USA > History > 2010 > Gays (I)

At Long Last, Military Honor

December 19, 2010

The New York Times


More than 14,000 soldiers lost their jobs and their dignity over the last 17 years because they were gay, but there will be no more victims of this injustice. The nation’s military is about to send a message of tolerance and shared purpose to the world — now that political leaders, who voted for legalized bigotry in the armed forces in 1993 and kept it alive since then, have found the strength to stand up and end it.

The Senate vote on Saturday afternoon to allow open service by gay and lesbian soldiers was one of the most important civil rights votes of our time. The ringing message of the decision to end the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law will carry far beyond its immediate practical implications. Saturday may be remembered as the day when sexual tolerance finally become bipartisan.

Sadly, the vast majority of Republicans remained on the benighted side of the party line. Senator John McCain disgraced his distinguished military career by flailing against the vote, claiming it would be celebrated only in liberal bastions like Georgetown salons. But to the surprise even of supporters of repeal, eight Republican senators broke with party orthodoxy and voted with virtually every Democrat to end the policy. Fifteen House Republicans did the same on Wednesday. By focusing on history and decency, they took a stand of which their states can be proud. Perhaps a new moral momentum may even help them erase the remaining traces of prejudice in public life, including Washington’s refusal to recognize same-sex marriage.

They listened to senators like Joseph Lieberman and Susan Collins, who helped round up the votes. They studied the Pentagon’s examination of the implications of repeal, prepared by the Defense Department’s general counsel, Jeh Johnson, which said it posed little risk to the military. They heard the voices of leaders like Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said repeal would enhance security by retaining soldiers who would otherwise be discharged or never enlist.

And those 23 Republicans split from those in their party who believe their principal purpose is to humble President Obama. The president, who will soon sign the bill into law, made repeal a signature promise, joined by Democratic leaders in the House and Senate. If he can muster support for the New Start nuclear treaty in the next few days, he will end the year, and the first half of his term, with more solid accomplishments than seemed likely after the midterm elections.

There is still much work to be done. The vote in Congress does not end the policy outright. That will come only after the administration certifies that it has prepared the armed services for the change, and after an additional 60 days. It should take only a few months to properly educate officers and enlisted forces and put the new policy into effect. During those weeks, as a matter of obvious fairness, the military should pledge not to discharge any more soldiers who acknowledge being gay.

After the transformative vote, Mr. Obama said thousands of men and women would no longer have to live a lie in order to serve their country. As they begin this new chapter in their service, their country too will find itself transformed for the better.

    At Long Last, Military Honor, NYT, 19.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/opinion/20mon1.html

Senate Repeals ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’

December 18, 2010
The New York Times
By CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Saturday voted to strike down the ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military, bringing to a close a 17-year struggle over a policy that forced thousands of Americans from the ranks and caused others to keep secret their sexual orientation.

By a vote of 65 to 31, with eight Republicans joining Democrats, the Senate approved and sent to President Obama a repeal of the Clinton-era law, known as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” a policy critics said amounted to government-sanctioned discrimination that treated gay, lesbian and bisexual troops as second-class citizens.

Mr. Obama hailed the action, which fulfills his pledge to reverse the ban, and said it was “time to close this chapter in our history.”

“As commander in chief, I am also absolutely convinced that making this change will only underscore the professionalism of our troops as the best-led and best-trained fighting force the world has ever known,” he said in a statement after the Senate, on a preliminary 63-to-33 vote, beat back Republican efforts to block final action on the repeal bill.

The vote marked a historic moment that some equated with the end of racial segregation in the military.

It followed an exhaustive Pentagon review that determined the policy could be changed with only isolated disruptions to unit cohesion and retention, though members of combat units and the Marine Corps expressed greater reservations about the shift. Congressional action was backed by Pentagon officials as a better alternative to a court-ordered end.

Supporters of the repeal said it was long past time to abolish what they saw as an ill-advised practice that cost valuable personnel and forced troops to lie to serve their country.

“We righted a wrong,” said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the independent from Connecticut and a leader of the effort to end the ban. “Today we’ve done justice.”

Before voting on the repeal, the Senate blocked a bill that would have created a path to citizenship for certain illegal immigrants who came to the United States at a young age, completed two years of college or military service and met other requirements including passing a criminal background check.

The 55-to-41 vote in favor of the citizenship bill was five votes short of the number needed to clear the way for final passage of what is known as the Dream Act.

The outcome effectively kills it for this year, and its fate beyond that is uncertain since Republicans who will assume control of the House in January oppose the measure and are unlikely to bring it to a vote.

The Senate then moved on to the military legislation, engaging in an emotional back and forth over the merits of the measure as advocates for repeal watched from galleries crowded with people interested in the fate of both the military and immigration measures.

“I don’t care who you love,” Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said as the debate opened. “If you love this country enough to risk your life for it, you shouldn’t have to hide who you are.”

Mr. Wyden showed up for the Senate vote despite saying earlier that he would be unable to do so because he would be undergoing final tests before his scheduled surgery for prostate cancer on Monday.

The vote came in the final days of the 111th Congress as Democrats sought to force through a final few priorities before they turn over control of the House of Representatives to the Republicans in January and see their clout in the Senate diminished.

It represented a significant victory for the White House, Congressional advocates of lifting the ban and activists who have pushed for years to end the Pentagon policy created in 1993 under the Clinton administration as a compromise effort to end the practice of barring gay men and lesbians entirely from military service.

Saying it represented an emotional moment for members of the gay community nationwide, advocates who supported repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” exchanged hugs outside the Senate chamber after the vote.

“Today’s vote means gay and lesbian service members posted all around the world can stand taller knowing that ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ will soon be coming to an end,” said Aubrey Sarvis, an Army veteran and executive director for Servicemembers Legal Defense Network.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and his party’s presidential candidate in 2008, led the opposition to the repeal and said the vote was a sad day in history.

“I hope that when we pass this legislation that we will understand that we are doing great damage,” Mr. McCain said. “And we could possibly and probably, as the commandant of the Marine Corps said, and as I have been told by literally thousands of members of the military, harm the battle effectiveness vital to the survival of our young men and women in the military.”

He and others opposed to lifting the ban said the change could harm the unit cohesion that is essential to effective military operations, particularly in combat, and deter some Americans from enlisting or pursuing a career in the military. They noted that despite support for repealing the ban from Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, other military commanders have warned that changing the practice would prove disruptive.

“This isn’t broke,” Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, said about the policy. “It is working very well.”

Other Republicans said that while the policy might need to be changed at some point, Congress should not do so when American troops are fighting overseas.

Only a week ago, the effort to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy seemed to be dead and in danger of fading for at least two years with Republicans about to take control of the House. The provision eliminating the ban was initially included in a broader Pentagon policy bill, and Republican backers of repeal had refused to join in cutting off a filibuster against the underlying bill because of objections over limits on debate of the measure.

In a last-ditch effort, Mr. Lieberman and Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a key Republican opponent of the ban, encouraged Democratic Congressional leaders to instead pursue a vote on simply repealing it. The House passed the measure earlier in the week.

The repeal will not take effect for at least 60 days, and probably longer, while some other procedural steps are taken. In addition, the bill requires the defense secretary to determine that policies are in place to carry out the repeal “consistent with military standards for readiness, effectiveness, unit cohesion, and recruiting and retention.”

“It is going to take some time,” Ms. Collins said. “It is not going to happen overnight.”

In a statement, Mr. Gates said that once the measure was signed into law, he would “immediately proceed with the planning necessary to carry out this change carefully and methodically, but purposefully.” In the meantime, he said, “the current law and policy will remain in effect.”

Because of the delay in formally overturning the policy, Mr. Sarvis appealed to Mr. Gates to suspend any investigations into military personnel or discharge proceedings now under way. Legal challenges to the existing ban are also expected to continue until the repeal is fully carried out.

In addition to Ms. Collins, Republicans backing the repeal were Senators Scott P. Brown of Massachusetts, Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, John Ensign of Nevada, Mark Kirk of Illinois, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Olympia J. Snowe of Maine and George V. Voinovich of Ohio.

“It was a difficult vote for many of them,” Ms. Collins said, “but in the end they concluded, as I have concluded, that we should welcome the service of any qualified individual who is willing to put on the uniform of this country.”

Mr. Lieberman said the ban undermined the integrity of the military by forcing troops to lie. He said 14,000 people had been forced to leave the armed forces under the policy.

“What a waste,” he said.

The fight erupted in the early days of President Bill Clinton’s administration and has been a roiling political issue ever since. Mr. Obama endorsed repeal in his presidential campaign and advocates saw the current Congress as their best opportunity for ending the ban. Dozens of advocates of ending the ban — including one severely wounded in combat before being forced from the military — watched from the Senate gallery as the debate took place.

Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Armed Services Committee, dismissed Republican complaints that Democrats were trying to race through the repeal to satisfy their political supporters.

“I’m not here for partisan reasons,” Mr. Levin said. “I’m here because men and women wearing the uniform of the United States who are gay and lesbian have died for this country, because gay and lesbian men and women wearing the uniform of this country have their lives on the line right now.”

    Senate Repeals ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’, NYT, 18.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/us/politics/19cong.html

Repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Advances

December 18, 2010
The New York Times
By CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON — Capping a 17-year political struggle, the Senate on Saturday cleared the way for repealing the Pentagon’s ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military.

By a vote of 63 to 33, with six Republicans joining Democrats, the Senate acted to cut off debate on a measure that would let President Obama declare an end to the Clinton-era policy, known as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which allows gay members of the armed forces to serve only if they keep their sexual orientation a secret. The vote indicated that there was easily enough support to push the measure to final passage.

“By ending ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ no longer will our nation be denied the service of thousands of patriotic Americans forced to leave the military, despite years of exemplary performance, because they happen to be gay,” Mr. Obama said in a statement after the cloture vote. “And no longer will many thousands more be asked to live a lie in order to serve the country they love.”

The vote put Congress at the brink of a historic moment that some equated with the decision to end racial segregation in the military. It followed a review by the Pentagon that found little concern in the military about ending the ban and that was backed by Pentagon officials as a better alternative to a court-ordered end.

Backers of the repeal said it was long past time to end what they saw as a discriminatory practice that cost valuable personnel and forced troops to lie to serve their country.

“I don’t care who you love,” Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said as the debate opened. “If you love this country enough to risk your life for it, you shouldn’t have to hide who you are.”

Mr. Wyden showed up for the Senate vote despite saying on Friday that he would be unable to do so because he would be undergoing final tests before his scheduled surgery for prostate cancer on Monday.

The vote came in the final days of the 111th Congress as Democrats sought to force through a final few priorities before they turn over control of the House of Representatives to the Republicans in January and see their clout in the Senate diminished.

It represented a significant victory for the White House, Congressional advocates of lifting the ban and activists who have pushed for years to end the Pentagon policy created in 1993 under the Clinton administration as a compromise effort to end the practice of banning gay men and lesbians entirely from military service. Activists said it represented an emotional moment for members of the gay community nationwide.

Opponents of lifting the ban said the change could harm the unit cohesion that is essential to effective military operations, particularly in combat, and deter some Americans from enlisting or pursuing a career in the military. They noted that despite support for repealing the ban from Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, other military commanders have warned that changing the practice would prove disruptive.

“This isn’t broke,” Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, said of about the policy. “It is working very well.”

Other Republicans said that while the policy might be need to changed at some point, Congress should not intrude on the issue now when American troops are fighting overseas.

“In the middle of a military conflict, is not the time to do it,” said Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia.

The vote to lift the ban came after the Senate blocked — and effectively killed for this year — a measure that would have allowed some younger illegal immigrants to gain legal status by attending college or serving in the military.

Backers of that measure, known as the Dream Act, said it would have aided those who, through no fault of their own, were brought into the country illegally by their parents. But opponents said the initiative had the potential for fraud and amounted to a path to amnesty. The vote was 55 to 41, five votes short of the 60 necessary for the measure to advance.

Only a week ago, the effort to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy seemed to be dead and in danger of fading for at least two years with Republicans about to take control of the House. The provision eliminating the ban was initially included in a broader Pentagon policy bill, and Republican backers of repeal had refused to join in cutting off a filibuster against the underlying bill because of objections over the ability to debate the measure.

In a last-ditch effort, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, and Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, encouraged Democratic Congressional leaders to instead pursue a vote on simply repealing the ban. The House passed the measure earlier in the week.

The Senate must take a second vote to approve the repeal and send it to President Obama for his signature. The repeal would not take effect for at least 60 days while some other procedural steps are taken. In addition the bill requires the defense secretary to determine that policies are in place to carry out the repeal “consistent with military standards for readiness, effectiveness, unit cohesion, and recruiting and retention.”

Mr. Lieberman said the ban undermined the integrity of the military by forcing troops to lie. He said 14,000 members of the armed forces had been forced to leave the ranks under the policy.

“What a waste,” he said.

The fight erupted in the early days of President Bill Clinton’s administration and has been a roiling political issue ever since. Mr. Obama endorsed repeal in his own campaign and advocates saw the current Congress as their best opportunity for ending the ban. Dozens of advocates of ending the ban — including one wounded in combat before being forced from the military — watched from the Senate gallery as the debate took place.

Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Armed Services Committee, dismissed Republican complaints that Democrats were trying to race through the repeal to satisfy their political supporters.

“I’m not here for partisan reasons,” Mr. Levin said. “I’m here because men and women wearing the uniform of the United States who are gay and lesbian have died for this country, because gay and lesbian men and women wearing the uniform of this country have their lives on the line right now.”

    Repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Advances, NYT, 18.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/us/politics/19cong.html

The Senate Stands for Injustice

December 9, 2010
The New York Times

On one of the most shameful days in the modern history of the Senate, the Republican minority on Thursday prevented a vote to allow gay and lesbian soldiers to serve openly in the military of the United States. They chose to filibuster a vital defense bill because it also banned discrimination in the military ranks. And in an unrelated but no less callous move, they blocked consideration of help for tens of thousands of emergency workers and volunteers who became ill from the ground zero cleanup after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The senators who stood in the way of these measures must answer to the thousands of gay and lesbian soldiers who must live a lie in order to serve, or drop out. They must answer to the civilians who will not serve their country when some Americans are banned from doing so for an absurd reason, and to the military leaders who all but pleaded with them to end this unjust policy. They must answer to the workers who thought they were aiding their country by cleaning up ground zero.

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, said that he would allow another vote on repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in a free-standing bill later this month. That long shot is likely to be the final test of whether the Republicans are interested in allowing military equality.

Republicans wanted extra days of debate, demanding the right to amend the defense bill that contained the repeal provision, and essentially killing the bill without quite admitting to it by suffocating it of time. Mr. Reid said he had concluded that they had no intention of repealing the repressive measure, so he called for a vote.

The outcome was three votes short of the 60 needed to break the filibuster. Only one Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, voted to end the filibuster. Two Republicans who said they would vote for repeal, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Scott Brown of Massachusetts, voted the other way, as did one Democrat, Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Ms. Murkowski and Mr. Brown stuck with a Republican pledge to support no other measures until the tax-cut deal had been dealt with.

Mr. Reid will undoubtedly be second-guessed on his decision to call for a vote, but given the other-worldly logic of a lame-duck session, it is hard to fault his hard-bitten calculation of the Republicans’ intentions. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said that if debate on the 850-page defense bill did not begin this week, there would be no time to finish it in the remaining few days of the session.

The defense bill would also have raised pay for soldiers, improved their medical care and provided troops in Iraq and Afghanistan with additional equipment and support. It would be the first time in 48 years that Congress did not approve such a bill — all because of an irrational prejudice against gay men and lesbians.

The filibuster on $7.4 billion in medical care and compensation for the workers at ground zero will be harrowing for the tens of thousands who labored tirelessly for weeks and eventually had to seek care under a patchwork of temporary medical and research programs in the city. These police, firefighters and waves of citizen volunteers need ongoing care for illnesses being traced to the toxic fumes, dust and smoke at ground zero.

In the House, Democrats also took a wrongheaded vote to ban transfers of prisoners from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to detention facilities in the United States. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. has urged the Senate to strip the provision from the final bill.

Another measure of overdue justice — the Dream Act, which would empower the innocent children of illegal immigrants with education and public service opportunity — barely survived a Republican filibuster in the Senate after being tabled by proponents hoping to drum up support in coming days. There is little sign of encouragement, however, for that good cause or others as the 111th Congress expires in the grip of Senate Republicans demeaning public service as an exercise of naysaying.

    The Senate Stands for Injustice, NYT, 9.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/opinion/10fri1.html

Gay Couples Begin Attack

on U.S. Marriage Law

November 8, 2010
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Joanne Pedersen tried to add her spouse to her federal health insurance on Monday. She was rejected. Again.

The problem is that while Ms. Pedersen is legally married to Ann Meitzen under Connecticut law, federal law does not recognize same-sex unions. So a health insurance matter that is all but automatic for most married people is not allowed for them under federal law.

Ms. Pedersen and Ms. Meitzen plan to file a lawsuit Tuesday against the government in an effort to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act, a 1996 law that prohibits the federal government from recognizing marriages of same-sex couples.

They are plaintiffs in one of two lawsuits being filed by the legal group Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, a gay rights legal organization based in Boston, and by the American Civil Liberties Union.

A similar challenge by the gay rights legal group resulted in a ruling in July from a federal judge in Boston that the act is unconstitutional. The Obama administration is appealing that decision.

The two new lawsuits, which involve plaintiffs from New York, Connecticut, Vermont and New Hampshire, expand the attack geographically and also encompass more of the 1,138 federal laws and regulations that the Defense of Marriage Act potentially affects — including the insurance costs amounting to several hundred dollars a month in the case of Ms. Pedersen and Ms. Meitzen, and a $350,0000 estate tax payment in the A.C.L.U. case.

The civil liberties union filed suit on behalf of Edith S. Windsor, whose spouse, Thea C. Spyer, died last year of aortic stenosis. The two women, New Yorkers who had been together for 44 years, married in Toronto in 2007. New York officially recognizes same-sex marriages performed in other states. Had the two been man and wife, there would have been no federal estate tax to pay.

“It’s just so unfair,” said Ms. Windsor, who is 81.

Taken together, said Mary Bonauto, the director of the Civil Rights Project for the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, the cases show same-sex couples “are falling through the safety net other people count on.”

Traditionally, Ms. Bonauto noted, the federal government has left the definition of marriage to the states. “The federal government has respected those determinations, except in the instance of gay and lesbian couples marrying,” she said. The result, she said, is a violation of constitutional guarantees of equal protection.

