gentrification, Tyler Clementi, Suns exec resigns, filters, immigrant culture, Iran, Prop 8
I haven't posted any news stories in quite a while. The time stamps at the end of the stories show their filing date.
West Hollywood development pains the funky
By CHRISTINA HOAG
Associated Press
WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. (AP) - The city is considering holding a Go-Go Dancer Appreciation Day this fall to honor the club “groovers” who helped establish the Sunset Strip as a hub of hipness in the 1960s, and whose successors lend an edgy energy to its gay bars today.
Go-Go day would also highlight the quirky flamboyance that for decades has been the hallmark of this small burg shoehorned into the middle of Los Angeles.
“West Hollywood has been toned down to be family friendly. That’s not what we are,” said Mayor John Duran. “I was concerned there seemed to be a sanitizing of the city. This is the sort of campy, tongue-in-cheek thing we’re known for.”
With a 40 percent gay population, this densely populated enclave has been long known for its dare-to-be different lifestyle that has fostered a funky vibe of artsy boutiques and coffeehouses along leafy streets lined with quaint bungalows and aging apartment buildings.
But intense development pressure has brought a wave of gleaming condo and office towers, tony shops and big-box retailers over the last decade, leading many residents to fear that West Hollywood is falling victim to the bland metropolitan sprawl that typifies much of Los Angeles.
“Our personality is changing,” said Elyse Eisenberg, who heads the West Hollywood Heights Neighborhood Association. “The city’s been pushing out old time residents in favor of upscale residents, and destroying the quality of life. We want to see an urban village, not high rises.”
The swelling backlash has included lawsuits against the city, the formation of residents’ groups and the election of an anti-development councilman earlier this year in a race where gentrification was the hot-button issue.
For many, the city of 35,000 stands at a crossroads to determine its future.
“It’s critical for the city to maintain and forge its own identity,” said council newcomer John D’Amico. “It’s easy to turn into another part of Beverly Hills or Los Angeles.”
That would be anathema to West Hollywood, which takes pride in its renegade history.
Formerly unincorporated, the 1.9-square-mile community was historically a place where Angelenos could let loose with lax liquor and gambling laws. It later became a refuge for gays fleeing the heavy-handed Los Angeles Police Department and for Jews escaping the Soviet Union.
In the 1960s, a shambling stretch of Sunset Boulevard became the epicenter for the burgeoning rock music scene with venues such as the Troubadour, Roxy Theatre and Whisky a Go Go launching legendary bands including The Doors and The Byrds. The area became a hippie haven.
When the county planned to do away with rent control in unincorporated areas, seniors, gays and immigrants banded together to incorporate the city in 1984. Today, 77 percent of residents are renters who enjoy one of the strictest rent-control laws in the nation.
Local leaders cleaned up the city, whose odd boundaries look like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. They got rid of street prostitution, buried utility lines, added landscaping and lighting, and promoted civic events such as an outlandish Halloween parade that attracts 350,000 revelers.
They also made a point of implementing liberal, if sometimes offbeat, policies - stipulating pets be called “companions” and owners “guardians” and barring gasoline-powered leaf blowers - as well as providing a generous array of social services, including taxi vouchers for seniors, free HIV testing, youth scholarships and a transgender advisory board.
Over the past dozen years, as West Hollywood has found its niche in LA’s cosmopolitan landscape, a slew of office, condo and retail projects - large and small - have gone up.
John Heilman, a councilman since the city was formed, attributed at least part of the flood of interest to a waning of homophobia and AIDS fear since the 1980s.
“I think gay communities the world round have seen greater acceptance,” he wrote in an email.
The biggest developments are landing on the famed Sunset Strip.
One project, Sunset Time, entails a hotel-condo tower to be built on the site of the House of Blues nightclub. Nearby, the proposed $300 million Sunset Millennium development would build a hotel, shops and condos at a key intersection.
Residents say these types of developments are ruining West Hollywood’s eclectic neighborhood feel, and adding to traffic and parking woes.
They’re particularly riled by the city’s use of “development agreements,” which allow developers to skirt zoning laws governing issues such as building height and parking spots in return for cash payments to the city.
