The Republic of T.

He “lost” the presidency in 2000, has won an Oscar and an Emmy since then, and now Gore just won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for their work to raise awareness about global warming.

…The former vice president said he would donate his half of the $1.5 million prize to The Alliance for Climate Protection, a U.S. organization founded by Gore that aims to persuade people to cut emissions and reduce global warming.

…The Nobel committee praised Gore as being “one of the world’s leading environmentalist politicians.”

He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted,” said Mjoes

The Nobel caps a series of prestigious awards associated with Gore, including two Oscars this year for the documentary film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which followed him on a worldwide tour publicizing the dangers of climate change.

Last month he also picked up an Emmy — the highest award in U.S. television — for “Current TV.” The show, which Gore co-created, describes itself as a global television network that gives its viewers the opportunity to create and influence its programming.

In all this, it’s natural to speculate whether Gore will announce a run for president, whether he should run, and whether he could win. I can’t blame people for hoping for all three. After all, can anyone who supported him in the 2000 race, and has rued the outcome for the past seven years not help feeling vindicated? Can we help comparing the president we have to the president we could have had?

Technorati Tags: 2008 election, current events, politics, al gore

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Well, the second conviction in the case of the hate crime that killed Michael Sandy has come in. Anthony Fortunato was convicted of second degree manslaughter and petty larceny.

Anthony Fortunato was found guilty today of manslaughter in the second degree as a hate crime and attempted petty larceny for his part in luring a gay man to a meeting place last October, beating him and chasing him into traffic.

There’s a kind of irony in this conviction coming on National Coming Out Day, since Fortunato came out in an (apparently failed) attempt to dodge the hate crime charges.

Technorati Tags: anti-gay violence, courts, crime, current events, gay rights, hate crimes, homophobia, politics

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You’d think I’d be done with coming out by now, and that on National Coming Out Day, I’d have nothing left to tell anyone. At this point, I think the only person I haven’t told is Oprah. I will if I’m ever on her show for some reason. Somehow I don’t think she’ll be surprised. Somehow nobody’s ever surprised at that revelation. I think I tend to give it way by some of the things I do. Like talking. The “gay accent” is a dead giveaway.

Or, if Parker speaks (and if this kid is awake he’s usually talking) we’re pretty much instantly outed after a barrage of questions and statements directed at Daddy and Papa. It just doesn’t take long for people to do the math.

So, when National Coming Out Day rolls around, I’m left feeling like I have nothing to do. Not that I want to tell that story again. Let’s face it. After a while, coming out stories get old. When I was co-director of the LGBT student group at UGA, anytime someone new came to a meeting, we’d put our chairs in in a circle and tell our coming out stories. After about a year of this we decided en mass to cease that practice, because it had gotten to the point where we could each go around the circle and tell everyone else’s coming out story.

So, no, I’m not going to tell min again. Because I’ve told it before, and thanks to the magic of blog archives, I don’t have to. I can just repost it. You can read it after the jump if our so inclined.

Technorati Tags: coming out, current events, gay, gay rights, homophobia, life, sexuality

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Sometimes, in the process of researching one hate crime, I end up coming across another one — usually in a brief reference in an article about another crime — and make a note to look it up later. Sometimes I find more information about the assailants than the victim. Sometimes, they’re cases that remind me of others. The story of Nick Moraida is all of the above.

I stumbled across the Moraida case while researching another one, and initially it wasn’t the victim’s name that I found, but one of the assailants. And when I began to dig for information, I came across more information about the assailant than I did about the victim. That seems to be the way it usually is, when the victim is killed. Their story effectively ends, and is ended by the killer who — as a result — becomes the focus of the story.

What’s left of the victim is usually the recollections of surviving friends and family, which may or may not make it into news reports, because it concerns the past. The victim, after all, has no future. Nothing further can be done for them to change their circumstances. But the story of what’s happening to the killer is happening now. They are still here to be sympathized with, defended, and perhaps even granted mercy or a reprieve. Appeals ma still be made on their behalf, and attempts made to save their lives, because they still have lives to save. All of that applies to the case of Nick Moraida.

Technorati Tags: anti-gay violence, courts, crime, current events, death penalty, gay bashing, hate crimes, politics

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Matthew Ashcraft was he victim of an anti-gay hate crime. But Matthew Ashcraft is not gay.