In the Massachusetts case earlier this year, the Justice Department defended the Defense of Marriage law, and is likely to do so again as the two new cases move forward. A spokeswoman for the Department of Justice, Tracy Schmaler, said, “The Justice Department has a longstanding tradition of defending acts of Congress when they are challenged in court.”

The new cases, however, could increase the pressure on President Obama to act on his repeated promises to support gay rights. Mr. Obama has called for the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, saying it is discriminatory. But he has also said he supports civil unions but not same-sex marriage. Last month, however, at a meeting with liberal bloggers, he said he had been thinking “a lot” about that position, saying, “Attitudes evolve, including mine.”

Five states and the District of Columbia allow same-sex marriages to be performed, but 31 states have passed laws blocking them. The issue continues to echo politically. Last week, Iowa voters removed three of the Supreme Court justices who had participated in a unanimous decision allowing same-sex marriage.

Maggie Gallagher, the chairwoman of the National Organization for Marriage, a group that opposes same-sex marriage, said court challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act showed that gay rights advocates “continue to push a primarily court-based strategy of, in our view, inventing rights that neither the founders nor the majority of Americans can recognize in our Constitution.”

To Ms. Pedersen, the question is one of justice. She and Ms. Meitzen, who married in 2008, have been together in Connecticut for 12 years. Ms. Meitzen, a social worker, has had health problems, and Ms. Pedersen, a civilian retiree from the Department of Naval Intelligence, tried to enroll her spouse in the federal employee health benefits program — a move that would save them hundreds of dollars a month.

Both women had been married before, to men, and have grown children. The fact that the law values one of their marriages over another is a source of consternation, Ms. Pedersen said.

“If we were heterosexual, we wouldn’t be talking today, because we would have the benefits,” Ms. Pedersen said. “I would just like the federal government to recognize our marriage as just as real as everybody else’s.”

    Gay Couples Begin Attack on U.S. Marriage Law, NYT, 8.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/us/09marriage.html

First Openly Gay Episcopal Bishop to Retire in 2013

November 6, 2010
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Bishop V. Gene Robinson, whose consecration as the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church set off a historic rift in the global Anglican Communion, announced to his New Hampshire diocese on Saturday that he intended to step down.

He plans to retire in January 2013 after nine years as bishop, to give the diocese enough time to elect a new bishop and get the approval of the national church, a process that can take two years.

The news took some by surprise because Bishop Robinson is an energetic 63-year-old, and mandatory retirement age for Episcopal bishops is 72. He has led a relatively stable and healthy diocese, despite predictions by some that his election would undermine the Episcopal Church in New Hampshire.

The reason to depart, he said in a speech delivered at the close of the annual convention of his diocese, is that being at the center of an international uproar has taken a toll on him and on the diocese.

“Death threats, and the now worldwide controversy surrounding your election of me as bishop, have been a constant strain, not just on me, but on my beloved husband, Mark” and on Episcopalians in the state, he said.

But those who know Bishop Robinson say he has no intention of retiring from public life. His status as a symbol in the international gay rights movement means that after he steps down, he will have no shortage of platforms from which to preach his message that God blesses gay relationships too. (Through a spokesman, he declined interview requests.)

Bishop Robinson has become a national figure. In 2009, he gave the invocation for the opening event of the inauguration of President Obama. He also sees himself as an evangelist to people alienated from Christianity.

The election of Bishop Robinson in a church in Concord, N. H., in 2003 was the shot heard round the Christian world. It cracked open a longstanding divide between theological liberals and conservatives in both the Episcopal Church and its parent body, the Anglican Communion — those churches affiliated with the Church of England in more than 160 countries.

Since 2003, the Communion’s leaders have labored to save it from outright schism, not just over homosexuality, but also over female bishops and priests.

The current strategy, pushed by the archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, is for each regional province to sign a “covenant” of common beliefs.

The covenant has been slowly making its way through laborious writing and approval processes, which could take years.

Late last month, an international coalition of liberal Anglicans started a campaign to reject the covenant, saying, “The covenant seeks to narrow the range of acceptable belief within Anglicanism.”

The group, Anglicans for Comprehensive Unity, said, “Rather than bringing peace to the Communion, we predict that the covenant text itself could become the cause of future bickering and that its centralized dispute-resolution mechanisms could beget interminable quarrels and resentments.”

The church in New Hampshire suffered less fallout under Bishop Robinson than the Episcopal Church or the Anglican Communion. Only one New Hampshire congregation departed during his tenure, a congregation long unhappy with the direction of the Episcopal Church, according to diocesan leaders.

The number of active members in New Hampshire fell 3 percent, from 15,259 in 2003 to 14,787 in 2009. In that period, the Episcopal Church, like most mainline Protestant denominations, lost about 10 percent of its members. (It had about two million in 2008, the last year for which statistics are available.)

Bishop Robinson won critics over with a leadership style that was decisive but collaborative, said Margaret Porter, moderator of the diocesan council.

“The people who were skeptics, that did not last,” she said. “He was willing to meet them where they were. There were churches that were reluctant to have him visit as bishop for a time, and I think he now visits every congregation and is welcomed.”

But the pressure on Bishop Robinson became apparent in 2006. He took a monthlong leave to be treated for alcoholism. He said Saturday that he was in his fifth year of sobriety.

He and his partner of more than 20 years had a civil union ceremony in New Hampshire in 2008.

Bishop Robinson is no longer the only openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church. Bishop Mary D. Glasspool was consecrated in Los Angeles earlier this year.

In his resignation speech in New Hampshire, Bishop Robinson said: “This is the one place on earth where I am not ‘the gay bishop.’ I believe that you elected me because you believed me to be the right person to lead you at this time. The world has sometimes questioned that, but I hope you never did.”

    First Openly Gay Episcopal Bishop to Retire in 2013, NYT, 6.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/us/07bishop.html

In School Efforts to End Bullying, Some See Agenda

November 6, 2010
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM

HELENA, Mont. — Alarmed by evidence that gay and lesbian students are common victims of schoolyard bullies, many school districts are bolstering their antiharassment rules with early lessons in tolerance, explaining that some children have “two moms” or will grow up to love members of the same sex.

But such efforts to teach acceptance of homosexuality, which have gained urgency after several well-publicized suicides by gay teenagers, are provoking new culture wars in some communities.

Many educators and rights advocates say that official prohibitions of slurs and taunts are most effective when combined with frank discussions, from kindergarten on, about diverse families and sexuality.

Angry parents and religious critics, while agreeing that schoolyard harassment should be stopped, charge that liberals and gay rights groups are using the antibullying banner to pursue a hidden “homosexual agenda,” implicitly endorsing, for example, same-sex marriage.

Last summer, school officials here in Montana’s capital unveiled new guidelines for teaching about sexuality and tolerance. They proposed teaching first graders that “human beings can love people of the same gender,” and fifth graders that sexual intercourse can involve “vaginal, oral or anal penetration.”

A local pastor, Rick DeMato, carried his shock straight to the pulpit.

“We do not want the minds of our children to be polluted with the things of a carnal-minded society,” Mr. DeMato, 69, told his flock at Liberty Baptist Church.

In tense community hearings, some parents made familiar arguments that innocent youngsters were not ready for explicit language. Other parents and pastors, along with leaders of the Big Sky Tea Party, saw a darker purpose.

“Anyone who reads this document can see that it promotes acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle,” one mother said at a six-hour school board meeting in late September.

Barely heard was the plea of Harlan Reidmohr, 18, who graduated last spring and said he was relentlessly tormented and slammed against lockers after coming out during his freshman year. Through his years in the Helena schools, he said at another school board meeting, sexual orientation was never once discussed in the classroom, and “I believe this led to a lot of the sexual harassment I faced.”

Last month, the federal Department of Education told schools they were obligated, under civil rights laws, to try to prevent harassment, including that based on sexual orientation and gender identity. But the agency did not address the controversy over more explicit classroom materials in grade schools.

Some districts, especially in larger cities, have adopted tolerance lessons with minimal dissent. But in suburban districts in California, Illinois and Minnesota, as well as here in Helena, the programs have unleashed fierce opposition.

“Of course we’re all against bullying,” Mr. DeMato, one of numerous pastors who opposed the plan, said in an interview. “But the Bible says very clearly that homosexuality is wrong, and Christians don’t want the schools to teach subjects that are repulsive to their values.”

The divided Helena school board, after four months of turmoil, recently adopted a revised plan for teaching about health, sex and diversity. Much of the explicit language about sexuality and gay families was removed or replaced with vague phrases, like a call for young children to “understand that family structures differ.” The superintendent who has ardently pushed the new curriculum, Bruce K. Messinger, agreed to let parents remove their children from lessons they find objectionable.

In Alameda, Calif., officials started to introduce new tolerance lessons after teachers noticed grade-schoolers using gay slurs and teasing children with gay or lesbian parents. A group of parents went to court seeking the right to remove their children from lessons that included reading “And Tango Makes Three,” a book in which two male penguins bond and raise a child.

The parents lost the suit, and the school superintendent, Kirsten Vital, said the district was not giving ground. “Everyone in our community needs to feel safe and visible and included,” Ms. Vital said.

Some of the Alameda parents have taken their children out of public schools, while others now hope to unseat members of the school board.

After at least two suicides by gay students last year, a Minnesota school district recently clarified its antibullying rules to explicitly protect gay and lesbian students along with other target groups. But to placate religious conservatives, the district, Anoka-Hennepin County, also stated that teachers must be absolutely neutral on questions of sexual orientation and refrain from endorsing gay parenting.

Rights advocates worry that teachers will avoid any discussion of gay-related topics, missing a chance to fight prejudice.

While nearly all states require schools to have rules against harassment, only 10 require them to explicitly outlaw bullying related to sexual orientation. Rights groups including the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, based in New York, are promoting a federal “safe schools” act to make this a universal requirement, although passage is not likely any time soon.

Candi Cushman, an educational analyst with Focus on the Family, a Christian group, said that early lessons about sexuality and gay parents reflected a political agenda, including legitimizing same-sex marriage. “We need to protect all children from bullying,” Ms. Cushman said. “But the advocacy groups are promoting homosexual lessons in the name of antibullying.”

Ellen Kahn of the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, which offers a “welcoming schools” curriculum for grade schools, denied such motives.

“When you talk about two moms or two dads, the idea is to validate the families, not to push a debate about gay marriage,” Ms. Kahn said. The program involves what she described as age-appropriate materials on family and sexual diversity and is used in dozens of districts, though it has sometime stirred dissent.

The Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, which runs teacher-training programs and recommends videos and books depicting gay parents in a positive light, has met opposition in several districts, including the Chicago suburb of Oak Park.

Julie Justicz, a 47-year-old lawyer, and her partner live in Oak Park with two sons ages 6 and 11. Ms. Justicz saw the need for early tolerance training, she said, when their older son was upset by pejorative terms about gays in the schoolyard.

Frank classroom discussions about diverse families and hurtful phrases had greatly reduced the problem, she said.

But one of the objecting parents, Tammi Shulz, who describes herself as a traditional Christian, said, “I just don’t think it’s great to talk about homosexuality with 5-year-olds.”

Tess Dufrechou, president of Helena High School’s Gay-Straight Alliance, a club that promotes tolerance, counters that, “By the time kids get to high school, it’s too late.”

Only a handful of students in Helena high schools are openly gay, with others keeping the secret because they fear the reactions of parents and peers, students said.

Michael Gengler, one of the few to have come out, said, “You learn from an early age that it’s not acceptable to be gay,” adding that he was disappointed that the teaching guidelines had been watered down.

But Mr. Messinger, the superintendent, said he still hoped to achieve the original goals without using the explicit language that offended many parents.

“This is not about advocating a lifestyle, but making sure our children understand it and, I hope, accept it,” he said.

    In School Efforts to End Bullying, Some See Agenda, NYT, 6.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/us/07bully.html

When the Tormentors Live Just Outside Your Front Door

October 15, 2010
The New York Times
By SUSAN DOMINUS

William Cruz, a shy homebody who moved to the Bronx in 2006, always kept his private life just that — private, for reasons of self-protection. “I hear the news, about gay people getting stabbed, beat up,” Mr. Cruz, now 47, said. “You never know. It could be things like that that happen to you, you could bump into the wrong person.”

He said those words two days before news broke of a brutal attack in which a 30-year-old gay man, and two 17-year-olds thought to have had sex with him, were tortured by members of a street gang, about two miles from the neighborhood near the Grand Concourse where Mr. Cruz once lived. Mr. Cruz, who survives on disability payments after having been severely injured in a 1981 fire, was never physically attacked while he lived in the Bronx, but he lived in fear of it, because of harassment he experienced in the most vulnerable of all places: his own home. His is a offstage story offering fresh insight into bullying when the target is an adult.

Mr. Cruz’s troubles began, he said, in June 2007. There was a minor dispute with the five-story building’s superintendent, Miguel Nieves, over some work Mr. Cruz requested be done in his one-bedroom apartment, whose $1,031 rent he paid mostly with a Section 8 housing voucher.

Not long after, Mr. Cruz said, Mr. Nieves started using a variety of antigay slurs about him and talking about him to the neighbors, telling one she should watch out lest Mr. Cruz rape her husband. Mr. Cruz’s cousin signed an affidavit saying that he saw the super’s wife drawing a penis and a gay epithet on Mr. Cruz’s mailbox; someone also drew an image of a penis on his door and that same offensive word, along with “bitch,” in permanent marker.

The words, on the threshold of his safe haven, were an assault, there for every child walking up the stairs to see, there to incite any possible homophobic thug with a baseball bat. “I imagine there’s more people out there like himself,” Mr. Cruz said of his old superintendent. “When they find out I’m gay? How will they react?”

When Mr. Cruz had a birthday party for himself, he painstakingly covered up the ugly words with a blue tablecloth and a sparkly “Happy Birthday” sign, so that the relatives who knew his sexual orientation would not feel hurt and the friends who did not know would not wonder. As the months wore on, and the insults escalated, Mr. Cruz’s life — already somewhat circumscribed by a disability in his hands — grew smaller and smaller: He feared leaving the house, worried the threats would graduate from the verbal to the physical.

If last week’s brutal attack represents the worst of what gay men might expect to endure, Mr. Cruz’s experience speaks more to the day-to-day, low-grade humiliations that are par for the course in so many corners of even New York City. And those neighborhoods extend far beyond the Bronx to ones in Manhattan like the East 50s, where Townhouse Management, which owns Mr. Cruz’s building, seemed incapable of putting an end to the harassment. His lawsuit against the company is scheduled to be heard in Bronx Supreme Court on Oct. 27.

“They treated it like a complaint about an overflowing toilet,” said Katie Rosenfeld, a lawyer representing Mr. Cruz. “They could have moved Nieves to another building, they could have installed cameras, they could have had housing-discrimination training.”

Mr. Nieves, who no longer works for Townhouse and could not be located for comment, denied all the accusations in a deposition.

Stuart Jackson, a lawyer representing Townhouse Management, said in an interview that the company sent supervisors to spot-check Mr. Nieves’s performance more often than usual, repeatedly spoke to Mr. Nieves and made some inquiries of the neighbors, but did not find sufficient evidence of his having done anything wrong. Mr. Jackson also said Townhouse, which owns or manages 2,000 apartments citywide, offered to move Mr. Cruz to another building; Mr. Cruz said no such offer was made until he sued.

“But even if it was,” his lawyer said, “William shouldn’t have to move out of the home he chose to feel safe.”

Since the spring of 2008, Mr. Cruz has lived in Brooklyn, and he now is content in a one-bedroom apartment decorated with his elaborate collection of Marilyn Monroe posters and calendars. When news broke of the attack in the Bronx, some sense of that newfound security eroded. He did not want to be photographed in a way that he could be recognized; he did not want to reveal the neighborhood where he now lives.

“This guy is a very sensitive man,” said Mr. Jackson, the landlord’s lawyer.

Can anyone blame him?

    When the Tormentors Live Just Outside Your Front Door, NYT, 15.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/16/nyregion/16BIGCITY.html

Openly Gay in the Bronx, but Constantly on Guard

October 15, 2010
The New York Times
By SAM DOLNICK

Keith Mitchell, a 24-year-old who likes to be called Sparkles, strolled down East Tremont Avenue in the Bronx, discussing what he would wear on a date that night. As he rounded a corner, a stocky man with baggy pants and arms covered in tattoos locked eyes on him.

The news had been filled with details of the vicious antigay attacks two weeks earlier and just two miles to the west, but Mr. Mitchell, breezy as ever, did not notice the stare until the tattooed man called out.

“What’s up, mama?” the man asked with a smile. “How you been?”

In West Farms, the neighborhood where Mr. Mitchell lives, nearly everyone — the bodega cashiers, the basketball players, even the gang members — knows he is gay, and he has rarely felt threatened.

Yet the torture of three men thought to be gay has shaken him, as it has people across the city, and especially in the Bronx, the borough with the city’s highest rates of poverty and some of its most violent crime.

In the toughest neighborhoods, gay residents say, it is possible to live openly much of the time — and then to suddenly pay for it.

“There is a constant threat of violence that we live with,” said Charles Rice-Gonzalez, 46, a writer and gay rights advocate who has been working in the South Bronx for two decades. “I was horrified, disgusted and angered by the attacks. I wouldn’t say I was surprised or shocked.”

In the week since the police announced the first arrests of several gang members in the assaults, Mr. Rice-Gonzalez and Arthur Aviles, co-founders of the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, have begun planning a self-defense class at their theater in Hunts Point. David Matthews, 43, another gay rights advocate who works in the South Bronx, said he was looking over his shoulder with a new vigilance.

And Mr. Mitchell, who said he can be himself in his neighborhood because people there watched him grow up, is taking care when straying beyond its borders. He has been beaten up before, he said, and the recent attacks are never far from his mind. “That could have been me,” he said. “You never know when someone is going to turn on you.”

In many respects, gay people in the lowest-income neighborhoods face the same challenges and threats as other gay New Yorkers.

The Department of Education reported 862 incidents of harassment based on sexual orientation in the 2008-9 school year. More than 40 percent of the 1,700 homeless youths in the Safe Horizon Streetwork Project, a citywide victims’ assistance program, identify themselves as gay or transgender.

But in dozens of interviews this week, gay and lesbian residents said it could be especially difficult to be gay in the Bronx, given the macho culture of the street, the local gang codes and the storefront churches that call homosexuality a sin.