“I call them bribes,” said community activist Jeanne Dobrin, who sued the city over a five-story office-condo tower and got its height reduced slightly and $300,000 more for the city. “I claim the city is for sale.”
But officials note residents have benefited as the revenue enabled the city to stay in the black - with no cuts in staff or services - and even expand with a $64 million library to be opened next month and an automated parking garage when many other municipalities are being financially squeezed.
“We don’t have overdevelopment, but we want economic development. It’s a question of where you draw the line,” Duran said. “That’s the challenge.”
Critics say the boom has led to a whitewashing of the city’s provocative, adult atmosphere.
They point to instances when the city last year decided not to endorse the annual Erotic Fair Weekend due to the licentious art displayed, and another proposal to replace a building housing a popular addiction recovery center with a preschool. The council relented on both issues after residents complained.
Bar and restaurant owners protested an outdoor smoking ban, arguing it was out of place in anything-goes West Hollywood, which only has about 1,500 children, but that measure was approved.
West Hollywood’s growing pains are far from unique.
Many former cheap-rent neighborhoods have undergone similar evolutions after being revitalized by a Bohemian crowd, said Peter Dreier, director of urban and environmental policy at Occidental College.
He pointed to Brooklyn Heights in New York and San Francisco’s Mission District as two examples of once-dicey neighborhoods that are now fashionable addresses.
“They say ‘first come the gays and artists, then come the croissant restaurants, then come the lawyers.’ I think that’s true,” Dreier said.
Many in West Hollywood say they want to preserve their community’s character.
“We don’t need any more development,” said 20-year resident Karl Klug. “It’s much nicer to walk by a small house with a garden than a big apartment building with generic landscaping and security gates.”
Judge won’t drop charges in Rutgers case
By George Anastasia
The Philadelphia Inquirer
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - A Superior Court Judge ruled Friday that there is more than enough evidence to support invasion-of-privacy and bias-intimidation charges against former Rutgers University student Dharun Ravi, who used the webcam on his laptop computer to watch his male roommate having sex with a man.
The ruling by Judge Glenn Berman came in response to a defense motion to dismiss all charges in the high-profile case.
In rejecting the defense argument, Berman emphasized that his ruling was not a reflection on Ravi’s guilt or innocence, but rather an analysis of the prosecution’s grand jury presentation and the subsequent 15-count indictment handed up against the 19-year-old in April.
Ravi’s roommate, Tyler Clementi, 18, committed suicide shortly after discovering that the fellow freshman and others had viewed his encounter via a laptop webcam.
The case has attracted international attention and has become a rallying point for those concerned with cyber-bullying and the intimidation of gay youth.
Ravi, of Plainsboro, sat quietly through Friday’s hourlong proceeding dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and tie and flanked by two defense attorneys.
Clementi’s parents, Jane and Joseph, sat in the front row of the small third-floor courtroom and declined to comment as they left the courthouse.
Ravi has been charged with invasion of privacy, bias intimidation and tampering with evidence. He has pleaded not guilty and remains free on bail.
Clementi, of Ridgewood, jumped off the George Washington Bridge on Sept. 22, shortly after learning that Ravi and others had spied on him on Sept. 19.
Ravi also is accused of trying to view a second encounter on Sept. 21.
Clementi’s death does not figure in the indictment. Defense attorneys argued that the widespread attention the case has received is linked to Clementi’s suicide and has clouded the prosecution.
In the motion rejected by Berman, Ravi’s attorneys contended that the county prosecutor’s office had overcharged the case and distorted the facts.
Berman has scheduled a hearing for Oct. 20 at which he is expected to set a trial date. Ravi could face up to five years in prison if convicted of the most serious bias-intimidation charges.
The judge ruled on several other defense motions, but he said they would not take effect for seven days to allow the prosecution time to consider appeals.
Over the objections of Assistant County Prosecutor Julia McClure, Berman ruled that the defense should be given the name and birth date of the man who was in the dorm room with Clementi.
In court documents he has been identified only by his initials, “M.B.”
Berman ruled that defense attorney Steven D. Altman could have the information, but barred him from making the man’s name or any other details public.
Altman said he had no desire to publicize anything about M.B. personally, but he would like to question him about Clementi’s “behavior, demeanor and attitude.” That, he said, could help build a defense against the bias-intimidation charges.
