as well as local groups like Lifelong, Pride Foundation, Equal Rights Washington, the choruses and several others.

In the mess that has become our local Pride celebration planning, we see what happens when a rag-tag burned-out group of overworked volunteers get in over their heads on something that would have benefitted long ago from a paid staff.

Labels: activism, gay organization, politics

It's always delightful to hear from or hear about an old friend that one has lost contact with. The internet makes that kind of serendipitous reconnection at least slightly more common. A semi-regular search that we do for "seattle gay" on Google news turned up this item from the Rappahannock Times, a community paper in Virginia.

Meet Ann Georgia McCaffray is the headline. "Hey, we used to know an Ann McCaffray," we thought. And sure enough, the brief item is about the same Ann:

Sperryville resident Ann Georgia McCaffray is a painter, designer, activist, early advocate for persons with HIV/AIDS and the sole surviving co-founder of Seattle AIDS Support Group. She played a key role in helping to establish a support network in Seattle throughout the first decade of the AIDS epidemic and was recognized this week for her work in an issue of the Seattle AIDS Support Group Newsletter.

Ann was born and raised in Seattle on Capitol Hill. As a young woman with a background in Theatre & Landscape Architecture, she graduated in the late 70s from the Conway School of Landscape Design in Massachusetts and ended up back in Seattle working on Broadway at what was then "The Seattle Design Store". During this time she was doing graphic design work. She was a vibrant and active young woman engaged with her community and with her many friends.

Ann was deeply moved by the death of her gay friends and thus, her AIDS advocacy was born. As a straight woman Ann didn't have any difficulty being accepted into this scene of mostly gay men. Many had been rejected by their families because they had AIDS or just because they were gay. "I was readily accepted into the gay fold as a surrogate family member. When people came in to the group my first response was to go up and hug them -- I knew how to hug! Being hugged by a woman was a huge deal at this time; many doctors wouldn't even touch gay men." The legacy of Ann's early work lives on in the form of organizations that continue to support persons with AIDS.

In Rappahannock County, Ann Georgia's studio is one of the most popular on the RAAC Art Tour circuit. She has creatively organized a substantial group of many of the county's favorite artists to present their work in her light filled and energetic space. Most recently Ann Georgia led a variety of February programs at the Middle Street Gallery, one of which was 42 people making Valentines! Sperryville salutes this talented artist and joins with the people of Seattle in recognizing her compassion and advocacy.

And we join with Sperryville in greeting and thanking Ann.


In addition to her work with SASG (now Dunshee House), Ann was one of the founding members of Tacky Tourist Clubs, the group that kindly and tolerantly hosts this blog. You can read a bit about the early days of that group here. Along with Rick Rankin, Ann created the name and theme of TTCA's long-running big Spring party, The Prom...You Never Went To! Ann also created the first incarnation of one of the characters that would be a mainstay of the party, Miss Ann Thropy, administrative assistant to Lavender High School principal, Sister Mary Discipline.

Scott Gehring took the Miss Ann role to great heights even after Ann left to pursue her work with SASG.

We'll be celebrating a few of those characters (and probably many more) this summer when the Queen City Cruise [and yes, we'll update that page real soon now] hosts for a tenth anniversary commemoration of the last dance at The Prom. Lavender Valley High will return from its virtual slumber for the Classless Reunion Tour of the Cruise.

Labels: activism, gay organization, gay party, Gay Seattle

In a story posted for the week's issue Bay Windows, one of Boston's gay newspapers, summarizes the challenge of blogs and new media to the old line activist group, Human Rights Campaign (HRC). Some bloggers haven't been giving the group the kind of deference it has grown accustomed to from paper-based activist media.

The back and forth between HRC and the blogs shows just how difficult it is for an organization to control its public image in the 24/7-instant-communication world of the Internet.... In the not-so-recent past, HRC could control its public image through emails to its members and stories in the LGBT press that would always carry HRC?s point of view.

The gay commentary blogs have criticized HRC for being too closely tied with the Democratic Party, for their membership claims, and, now, for their spending.

On a daily basis, bloggers from across the political spectrum -- conservatives like Andrew Sullivan, progressives like Pam Spaulding and Michael Petrelis and libertarian-leaning bloggers like those at the Malcontent -- have used the platform of their blogs to whack the organization on everything ranging from the organization?s perceived alignment with the Democratic Party and its slowness to acknowledge the work of gay-friendly Republicans to its aggressive fundraising and merchandising campaigns within the community to its alleged ineffectiveness.

In the past, local gay papers, including Seattle Gay News, generally printed press releases from HRC unedited, often including its oft-repeated tag line "America's largest civil rights organization working to achieve gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender equality." Most blogs do the same, but a handful have begun to question the group's policy, strategies, and even its membership figures. Sullivan doubts the accuracy the membership figures on which they base that tag line.

The Boston paper doesn't attempt to trace the genesis of the blog critiques of HRC, but the critical attitude seems to have started with the one gay paper that has often dared to question HRC and other LGBT activist group, the Washington Blade. Today, in fact, the Blade posted a news story revealing that HRC spent $26.4 million for a new headquarters building and also paid out nearly $160,000 last year to a former executive directory who left HRC after the disastrous 2004 elections.

The Blade's former editor, Chris Crane, set a style of questioning HRC policies while he was at the paper. Since leaving the Blade last year, he's continued to question the group with frequent posts on his superb commentary blog Citizen Crane. The other blogs seemed to follow Crane in his skeptical view of the group.

Bay Windows offers this summary

Crain ... traces the recent discontent with HRC to a January Boston Globe article on HRC?s work in the 2006 elections. The piece noted HRC's work to help elect Democratic majorities both in Congress and at the state level in New Hampshire and elsewhere. The article claimed that HRC leaders wanted the organization to be seen as a "steady source of grassroots support for Democrats -- more akin to a labor union than a single-issue activist group."

In the article HRC President Joe Solmonese said that after the 2004 elections HRC shifted its priorities away from opposing state marriage amendments and towards electing candidates. For Crain, the article showed that HRC had put the interests of the Democratic Party ahead of the LGBT community.

"For a lot of people that expressed what had been suspected for a long time.... It plays out with whether they view the Democratic Party's priorities as their own.... I have yet to hear the kind of response I had hoped to hear, which is, 'No, that is not the case, and let me show you how we have stood up to the Democratic Party nationally and locally, and let me alleviate your concerns,'" said Crain.

Although the Blade's parent company, Window Media, still prints its many papers for standard distribution, the company and its conglomerate of local gay papers have largely transformed themselves into new media with significant and frequently-updated web content. (Witness, for example, our own Gay News page on Squidoo that often links to Blade stories.) The Blade is now a part of the new media world which gives its critical stories quicker and wider distribution.

HRC, which has been only slightly more effective than local Seattle groups at harnessing the power of new channels of communication, has found new media slightly more skeptical even among its friends. But this is a skepticism that is bound to make the overall goals that HRC claims to still seek more achievable.

Activist group like HRC could get away with claiming to speak authoritatively for all LGBTQ people. Blogs are making it apparent the the many agendas (as the right calls them) of those group are far more diverse than HRC liked to pretend.

Note: Regulary updated feeds from bloggers mentioned here and others are available on our Queer Commentary Squidoo page.

Labels: activism, blog-on-blog, gay organization