“If I walk around wearing tight jeans and looking non-hood, I feel the tension,” said Ruben Porras, 29, who grew up in Morris Heights, where the attacks occurred. “If I’m walking by some Bloods, I’ll walk tougher.

“But if I’m in Chelsea,” he said with a laugh, “I’ll act very differently.”

If the Bronx has no Chelsea, a Manhattan neighborhood that wears its gay identity proudly, it does have its public gay life. Some bars sponsor gay nights — Tuesdays at Mi Gente Café on Unionport Road are popular — but the scene is scattered, without the security that an enclave like Chelsea or the West Village provides.

“It’s loose and it’s not centralized, but there is a gay community in the Bronx,” said Mr. Rice-Gonzalez, whose theater acts as something of a clearinghouse for gay culture in the borough.

When Mr. Rice-Gonzalez was growing up in the Soundview neighborhood in the 1970s and ’80s, there were few gay organizations, making for “a very clear sense of isolation,” he said.

“There wasn’t a queer voice in the Bronx,” Mr. Rice-Gonzalez said. “There was no way for gay men to meet each other unless you ran into someone downtown.”

Today, several groups offer services and counseling to gay people, including the Bronx Community Pride Center, Bronx AIDS Services and the Hispanic AIDS Forum. Harassment and even violence against gays are not uncommon, but the Oct. 3 attacks in Morris Heights have struck a nerve because of their brutality and extent — 11 suspects; 4 victims, including the brother of one of the men who were tortured; and a 20-hour rampage involving cigarette burns, sodomy and beatings with baseball bats.

Mr. Porras, who said he knew some of the men arrested, offered an explanation of the attacks informed by life on those same streets. He said the men, who belonged to the Latin King Goonies, a subset of the Latin Kings, were not overtly hostile to gays. He compared the gang to a father who tolerated gay people — as long as they were not in his family.

“People will embrace it so long as it’s not someone they are claiming as their own,” he said.

The trouble began, the authorities said, after one gang member saw a 30-year-old man, who was suspected of being gay, with a 17-year-old who wanted to join the group. Gang members assumed the men had slept together; they punished them, another teenager and the older man’s brother.

Morris Heights is a tight-knit community where neighbors know one another by nicknames. Old men stand in bodegas discussing the day’s headlines. On a recent afternoon, young men on Burnside Avenue argued about the price a chop shop would pay for a Toyota.

A 29-year-old mother stood outside a bodega, two blocks from the house where the attacks occurred, reading newspaper accounts of the arrests. She said she was horrified by the violence, but she acknowledged that gay people, including a man in her building, made her uncomfortable.

“It’s hard for me to handle,” said the woman, who declined to give her name for fear of gang reprisals. “It’s something that’s not normal in a household.”

Yet her feelings about homosexuality are conflicted, which gay advocates say is not unusual. “I watch a lot of gay porn,” she said. “It’s very intriguing to me. Why are they so interested? What pleasure do they get?”

In neighborhoods where gangs are common, some churches offer a message of tolerance. But several gay residents said a growing number of congregations made them feel attacked from two sides.

“I feel assaulted every weekend because of the hate speech from sidewalk preachers,” Mr. Rice-Gonzalez said. “They say gay people need to repent, they’re going to hell.”

State Senator Rubén Díaz Sr., a Pentecostal minister who represents the South Bronx, is a vocal opponent of gay marriage. Many gay leaders noted that the statement he released condemning the recent attacks made no mention of homosexuality.

In an interview, Mr. Díaz, a Democrat, said: “I don’t support violence against anybody. I would ask for the maximum penalty to anyone that abuses another human being.” But he added, “I’m against gay marriage, and I always will be.”

New York has long been a refuge for gay people. But many have been dismayed by an assault this month on a gay man at the landmark Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, followed by the Bronx attacks and remarks this week by the Republican nominee for governor, Carl P. Paladino, who said gay pride parades were “disgusting.”

“If this is the oasis in our country,” Eliza Byard, executive director of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, said, “it doesn’t feel that great right now.”

    Openly Gay in the Bronx, but Constantly on Guard, NYT, 15.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/16/nyregion/16gays.html

Judge Orders U.S. Military to Stop ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’

October 12, 2010
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the United States military to stop enforcing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law that prohibits openly gay men and women from serving.

Judge Virginia A. Phillips of Federal District Court for the Central District of California issued an injunction banning enforcement of the law and ordered the military to immediately “suspend and discontinue” any investigations or proceedings to dismiss service members.

In language much like that in her Sept. 9 ruling declaring the law unconstitutional, Judge Phillips wrote that the 17-year-old policy “infringes the fundamental rights of United States service members and prospective service members” and violates their rights of due process and freedom of speech.

While the decision is likely to be appealed by the government, the new ruling represents a significant milestone for gay rights in the United States.

Two other recent decisions have overturned restrictions on gay rights at the state and federal levels. Tuesday’s ruling, in Log Cabin Republicans v. United States of America, could have a potentially sweeping impact, as it would apply to all United States service members anywhere in the world.

Christian Berle, the acting executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay organization, applauded the judge’s action, saying it would make the armed forces stronger.

“Lifting the ban on open service will allow our armed forces to recruit the best and brightest,” Mr. Berle said, “and not have their hands tied because of an individual’s sexual orientation.”

Alexander Nicholson, the named plaintiff in the lawsuit, said “we sort of won the lottery,” considering the breadth of the decision. Mr. Nicholson is executive director of Servicemembers United, an organization of gay and lesbian troops and veterans.

The government has 60 days to file an appeal. “We’re reviewing it,” said Tracy Schmaler, a Justice Department spokeswoman, adding that there would be no other immediate comment. The government is expected, however, to appeal the injunction to the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to try to keep it from taking effect pending an appeal of the overall case.

Such a move would carry risks, said Richard Socarides, who was an adviser to President Bill Clinton on gay rights issues. “There will be an increasingly high price to pay politically for enforcing a law which 70 percent of the American people oppose and a core Democratic constituency abhors,” he said.

Critics of the ruling include Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council and a proponent of the don’t ask, don’t tell law, who accused Judge Phillips of “playing politics with our national defense.”

In a statement, Mr. Perkins, a former Marine, said that “once again, an activist federal judge is using the military to advance a liberal social agenda,” and noted that there was still “strong opposition” to changing the law from military leaders.

Mr. Perkins predicted that the decision would have wide-ranging effects in the coming elections. “This move will only further the desire of voters to change Congress,” he said. “Americans are upset and want to change Congress and the face of government because of activist judges and arrogant politicians who will not listen to the convictions of most Americans and, as importantly, the Constitution’s limits on what the courts and Congress can and cannot do.”

The don’t ask, don’t tell law was originally proposed as a compromise measure to loosen military policies regarding homosexuality. Departing from a decades-old policy of banning service by gay, lesbian and bisexual recruits, the new law allowed service and prohibited superiors from asking about sexual orientation. But the law also held that service members could be dismissed from the military if they revealed their sexual orientation or engaged in homosexual acts.

Since 1993, some 14,000 gay men and lesbians have been discharged from the service when their sexual orientation became known, according to Mr. Nicholson’s group.

The law has long been a point of contention, and President Obama has asked Congress to repeal it.

At an afternoon briefing on Tuesday, the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said the injunction was under review, but that “the president will continue to work as hard as he can to change the law that he believes is fundamentally unfair.”

The Department of Justice, however, is required to defend laws passed by Congress under most circumstances.

In February, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked Congress to repeal the law.

The House voted to do so in May, but last month the Senate voted not to take up the bill allowing repeal. Advocates for repeal have pushed for that vote to be reconsidered after the midterm elections.

Jim Manley, a spokesman for the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, said, “Senator Reid is encouraged by the decision, and still hopes to be able to take the bill to the floor after the elections in November.”

Mr. Gates was on an official visit to Vietnam when Judge Phillips’s action was announced on Tuesday. “We have just learned of the ruling and are now studying it,” said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary. “We will be in consultation with the Department of Justice about how best to proceed.”

After her initial ruling in September, Judge Phillips, who was appointed by Mr. Clinton, sought recommendations from the parties as to what kind of legal relief should follow.

The Log Cabin Republicans recommended a nationwide injunction. The Department of Justice sought narrower action.

Arguing that “the United States is not a typical defendant, and a court must exercise caution before entering an order that would limit the ability of the government to enforce a law duly enacted by Congress,” the Justice Department noted that the law had been found constitutional in other courts.

It asked that the judge’s injunction apply only to members of Log Cabin Republicans and not to the military over all.

In the other recent cases in which federal judges have pushed back against laws that restrict gay rights, a judge in California struck down that state’s ban on same-sex marriages in August. And in July, a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that a law prohibiting the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages, the Defense of Marriage Act, was unconstitutional, opening the way for federal benefits in such unions.

While Mr. Obama has been critical of the Defense of Marriage Act, the Justice Department has defended it in the federal court challenge. On Tuesday, the department filed an appeal in the case and issued a statement that might well be echoed in coming weeks in the military case.

“As a policy matter, the president has made clear that he believes DOMA is discriminatory and should be repealed,” said Ms. Schmaler, the department spokeswoman. “The Justice Department is defending the statute, as it traditionally does when acts of Congress are challenged.”

Advocates for gay rights said they were cheered by the direction of the three recent rulings.

Chad Griffin, the board president of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which sponsored the litigation against California’s same-sex marriage ban, said that “with the momentum of these three court decisions, I think it really is the beginning of the end of state-sanctioned discrimination in this country.”

    Judge Orders U.S. Military to Stop ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’, NYT, 12.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/us/13military.html

Bronx Attacker’s Ultimatum: Be Hit With a Bat, or a Pipe

October 11, 2010
The New York Times
By SAM DOLNICK and COLIN MOYNIHAN

After he had been punched, kicked and stripped of his clothes and jewelry, the 17-year-old man was given a choice: the bat or the pipe.

His attackers, part of a gang of nine young men, were in the midst of a night of savage assaults against three men they suspected of being gay, according to a criminal complaint released on Sunday.

Before the night was out, the victims would be tortured with burning cigarettes, box cutter blades, plunger handles and more, prosecutors charged. But first, the 17-year-old had to make his selection.

“I guess the bat,” he said.

Idelfonso Mendez, 23, the accused ringleader and chief interrogator, proceeded to beat the teenager with a bat, the authorities say; the beating may have been blunted by the bat’s composition: plastic.

Fresh details of last weekend’s attack against three men emerged Sunday in Bronx Criminal Court during the arraignment of eight men charged with crimes including gang assault, sexual abuse and unlawful imprisonment, all as hate crimes. The police were still searching on Sunday for the ninth suspect, Rudy Vargas-Perez, 22, who was said to have reneged on a promise made through a lawyer to turn himself in.

The men were part of a Morris Heights street gang who called themselves Latin King Goonies.

Prosecutors say the men lured a gay 30-year-old man and two 17-year-olds to an empty apartment in a four-story house on Osborne Place and tortured and beat them, in what city officials have called the worst antigay attack in recent memory.

Six of the men, including Mr. Mendez, were being held without bail, while Judge Harold Adler set bail of $50,000 cash or $100,000 bond for both Steven Carabello and Denis Peitars, both 17 and neither charged in the attack on the 30-year-old man, which was probably the most vicious.

Mr. Peitars will testify before a grand jury, according to his court-appointed lawyer, Fred Bittlingmeyer, who said his client had not participated in the sexual abuse and had been only tangentially involved in the attacks.

“This was not part of some gang scene,” he said in court. He described the night as a group of people who were drinking together until “one individual let it get out of hand.”

“The 17-year-olds, in particular, Judge, were just there,” Mr. Bittlingmeyer said.

Mr. Carabello’s lawyer, Paul Horowitz, said, “It’s very dangerous to paint all of them with a broad brush.”

After the arraignment, the mother of Nelson Falu, 17, another of the accused, maintained her son’s innocence.

“He goes to school,” said the woman, who identified herself only as Caroline. “He’s doing everything good. He has a baby on the way. I raised a good boy. I know my son has nothing to do with this.”

The attacks have stirred outrage across the city. Gay-rights advocates passed out leaflets in the Morris Heights neighborhood calling for tolerance, while elected officials denounced the attack.

“How can one human being be so inhuman to another simply on the basis of who they are?” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg asked from the pulpit of the East Ward Missionary Baptist Church in East Harlem on Sunday.

“What kind of twisted logic spurs a large group of men to show off their toughness by ganging up on helpless individuals? That’s not showing you’re tough, that’s just showing that you’re weak and despicable."

A Bronx assistant district attorney, Theresa Gottlieb, laid out a harrowing narrative describing the attacks as something of a ritualized interrogation, led by Mr. Mendez, followed by a group beating.

The victims were all seated in a chair marked with a red bandanna and attacked with whatever was at hand — a plastic bat, a box cutter, even a shaving cream can.

As the charges were outlined in court on Sunday, the men, dressed in sweatshirts, sneakers and jeans, betrayed little emotion. They all were arrested Thursday and Friday, except for Elmer Confresi, who turned himself in on Saturday.

The first attack took place on Oct. 3, early Sunday morning, after one member of the group saw the 30-year-old man, who he knew was gay, with a 17-year-old who wanted to join the gang.

They brought the teenager to the nondescript brick building that they had used all summer as a party house.

Mr. Falu, according to the criminal complaint, cut the victim in the thigh, foot and back with a box cutter, saying: “You crazy. You lost your mind.”

The complaint offered other specifics: that Mr. Mendez and David Rivera, 21, punched and kicked the victim, while Mr. Mendez asked him if he was gay; that Mr. Rivera hit him in the forehead so hard with can of a shaving cream that it left a bruise that lasted four days.

“If you snitch, your family is gonna get it,” he said, according to the complaint.

Then, it said, Mr. Mendez inserted a wooden stick into the victim’s rectum, and asked, “Do you like this?”

Later , while the victim who was beaten with a bat was still in the house, the men lured the 30-year-old to the house with the promise of a party.

“You like to have sex with the young ones,” Mr. Mendez said to the man, the complaint stated, adding that Mr. Rivera blindfolded him and chained his hands behind his back. He was punched, burned with cigarettes and sodomized with a wooden object, prosecutors said.

The men took the man’s keys and went to his home, where the authorities said they tied up his brother and stole three cellular phones, $1,000 in cash and a 52-inch television.

The other defendants are Bryan Almonte, 17, and Brian Cepeda, 17. The next court hearing is set for Thursday.


Elizabeth A. Harris and Nate Schweber contributed reporting.

    Bronx Attacker’s Ultimatum: Be Hit With a Bat, or a Pipe, NYT, 11.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/nyregion/11bias.html

Two Worlds Collide in a Gritty Bronx Neighborhood

October 9, 2010
The New York Times
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN and SAM DOLNICK

The most severely brutalized victim was a gay 30-year-old Hispanic immigrant known in his Bronx neighborhood as “la Reina,” Spanish for “the Queen.” He was playful, flirty and always ready for a party, neighbors said. At the bodega below the apartment he shared with his brother, he often bought sodas for teenagers.

The ringleader of the street crew was known on his block as a stocky 23-year-old thug with tattoos all over his arms and a pit bull at his side, a marijuana dealer who would hang out on a fire escape and would put teenagers to work selling drugs. He had previous arrests for gun possession and robbery and, as a neighbor put it, “looked like trouble.”

“He acted like he was a big shot,” said the neighbor, Michael Perez, 20, of the ringleader, Idelfonso Mendez, 23. “It was just a matter of time.”

Their lives intersected last weekend in what city officials described on Saturday as the worst antigay attack in recent memory. It happened in an abandoned building in the Morris Heights section that neighbors said had been virtually taken over in recent months by youths who used it for wild parties and sex.

The authorities say nine young men who called themselves the Latin King Goonies lured the gay man to the building with the promise of a party and tortured him and the two 17-year-olds they suspected of having sex with him, subjecting them to beatings that went on for hours, gruesome sexual attacks with a small baseball bat and the wooden handle of a toilet plunger, and cigarette burns on the genitals of the older man.

The attacks unfolded inside 1910 Osborne Place, a four-story brick building with a lime-green door on a third-floor porch. The building is across the street from an elementary school on a quiet block in Morris Heights, a largely Hispanic neighborhood. But neighbors said that, lately, it had become a magnet for trouble, with music blasting in the small hours of the morning, young men and boys drinking on the stoop, and, on several occasions, police officers breaking up the crowds but making no arrests.

Officials said Saturday that the building’s owner had paid fines on two Buildings Department violations — one for doing work without a permit, another for having too many tenants — since 2005. Both had followed complaints to the city’s 311 line.

A makeshift tribute appeared on the steps Saturday: pink roses with a card calling for “Prayers for healing — for our community.” Gov. David A. Paterson, five members of the City Council, and a coterie of other politicians and ministers marched down a block to show solidarity with the victims.

The 30-year-old gay man and his 40-year-old brother, who neighbors said were from Ecuador, lived two blocks away, in a fifth-floor apartment at the corner of Loring Place South and West Burnside Avenue. During the attacks, investigators said, some members of the group went to the apartment, beat the older brother and stole $1,000, debit cards and a 52-inch television set.

On Saturday, the brothers’ neighbors gave a harrowing account of having heard banging at their door early Monday, and opening it to find the older brother, his face and head covered with blue and white masking tape, his hands tied behind him with white string. Behind the gag, they said, they heard him cry, “Ayúdame!” (“Help me!”). They took him in, cut the bindings and called the police, spawning a weeklong investigation that led to the arrest of seven of the gang members late Thursday and early Friday.

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said Saturday that those suspects had “made statements implicating themselves in this crime.” An eighth suspect, Elmer Confresi, 23, turned himself in on Saturday, while the ninth, Rudy Vargas-Perez, 22, reneged on a promise made through a lawyer to turn himself and remained at large, Mr. Kelly said.

Besides Mr. Mendez and Mr. Confresi, the suspects are David Rivera, 21, who had prior arrests for weapons possession and robbery; Bryan Almonte, 17; Steven Caraballo, 17; Elin Brayon Cepeda, 16; Nelson Falu, 17; and Denis Peitars, 17, all of the Bronx. They were still awaiting arraignment on Saturday night; officials said that the charges included kidnapping and sodomy, and that all would be charged as adults and with hate crimes.

“Like many New Yorkers, I was sickened by these antigay crimes,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said Saturday afternoon. “The heartless men who committed these crimes should know that New Yorkers will not tolerate them.”

Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, who is gay, added: “These crimes are not jokes. They are not games. They are things that eat away at the fabric of our city.”

Mr. Mendez, who the police said was the ringleader and was known by the street name “Cheto,” lived several miles away from the crime scene, in Bedford Park. Neighbors on his block, marred by graffiti and the scene of open drug markets, said that he had a crew of younger friends who were often with him but that he spent most of his time elsewhere. “He tried to look gangster,” Mr. Perez said. “He walked around like he was one of the neighborhood thugs.”

Several other suspects lived in the blocks surrounding Osborne Place, near the man known as “la Reina,” who worked at an optometrist’s store in the Parkchester section. Every day, he stopped by El Tio grocery, the bodega on the ground floor of his building, for juices, sandwiches and small talk, according to the manager, Xavier Peña. “He was a good friend,” Mr. Peña said. “He’s a very, very nice guy. He called me Papi, Papi.”

Many in the neighborhood used female pronouns to refer to the man, though they said he dressed in men’s clothes. “She’s gay, she’s like a woman, we think of her like a woman,” explained one neighbor, speaking on the condition that he not be named for fear of reprisals.

“She’s a very good person,” he added. “If you were ever hungry or thirsty, you could go to Reina, and she would help you.”

The police said the violence began about 3:30 a.m. Sunday, when, investigators said, the 17-year-old gang recruit was taken to the Osborne Place building, beaten, stripped, slashed with a box cutter and sodomized with a plunger handle after admitting that he had had a sexual encounter with the 30-year-old.

On Sunday night, the police said, gang members abducted a second 17-year-old, who was robbed of jewelry and beaten after telling them of having also had a liaison with the 30-year-old. The older man, told to bring 10 tall cans of a malt liquor called Four Loko to Osborne Place for a party, was then stripped, tied up, beaten, made to drink all 10 cans of the liquor, burned and sodomized with a small baseball bat, the police said.

Relatives of some of the suspects expressed shock at the charges on Saturday, describing them as young men who went to school and steered clear of trouble.

Carmen Almonte, 54, Bryan’s stepmother, said Bryan’s father had died three months ago, and that Bryan was admitted on Friday night to Montefiore Medical Center after going into diabetic shock during his arrest. “Bryan is not a bad kid,” she said. “If he was there, he didn’t do anything.”

Steven Caraballo’s parents said that he had enrolled in a G.E.D. program, lifted weights and played basketball with his three brothers. “He told me nothing is going on in the streets,” said his father, Jose. “He’s in school. He never got involved in this kind of thing.”

Genesis Suarez, who is 15, pregnant and referred to herself as Steven Caraballo’s wife, said Bryan Almonte was her sister’s boyfriend. “If you bother him he gets mad, like everybody,” she said of Bryan. “But he’s a good guy.”

Ada Cepeda said her son, Elin, had joined her from Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, three years ago; attended classes at Bronx International High School; and recently had expressed interest in becoming a police officer. He was in his room playing video games when the police arrested him on Thursday.

“I’m a realist,” Ms. Cepeda, 52, said. “It’s not that my son is a saint. But I doubt he would do that.”


Reporting was contributed by Al Baker, Jack Begg, Elizabeth A. Harris, Colin Moynihan, Joel Stonington and Karen Zraick.

        Two Worlds Collide in a Gritty Bronx Neighborhood, NYT, 9.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/nyregion/10bias.html

Lured Into a Trap, Then Tortured for Being Gay

October 8, 2010
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WILSON and AL BAKER

He was told there was a party at a brick house on Osborne Place, a quiet block set on a steep hill in the Bronx. He showed up last Sunday night as instructed, with plenty of cans of malt liquor. What he walked into was not a party at all, but a night of torture — he was sodomized, burned and whipped.

All punishment, the police said Friday, for being gay.

There were nine attackers, ranging from 16 to 23 years old and calling themselves the Latin King Goonies, the police said. Before setting upon their 30-year-old victim, they had snatched up two teenage boys whom they beat, the police said — until the boys — one of whom was sodomized with a plunger — admitted to having had sex with the man.

The attackers forced the man to strip to his underwear and tied him to a chair, the police said. One of the teenage victims was still there, and the “Goonies” ordered him to attack the man. The teenager hit him in the face and burned him with a cigarette on his nipple and penis as the others jeered and shouted gay slurs, the police said. Then the attackers whipped the man with a chain and sodomized him with a small baseball bat.

The beatings and robberies went on for hours. They were followed by a remarkably thorough attempt to sanitize the house — including pouring bleach down drains, the police said, as little by little word of the attacks trickled to the police. A crucial clue to the attackers was provided by someone who slipped a note to a police officer outside the crime scene, at 1910 Osborne Place in Morris Heights, near Bronx Community College.

Seven suspects were arrested on Thursday and Friday, and two were still being sought in a crime that the leader of the City Council called among the worst hate crimes she had ever heard of. “It makes you sick,” said the Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, the city’s highest ranking openly gay official.

The charges included abduction, unlawful imprisonment and sodomy, all as hate crimes.

“These suspects deployed terrible, wolf-pack odds of nine against one, which revealed them as predators whose crimes were as cowardly as they were despicable,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said at a news conference.

The assaults are the latest in a string of recent episodes of bullying and attacks against gays. A Rutgers University student jumped to his death off the George Washington Bridge last month, prosecutors said, after his roommate had secretly set up a webcam in their room and streamed over the Internet his sexual encounter with another man. Two men were accused of robbing and beating a man in the Stonewall Inn, a landmark gay bar in Greenwich Village, last weekend while shouting slurs.

Neighbors on Osborne Place said the house, nondescript but for its door painted a bright lime green, had been vacant for some time. A group of teenagers and young men had moved in as squatters, neighbors said, and hosted loud parties.

“You could smell it from them,” said a neighbor who gave only his last name, Gomez. “From the start, you could tell they were trouble.” Mr. Gomez said he and other neighbors had discussed whether anything could be done about the squatters, but nothing came of it.

The nine suspects — the group seemed not so much part of an established gang as a loose group of friends who adopted a nickname — knew some or all three victims. The idea for the attacks seemed to have been hatched last Saturday, after one member of the group saw the 30-year-old man, who he knew was gay, with a 17-year-old who wanted to join the gang, the police said.

Hours later, at 3:30 a.m. on Sunday, the group grabbed the 17-year-old, took him to the house and slammed him into a wall, the police said.

He was beaten, made to strip naked, slashed with a box cutter, hit on the head with a can of beer and sodomized with the wooden handle of a plunger, the police said. And he was interrogated about the 30-year-old and asked if they had had sex.

The teenager said that they had. The gang members set him loose, warning him to keep quiet or they would hurt his friends and family. The teenager walked into a nearby hospital and said he had been jumped by strangers on the street and robbed.

At 8:30 p.m. on Sunday, the police said, the group members grabbed a second 17-year-old, beating and likewise interrogating him about his contact with the 30-year-old. He, too, said he had had sex with the man. They took his jewelry and held him while the 30-year-old arrived for what he thought was a party, his arms filled with 10 tall cans of Four Loko, a caffeine-infused malt liquor. He had cleaned out a store of its entire stock.

He was immediately set upon and tied up. Then the assailants ordered the second teenager to attack the 30-year-old, and they joined in the beating. The beating lasted hours, the police said. The attackers forced the man to drink all 10 cans of liquor — each about twice the size of a can of beer, with a higher alcohol content, 10 percent to 12 percent, according to Four Loko’s Web site.

While the man was held captive and attacked, five of the Latin King Goonies went to his house, which he shared with his 40-year-old brother. Using a key taken from the 30-year-old to get inside, they found his brother in bed. They pulled a blanket over his head and hit him, demanding money. When he refused, one placed a cellphone to the brother’s ear, and he heard the voice of his younger brother, who said he had been kidnapped and who pleaded, “Give them the money.”

The brother complied. The men took $1,000 in cash, two debit cards and a 52-inch television.

The brother managed to free himself about three hours later, and he called the police, leaving out the fact that his brother was being held. By then it was Monday morning. Detectives went to the brothers’ home and, upon leaving, saw the 30-year-old, passed out on the landing from the alcohol he had consumed. But having no reason to believe he had been a victim of a crime, they did not question him.

Detectives returned later that day, suspicious of how the robbers had entered the brothers’ home without using force, and the 30-year-old told them he had been picked up in a van by strangers and forced to give them his keys and address, the police said.

Officers still had no idea about the first teen who had visited the hospital, because he had not called the police, and hospitals are not required to inform the authorities about assaults, the police said. The man had said he was robbed near 1910 Osborne, and police officers tried to obtain a search warrant for the house but were told they did not have enough cause, the police said.

Late on Tuesday the second teenager walked into a Bronx police station house and gave a version of what had happened, the police said. None of the three victims, in their first interviews with the police, were fully forthcoming, fearing reprisal and wanting to keep their lives a secret. But the second teenager gave an address, and a second request for a search warrant was granted.

On Wednesday morning, officers entered 1910 Osborne Place and found a surprising sight: an immaculate house, with fresh coats of paint and the smell of bleach hanging thick in the air. One detective called the house “the cleanest crime scene I’ve ever seen,” Mr. Kelly said.

“Lots of bleach and paint were used to cover the blood shed by their tortured prey,” he said. “They even poured bleach down the drains.”

Rugs and linoleum had been ripped out. Detectives were able to scrape evidence, including pubic hair and empty liquor cans, from the house, but not much was found, Mr. Kelly said.

The break in the case came later Wednesday when someone in a crowd of onlookers outside the house quietly slipped an officer his phone number and, when a detective called, gave the name of the man believed to be the ringleader of the group of nine: Ildefonzo Mendez, 23. Officers later learned the name of the first victim from the other teenager.

By Wednesday night, all three victims had given full accounts of the attacks, and for the next 36 hours, officers with the Hate Crimes Task Force, the Gang Division and Special Victims squad worked up a list of nine suspects.

Arrests began Thursday.

The other suspects under arrest were identified as David Rivera, 21; Nelson Falu, 17; Steven Carballo, 17; Denis Peitars, 17; Bryan Almonte, 17; and Brian Cepeda, 16. They were being held by the police in the Bronx on Friday night, with no arraignment scheduled. Still being sought, the police said, are Elmer Confessor, 23, and Ruddy Vargas-Perez, 22.

One suspect confessed, a law enforcement official said, others have not given statements.

One suspect was taken to the hospital unconscious Friday night, with an undisclosed medical problem.


Sam Dolnick and Elizabeth A. Harris contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 9, 2010


An earlier version of this article misstated the age of Nelson Falu.

    Lured Into a Trap, Then Tortured for Being Gay, NYT, 9.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/09/nyregion/09bias.html

Suicides Put Light on Pressures of Gay Teenagers

October 3, 2010
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY

FRESNO, Calif. — When Seth Walsh was in the sixth grade, he turned to his mother one day and told her he had something to say.

“I was folding clothes, and he said, ‘Mom, I’m gay,’ ” said Wendy Walsh, a hairstylist and single mother of four. “I said, ‘O.K., sweetheart, I love you no matter what.’ ”

But last month, Seth went into the backyard of his home in the desert town of Tehachapi, Calif., and hanged himself, apparently unable to bear a relentless barrage of taunting, bullying and other abuse at the hands of his peers. After a little more than a week on life support, he died last Tuesday. He was 13.

The case of Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers University freshman who jumped off the George Washington Bridge after a sexual encounter with another man was broadcast online, has shocked many. But his death is just one of several suicides in recent weeks by young gay teenagers who had been harassed by classmates, both in person and online.

The list includes Billy Lucas, a 15-year-old from Greensburg, Ind., who hanged himself on Sept. 9 after what classmates reportedly called a constant stream of invective against him at school.

Less than two weeks later, Asher Brown, a 13-year-old from the Houston suburbs, shot himself after coming out. He, too, had reported being taunted at his middle school, according to The Houston Chronicle. His family has blamed school officials as failing to take action after they complained, something the school district has denied.

The deaths have set off an impassioned — and sometimes angry — response from gay activists and caught the attention of federal officials, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who on Friday called the suicides “unnecessary tragedies” brought on by “the trauma of being bullied.”

“This is a moment where every one of us — parents, teachers, students, elected officials and all people of conscience — needs to stand up and speak out against intolerance in all its forms,” Mr. Duncan said.

And while suicide by gay teenagers has long been a troubling trend, experts say the stress can be even worse in rural places, where a lack of gay support services — or even openly gay people — can cause a sense of isolation to become unbearable.

“If you’re in the small community, the pressure is hard enough,” said Eliza Byard, executive director of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, which is based in New York. “And goodness knows people get enough signals about ‘how wrong it is to be gay’ without anyone in those communities actually having to say so.”

According to a recent survey conducted by Ms. Byard’s group, nearly 9 of 10 gay, lesbian, transgender or bisexual middle and high school students suffered physical or verbal harassment in 2009, ranging from taunts to outright beatings.

In Mr. Clementi’s case, prosecutors in New Jersey have charged two fellow Rutgers freshmen with invasion of privacy and are looking at the death as a possible hate crime. Prosecutors in Cypress, Tex., where Asher Brown died, said Friday that they would investigate what led to his suicide.

In a pair of blog postings last week, Dan Savage, a sex columnist based in Seattle, assigns the blame to negligent teachers and school administrators, bullying classmates and “hate groups that warp some young minds and torment others.”

“There are accomplices out there,” he wrote Saturday.

In an interview, Mr. Savage, who is gay, said he was particularly irate at religious leaders who used “antigay rhetoric.”

“The problem is that kids are being exposed to this rhetoric, and then they go to the school and there’s this gay kid,” he said. “And how are they going to treat this gay kid who they’ve been told is trying to destroy their family? They’re going to abuse him.”

In late September, Mr. Savage began a project on YouTube called “It Gets Better,” featuring gay adults talking about their experiences with harassment as adolescents.

In one video, a gay man named Cyrus tells of his life as a closeted teenager in a small town in upstate New York.

“The main thing I wanted to come across from this video is how different my life is, how great my life is, and how happy I am in general,” he says.

Glennda Testone, the executive director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in New York City, said their youth programs serve about 50 young people a day, often suffering from “bullying, harassment or even violence.”

“The three main groups of pivotal figures are family, friends and their schoolmates,” she said. “And if they’re feeling isolated and like they can’t tell those people, it’s going to be a very rough ride.”

Here in Fresno, in California’s conservative Central Valley, groups like Equality California have been more active in trying to establish outreach offices, particularly after an election defeat in 2008, when California voters approved Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage.

In Tehachapi, in Kern County south of here, more than 500 mourners attended a memorial on Friday for Seth Walsh. One of those, Jamie Elaine Phillips, a classmate and friend, said Seth had long known he was gay and had been teased for years.

“But this year it got much worse,” Jamie said. “People would say, ‘You should kill yourself,’ ‘You should go away,’ ‘You’re gay, who cares about you?’ ”

Richard L. Swanson, superintendent of the local school district, said his staff had conducted quarterly assemblies on behavior, taught tolerance in the classroom and had “definite discipline procedures that respond to bullying.”

“But these things didn’t prevent Seth’s tragedy,” he said in an e-mail. “Maybe they couldn’t have.”

For her part, Ms. Walsh said she had complained about Seth’s being picked on but did not want to cast blame, though she hoped his death would teach people “not to discriminate, not be prejudiced.”

“I truly hope,” she said, “that people understand that.”


Ian Lovett contributed reporting from Tehachapi, Calif.

    Suicides Put Light on Pressures of Gay Teenagers, NYT, 3.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/us/04suicide.html

Florida Court Calls Ban on Gay Adoptions Unlawful

September 22, 2010
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

A 30-year-old Florida law that prohibits adoption by gay men and lesbians is unconstitutional, a state appeals court ruled on Wednesday, and the state’s governor said the law would not be enforced pending a decision on whether to appeal.

The decision by Florida’s Third District Court of Appeal said that Florida’s adoption law, which bans adoption by gay men and lesbians while allowing them to be foster parents, had “no rational basis” and thus violated the equal protection clause in the State Constitution. Judge Gerald B. Cope Jr. wrote the opinion, which affirmed a 2008 decision from a lower court.

At a news conference on Wednesday afternoon, Gov. Charlie Crist applauded the decision, saying: “It’s a very good day for Florida; it’s a great day for children. Children deserve a loving home to be in.”

Because the decision applies statewide, he said, “We are going to immediately stop enforcing the ban.”

The state, however, has 30 days to appeal. The governor said that he had spoken with the secretary of Florida’s Department of Children and Families, but did not say whether there would be an appeal.

A spokeswoman for Bill McCollum, the state attorney general, who has voiced support of the adoption ban, said his office was representing the department in the case, “and will be in discussions with our client as to whether or not they plan to appeal.”

A spokesman for the department said, “The primary consideration on whether to appeal is finding the balance between the value of a final ruling from the Florida Supreme Court versus the impact on the Gill family.”

Judge Cope wrote that “our ruling is unlikely to be the last word.”

The case involved the efforts of Martin Gill, a gay man, to adopt two brothers he took in more than five years ago as foster children when one was 4 years old and the other 4 months old. They had ringworm at the time, and the younger child had an untreated ear infection. The older boy did not speak for the first month with Mr. Gill and his partner.

“When they came in the door, we were kind of shocked at what bad condition we were in,” Mr. Gill said Wednesday in an interview. “We realized we had our work cut out for us.”

He added, “I would say today they are two happy, healthy, normal kids.”

In a concurring opinion, Judge Vance E. Salter wrote that the steps taken to heal and raise the boys “are nothing short of heroic.”

Evidence presented at the trial by opponents of the ban found no difference in the well-being of children raised by gay parents versus heterosexual parents.

Judge Cope wrote that at the trial, the state presented only two expert witnesses, one of whom undercut the state’s case by disagreeing with the idea of a blanket ban on gay adoption, stating instead that adoptions should be considered case by case. The other expert called by the state, Dr. George A. Rekers, was criticized by opposing experts as having provided research that was rife with “errors in scientific methodology and reporting” and that “did not meet established standards in the field.”

The court did not comment on the fact that Dr. Rekers, who was paid $120,000 for his work in the case, has since been enmeshed in a scandal after he was discovered to have taken a 10-day trip to Europe with a young man who advertised sexual services on a site for gay escorts.

According to the lower court decision cited in the opinion on Wednesday, “Florida is the only remaining state to expressly ban all gay adoptions without exception.”