How can that be? How can a heterosexual male be the victim of an anti-gay hate crime? Well, as the text of the hate crimes act now awaiting Bush’s signature or veto makes clear, it’s a matter of perception. A hate crime is a crime of violence, that constitutes a felony under state, local, or tribal laws, and …

… is motivated by prejudice based on the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability of the victim, or is a violation of the State, local, or Tribal hate crime laws.

It’s worth noting that, as written, the hate crime act would also protect heterosexuals who are targeted for violent crime because they are heterosexual. But as far as Matthew Ashcraft’s attacker knew, Ashcraft was gay.

Why?

Technorati Tags: anti-gay violence, crime, current events, gay bashing, hate crimes, homophobia, politics

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It’s been a strange week for me and presidential campaigns. First, I get a phone call from the Hillary Clinton campaign about a volunteer meeting. Me? Volunteer for Hillary? When did I sign up for that? And why? I couldn’t have been drunk, because I haven’t had a drink in 15 years or more. And I tend to waive off those people with the clipboards.

I’m still trying to figure that one out when I get an email that Barrack Obama wants to be my friend n some social network. And I’m not talking about Facebook. That I can understand. But Barrack Obama with a profile on a gay social nework? What are his evangelist friends gonna say about this? See, a while back I registered with GLEE, a gay social network. Well, not just gay. GLEE stands for “Gay, Lesbian & Everyone Else.” And I guess that’s where Barrack comes in.

I was fortunate to be able to grow up seeing America from varied viewpoints. My childhood was spent in Hawaii and Indonesia. After college I worked as a community organizer on the South side of Chicago focusing on improving living conditions in poor neighborhoods.

I came to understand that to truly solve the problems facing our communities, it would take a change in our laws and our politics. I ran and served for seven years in the Illinois state Senate, where I fought for expanding children’s health care, providing tax cuts for the working poor and enacting welfare reform. In 2004, I was elected to the U.S. Senate, where I have worked to pass laws securing dangerous weapons and making government more accountable. I have also opposed the Iraq war from the start, and believe that we need to bring our troops home by March of 2008 so we can refocus on the wider struggle against terrorism.

So, which is more surprising? That Obama has a profile on a gay social network? Or what that profile doesn’t say?

Technorati Tags: 2008 election, current events, gay marriage, obama, politics, web

Your LGBT heroes, that is. Dana, of Mombian, posed the question in honor of GLBT History month, and a lot of names came to mind for me. Some of them are people who, in some small way, gave a little bit of hope to a skinny, effeminate, non-athletic, black, gay boy growing up in Augusta, GA, during the Reagan era. Some of them are people who helped that same kid hold on to (as my mama would say) “a portion of my right mind” through college and into adulthood.

All of them are people whose lives or work gave me three clear messages: You’re not alone. Everything will be alright. Anything is possible.

These are a few of them.

Technorati Tags: books, culture, current events, gay rights, homophobia, politics, race

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It’s happened again. Another mom drowned her kids in the bathtub.

City prosecutors filed two counts of aggravated murder against Amber Hill, 22, after a coroner ruled the deaths of the girls, ages 4 and 2, were homicides.

Hill had no documented history of neglecting the girls, but had herself been the victim of abuse by their father, Jamie Cintron, according to authorities and court records.

“We never had a call of any maltreatment of the children,” said Jim McCafferty, director of the Cuyahoga County Department of Children and Family Services. “The kids were clean and well cared for. It’s just a sad situation.”

Cintron, 23, said Hill called him at work Monday and said their children “are at peace,” police Lt. Thomas Stacho said. He then went to the woman’s apartment and pulled the girls from the water in the

I was actually watching a television show about Andrea Yates when I read this news. And I knew that I’d post about it, though I also knew that doing so would will probably draw some criticism about politicizing or exploiting what’s clearly a tragedy no matter how you look at it. But every time I hear a store like this one, I can’t help remembering that even though the only thing our son has ever gotten in the bathtub is a bath, we’re still in the same category as parents who do all manner of violence to their children.

The series I didn’t intend to be a series is becoming the series that just won’t die. Now, to be fair, there’s a good reason for that. There are, after all, more heterosexuals than homosexuals. That’s the way it’s always been and — despite the fear of various and sundry wingnuts that everyone’s gonna up and go gay and stop reproducing if there’s even slightly less discrimination against gays or anything approaching equal treatment — how it’s always gonna be. Thousands upon thousands of years of human history and human culture, including many in which same-sex orientation was not only tolerated but an accepted part of some cultures, bear that out.