The defense would like to show tht Clementi felt neither intimidated nor harrassed by Ravi.
M.B. had indicated, according to the prosecutor, that he might agree to be questioned by the defense, but only in the presence of a representative of the prosecutor’s office.
M.B. has told investigators that he met Clementi through an online chatroom and dating service for gay men. He has no obligation to speak to the defense, Berman pointed out.
The judge withheld rulings on defense motions to gain access to notes allegedly written by Clementi and to Clementi’s computer.
Berman said he tended to agree with the prosecution’s argument that that information was not relevant, but he said he wanted to review Clementi’s notes and the content of his computer privately before deciding.
He said he had the same reservations about a defense request for information gathered by Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police who recovered Clementi’s body.
McClure objected not only to the defense having access to the information, but to the judge reviewing it privately. Berman granted a seven-day delay after McClure said she wanted to consider filing an objection with the New Jersey State Appellate Court.
While lawyers for Ravi concede he exercised poor judgment and may have been insensitive, they claim he never intended to intimidate or harass Clementi because of his sexual orientation.
Ravi dropped out of Rutgers shortly after being arrested in October. He has remained free on bail.
___
(c)2011 The Philadelphia Inquirer
Visit The Philadelphia Inquirer at www.philly.com
SUNS’ CHIEF EXECUTIVE QUITS, CALLING DECISION PERSONAL
BY HOWARD BECK
c.2011 New York Times News Service
Rick Welts is resigning as the president and chief executive of the Phoenix Suns, only four months after becoming the most prominent sports executive to acknowledge that he is gay.
Welts will step aside on Sept. 15, after nine years as the Suns’ top business executive. He is not leaving for another job, and is framing the decision as more personal than professional. He told The Arizona Republic that he would move to Sacramento to be closer to his partner.
“The most important thing for me is to get my personal and professional lives better aligned,” Welts was quoted as saying. “They’ve probably never been aligned. I’m 58 years old and it’s time to do that. This isn’t one of those departures to see greener pastures. It really is completely a personal situation. These guys have been tremendously accommodating and any other inference than that is absolutely crazy.”
Before joining the Suns, Welts spent 17 years working in business and marketing for the NBA league office in New York. He is credited with creating All-Star weekend in 1984.
In May, Welts stunned many around the league by disclosing his sexual orientation. “This is one of the last industries where the subject is off limits,” Welts said in a New York Times article. “Nobody’s comfortable in engaging in a conversation.”
AMX-2011-09-09T22:06:00-04:00<
ACLU’s ‘Don’t Filter Me’ campaign makes sense
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
The following editorial appeared in the Los Angeles Times on Thursday, Sept. 8:
___
The Trevor Project is an organization devoted to preventing suicides among gay and lesbian teenagers. It has been honored by the White House. But some students have been barred from accessing the group’s website using school computers, even though the schools allow them to view all sorts of other sites, including some with anti-gay messages. This censorship of gay-themed, non-sexually explicit sites has resulted in an American Civil Liberties Union campaign called “Don’t Filter Me!” It’s good advice, and not just because it might spare a school district a lawsuit.
The original culprits in this snafu are not the schools but commercial Internet filtering programs that block gay-themed sites, however innocuous, along with more explicit sites that may include material - heterosexual or homosexual - that would be inappropriate for students. It’s the schools, however, that make the final decision on what is filtered. Some schools may have consciously banned sites such as the Trevor Project on the erroneous assumption that students can (and should) be shielded from discussions of homosexuality. Others genuinely thought they were blocking only pornography. Either way, the result has been censorship.
Filtering programs also have blocked the sites of PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) and GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network, another White House honoree). That’s fine with some social conservatives, who see such sites as propagating a “homosexual agenda,” a fair charge only if one defines the agenda as preaching respect for gay people. But even if one sees such sites as polemical, the same is true of anti-gay-rights websites such as the Family Research Council and the National Organization for Marriage, which students are free to view.
As a result of the “Don’t Filter Me!” campaign, some providers of filters are changing their software, and several school districts have agreed to unblock non-sexual, gay-themed content. The ACLU is also suing a school district in Missouri over its filtering policy, arguing that it violates students’ rights under a 1982 Supreme Court decision preventing schools from removing controversial books from their libraries.