Howard Simon, the executive director of the A.C.L.U. of Florida, which represented the Gill family, hailed the decision on Wednesday as a blow against discrimination that means all potential adoptive parents “will be judged on their individual fitness to provide a loving, stable, permanent adoptive home.”

That means, he said, that “some gays will be disqualified, and some heterosexuals will be disqualified,” but that “nobody is going to be categorically excluded because of who they are.”

Conservative organizations attacked the decision. Mathew D. Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel and dean of the Liberty University School of Law, said in a statement, “Common sense and human history underscore the fact that children need a mother and a father.”

Mr. Gill said that during the long trial process he had been careful to shield the boys from news that might make them fear further disruption in their lives, including threats about being removed from their home.

“I try to keep it all positive, and try to insulate them from the negative,” Mr. Gill said. But, he added, “I’m certainly going to tell them we have a victory today.”

    Florida Court Calls Ban on Gay Adoptions Unlawful, NYT, 22.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/us/23adopt.html

Military Equality Goes Astray

September 21, 2010
The New York Times

The best chance this year to repeal the irrational ban on openly gay members of the military slipped away Tuesday, thanks to the buildup of acrimony and mistrust in the United States Senate.

Republicans, with the aid of two Arkansas Democrats, unanimously voted to filibuster the Pentagon’s financing authorization bill, largely because Democrats had included in it a provision to end the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

Another vote to end the policy could come again in the lame-duck session in December, but now there is also a chance it will be put off until next year, when the political landscape on Capitol Hill could be even more hostile to gay and lesbian soldiers.

The decision also means an end, for now, to another worthy proposal that was attached to the Pentagon bill: the Dream Act, which permits military service and higher education — as well as a chance for citizenship — for young people whose parents brought them to this country as children without proper documentation.

Republicans said the inclusion of both items in the defense bill was a blatant political attempt by Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, to bolster his chances for re-election by invigorating the party’s base. This is, in fact, an election year, but the debate over the military’s discrimination policy has gone on for years, and the looming balloting does not absolve Congress of the duty to address this denial of a fundamental American right.

No evidence has been found that open service by gay and lesbian soldiers would harm the military; in fact, a federal judge recently found the opposite. The policy has led to critical troop shortages by forcing out more than 13,000 qualified service members over the last 16 years, according to the judge, Virginia Phillips.

A Pentagon study now under way may help guide the implementation of a nondiscrimination policy, but it is unlikely to change the basic facts of the question.

President Obama, the House and a majority of senators clearly support an end to “don’t ask, don’t tell,” but that, of course, is insufficient in the upside-down world of today’s Senate, where 40 members can block anything.

The two parties clashed on the number of amendments that Republicans could offer. Republicans wanted to add dozens of amendments, an obvious delaying tactic, while Democrats tried to block all but their own amendments. In an earlier time, the two sides might have reached an agreement on a limited number of amendments, but not in this Senate, and certainly not right before this election, when everyone’s blood is up even more than usual.

If the military’s unjust policy is not repealed in the lame-duck session, there is another way out. The Obama administration can choose not to appeal Judge Phillips’s ruling that the policy is unconstitutional, and simply stop ejecting soldiers.

But that would simply enable lawmakers who want to shirk their responsibility. History will hold to account every member of Congress who refused to end this blatant injustice.

    Military Equality Goes Astray, NYT, 21.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/opinion/22wed1.html

Judge Rules That Military Policy Violates Rights of Gays

September 9, 2010
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

The “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward gay members of the military is unconstitutional, a federal judge in California ruled Thursday.

Judge Virginia A. Phillips of Federal District Court struck down the rule in an opinion issued late in the day. The policy was signed into law in 1993 as a compromise that would allow gay and lesbian soldiers to serve in the military.

The rule limits the military’s ability to ask about the sexual orientation of service members, and allows homosexuals to serve, as long as they do not disclose their orientation and do not engage in homosexual acts.

The plaintiffs challenged the law under the Fifth and First Amendments to the Constitution, and Judge Phillips agreed.

“The don’t ask, don’t tell act infringes the fundamental rights of United States service members in many ways,” she wrote. “In order to justify the encroachment on these rights, defendants faced the burden at trial of showing the don’t ask, don’t tell act was necessary to significantly further the government’s important interests in military readiness and unit cohesion. Defendants failed to meet that burden.”

The rule, she wrote in an 86-page opinion, has a “direct and deleterious effect” on the armed services.

The plaintiffs argued that the act violated the rights of service members in two ways.

First, they said, it violates their guarantee of substantive due process under the Fifth Amendment. The second restriction, the plaintiffs said, involves the free-speech rights guaranteed under the First Amendment. Although those rights are diminished in the military, the judge wrote, the restrictions in the act still fail the constitutional test of being “reasonably necessary” to protect “a substantial government interest.”

The “sweeping reach” of the speech restrictions under the act, she said, “is far broader than is reasonably necessary to protect the substantial government interest at stake here.”

The decision is among a number of recent rulings that suggest a growing judicial skepticism about measures that discriminate against homosexuals, including rulings against California’s ban on same-sex marriage and a Massachusetts decision striking down a federal law forbidding the federal government to recognize same-sex marriage.

It will not change the policy right away; the judge called for the plaintiffs to submit a proposed injunction limiting the law by Sept. 16th. The defendants will submit their objections to the plan a week after that. Any decision would probably be stayed pending appeals.

The suit was brought by the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay organization. The group’s executive director, R. Clarke Cooper, pronounced himself “delighted” with the ruling, which he called “not just a win for Log Cabin Republican service members but all American service members.”

Those who would have preserved the rule were critical of the decision.

“It is hard to believe that a District Court-level judge in California knows more about what impacts military readiness than the service chiefs who are all on record saying the law on homosexuality in the military should not be changed,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a conservative group. He called Judge Phillips a “judicial activist.”

As a candidate for president, Senator Barack Obama vowed to end “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Once elected, he remained critical of the policy but said it was the role of Congress to change the law; the Justice Department has continued to defend the law in court.

In February, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked Congress to allow gays to serve openly by repealing the law. The House has voted for repeal, but the Senate has not yet acted.

Richard Socarides, a lawyer who served as an adviser to the Clinton administration on gay issues when the policy was passed into law, said the legal action was long overdue. “The president has said he opposes the policy, yet he has defended it in court. Now that he’s lost, and resoundingly so, he must stop enforcing it.”

The case, which was heard in July, involved testimony from six military officers who had been discharged because of the policy. One, Michael Almy, was an Air Force major who was serving his third tour of duty in Iraq when someone using his computer found at least one message to a man discussing homosexual conduct.

Another plaintiff, John Nicholson, was going through training for intelligence work in the Army and tried to conceal his sexual orientation by writing to a friend in Portuguese. A fellow service member who was also fluent in that language, however, read the letter on his desk and rumors spread throughout his unit.

When Mr. Nicholson asked a platoon sergeant to help quash the rumors, the sergeant instead informed his superiors, who initiated discharge proceedings.

    Judge Rules That Military Policy Violates Rights of Gays, NYT, 9.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/us/10gays.html

Seymour Pine Dies at 91; Led Raid on Stonewall Inn

September 7, 2010
The New York Times
By DENNIS HEVESI

Seymour Pine, the deputy police inspector who led the raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, on a hot summer night in 1969 — a moment that helped start the gay liberation movement — died Thursday at an assisted-living center in Whippany, N.J. He was 91.

His death was confirmed by his son Daniel.

Inspector Pine, who later apologized for his role in the raid, was commander of the New York Police Department’s vice squad for Lower Manhattan when he led eight officers into the Stonewall Inn, an illegal club frequented by cross-dressers, just after midnight on June 28, 1969.

Although the ostensible reason for the raid was to crack down on prostitution and other organized-crime activities, it was common at the time for the police to raid gay bars and arrest transvestites and harass customers.

The club, on Christopher Street near Seventh Avenue South, was owned by members of the Mafia. Inspector Pine later said he conducted the raid on orders from superiors.

About 200 people were inside. When the officers ordered them to line up and show identification, some refused. Several transvestites refused to submit to anatomical inspections. Word of the raid filtered into the street, and soon hundreds of protesters gathered outside, shouting “gay power” and calling the police “pigs.”

The turning point came when a lesbian fought with officers as she was pushed into a patrol car. The crowd rushed the officers, who retreated into the club. Several people ripped out a parking meter and used it as a battering ram; others tried to set fire to the club. It took police reinforcements an hour and a half to clear the street.

It was the start of several nights of rioting, during which the police used force to disperse crowds that sometimes numbered in the thousands. Fewer than three dozen protesters were arrested, but hundreds were detained and released.

“The Stonewall uprising is the signal event in American gay and lesbian civil rights history because it transformed a small movement that existed prior to that night into a mass movement,” David Carter, author of “Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution” (2004), said in an interview. “It is to the gay movement what the fall of the Bastille is to the unleashing of the French Revolution.”

In 2004, Inspector Pine spoke during a discussion of the Stonewall uprising at the New-York Historical Society. At the time of the raid, he said, the police “certainly were prejudiced” against gays, “but had no idea about what gay people were about.”

The department regularly raided gay clubs for two reasons, he said. First, he insisted, many clubs were controlled by organized crime; second, arresting gay people was a way for officers to improve their arrest numbers. “They were easy arrests,” he said. “They never gave you any trouble” — at least until that night.

When someone in the audience said Inspector Pine should apologize for the raid, he did.

“There’s been a stereotype that Seymour Pine was a homophobe,” Mr. Carter said. “He had some of the typical hang-ups and preconceived ideas of the time, but I think he was strictly following orders, not personal prejudice against gay people.”

Seymour Pine was born in Manhattan on July 21, 1919, one of four children of Nathan and Anne Pine. Besides his son Daniel, he is survived by another son, Charles; a brother, Arnold; a sister, Connie Katz; and seven grandchildren. His wife of 45 years, the former Judith Handler, died in 1987.

Soon after graduating from Brooklyn College in 1941, he joined the police force, but within months he was serving in the Army, first in Africa and later in Europe. He returned to the department after the war, rising to deputy inspector in the late 1960s. He retired in 1976.

“He once told me,” Mr. Carter said, “ ‘If what I did helped gay people, then I’m glad.’ ”

    Seymour Pine Dies at 91; Led Raid on Stonewall Inn, NYT, 7.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/08/nyregion/08pine.html

Over Time, a Gay Marriage Groundswell

August 21, 2010
The New York Times
By ANDREW GELMAN, JEFFREY LAX and JUSTIN PHILLIPS

Gay marriage is not going away as a highly emotional, contested issue. Proposition 8, the California ballot measure that bans same-sex marriage, has seen to that, as it winds its way through the federal courts.

But perhaps the public has reached a turning point.

A CNN poll this month found that a narrow majority of Americans supported same-sex marriage — the first poll to find majority support. Other poll results did not go that far, but still, on average, showed that support for gay marriage had risen to 45 percent or more (with the rest either opposed or undecided).

That’s a big change from 1996, when Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act. At that time, only 25 percent of Americans said that gay and lesbian couples should have the right to marry, according to an average of national polls.

The more important turning points in public opinion, however, may be occurring at the state level, especially if states continue to control who can get married.

According to our research, as recently as 2004, same-sex marriage did not have majority support in any state. By 2008, three states had crossed the 50 percent line. *

Today, 17 states are over that line (more if you consider the CNN estimate correct that just over 50 percent of the country supports gay marriage).

In 2008, the year Proposition 8 was approved, just under half of Californians supported same-sex marriage,. Today, according to polls, more than half do. A similar shift has occurred in Maine, where same-sex marriage legislation was repealed by ballot measure in 2009.

In both New York and New Jersey, where state legislatures in the past have defeated proposals to allow same-sex marriage, a majority now support it.

And support for same-sex marriage has increased in all states, even in relatively conservative places like Wyoming and Kentucky. Only Utah is still below where national support stood in 1996.

Among the five states that currently allow same-sex marriage, Iowa is the outlier. It is the only one of those states where support falls below half, at 44 percent.

This trend will continue. Nationally, a majority of people under age 30 support same-sex marriage. And this is not because of overwhelming majorities found in more liberal states that skew the national picture: our research shows that a majority of young people in almost every state support it. As new voters come of age, and as their older counterparts exit the voting pool, it’s likely that support will increase, pushing more states over the halfway mark.

* In all of the time periods shown here, a statistical technique has been used to generate state estimates from national polls. Public opinion is estimated in small demographic categories within each state, and then these are averaged using census information to get state-level summaries. Estimates in 2010 are projected from 2008 state-level estimates using an aggregate national estimate of 45 percent (or 50 percent) support for gay marriage.

The authors are professors of political science at Columbia University.

    Over Time, a Gay Marriage Groundswell, NYT, 21.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/weekinreview/22gay.html

Marriage Is a Constitutional Right

August 4, 2010
The New York Times

Until Wednesday, the thousands of same-sex couples who have married did so because a state judge or Legislature allowed them to. The nation’s most fundamental guarantees of freedom, set out in the Constitution, were not part of the equation. That has changed with the historic decision by a federal judge in California, Vaughn Walker, that said his state’s ban on same-sex marriage violated the 14th Amendment’s rights to equal protection and due process of law.

The decision, though an instant landmark in American legal history, is more than that. It also is a stirring and eloquently reasoned denunciation of all forms of irrational discrimination, the latest link in a chain of pathbreaking decisions that permitted interracial marriages and decriminalized gay sex between consenting adults.

As the case heads toward appeals at the circuit level and probably the Supreme Court, Judge Walker’s opinion will provide a firm legal foundation that will be difficult for appellate judges to assail.

The case was brought by two gay couples who said California’s Proposition 8, which passed in 2008 with 52 percent of the vote, discriminated against them by prohibiting same-sex marriage and relegating them to domestic partnerships. The judge easily dismissed the idea that discrimination is permissible if a majority of voters approve it; the referendum’s outcome was “irrelevant,” he said, quoting a 1943 case, because “fundamental rights may not be submitted to a vote.”

He then dismantled, brick by crumbling brick, the weak case made by supporters of Proposition 8 and laid out the facts presented in testimony. The two witnesses called by the supporters (the state having bowed out of the case) had no credibility, he said, and presented no evidence that same-sex marriage harmed society or the institution of marriage.

Same-sex couples are identical to opposite-sex couples in their ability to form successful marital unions and raise children, he said. Though procreation is not a necessary goal of marriage, children of same-sex couples will benefit from the stability provided by marriage, as will the state and society. Domestic partnerships confer a second-class status. The discrimination inherent in that second-class status is harmful to gay men and lesbians. These findings of fact will be highly significant as the case winds its way through years of appeals.

One of Judge Walker’s strongest points was that traditional notions of marriage can no longer be used to justify discrimination, just as gender roles in opposite-sex marriage have changed dramatically over the decades. All marriages are now unions of equals, he wrote, and there is no reason to restrict that equality to straight couples. The exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage “exists as an artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage,” he wrote. “That time has passed.”

To justify the proposition’s inherent discrimination on the basis of sex and sexual orientation, he wrote, there would have to be a compelling state interest in banning same-sex marriage. But no rational basis for discrimination was presented at the two-and-a-half-week trial in January, he said. The real reason for Proposition 8, he wrote, is a moral view “that there is something wrong with same-sex couples,” and that is not a permissible reason for legislation.

“Moral disapproval alone,” he wrote, in words that could someday help change history, “is an improper basis on which to deny rights to gay men and women.”

The ideological odd couple who led the case — Ted Olson and David Boies, who fought against each other in the Supreme Court battle over the 2000 election — were criticized by some supporters of same-sex marriage for moving too quickly to the federal courts. Certainly, there is no guarantee that the current Supreme Court would uphold Judge Walker’s ruling. But there are times when legal opinions help lead public opinions.

Just as they did for racial equality in previous decades, the moment has arrived for the federal courts to bestow full equality to millions of gay men and lesbians.

    Marriage Is a Constitutional Right, NYT, 4.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/opinion/05thu1.html

In Same-Sex Ruling, an Eye on the Supreme Court

August 4, 2010
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

A federal judge’s forceful opinion Wednesday in favor of same-sex marriage is only the beginning of a process that is likely to go all the way to the United States Supreme Court.

The ultimate outcome of the California case cannot be predicted, but appeals court judges and the justices at the highest court in the land could find themselves boxed in by the careful logic and structure of Judge Vaughn R. Walker’s opinion, legal experts said.

In his ruling, Judge Walker found that California’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage irrationally discriminates against gay men and women.

To opponents of same-sex marriage, the ruling was a travesty that usurped the will of millions of California voters. Brian S. Brown, the executive director of the National Organization for Marriage, called it "a horrendous decision" that "launched the first salvo in a major culture war over same-sex marriage and the proper purview of the courts."

But Andrew Koppelman, a professor at Northwestern Law School, said "if the Supreme Court does not want to uphold same-sex marriage, its job has been made harder by this decision."

The reason, he said, is that while appeals courts often overturn lower-court judges on their findings of law -- such as the proper level of scrutiny to apply to Proposition 8 -- findings of fact are traditionally given greater deference.

“They are supposed to take as true facts found by the district court, unless they are clearly erroneous," he said. "This opinion shows why district courts matter, even though the Supreme Court has the last word."

And to that end, Judge Walker’s 136-page opinion lays a rich factual record, with extensive quotation of expert testimony from the lengthy trial. The 2008 initiative campaign to ban same-sex marriages was suffused, the judge said, with moral comparisons of these unions and heterosexual marriage, with the clear implication that "denial of marriage to same-sex couples protects children" and that "the ideal child-rearing environment" requires marriage between a man and a woman.

Judge Walker wrote, however, that the Supreme Court has stated that government cannot enforce moral or religious beliefs without an accompanying secular purpose. The judge suggested that the defendants shifted their arguments for the courtroom, with a focus on "statistically optimal" child-rearing households and by arguing that they were abiding by the will of California voters.

California’s law, he wrote, demanded discrimination on the basis of sex and sexual orientation. "Proposition 8 places the force of law behind stigmas against gays and lesbians," he wrote, including the notion that "gays and lesbians are not as good as heterosexuals" and "gay and lesbian relationships do not deserve the full recognition of society."

In his ruling, Judge Walker took a conservative approach to his findings of law, said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law. Judge Walker laid the factual groundwork that might have allowed him to invoke the tough "strict scrutiny" test to Proposition 8 -- a test that most laws flunk.

"His decision does not depend on the higher court finding strict scrutiny," he said, a legal finding that a higher court might well overturn. Instead, he subjected the law to a lower standard that many laws can pass, but that this one, in his opinion, does not.