Technorati Tags: child abuse, civil rights, crime, current events, family, gay marriage, gay rights, homophobia, marriage, parenting, politics

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They do as far as I’m concerned.

I saw this one in a neighbor’s yard on the way out this morning. One of the things that’s make it a little easier to recover from last week has been to come home and be reminded how much support we have. We always knew we had good friends and good people in our lives. But it’s nice to be reminded.

Technorati Tags: civil rights, current events, gay marriage, marriage, politics

On those married death row inmates I mentioned in the previous post, I wanted to add that they’d pass muster with the Maryland Court of appeals too, because of the possibility that they could reproduce if they weren’t on death row. And that — and only that — is what marriage is all about, after all.

It’s not love we’re talking about here, it’s grinding out the next generations. What the Maryland judges remind us is that marriage is mainly the business arrangement to keep baby creation somewhat orderly in humans. That sure takes a lot of the romance out of it, doesn’t it? Not all of it mind you, because reproduction can be pretty damned nice for a few minutes or so, depending on one’s, uh, skill. But again, I digress.

Of course no one has ever come up with a satisfactory answer to why a man and woman who plan to remain childless can legally wed.

Well, they can, but then they usually lapse into reverie of magical thinking, and start spouting about the “symbolic” union of people with a specific combination of genitalia.

What we get instead is something like “Marriage between man and woman is sacred and must be protected.” Period. Funny enough, that’s a battle that’s already lost. Men and women divorce and it’s probably because they shouldn’t have tied the knot in the first place, had they not been shamed or propagandized to doing so. Got to keep those offspring coming after all. Never mind that the kids caught up in the shambles of the breakup suffer mightily while they grow up and get ready to procreate.

That is if the procreate at all. Some people seem to have convinced themselves that if gay couples can get married people might stop making babies altogether.

Technorati Tags: courts, crime, gay marriage, gay rights, homophobia, parenting, politics, religion

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I’ll just go ahead and admit that it’s going to be a long time before I can let this go and stop going on about the Maryland Court of Appeals ruling on same-sex marriage or stop looking for sharp stick to poke into the heart of the majority decision.

“Looking beyond the fact that any inquiry into the ability or willingness of a couple actually to bear a child during marriage would violate the fundamental right to marital privacy recognized in Griswold, 381 U.S. at 484-86, 493, 85 S. Ct. at 1681, 14 L. Ed. 2d 510, the fundamental right to marriage and its ensuing benefits are conferred on opposite-sex couples not because of a distinction between whether various opposite-sex couples actually procreate, but rather because of the possibility of procreation.”
-Judge Glenn Harrell, Jr.

Maybe that’s because I keep coming across examples of just how far the court has lowered the bar by arguing, essentially, that if you and your spouse can perform the bodily functions necessary to make babies — or even possibly do so if you were not, say infertile or well past child-bearing age — you deserve the benefits and protections of marriage.

I’ve started compiling these examples in a series, and it looks like there won’t be a shortage any time soon. Just this evening I stumbled across one, right in my own back yard, of an enterprising pedophile who reproduced and then put his progeny to work procuring for him.

Technorati Tags: child abuse, courts, crime, current events, family, gay marriage, parenting

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With everything that happened last week, I missed out on (and didn’t feel much like) blogging about the Senate passage of the hate crimes bill.

The Senate voted today to extend federal hate-crime protection to people victimized because of their sexuality, but it remained doubtful that the measure would ever become law.

By voice vote and without dissent, the senators attached the hate-crime provision to a seemingly unrelated defense authorization bill, which is needed to run the Defense Department. Attaching the provision to the military bill was intended, at least by some of the provision’s supporters, to force President Bush to choose between accepting the provision or vetoing the military bill. .

The White House has said previously that Mr. Bush opposed the extension of hate-crime protection as “unnecessary and constitutionally questionable” and that he would veto it if it came to him as a stand-alone bill.

But that isn’t to say that I wasn’t still researching and writing up hate crime cases for The LGBT Hate Crimes Project. There’s still no shortage of cases to research and record, and either new ones seem to keep happening every other day or new details are reported in existing cases. So with the hate crimes bill passed in both houses of Congress, and awaiting Bush’s signature or veto stamp, it seems like a good time to report on the progress of the LGBT Hate Crimes Project.

Technorati Tags: anti-gay violence, bush, crime, current events, gay bashing, gay rights, hate crimes, homophobia, politics

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