That is a weighty legal argument, but the paramount reason for schools to stop blocking these sites is educational. Within sensible limits (such as a restriction on sexually explicit material), allowing students to browse the Web expands their horizons and, in the case of sites like the Trevor Project, could save their lives. It shouldn’t take a warning letter from the ACLU to convince school administrators of that proposition.
(c) 2011, Los Angeles Times. Visit the Los Angeles Times on the Internet at http://www.latimes.com/ Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
AMX-2011-09-09T08:00:00-04:00<
IN IMMIGRANT AREAS, A CULTURE CLASH OVER GAY MARRIAGE
BY DAN BILEFSKY
c.2011 New York Times News Service
NEW YORK -- Molly Blooms, a Victorian-accented Irish bar in Sunnyside, Queens, recently raffled off a free same-sex wedding reception, with a three-hour open bar, a D.J., a photographer and a horse-drawn gilded carriage to deliver the winning couple to the festivities. The bar’s owner thought the idea would be good for business and for the largely working-class and immigrant neighborhood.
But some in the community disagreed.
Neighbors said they would boycott the bar. Bloggers posted reports of past health violations there. Larry Yang, a Korean-American owner of a hardware store next door, said he resented such a public promotion of same-sex marriage. He said many among the large number of Korean-American Christians in Queens felt similarly but feared that if they spoke out they would be demonized by a liberal majority.
“If that horse-drawn carriage rides by my store, I will make sure my kids do not see it,” Yang, 45, said. “I am worried about what kind of message gay marriage is sending.”
The legalization of same-sex marriage in New York has been embraced by many in the city. But in some neighborhoods heavily populated by immigrants from countries where homosexuality is less accepted, the idea is stirring feelings of unease or, at times, outright disgust.
Sunnyside has been transformed in recent decades, first by immigration, and more recently byurban professionals priced out of Manhattan. As in some other parts of the city, same-sex marriage has laid bare the clash between the social conservatism of many immigrants and the values of the often wealthier and more liberal newcomers to the neighborhood.
Many immigrants in Sunnyside are Muslims from Turkey, where the military, the guardian of the country’s secular state, regards homosexuality as a disorder.
On a recent day, a group of men hunched over Turkish newspapers next to a mosque in a part of the neighborhood that includes kebab shops, a Jewish community center, a Romanian restaurant and a Russian hairdresser.
AliihsanSimcek, 63, a former police officer from Ankara, said many Turks in New York opposed same-sex marriage because Islam regards homosexuality as a sin. “Here in America, everything is possible,” he said. “I am not against gays, just gay marriage. I don’t want to see two guys kissing or two men adopting a child. I’ll never go to this Molly Blooms. What they do behind four walls is their business.”
Dean Sirigos, 50, a Greek-American writer for The National Herald, a Greek newspaper based in Long Island City, Queens, said that among the 450,000 Greek-Americans in the New York metropolitan region, the debate over same-sex marriage had created a culture clash and a generational divide. Even the younger people, reared on Internet dating and MTV, are struggling to reconcile secular values absorbed in America with the teachings of the Greek Orthodox Church, which opposes same-sex marriage.
In a National Herald poll late last month, about 1,000 Greek-Americans were asked, “Do you approve of gay marriage?” Eighty-six percent of the respondents said no.
“Many in the Greek community are conservative and traditional, and marriage is viewed as a sacrament of the church, not as a civil right,” Sirigos said.
In Flushing, Queens, one of New York’s most polyglot neighborhoods, with one of the largest Asian communities in the country, opponents of same-sex marriage said they had felt sidelined during the debate over it.
Dian Song Yu, executive director of the Flushing Business Improvement District, said many Chinese-Americans did not support same-sex marriage, especially those from mainland China, which has socially conservative Communist rulers. Yu said many Chinese-Americans had imported the values of their homeland, where gay-oriented websites are blocked, gay characters are largely absent from television and coming out remains rare.
“If someone were to open a gay club in Chinatown here, most people won’t go,” he said. “The younger generation might be more accepting, but for the older generation, it would be viewed as horrible.”