"He finds it doesn’t even meet rational basis review" for the legal distinction between same-sex marriage and heterosexual unions, Professor Chemerinsky said.

Even some of those who applauded the opinion, however, said the path ahead for it is not clear or easy. Associate Professor Doug NeJaime at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles said while Judge Walker’s ruling he found "a great opinion," he was skeptical of the strategy to take a marriage case through the federal courts. Despite Judge Walker’s efforts to set a factual foundation and the traditions of deference, he said, the Supreme Court is not completely constrained by lower court findings of fact.

"We’ve seen time and time again that the Supreme Court can do whatever it wants" with the factual record, and "I don’t see five justices on the Supreme Court taking Judge Walker’s findings of fact to the place that he takes them."

Professor NeJaime suggested the case might turn on the Court’s traditional swing vote, Anthony M. Kennedy, who has shaped decisions that strike down laws that discriminate against gays and lesbians. The rational basis test used by Judge Walker is in line with the standard used by Justice Kennedy in such cases as Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down a state sodomy law. By structuring an opinion that allows the Court to use the lower level of scrutiny, Judge Walker "is speaking to Justice Kennedy," he said.

Professor Jesse H. Choper, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, said that it is too soon to tell which way Justice Kennedy might come down on the issue of same-sex marriage. "I have no way of predicting how he’d come down on this and I don’t think he does, either, at this point."

Ultimately, Professor NeJaime said, even the four more liberal justices on the Court might shy away from a sweeping decision that could overturn same-sex marriage bans across the country. "The Supreme Court rarely likes to get too far ahead of things," he said.

Reverend Jim Garlow, pastor of Skyline Church in La Mesa, Calif., and a leading supporter of Proposition 8, agreed.

"Given the present makeup of the Supreme Court at this time, ’one woman, one man’ will stand," he said.

And that is why Professor Chemerinsky said "this is a huge victory for the supporters of marriage equality -- but it’s not the last word."

    In Same-Sex Ruling, an Eye on the Supreme Court, NYT, 4.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/us/06assess.html

When the Bride Takes a Bride

July 15, 2010
The New York Times
By KEVIN SACK

EAST POINT, Ga. — When the Palladinos were planning their wedding, they found that traditional bridal magazines were all but useless in addressing their particular questions.

Questions like: Where does a woman find a man’s suit that does not make her look like a woman in a man’s suit? Should Kirsten and Maria both walk down the aisle, or was it O.K. for Maria, who sees herself as more masculine, to wait for her bride? At which of the Caribbean resorts in the honeymoon pictorials would two women feel most comfortable holding hands?

“On every level there was something lacking,” said Kirsten Palladino, who took Maria’s surname after their wedding in June 2009. “We didn’t see any couples like us. The language was all he and she, bride and groom, please your man.”

After their honeymoon in St. Martin, they decided to do something about it. This month, they published the second issue of their online same-sex wedding magazine, Equally Wed.

Almost from the moment Massachusetts became the first state to offer marriage licenses to same-sex couples in 2004, mainstream businesses have tried to find a way to attract customers from this new, lucrative market. But as more states legalize same-sex marriage, and the weddings take root in American culture, the marketplace is responding with a growing number of new companies, services and publications aimed directly at gay grooms and lesbian brides.

Equally Wed, published in a state where same-sex marriage is outlawed, is among a crop of Web sites that are filling the void left by conventional bridal publications. They join companies like OutVite.com, a Massachusetts stationery firm that grew along with that state’s same-sex wedding industry; photographers who promote images of gay weddings on their home pages; purveyors of groom-and-groom cake toppers; and cruise lines that advertise their embrace of gay honeymoons.

“The market doesn’t wait for politics to catch up,” said Katherine Sender, an associate professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “Business, Not Politics: The Making of the Gay Market.” “As gay marriage becomes part of the national imagination, marketing to it and publications concerning it become more and more viable.”

Gay weddings have been depicted on network television since the mid-1990s, and about 70 percent of daily newspapers now carry same-sex wedding announcements, according to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. But some mainstream publications and broadcasters are only now taking their first halting steps toward inclusion.

This month, under pressure from gay rights groups, the “Today” show on NBC welcomed same-sex couples to compete in its annual wedding contest. Also this month, Brides, a Condé Nast publication, ran its first feature about a same-sex wedding, depicting the union of one of the magazine’s photo editors and her longtime girlfriend.

Martha Stewart Weddings, a publication of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, had already broken precedent in its winter 2010 issue, with a pictorial that showed Jeremy Hooper and Andrew Shulman stomping on glass and sharing a kiss.

Both magazines played it straight, focusing on menus and decorations, with no mention beyond the obvious of the couples’ orientations. “This is a part of the mix going forward,” said Millie Martini Bratten, the editor-in-chief of Brides. “The world is changing.”

But because it must appeal to a broad base, Brides does not plan to spotlight same-sex weddings in any deliberate way or to document their sociological evolution, Ms. Bratten said. That leaves an untapped market for Equally Wed and a handful of other Web sites devoted to same-sex weddings, with titles like Queerly Wed, So You’re EnGAYged, GayWeddings.com and RainbowWeddingNetwork.com.

In the six years since Massachusetts broke the barrier, there have been an estimated 40,000 legal same-sex marriages in the United States, according to the Williams Institute for Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. A comparable number of gay Americans have married in other countries, and an additional 84,000 couples may be in civil unions or domestic partnerships, according to the institute.

Connecticut, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont and the District of Columbia have now joined Massachusetts in recognizing same-sex marriage, and court cases in California and Massachusetts are challenging the constitutionality of state and federal laws against it.

It is not lost on the Palladinos that despite the assertion in their publication’s name, they were wed and continue to live in one of the 41 states that prohibit same-sex marriage. But it is the very absence of state approval, they said, that made their own vows so meaningful and inspired the spirit of their magazine.

“We’ve done everything we can to be equally wed,” Maria Palladino said.

The couple are publishing their quarterly from a back room in their tidy house in East Point, an emerging gay outpost just south of Atlanta. Maria, 30, who works as a freelance Web designer, is publisher. Kirsten, 32, who manages the lifestyle sections of a weekly newspaper, is editor.

Their magazine, which features a more content-driven format than some competing sites, is attracting about 8,000 unique viewers a month, Maria Palladino said. It has about 20 advertisers, including a jeweler, a hotel chain and a car insurer.

Equally Wed can seem driven by conflicting impulses. On the one hand, it is devoted to making same-sex weddings seem ordinary, providing the same obsessive attention to floral arrangement and cake design as bridal magazines. On the other, it celebrates the distinctive, norm-flouting nature of gay unions and guides participants through their specific challenges.

In the summer issue, a feature about planning a green wedding shares space on the home page with an article about the legal dilemmas facing married couples when one spouse changes genders. A feature on boudoir photography gives way to an advice column on managing marriage license waiting periods in Iowa and Massachusetts.

Like traditional magazines, Equally Wed pulses with the love stories of real couples and lush photography of their ceremonies. Kirsten Palladino, who always dreamed of a white-dress wedding, writes a blog called “In Bloom,” which dispenses advice on invitation fonts and summer cocktails.

But she also answers reader questions about whether a man should propose to another man with a ring (why not?) and whether a couple should invite homophobic relatives to their wedding (better to send them an announcement after the fact). Maria Palladino, who said she has not worn a dress since high school, writes a blog from the butch point of view called “Broom Closet,” a term she coined for those who do not quite fit as either bride or groom.

The magazine includes a consumer guide to vendors who are practiced in avoiding heterosexist language and customs. When planning their own wedding, the Palladinos quickly learned to detect discomfort among the photographers they interviewed.

“They were so delicate in their handling of it,” Kirsten Palladino said. “They’d say, ‘You know, I’ve never shot a gay wedding, but I’d be happy to.’ And then sign off their e-mail: ‘Much love in Jesus Christ.’ ”

The Palladinos said that what excited them about the future, both of same-sex weddings and their magazine, was the chance to navigate between tradition and innovation. “There are no rules,” Kirsten Palladino said. “We can look to the history of straight weddings and take what we want and leave what we don’t.”

    When the Bride Takes a Bride, NYT, 15.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/us/16marriage.html

Redefining Marriage

July 9, 2010
The New York Times
 

For 14 years, as states, courts and many Americans began to change their minds on the subject, the federal government has clung to its official definition of marriage as only between a man and a woman. On Thursday, a federal judge in Massachusetts finally stood up and said there was never a rational basis for that definition. Though we are a little wary of one path Judge Joseph L. Tauro took to declare the definition unconstitutional, the outcome he reached is long overdue.

The definition is contained in the Defense of Marriage Act, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996. At the time, there was no legal same-sex marriage in the United States, but now five states and the District of Columbia issue licenses to all couples. Because of the federal law, thousands of couples in those states cannot receive the same federal benefits as opposite-sex couples, including Social Security survivor payments and spousal burials in national military cemeteries.

There were two cases that came before Judge Tauro on this subject, allowing him to arrive at the same conclusion in two different ways. In one case, brought by Martha Coakley, the Massachusetts attorney general, the judge said the marriage act exceeded Congress’s powers and infringed on the state’s right to regulate marriage. This does not appear to be a legitimate basis for overturning the act. Many of the biggest federal social programs — including the new health care law — deal with marriages and families, as the Yale law professor Jack Balkin noted on Thursday, and states should not be given the right to supersede them.

The judge made a better argument in the other case, brought by a gay rights group, that the marriage definition violates the equal-protection provisions of the Constitution. There is no rational basis for discriminating against same-sex couples, he ruled, discrediting the reasons stated by lawmakers in 1996, including the encouragement of “responsible procreation” and traditional notions of marriage and morality. In this argument, he was helped by the Obama administration’s obligatory but half-hearted defense of the law, which since last year no longer supports Congress’s stated reasons.

Courts should generally give Congress wide deference in writing laws, but should not be afraid to examine them when challenged, to make sure they serve a legitimate purpose. The Defense of Marriage Act was passed and signed as an election-year wedge issue, and the brief debate leading up to it was full of bigoted attacks against homosexuality as “depraved” and “immoral.” One congressman said gay marriage would “devalue the love between a man and a woman.” Laws passed on this kind of basis deserve to be upended, and we hope Judge Tauro’s equal-protection opinion, which, for now, applies only to Massachusetts, is upheld on appeal.

Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court actually predicted this moment would arrive when he dissented from the court’s 2003 decision to strike down antisodomy laws. That decision left laws prohibiting same-sex marriage “on pretty shaky grounds,” he warned, since it undercut the traditional moral basis for opposing homosexuality. The Justice Department cited those words when it abandoned its defense of the law as related to procreation, which, in turn, helped lead to Thursday’s decision. The process of justice can take years, but in this case it seems to be moving in the right direction.

    Redefining Marriage, NYT, 9.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/10/opinion/10sat1.html

Judge Topples U.S. Rejection of Gay Unions

July 8, 2010
The New York Times
By ABBY GOODNOUGH and JOHN SCHWARTZ

BOSTON — A federal judge in Massachusetts found Thursday that a law barring the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, ruling that gay and lesbian couples deserve the same federal benefits as heterosexual couples.

Judge Joseph L. Tauro of United States District Court in Boston sided with the plaintiffs in two separate cases brought by the state attorney general and a gay rights group.

Although legal experts disagreed over how the rulings would fare on appeal, the judge’s decisions were nonetheless sure to further inflame the nationwide debate over same-sex marriage and gay rights.

If the rulings find their way to the Supreme Court and are upheld there, they will put same-sex marriage within the constitutional realm of protection, just as interracial marriage has been for decades. Seeking that protection is at the heart of both the Massachusetts cases and a federal case pending in California over the legality of that state’s ban on same-sex marriage.

Tracy Schmaler, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said federal officials were reviewing the decision and had no further comment. But lawyers for the plaintiffs said they fully expected the Obama administration to appeal. An appeal would be heard by the First Circuit, which also includes Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire and Puerto Rico.

In the case brought by Attorney General Martha Coakley, Judge Tauro found that the 1996 law, known as the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, compels Massachusetts to discriminate against its own citizens in order to receive federal money for certain programs.

The other case, brought by Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, focused more narrowly on equal protection as applied to a handful of federal benefits. In that case, Judge Tauro agreed that the federal law violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution by denying benefits to one class of married couples — gay men and lesbians — but not others.

Neither suit challenged a separate provision of the Defense of Marriage Act that says states do not have to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. But if the cases make their way to the Supreme Court and are upheld, gay and lesbian couples in states that recognize same-sex marriage will be eligible for federal benefits that are now granted only to heterosexual married couples.

“This court has determined that it is clearly within the authority of the commonwealth to recognize same-sex marriages among its residents, and to afford those individuals in same-sex marriages any benefits, rights and privileges to which they are entitled by virtue of their marital status,” Judge Tauro wrote in the case brought by Ms. Coakley. “The federal government, by enacting and enforcing DOMA, plainly encroaches upon the firmly entrenched province of the state.”

Proponents of gay rights embraced the rulings as legal victories.

“Today the court simply affirmed that our country won’t tolerate second-class marriages,” said Mary Bonauto, civil rights project director for Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, who argued the case. “This ruling will make a real difference for countless families in Massachusetts.”

Chris Gacek, a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, a leading conservative group, said he was disappointed by the decision.

“The idea that a court can say that this definition of marriage that’s been around forever is irrational is mind-boggling,” Mr. Gacek said. “It’s a bad decision.”

Massachusetts has allowed same-sex couples to marry since 2004, and while more than 15,000 have done so, they are denied federal benefits like Social Security survivors’ payments, the right to file taxes jointly and guaranteed leave from work to care for a sick spouse.

In the Coakley case, the judge held that that federal restrictions on funding for states that recognize same-sex marriage violates the 10th Amendment, the part of the Constitution that declares that rights not explicitly granted to the federal government, or denied to the states, belong to the states.

The Obama administration’s Justice Department was in the position of defending the Defense of Marriage Act even though Barack Obama had called during the 2008 presidential campaign for repealing it. Scott Simpson, when arguing the case on behalf of the government in May, opened by acknowledging the administration’s opposition to the act, but saying he was still obliged to defend its constitutionality.

“This presidential administration disagrees with DOMA as a matter of policy,” Mr. Simpson said at the time. “But that does not affect its constitutionality.”

Some constitutional scholars said they were surprised by Judge Tauro’s opinions in the two cases.

“What an amazing set of opinions,” said Jack M. Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School. “No chance they’ll be held up on appeal.”

Professor Balkin, who supports the right to same-sex marriage, said the opinions ignored the federal government’s longstanding involvement in marriage issues in areas like welfare, tax policy, health care, Social Security and more. The opinion in the advocacy group’s case applies the Constitution to marriage rights, he said, undercutting the notion that the marriage is not a federal concern.

“These two opinions are at war with themselves,” he said.

The arguments concerning the 10th Amendment and the spending clause, if upheld, would “take down a wide swath of programs — you can’t even list the number of programs that would be affected,” he said.

By citing the 10th Amendment and making what is essentially a states’ rights argument, Professor Balkin said Judge Tauro was “attempting to hoist conservatives by their own petard, by saying: ‘You like the 10th Amendment? I’ll give you the 10th Amendment! I’ll strike down DOMA!’ ”

Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, was more supportive of the logic of the two opinions, and said they worked together to establish a broad right of marriage for same-sex couples.

“The key issue in this case, and in all litigation about marriage equality for gays and lesbians, is, Does the government have a rational basis for treating same-sex couples differently from heterosexual couples?” he said. “Here, the court says there is no rational basis for treating same-sex couples differently from heterosexual couples. Therefore, DOMA is unconstitutional, and conditioning federal funding on compliance with DOMA is unconstitutional.”

A central issue in the fight over the constitutionality of California’s same-sex marriage ban is whether laws restricting gay rights should be held to a tougher standard of review than the “rational basis” test, and so Judge Tauro’s decision takes a different path that would eliminate the need for that line of argument, Professor Chemerinsky said.

“There’s no need to get to higher scrutiny if it fails rational basis review,” he said.


Katie Zezima contributed reporting.

    Judge Topples U.S. Rejection of Gay Unions, NYT, 8.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/09/us/09marriage.html

A ‘Kagan Doctrine’ on Gay Marriage

July 2, 2010
The New York Times
By JONATHAN RAUCH

Washington

ELENA KAGAN uttered neither the word “gay” nor “marriage” in her opening statement at the Senate confirmation hearings on her nomination to the Supreme Court, but she addressed the issue nonetheless. No, she didn’t say how she will vote when gay marriage comes before the court, as it may soon. What she did say was this:

“The Supreme Court, of course, has the responsibility of ensuring that our government never oversteps its proper bounds or violates the rights of individuals. But the court must also recognize the limits on itself and respect the choices made by the American people.”

Ms. Kagan may not have had gay marriage in mind when she made that statement, but it could not be more relevant. She seems to be saying that protecting minority rights is the Supreme Court’s job description, but also that a civil rights claim doesn’t automatically trump majority preferences. This is something absolutists on both sides of the gay marriage debate don’t like to hear, but it has the virtue of being right.

While the Senate considers Ms. Kagan’s nomination, Judge Vaughn Walker of the United States District Court in San Francisco is deciding how to rule in a major lawsuit challenging Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot initiative that revoked and banned same-sex marriage in California (while leaving the state’s marriage-like domestic partner program intact). Judge Walker may declare that the United States Constitution gives gay couples the right to marry — a decision sure to start a political firestorm (possibly just in time to give the Democrats an additional headache in this year’s midterm elections). Whatever he decides is likely to be appealed, presumably up to the court that Ms. Kagan seems likely to join.

This case is not primarily about the merits of gay marriage. It is primarily about who gets to decide. The plaintiffs say marriage is a civil right, and when a civil right is assailed, the Supreme Court has no choice but to take command. If the Supreme Court doesn’t protect minority rights, it abdicates its job.

Proposition 8’s defenders retort that gay marriage is not a civil right, because it is not marriage, or not marriage as defined by most Californians. If the court does not defer to the voters’ wishes, it oversteps its bounds.

Ms. Kagan seems to reject both forms of absolutism. Civil rights, she implies, are important, but so is judicial modesty, and a sensible judge balances the two. A sensible judge can say something like, “Same-sex marriage may indeed be a civil right, but not all civil rights demand immediate judicial intervention, and other important interests militate against imposing this one on the whole country right now.”