Even some who back same-sex marriage expressed ambivalence. The Rev. Joseph D. Jerome, a Haitian-American who is the rector at All Saints Episcopal Church in Sunnyside, said that though he supported the right of same-sex couples to wed, he was not ready to officiate at such marriages. He said he had yet to come to terms with the language and liturgy for such ceremonies.
“To pronounce someone ‘spouse and spouse’ would be difficult for me,” he said.
For all the dissenting voices in Sunnyside, the neighborhood is represented by a gay city councilman, Jimmy Van Bramer, a Democrat. He said he understood that some immigrants were uncomfortable with same-sex marriage, but he added that it was a sign of the times that he had been embraced by many of them.
“Today you can see two young gay men holding hands and walking down Queens Boulevard, and no one cares,” he said.
The owner of Molly Blooms, Ciaran Staunton -- a heterosexual married father of two and a Roman Catholic -- said he was determined to be part of what he called “the last great civil rights battle.”
He said most in the neighborhood had welcomed the idea of a free same-sex wedding reception.
“There are always going to be some naysayers who don’t like it,” said Staunton, 48, who came to New York from County Mayo, Ireland, nearly 20 years ago.
The pub was overflowing with Guinness-fueled revelers when the winners of the wedding reception, Janice Velten, 59, a mail carrier in Queens, and her girlfriend of 24 years, Pat Pfirman, 54, a civilian worker in the Police Department, were announced.
They said their biggest worry was that Molly Blooms was not large enough to host all the guests they planned to invite to their October celebration.
Velten recalled that when she moved to Sunnyside 30 years ago, it was largely Irish and Italian, and Catholic and conservative. Back then, coming out as gay was seen as debilitating, both personally and professionally, she said. But since the announcement of the raffle result, Velten said, residents of all backgrounds have high-fived her when she delivers the mail.
“Today, Sunnyside is no longer Archie Bunker land,” she said.
Around the neighborhood, though, some immigrants said they were still not ready for such stark social change. Yang, the hardware store owner, dismissed the free wedding reception as a cynical ploy.
“It’s a business thing, because a lot of gay people live here,” he said. “I have no problem with my gay customers. But we are Korean. We are conservative. No one says, ‘This gay marriage is a good thing.’ What is this world coming to?”
AMX-2011-09-07T23:12:00-04:00<
A Daring Take on Repression, Lesbianism in Iran
By Mark Jenkins
Special to The Washington Post
In the 1980s, before Iran’s cultural defenses were battered by the Internet, Maryam Keshavarz was a preteen threat to national purity. The U.S.-born filmmaker remembers traveling to her parents’ homeland to visit her cousins, bearing such prohibited gifts as pop-music cassettes.
“I would be sweating bullets going through customs,” she says. “In the old airport in Tehran, there was a bathroom area before you went through customs. And sometimes there would be a rumor, ‘Today they’re cracking down.’ As a kid once, I took all these Michael Jackson tapes, and I was breaking them, trying to shove them down the toilet, because I had heard that today was the day they were going to get you.”
Keshavarz, 36, doesn’t expect to go through Iranian customs any time soon. Her feature film debut, “Circumstance,” is about lesbian romance and abuse of religious authority, both taboo subjects in Iran. The director and the stars of the personal-is-political melodrama think they will probably be banned from the country for the near future.
“Circumstance” follows two high school classmates as they fall in love and explore Tehran’s underground youth culture of rave parties, recreational drug use, graffiti-painting expeditions and grooving to Le Tigre, the American lesbian electroclash trio. It’s “based on my experiences with my cousins,” Keshavarz says. “I was in awe of these women who were really pushing the boundaries.”
Among the story’s illicit locales is a clandestine DVD store. “Once my film is released on DVD, I know it will be available there,” Keshavarz says. “I’ve gotten hundreds of e-mails from kids in Iran. They ask, ‘We tried to download your film on this site. How can we download it?’ “
Although a few of the movie’s smaller parts are played by actors who still live in Iran, Keshavarz deliberately cast the three central characters from the Iranian diaspora. Lovers Afafeh and Shireen are played by Nikohl Boosheri and Sarah Kazemy, and Afafeh’s manipulative brother, Mehran, by Reza Sizo Safai.