Viewed in that light, the argument for upholding California’s gay marriage ban has merit — not because the policy is fair or wise (it isn’t) but because it represents a reasonable judgment that the people of California are entitled to make. Barring gay marriage but providing civil unions is not the balance I would choose, but it is a defensible balance to strike, one that arguably takes “a cautious approach to making such a significant change to the institution of marriage” (as the lawyers defending Proposition 8 write in one of their briefs) while going a long way toward meeting gay couples’ needs.

I say this knowing how deeply it stings gay Americans to let states make invidious choices. In June, my partner, Michael, and I married in the District of Columbia. But every time I commute from my office in Washington to my home in Virginia, my marriage magically dissolves like some matrimonial Cheshire Cat, because Virginia constitutionally bans any recognition of it. What straight couple would tolerate that?

Shortly before we married, we visited a lawyer who explained that it would cost thousands of dollars to draw up documents protecting us in states that, like Virginia, treat us as legal strangers — documents making Michael my heir, giving him access to my hospital room, allowing him to make financial decisions should I be incapacitated. Even so, our pricey paperwork could replicate only a few of the perquisites of marriage, and only imperfectly at that. This is how second-class citizenship feels.

But the gay-marriage debate, while assuredly a civil rights argument, is much more than that. It is also a debate about the meaning of marriage, about the pace of change in a conflicted society and about who gets to decide. Whatever the activists on both sides say, nothing in the Constitution requires the Supreme Court to short-circuit the country’s search for a new consensus, either by imposing gay marriage nationwide or by slamming the door on it with an aggressively dismissive ruling. Sometimes the right answer for the courts is to step aside and let politics do its job.

In her testimony, Ms. Kagan described the Supreme Court as “a wondrous institution” and the democratic process as “often messy and frustrating.” She was right, as every veteran of a civil rights struggle can attest. But she was also right to say that the court should be “properly deferential to the decisions of the American people and their elected representatives.” If she can turn those platitudes into a jurisprudence that respects both gay equality and judicial modesty, she will be unpopular on both sides of the marriage debate — and correct.


Jonathan Rauch, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, is the author of “Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights and Good for America.”

    A ‘Kagan Doctrine’ on Gay Marriage, NYT, 2.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/03/opinion/03rauch.html

A Stonewall Veteran, 89, Misses the Parade

June 27, 2010
The New York Times
By MANNY FERNANDEZ

At noon on Sunday, thousands of marchers filled Fifth Avenue for New York City’s annual gay pride parade. Nearly six miles away, on the sixth floor of a nursing home in Brooklyn, the frail, white-haired woman in beige pajamas and brown slippers in Room 609 sat motionless at the edge of her bed, staring out her window.

She touched the medallion on her necklace — an image of St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes — and fiddled with one of her rings.

“This one,” she said of the ring on a pinky finger, “I hit a guy so hard I knocked the stone out, and I hadn’t gotten around to put it back yet.”

She had forgotten that the gay pride march was Sunday. Her mind and her memory are not as sharp as her wit and her tongue. She said she had been living there, at the Oxford Nursing Home, for years (she arrived in April). She was not sure how old she was (she will be 90 in December).

The woman in Room 609, Storme DeLarverie, has dementia. She is but one anonymous elderly New Yorker in a city with thousands upon thousands of them. And many of those who marched down Fifth Avenue on Sunday would be hard pressed to realize that this little old lady — once the cross-dressing M.C. of a group of drag-queen performers, once a fiercely protective (and pistol-packing) bouncer in the city’s lesbian bars — was one of the reasons they were marching.

Ms. DeLarverie fought the police in 1969 at the historic riot at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village that kicked off the gay rights movement. The first gay pride parade in 1970 was not a parade at all but a protest marking the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.

Some writers believe Ms. DeLarverie may have been the cross-dressing lesbian whose clubbing by the police was the catalyst for the riots (the woman has never been identified). While others are adamant that Ms. DeLarverie was not that woman, no one disputes that she was there, and no one doubts that the woman who had been fighting back all her life fought back in the summer of 1969.

At one point on Sunday, she said she was not struck by the police. At another moment, she said a police officer had hit her from behind. “He wound up flat on his back on the ground,” said Ms. DeLarverie, a member of the Stonewall Veterans’ Association. “I don’t know what he hit me with. He hit me from behind, the coward.”

Ms. DeLarverie has struggled in recent years with a confluence of housing, mental health and legal issues. In 2009, a social services group, the Jewish Association for Services for the Aged, was appointed her legal guardian by a judge. In March, she was hospitalized after she was found disoriented and dehydrated at the Chelsea Hotel, her home for decades. No one occupies her room on the seventh floor of the hotel, but it remains unclear if she will ever return.

A small group of friends, including some of her neighbors at the Chelsea Hotel, visit her regularly. A social worker with the nonprofit group SAGE, which provides services to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender older people, has been assisting Ms. DeLarverie since 1999, when she was at risk of eviction from the hotel.

Some of her friends said they had been frustrated by the way she was treated by the authorities and others, and they expressed disappointment that Ms. DeLarverie’s troubles have not been a widespread concern for many gay and lesbian activists.

“I feel like the gay community could have really rallied, but they didn’t,” said Lisa Cannistraci, a longtime friend of Ms. DeLarverie’s who is the owner of the lesbian bar Henrietta Hudson, where Ms. DeLarverie worked as a bouncer.

“The young gays and lesbians today have never heard of her,” Ms. Cannistraci said, “and most of our activists are young. They’re in their 20s and early 30s. The community that’s familiar with her is dwindling.”

Ms. DeLarverie’s friends said they were disturbed because she spent most of her days inside the nursing home and they had not been allowed to take her outside, even for walks.

Leah Ferster, chief services officer for the Jewish Association for Services for the Aged, said she was not aware that that was a concern among her friends. “We have to make sure she’s medically capable and able, and if that was true, then we would be glad to speak with her friends and see if we can come up with a safe plan and have her go out for a few hours,” she said.

Ms. DeLarverie’s first name is pronounced STORM-ee, like the weather, but in Room 609 on Sunday, she was calm, chatty, graceful. Her life has been flamboyant, boundary-breaking, the stuff of pulp fiction.

Friends say she worked for the mob in Chicago. The drag-queen group she performed with decades ago, known as the Jewel Box Revue, regularly played the Apollo in Harlem (she dressed as a man and the men dressed as women). She was photographed by Diane Arbus. She carried a straight-edge razor in her sock, and while some merely walked to and from the gay and lesbian bars in the Village, friends said, she patrolled.

Sitting at the edge of her bed, her mind turned again to the parade, where, in the past, she had been a fixture. She said she had a message for those who took part in the celebration. “Just be themselves, like they’ve always been,” she said. “They don’t have to pretend anything. They’re who they are.”

Ms. DeLarverie asked what time it was, and what time the march started. At one point, she took off her slippers and seemed to look for her shoes. “I think they started already,” she said. “They’re probably wondering where I am.”


Colin Moynihan contributed reporting.

    A Stonewall Veteran, 89, Misses the Parade, NYT, 27.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/nyregion/28storme.html

Gay Workers Will Get Time to Care for Partner’s Sick Child
 

June 21, 2010
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — President Obama will soon expand the rights of gay workers by allowing them to take family and medical leave to care for sick or newborn children of same-sex partners, administration officials said Monday.

The policy will be set forth in a ruling to be issued Wednesday by the Labor Department’s wage and hour division, the officials said.

Under a 1993 law, people who work for a company with 50 or more employees are generally entitled to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a newborn or for a spouse, son or daughter with “a serious health condition.”

The new ruling indicates that an employee in a same-sex relationship can qualify for leave to care for the child of his or her partner, even if the worker has not legally adopted the child.

The ruling, in a formal opinion letter, tackles a question not explicitly addressed in the 1993 law. It is one of many actions taken by the Obama administration to respond to the concerns of gay men and lesbians within the constraints of the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman as husband and wife.

In April, Mr. Obama announced plans to grant hospital visiting rights to same-sex partners, and the Justice Department concluded that the Violence Against Women Act protects same-sex partners.

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama plans to welcome lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights advocates to a White House reception celebrating June as “LGBT Pride Month.”

The Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group, worked with the administration to develop the policy on family leave.

Jennifer W. Chrisler, executive director of the Family Equality Council, another advocacy group, estimated that one million lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender families were raising two million children.

The upshot of the Labor Department policy, she said, is that “if you act like a parent, do the work of a parent and raise a child like a parent, then you are a parent for the purpose of the Family and Medical Leave Act.”

Federal law does not recognize same-sex relationships. But Labor Department lawyers have concluded that people in such relationships may nevertheless qualify for family and medical leave when they act as parents, sharing the care and support of a child.

The 1993 law, the Family and Medical Leave Act, allows employees to take time off for certain family and medical needs, including the care of a son or daughter with health problems.

Under the law, “the term ‘son or daughter’ means a biological, adopted or foster child, a stepchild, a legal ward or a child of a person standing in loco parentis.” The law does not define “in loco parentis.” But the relevant federal regulations say, “Persons who are ‘in loco parentis’ include those with day-to-day responsibilities to care for and financially support a child.”

Moreover, the rules say, “A biological or legal relationship is not necessary.”

State laws on adoption by same-sex couples vary widely. In some states, it is allowed. In others, it is not. And in many states, the law is unclear.

The 1993 law cannot be used to care for a partner or spouse of the same sex because federal law does not recognize same-sex relationships.

But many employers, including scores of large companies, provide benefits more comprehensive than those required by federal law. The benefits may include time off to care for domestic partners.

Among those who might have benefited from the new policy are Nazanin Meftah, 38, a real estate broker in Tucson, and her partner, Dr. Lydia Bañuelos, a pediatric ophthalmologist.

In 2007, Ms. Meftah said, she developed a wound infection after the delivery of her son by Caesarean section, and in 2009 she had complications during and after a second pregnancy.

“Lydia could not take time off from work to be with us and provide support when we needed it,” Ms. Meftah said.

Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, has introduced a bill that would amend the 1993 law to allow workers to take leave to care for a domestic partner or a same-sex spouse. The bill would expand the definition of “spouse” to include “a same-sex spouse as determined under applicable state law.”

At present, said Ms. Chrisler, a lesbian and mother of twin boys in Massachusetts, “states have a hodgepodge of laws on same-sex couples and their relationships to their children.”

    Gay Workers Will Get Time to Care for Partner’s Sick Child, NYT, 21.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/us/politics/22rights.html

Deal Reached for Ending Law on Gays in Military

May 24, 2010
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON — President Obama, the Pentagon and leading lawmakers reached agreement Monday on legislative language and a time frame for repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, clearing the way for Congress to take up the measure as soon as this week.

It was not clear whether the deal had secured the votes necessary to pass the House and Senate, but the agreement removed the Pentagon’s objections to having Congress vote quickly on repealing the contentious 17-year-old policy, which bars gay men and lesbians from serving openly in the armed services.

House Democratic leaders were meeting Monday night and considering taking up the measure as soon as Thursday. But even if the measure passes, the policy cannot not change until after Dec. 1, when the Pentagon completes a review of its readiness to deal with the changes. Mr. Obama, his defense secretary and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff would also be required to certify that repeal would not harm readiness.

The measure could enable gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military for the first time, ending a policy that Mr. Obama, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, all say they oppose.

Representative Patrick J. Murphy, Democrat of Pennsylvania and a leading advocate in the House for repeal, is hoping to attach the proposal to a defense authorization bill that will come up for a vote on Thursday.

In the Senate, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, intends to introduce the language on Thursday in the Armed Services Committee. In a letter to Mr. Obama on Monday, Mr. Murphy, Mr. Lieberman and Senator Carl M. Levin, the Armed Services Committee chairman, announced support for the proposal and asked the White House for its “official views.”

But Capitol Hill aides said the letter was pro forma; Mr. Obama’s budget director, Peter R. Orszag, quickly replied with the White House’s assent.

The compromise emerged Monday after a flurry of closed-door meetings at the White House and on Capitol Hill.

White House and Pentagon officials, who met with aides to proponents of repeal in Congress, declined early in the day to talk about the negotiations.

“Given that Congress insists on addressing the issue this week,” said Geoff Morrell, a spokesman for Mr. Gates, “we are trying to gain a better understanding of the legislative proposals they will be considering.”

Some gay rights advocates complained that too many conditions were attached to the repeal. But the president of the Human Rights Campaign, Joe Solmonese, said the deal “puts us one step closer to removing this stain from the laws of our nation.”

Mr. Obama has been under intense pressure from gay rights groups to live up to his campaign promise to work with Congress to repeal the law.

Already this year, the administration has taken significant steps toward doing undoing the policy; last month, the Secretary of the Army, John M. McHugh, said he was effectively ignoring “don’t ask, don’t tell” and had no intention of pursuing discharges of active duty service members who have told him they are gay.

But full-fledged repeal, which requires an act of Congress, has been moving slowly. Gay rights advocates want a vote before the November midterm elections, when Democrats are expected to lose seats. The language that is now circulating allows lawmakers to do that, while allowing Mr. Gates to keep the timetable for his review intact.

    Deal Reached for Ending Law on Gays in Military, NYT, 24.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/us/politics/25tell.html

Finding a Gay-Friendly Campus

April 8, 2010
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

The scene was similar to one that plays out thousands of times a year in gyms and auditoriums around the country: a college fair. The folding tables, the school banners, the admissions officers with a student representative or two, and the brochures and tchotchkes laid out. The only thing that might have made this one appear out of the ordinary was the preponderance of handouts with rainbow designs, and the fact that the fair was being held at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center in Greenwich Village. This college fair, and several like it around the country, was devoted to recruiting gay students.

“Actually going out and recruiting a gay student — that’s a very new thing for colleges,” says Shane L. Windmeyer, the co-founder of Campus Pride, a national organization that promotes safe college environments for gay students and sponsored the event.

While Ivy League schools are often represented, the fairs also attract lesser-known institutions like Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Scott A. McIntyre, associate director of admissions there, says that his university attends some 500 fairs each year, and that including one for gay students made sense.

“The more I can help my institution be open to diversity of all different kinds,” he says, “it’s just going to make us a stronger university, and it’s going to make our student body be more robust.”

All this is good news for the young gay applicant. Of course, being gay does not lend an advantage, and the embrace is not universal inside admissions offices, and out. While much of the stigma of homosexuality may have eased over the years, harassment and even violence are still real concerns around campus — Matthew Shepard, after all, was an undergraduate.

Students are looking for colleges where they will feel comfortable and safe, Mr. Windmeyer says. Also, he says, “straight students who have gay family members want to find a campus that is welcoming,” so, for example, two moms can show up for parents weekend without a ripple. “They don’t want to pick a college that’s not going to be accepting of people they love.”

Although many young people say they do not feel the anguish about coming out that has burdened past generations, the fact is that adolescence is a time of strong pressures to conform, and being different in any way can cause intense inner turmoil.

Life’s conflicts can make for compelling narratives — the stuff of memorable college essays. And students are working the story of their sexuality into their admissions essays. “Students are finding out that not only are they not being discriminated against for revealing their orientation in their applications, it may be an extra,” says Rachel Pepper, a co-author of “The Gay and Lesbian Guide to College Life.”

As with all essays, the value is in what you actually say. Being spurred to found an organization or join one could show the positive attitude and leadership abilities that colleges look for, Ms. Pepper says. “Students who are out in high school and are comfortable enough to put this in their essay are probably leaders.”

Another reason for a student to be up front about sexual orientation: scholarships and other financial help have emerged from such groups as the Point Foundation, the League Foundation at AT&T, and Colage (Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere).

The University of Pennsylvania made waves this year when the online publication Inside Higher Ed reported on the university’s new outreach policy: applicants whose essay identifies them as gay are put in touch with gay students and organizations on campus. Eric J. Furda, the dean of admissions, told the publication that it was doing for gay applicants what it has long done for other groups. “We are speaking to students on the areas they are most interested in,” he says.

To some admissions officials, Penn was taking risks with students’ privacy. S. Caroline Kerr, the senior assistant director of admissions at Dartmouth, says that sending gay-themed information to students can be delicate. “A lot of them aren’t out to their parents or might have only come out to some friends,” she says. “We’re more concerned about how we approach them with information than I perhaps am with different students. If someone talks about involvement with the gay student alliance in their essay, I’m not adding them to the list.” But Dartmouth is, for the second year, sending information about gay life and organizations to students who specifically request it on forms asking about their interests.

Ms. Kerr says that “I have gotten some raised eyebrows” from alumni, who have been surprised to find that there are special recruiting efforts for gay students and have asked, “Do you mean to tell me you are admitting someone based on this?” She counters: “That is not the case. You’re not admitting anyone based on a single aspect of their candidacy.”

The University of Southern California, too, reaches out to applicants who identify themselves as gay or transgender. Prospective students can have a “Rainbow Floor Overnight Experience” — a night on the gay floor of a residence hall and a day visiting their host’s classes and student organizations.

Derek Pooley, an admissions counselor at the State University of New York at Potsdam, manned a booth at the New York college fair this past fall. “The first person I had come up to me was a drag queen,” he says. “I thought that was fantastic.”

He says, though, that not many in attendance expressed a strong interest in Potsdam, perhaps because it doesn’t have a reputation as a gay haven. Mr. Pooley, who is gay and graduated from there last year, let a lot of people know “I had a great experience; not once did I ever feel uncomfortable there.”

Ms. Pepper has served as program coordinator for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies at Yale, which is known for its curriculum on gay issues. She says that while some institutions, including Yale, get reputations as a gay school, “you don’t want to just take any school on its reputation.”

Campus Pride’s Web site serves as a virtual college fair for gay-friendly colleges, and provides a sense of the activities and services geared to various interests. Its “campus climate index” ranks colleges based on programs and policies, including identifying those with strong ones to protect gay students — say, explicitly including them in their declarations against discrimination.

Another clue to an institution’s commitment: whether staff members serve as advisers to gay student groups, and what accommodations are made. Transgender students, Ms. Pepper says, would want to know if the health center provides hormone shots as part of the health plan.

The Princeton Review, which surveys 122,000 students on a variety of topics for its “Best 371 Colleges: 2010 Edition,” has come out with a ranking of colleges where the gay community is “most accepted.” (New York University was No. 1.)

That approach, however, drew criticism from Mr. Windmeyer: asking the overall population whether gays are accepted on campus — “Oh, gay people, I love ’em!” he mocks — “is not the way to assess how gay students feel.” Campus Pride is working on its own survey, which Mr. Windmeyer says he hopes to publish in September.