“I auditioned about 2,000 people for the three leads,” the director says. “People could audition from Skype and on video. Nikohl was just out of high school, living in a small town outside of Vancouver. Sarah, I found in Paris. She was not an actor; she was at the Sorbonne. And Reza I found through traditional casting, in L.A.”
Keshavarz decided that the players had to be native Farsi speakers. “Aside from Nikohl, who’s never really been to Iran -- her parents escaped when she was an infant -- all of us had spent a significant part of time there. The actors were in Iran just before the shoot. Sort of a last-goodbye sort of thing. So when production ended, it was quite an emotional feeling on set.”
The director helped her brother, Hossein Keshavarz, make his 2010 film, “Dog Sweat,” in Iran. But she knew she couldn’t get script approval to shoot “Circumstance” there. So she gambled on Lebanon.
“It’s considered the gay mecca of the Middle East, the French Riviera of the Middle East,” the filmmaker says. “If you’re just a tourist, it’s very liberal. When you try to make a film, it’s more hairy. But it added to the authenticity.
“We had to bend a lot of rules. We basically censored our own script to get a permit to shoot,” she says. “We had some run-ins with the law. I was just amazed that everybody kept a level head. Because we knew, if the film was confiscated, that would be the end of it. There’s no budget to reshoot an independent film.” (Begun as Keshavarz’s New York University film school master’s thesis, “Circumstance” was made for less than $1 million.)
The character of Mehran, who works with the morality police to fulfill his personal desires, would be controversial in Iran. But Atafeh and Shireen’s kisses and caresses ( the movie shows nothing more than that) could shock viewers throughout the region.
“I can’t even show this film in the Middle East, except in Turkey and Israel,” Keshavarz says. “In Iranian culture, Muslim culture in general, we are so afraid of women’s sexuality. The film, for me, is not necessarily about queer sexuality, but just about sexuality.”
Underlining the movie’s critique is a subplot in which Atafeh and Shireen’s friend Hossein, an Iranian American like Keshavarz, dubs the Harvey Milk movie “Milk” for an Iranian bootleg. “I met someone who dubs ‘Gandhi’ into different languages for conflict zones,” Keshavarz says. “I thought that was a great idea, but when I was a kid, ‘Gandhi’ was shown in Iran. He’s the ultimate anti-imperialist, anti-British figure. Often the Iranian government will co-opt these figures. They even co-opted Che.
“So I thought, ‘Who is the figure they really can’t co-opt?’ When I was in Iran previously, ‘Brokeback Mountain’ was really popular. People really connected to the forbidden love. And Iranians really love Sean Penn. I thought there was a crossover between the democracy movement in Iran, and the gay movement in the U.S.”
That doesn’t mean that Keshavarz identifies more strongly with Hossein than with Atafeh and Shireen. “I identify with everyone!” she says, laughing. “But the character of Hossein is sort of a nod to my own perspective. Someone who knows the culture but is outside. He’s trying to engage in a dialogue that brings these two worlds together.”
AMX-2011-09-08T14:24:00-04:00<
COURT WEIGHS WHO DEFENDS CALIFORNIA’S MARRIAGE MEASURE
By JESSE McKINLEY
(c) Copyright 2011 New York Times News Service
SAN FRANCISCO -- In a hearing that suggested no quick resolution to the long-contested legal battle over Proposition 8, the same-sex marriage ban in California, several members of the state’s highest court seemed skeptical of arguments Tuesday that the measure’s supporters should not have a chance to defend it in federal court.
The hearing, at California Supreme Court here, came at the behest of a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Court of Appeals, which is reviewing a 2010 decision by a federal judge who found Proposition 8 to be unconstitutional.
The appellate court had asked the state court if the backers of Proposition 8 -- which passed in 2008 -- had legal standing to defend the measure under state law, because both the current and previous governors and attorneys general of California have repeatedly refused to argue for Proposition 8. And opponents of the measure say that without standing, there is no case, something that could mean a resumption of gay marriage in the state, where it was briefly legal in 2008.
But while no decisions were issued at the hearing Tuesday -- the seven-member Supreme Court has 90 days to do so -- there were indications that several California justices were wary of finding that supporters of Proposition 8 had no right to defend their measure.
The steady stream of questions from the judges seemed to cheer the backers of Proposition 8. Andrew P. Pugno, general counsel for the measure’s proponents, said that the court had shown that it was “very uncomfortable that voters go completely unrepresented.”
It was not the first time the California Supreme Court has heard arguments on same-sex marriage. In spring 2008, the court legalized such unions, setting off a flurry of some 18,000 marriages. That lasted until November 2008, when Proposition 8 passed with 52 percent of the vote. Since then, California has watched some other states make such unions legal, most notably New York this year.
On Tuesday, Theodore B. Olson, the conservative lawyer who has helped lead the federal legal challenge of Proposition 8, acknowledged that even with a quick decision -- either for standing or against -- there were still many days in court ahead, including what many people expect will be an eventual trip to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“We would all like this to move faster,” he said.
AMX-2011-09-06T20:04:00-04:00<
BC-GAYCOUPLES-DEPORT:CC 09-06
Deportation tide changing for gay couples
By Matt O’Brien
Contra Costa Times
OAKLAND, Calif. - When a judge last month closed a deportation case against Filipino immigrant Raul Sinense, he and his husband, Peter Gee, celebrated by having coffee together on Berkeley’s Solano Avenue.
The low-key celebration suited the low-key couple, who married on a Big Sur beach during the six-month window in 2008 when same-sex marriage was legal in California.
The occasion, however, also marked a turning point: The Oakland pair is one of just three gay couples nationwide to benefit from a new Obama administration policy that orders immigration officials to reconsider deporting illegal immigrants who have strong community and family ties.
“This is a really pivotal case,” Gee said. “It seems like the tide is changing in the U.S. toward inclusion, toward equality, toward human.”
Immigration Judge Tue Phan-Quang ordered the case against Sinense closed on Aug. 16 because the immigration service said a few days earlier it was no longer seeking to deport Sinense to the Philippines. The problems are not over for Sinense - his case is not decisively terminated, just on indefinite hold - but the action means the couple won’t be separated and Sinense can reapply for a work permit.
“San Francisco right now is really the center of this policy shift,” said Camiel Becker, the couple’s lawyer. “We have judges who don’t want to deport people if they’re in a same-sex marriage. It’s not just by chance. The trial attorneys and the judges understand this is a human right. If we were in the Harlingen, Texas, court, this would not be happening. This is all discretionary.”
A June 17 memorandum from John Morton, the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was the first sign of major changes happening within the nation’s complicated immigration enforcement apparatus, which deported a record 393,000 people last year.
Morton listed new guidelines for agents to use “prosecutorial discretion” when deciding whom to deport, and said special consideration should be made for students and other upstanding immigrants, especially when their removal from the country would split a family apart. For much of the summer, however, lawyers across the country remained unclear about whether the agency would show same-sex spouses the same discretion it shows opposite-sex spouses and other immediate family members.
Six states allow same-sex marriages but the federal government does not recognize them.
On June 29, a federal immigration judge in New Jersey was the first to halt the deportation of a gay spouse, a Venezuelan man who had married a U.S. citizen in Connecticut.
On July 13, San Francisco-based immigration Judge Marilyn Teeter halted the deportation of another Venezuelan man, Alex Benshimol, who had married his Southern California partner in Connecticut. Teeter gave immigration officials two months to contest her decision.
The answer came Aug. 11, when Aaron Keesler, a lawyer for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, wrote back that the agency was dropping its case against Benshimol.
On the same day, Keesler said the deportation case against Sinense was being dropped, and a judge formally closed that case Aug. 16.
That made Sinense, 46, and Gee, 49, one of the first three binational gay couples to be spared from separation as a result of the new policy.
“I see myself growing old with Peter,” Sinense said. “It would have been difficult starting my whole life over again.”
White House officials and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano made the new discretionary policy more explicit Aug. 18 when they announced they would begin a case-by-case review of the nation’s 300,000 pending deportation cases and close those against many illegal immigrants who are not criminals or repeat violators of immigration laws. The White House also made clear, for the first time, that same-sex marriages would be treated as a family tie.
Gee said the reprieve brought closure to a difficult time for the couple, who moved to East Oakland from Southern California less than two years ago.