Mr. McIntyre, the admissions officer from Indianapolis, says that a welcoming environment is only part of what makes a campus right for a prospective gay student. “It’s important that when students are looking for colleges, it’s not, ‘What’s the best college I can get into?’ but ‘What’s the best fit for me?,’” he says.

Mr. McIntyre represented his university at a Campus Pride fair earlier this year at the University of Southern California. He took his 17-year-old son, Anderson, who had come out to him two years ago. Mr. McIntyre says he saw the trip as an opportunity for his son to explore campuses’ attitudes and acceptance.

But Anderson was not so much impressed by whether a college was gay friendly as its focus on his areas of interest. “That’s great,” he told his father, “but do they have photography?”

    Finding a Gay-Friendly Campus, NYT, 8.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/education/edlife/18guidance-t.html

Obama Widens Medical Rights for Same-Sex Partners

April 15, 2010
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Thursday ordered his health secretary to issue new rules aimed at granting hospital visiting rights to same-sex partners.

The White House announced the rule changes, which will also make it easier for gay men and lesbians to make medical decisions on behalf of their partners, in a memorandum released Thursday night. In it, the president said the new rules would affect any hospital that participates in Medicare or Medicaid, the government programs to cover the elderly and the poor.

“Every day, all across America, patients are denied the kindness and caring of a loved one at their sides,” Mr. Obama said in the memorandum, adding that the rules could also help widows and widowers who rely on friends and members of religious orders who care for one another. But he says gay men and lesbians are “uniquely affected” because they are often barred from visiting partners with whom they have spent decades.

Richard Socarides, who advised President Bill Clinton on gay rights issues, said that while the memorandum on its own did not grant any new rights, it did “draw attention to the very real and tragic situations many gays and lesbians face when a partner is hospitalized.”

Ordering the Department of Health and Human Services to find a better way to handle such situations, Mr. Socarides said, is “the kind of thing the gay community was hoping Obama would do right after he was inaugurated.”

Several states have tried to put an end to discrimination against same-sex couples, and Mr. Obama said he intended to build on those efforts. He said the new rules would make clear that designated visitors should enjoy visiting privileges that are no more restrictive than those enjoyed by immediate family members.

The rules will take time to draft and put in place, and so Mr. Obama’s order will have no immediate effect. Even so, gay rights groups called it a major advance for the families of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgender individuals.

“It’s a huge deal,” said David Smith, vice president of policy for the Human Rights Campaign, which worked with the White House to develop the memorandum, in an interview Thursday night. “Nearly every hospital in the country will now be required to provide hospital visitation rights to LGBT families. It’s an enormous step. In the absence of equal marriage rights in most jurisdictions, this step provides an essential right to LGBT families for a gay person or a lesbian person to spend time with their partner in a critical situation.”

In some instances in the past, hospitals have barred bedside visits by the person who held the medical power of attorney for a patient.

Gay rights advocates said the rules change was inspired by one of those cases involving a same-sex couple, Janice Langbehn and Lisa Pond, who were profiled in The New York Times last year. After Ms. Pond was stricken with a fatal brain aneurysm, Ms. Langbehn was denied visiting rights in 2007 by a Florida hospital. Although Ms. Langbehn had power of attorney and she and Ms. Pond were parents to four children they had adopted, the hospital refused for eight hours to allow her and the children to see Ms. Pond, her partner for 18 years. Ms. Pond died as Ms. Langbehn tried in vain to get to her side.

Ms. Langbehn, represented by Lambda Legal, a legal advocacy organization, brought suit against the hospital, Jackson Memorial in Miami, but lost. On Thursday night, Mr. Obama called her from Air Force One to say that he had been moved by her case.

“I was so humbled that he would know Lisa’s name and know our story,” Ms. Langbehn said in a telephone interview. “He apologized for how we were treated. For the last three years, that’s what I’ve been asking the hospital to do. Even now, three years later, they still refuse to apologize to the children and I for the fact that Lisa died alone.”

Mr. Obama campaigned saying he would fight for the rights of gay men and lesbians, but he has been under pressure since the beginning of his presidency to be a stronger advocate for their issues.

Many gay men and lesbians grew disenchanted with what they viewed as his foot-dragging on reversing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the policy that bars them from serving openly in the military. The president said in his State of the Union address this year that he intended to move to overturn the policy, and his administration has been taking steps to do so.

The memorandum is intended to “help ensure that patients will be able to face difficult times in hospitals with compassion, dignity and respect,” a White House spokesman, Shin Inouye, said Thursday night. “By taking these steps, we can better protect the interests and needs of patients that are gay or lesbian, widows and widowers with no children, members of religious orders, or others for whom their loved ones are not always immediate relatives. Because all Americans should be able to have loved ones there for them in their time of need.”

    Obama Widens Medical Rights for Same-Sex Partners, NYT, 15.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/us/politics/16webhosp.html

Gay Marriage Is Legal in U.S. Capital

March 3, 2010
The New York Times
By IAN URBINA

WASHINGTON — It was cold and drizzling outside the City Courthouse just after 6 a.m. on Wednesday, but no one seemed to mind among the same-sex couples waiting for the chance to apply for a marriage license.

“This is a dream come true,” said Sinjoyla Townsend, 41, as she smiled ear to ear and held up her ticket indicating she was first in line with her partner of 12 years, Angelisa Young, 47. “We wanted it so bad.”

Gay rights advocates hailed the day as a milestone for equal rights and a symbolic victory as same-sex marriage became legal in the nation’s capital.

Washington is now the sixth place in the nation where same-sex marriages can take place. Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont also issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Despite failing in court, opponents of the law vowed to fight another day.

The law survived Congressional attempts to block it, and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. on Tuesday rejected a request from opponents of same-sex marriage to have the United States Supreme Court delay it.

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty signed the measure into law in December, but because the District of Columbia is not a state, the law had to undergo Congressional review, which ended Tuesday.

Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington on Tuesday limited employee health care benefits to avoid coverage of same-sex couples. It was the second time Catholic Charities changed its rules to protest same-sex marriage, having earlier ended its foster care program.

The new law was already having regional implications.

Maryland’s attorney general, Douglas F. Gansler, issued a legal opinion last week concluding that Maryland should immediately recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere.

Mr. Gansler’s move is expected to draw legal and legislative challenges, but for Terrance Heath of Montgomery County, Md., it was the turning point that persuaded him to get married.

“We realized that we can finally get many of the benefits and protections that other couples take for granted,” said Mr. Heath, 41, a blogger who lives with his partner, Rick Imirowicz, 43, and their two adopted sons.

“Before that attorney general decision we could have the legal documents, like wills and medical power of attorney,” Mr. Heath said. “But there was no guarantee that those documents would be recognized.”

He said that he and Mr. Imirowicz had worried about what might happen to any inheritance meant for their sons, Parker, 7, and Dylan, 2. “Marriage gives us peace of mind,” Mr. Heath said. “It gives my family security that we deserve.”

At the city’s Marriage Bureau inside the Moultrie Courthouse, just blocks from the Capitol, the mood was giddy as couples hugged and talked about a day they never thought would arrive.

“I became a naturalized U.S. citizen in the mid-’90s,” said Cuc Vu, a native of Vietnam who was third in line with her partner of 20 years, Gwen Migita. “But this is really the first time that I feel like I have the full rights and benefits of citizenship.”

Court officials explained that the Marriage Bureau had changed its license applications: They ask for the name of each spouse rather than the bride and groom. Officials who perform the weddings read, “I now pronounce you legally married.”

On a typical day the office processes 10 licenses, court officials said. By late Wednesday afternoon, more than 140 couples had filed to be married, the mayor’s office said.

Because of a mandatory waiting period, couples will not be able to marry in the city until Tuesday.

City officials say the measure will also provide a financial boost to the local economy. A study by the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, predicted that more than 14,000 same-sex marriages would occur in the city over the next three years, which would bring in $5 million in new tax revenue and create 700 jobs.

    Gay Marriage Is Legal in U.S. Capital, NYT, 4.3.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/us/04marriage.html

Editorial

Equality in the Military

February 3, 2010
The New York Times
 

History was made on Capitol Hill on Tuesday. More than 16 years after their predecessors helped impose the odious “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, the nation’s two top defense officials called on Congress to repeal the law that bans gay men and lesbians from serving openly in the military. The principled courage of the defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is a major step forward for civil rights.

Their action leaves no further excuse for Republican lawmakers to go on supporting this discrimination. President Obama must not let the opponents of repeal, who are already mobilizing, keep this terribly unjust law on the books.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” was passed by Congress in 1993, with the support of Les Aspin, who then was the secretary of defense, and Gen. Colin Powell, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. It compelled gay men and lesbians to hide who they are and to live in fear of being reported. Many thousands of men and women have been drummed out of the armed forces under this law.

Critics argue that the presence of gay service members makes the military less unified and effective. There is strong evidence that this is not so, including the experiences of nations, such as Canada and Britain, where gays serve openly. A policy of driving out good and talented people — including ones with much-needed skills in Arabic, Farsi, and other languages — makes the military less effective.

At Tuesday’s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Robert Gates, the secretary of defense, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made a clear commitment to end “don’t ask, don’t tell” — following up on the promise President Obama made in his State of the Union address. The question, Mr. Gates said, “is not whether the military prepares to make this change, but how we best prepare for it.” He said, however, that more time will be needed to work out how to change the policy.

While the policy is being reviewed by the Pentagon’s top lawyer and the commander of the United States Army in Europe, Mr. Gates said the existing law will be carried out in a “more humane and fair manner.” One welcome change would be a decision by the military to no longer aggressively pursue discharge cases against people whose sexuality is revealed by third parties, including jilted romantic partners.

Since “don’t ask, don’t tell” is a federal law, the Obama administration will have to work to get Congress to repeal it. There will be considerable opposition. Senator John McCain, a Republican of Arizona, declared his opposition on Tuesday. Representative John Boehner, the leader of the House Republicans, indicated earlier that with two wars under way it was not the right time to change the policy.

In fact, it is an ideal time. The armed forces need every qualified person who wants to serve. Polls show that Americans broadly support repealing the law. President Obama has spoken out forcefully for jettisoning the policy, and his party controls both houses of Congress. The armed forces have evolved. Gen. John Shalikashvili, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently called for a repeal, declaring that “as a nation built on the principle of equality, we should recognize and welcome change that will build a stronger, more cohesive military.”

The United States has traveled far since 1993 on gay rights. It is ready for a military built on a commitment to equal rights for all.

    Equality in the Military, NYT, 3.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/opinion/03wed1.html

Top Defense Officials Seek to End ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’

February 3, 2010
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON — The nation’s top two Defense officials called on Tuesday for an end to the 16-year-old “don’t ask, don’t tell” law, a major step toward allowing openly gay men and women to serve in the United States military for the first time in its history.

“No matter how I look at the issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens,” Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee. He said it was his personal and professional belief that “allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do.”

But both Admiral Mullen and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told the committee they needed more time to review how to carry out the change in policy, which requires an act of Congress, and predicted some disruption to the armed forces.

Admiral Mullen is the first sitting chairman of the Joint Chiefs to support a repeal of the policy. In 1993, Gen. Colin L. Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time, opposed allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly but supported “don’t ask, don’t tell” as the compromise passed by Congress. Under the policy, gay men and lesbians may serve as long as they keep their sexual orientation secret.

To lead a review of the policy, Mr. Gates appointed a civilian and a military officer: Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon’s top legal counsel, and Gen. Carter F. Ham, the commander of the United States Army in Europe. Pentagon officials said the review could take up to a year.

In the interim, Mr. Gates announced that the military was moving toward enforcing the existing policy “in a fairer manner” — a reference to the possibility that the Pentagon would no longer take action to discharge service members whose sexual orientation is revealed by third parties or jilted partners, one of the most onerous aspects of the law. Mr. Gates said he had asked the Pentagon to make a recommendation on the matter within 45 days, but “we believe that we have a degree of latitude within the existing law to change our internal procedures in a manner that is more appropriate and fair to our men and women in uniform.”

As the hearing opened, the committee’s chairman, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, welcomed the abolition of the policy, saying it had never made sense to him. Its ranking Republican, Senator John McCain of Arizona, said that he was “deeply disappointed” and that the original rationale, endorsed by Congress in 1993, was as sound as ever.

On one thing, they agreed: many gay men and lesbians are serving honorably and effectively in the military today, despite a policy that has driven thousands of others out of the services. But Mr. Levin said the military should act in this matter as it has in others, as a force against discrimination. And Mr. McCain said the military culture was so different from civilian life that the rules for its members, too, must differ.

Mr. Levin cited an overwhelming view on the part of the public, as seen in polls, that the law should change. Mr. McCain said that a thousand retired admirals and generals had signed a petition against change, and that their views reflected the honest beliefs of military leaders as a whole, whatever Admiral Mullen’s personal view.

Mr. Gates said that the review would examine changes that might have to be made to Pentagon policies on benefits, base housing, fraternization and misconduct and that it would also study the potential effect on unit cohesion, recruiting and retention.

For further information, Mr. Gates said he would ask the Rand Corporation to update a 1993 study on the effect of allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly. That study concluded that gay service members could serve openly if the policy was given strong support from the military’s senior leaders.

Mr. Gates and Admiral Mullen were responding to President Obama’s campaign pledge to end “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which the president, after a year of saying of little about it, reaffirmed in his State of the Union address last week.

“The question before us is not whether the military prepares to make this change, but how we best prepare for it,” Mr. Gates told the committee. “We have received our orders from the commander in chief and we are moving out accordingly. However, we also can only take this process so far as the ultimate decision rests with you, the Congress.”

Gay rights groups had grown increasingly angry over the past year that Mr. Obama delayed acting on the policy for his first 12 months in office. But Pentagon officials were reluctant to move forward when they were at crucial points in two wars, and Mr. Obama himself did not want another polarizing debate to distract from his 2009 health care fight.

Admiral Mullen told the committee that although he believed “the great young men and women of our military can and would accommodate such a change,” he did not know for sure. “Nor do I know for a fact how we would best make such a major policy change in a time of two wars,” Admiral Mullen said.

Republicans have already signaled that they are concerned about timing and not eager to take up the issue. “In the middle of two wars and in the middle of this giant security threat, why would we want to get into this debate?” Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican leader, said Sunday on “Meet the Press” on NBC.

Some advocates of allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly have pointed to an article last fall in Joint Force Quarterly, an official military journal, that found that the several countries that have lifted bans on such open service had seen few harmful effects.

The article, by Col. Om Prakash of the Air Force, cited evidence that in countries where such bans had been lifted, including Australia, Britain and Canada, there had been no “mass exodus” of heterosexual service members and no impact on military performance. Colonel Prakash’s article had been reviewed in advance by Admiral Mullen’s office.

Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, asked the admiral on Tuesday if he was aware of whether the policies of many NATO allies in Afghanistan, allowing open service, had had any deleterious effect.

The admiral said that he had spoken to many of the NATO partners and that they had reported seeing “no impact” on military performance.

Polls now show that a majority of Americans support openly gay service — a majority did not in 1993 — but there have been no recent broad surveys of the 1.4 million active-duty personnel.

A 2008 census by The Military Times of predominantly Republican and largely older subscribers found that 58 percent were opposed to efforts to repeal the policy; in 2006, a poll by Zogby International of 545 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans found that three-quarters were comfortable around gay service members.

General Ham, a veteran of Iraq, is unusual among top military officers for speaking out about his struggles with post-traumatic stress after witnessing the devastation when a suicide bomber blew up a mess tent on an American military base near Mosul, killing 22 people, including 14 United States troops. Mr. Johnson, a former assistant United States attorney in the Southern District of New York, was previously a trial lawyer at the firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.

    Top Defense Officials Seek to End ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’, NYT, 3.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/us/politics/03military.html

Editorial

Ending ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’

January 29, 2010
The New York Times

Toward the end of his State of the Union address Wednesday night, President Obama said something that untold numbers of Americans who suffer discrimination had wanted to hear for more than 16 years. He promised to work to repeal the law that bans gay members of the military from living their lives openly.

The 1993 law was always pointless and cruel, but today, when numerous polls show that a solid majority of Americans oppose it, “don’t ask, don’t tell” feels ever more like the relic of a bygone era. There is evidence that the attitude of military officers is shifting. All that is lacking is political will. Congress and the military should work with Mr. Obama to repeal the law quickly.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” is not just a technicality on the books. It is actively being used to drive gay men and lesbians out of the military — more than 13,000 since the law was adopted, according to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. That includes people with vital skills, like Arabic translators. The legal defense network, which helps people facing charges under “don’t ask don’t tell,” estimates that 644 people have been discharged under the law since Mr. Obama took office.

The policy of drumming gay men and lesbians out of the military is based on prejudice, not performance. Gay people serve openly and effectively in the armies of Britain, Israel, Australia and Canada.

The winner of last year’s secretary of defense essay contest was a piece by an Air Force colonel, published in Joint Force Quarterly, a military journal, that called “don’t ask, don’t tell” a “costly failure” and debunked the canard that unit cohesion would be harmed if gay service members were allowed to be open about their sexuality.

The law singles out a group of Americans for second-class treatment, forcing them to hide who they are and to live in fear of being found out and discharged. The policy hurts the military by depriving it of the service of a large number of loyal and talented Americans.

There is a bill in the House of Representatives, the Military Readiness Enhancement Act, that would undo the 1993 law. Representative Patrick Murphy, an Iraq war veteran and Democrat of Pennsylvania, is leading the effort to get it passed, and the bill has more than 180 co-sponsors. The forthcoming vote on the Defense Department’s annual budget would also be a good opportunity for repeal.

This is a winnable battle, but it will take committed leadership, starting with Mr. Obama, who until Wednesday was not vocal enough on the subject as president. He should prod the Pentagon to speak out, but the military officers will need strong support in Congress, particularly from the many Republican lawmakers who voice their commitment to a strong military. The evidence is clear that this law makes the military weaker.

Some supporters of gay rights have been disappointed by the Obama administration, let down, for example, by its decision to file a brief last year in support of the Defense of Marriage Act, the law protecting the power of states to not recognize same-sex marriages. But there also has been important progress, notably the enactment of the Matthew Shepard Act, which makes hate crimes against gay people federal crimes.

Much more needs to be done, including recognizing same-sex marriage at the national level and passing a federal law protecting gay people from discrimination on the job. Repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” would be an important step forward.

    Ending ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’, NYT, 29.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/opinion/29fri1.html