“We were so naive about the whole process, what the options were, what to do,” Gee said. “We don’t have O.J. Simpson’s legal budget.”
Sinense has lived in California for about 15 years and had been working to get a green card. An insurance company agreed to sponsor him for an employment-based visa, he said, and he was able to get a legal work permit as he waded through the application process. In the meantime, he also met Gee, a native Californian and professional artist, and fell in love.
At their wedding ceremony in 2008, Sinense told guests of Gee’s “gentle aura.” Gee described how he was immediately connected by Sinense’s smile that put him at ease, and talked of their journey into a “most ordinary and simple life” together.
They learned the next year that it wouldn’t be so simple. The work visa plans fell through in the recession and Sinense received a deportation notice in 2009. They talked about what would happen if Sinense was forced to leave.
For Becker, their lawyer, keeping the couple together wasn’t just a matter of legal prowess. It was also personal.
A decade ago, Becker fell in love with a Salvadoran man while he was working in El Salvador. The pair wanted to move together to the United States, but the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which bans same-sex marriage, made it impossible for Becker to apply for a green card on his partner’s behalf, as he could have done if he married a Salvadoran woman. The same law made it impossible for Gee to apply for a green card for Sinense, though their marriage is considered legally valid in California.
Becker wrote about his experience last year in an essay for a local news outlet. Gee and Sinense read that essay and, after having contacted dozens of lawyers, decided it was Becker they wanted helping them.
Months after he took on their case, Becker began to sense that the Defense of Marriage Act was cracking when the Justice Department announced in February that it would stop defending it because it considered the act unconstitutional.
“At that point, I felt there was no way I was going to let Raul be deported. I just wasn’t going to let that happen,” Becker said.
He argued in court that the Constitution requires the couple’s same-sex marriage license to be recognized under immigration law. He encouraged Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, a friend of the couple, to write a letter on their behalf, which she did.
Gee and Sinense said they began to see their legal battle as a civil rights cause.
“I just see it as a right and I feel like it’s happening, it’s going to happen, it has to happen,” Gee said.
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(c)2011 the Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, Calif.)
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AMX-2011-09-06T08:05:00-04:00<
Esoteric legal details come to forefront in gay marriage battle
By Howard Mintz
San Jose Mercury News
SAN JOSE, Calif. - At least for now, the fate of the legal battle over California’s ban on gay marriage no longer turns on the constitutional rights of same-sex couples to wed.
Instead, the latest chapter in the ongoing drama over gay nuptials rests on an arcane but critical legal procedure that dazzles legal scholars, torments first-year law students and forms the DNA of most every lawsuit that unfolds in the nation’s courts.
On Tuesday, the California Supreme Court will hear arguments over how that procedure, known as legal “standing,” applies in the ongoing tussle over Proposition 8, the 2008 voter-approved law that restored the state’s ban on same-sex marriage. Specifically, the justices will consider whether sponsors of Proposition 8 have a legal right, or standing, to defend the state law and appeal a federal judge’s ruling striking it down when California’s governor and attorney general refuse to do so.
The stakes are high. If the Supreme Court concludes that Proposition 8 backers do not have the right to appeal the ruling, it could slam the door on their efforts to keep the law in place and pave the way for same-sex weddings to resume in California. And if the Supreme Court sides with Proposition 8 sponsors, it would propel the legal battle forward, with the case widely expected to ultimately reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
Experts say it is anybody’s guess what the state Supreme Court will do.
“There are strong policy arguments on both sides,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California-Irvine’s law school. “I think it’s very difficult to predict what the California Supreme Court is going to do on this issue.”
The Proposition 8 case has taken a tortured path back to the state Supreme Court, which upheld the law after it was approved by a 52-to-48 percent vote. Last summer, after conducting an unprecedented trial in federal court, former San Francisco Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker struck down the law, finding it violated the federal equal protection rights of same-sex couples.
But Proposition 8 sponsors appealed Walker’s ruling to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on their own because state officials, including Gov. Jerry Brown and state Attorney General Kamala Harris, agreed with Walker’s conclusion. The attorney general ordinarily defends challenges to state laws, but in this rare case opted to drop any appeals.
The 9th Circuit then asked the state Supreme Court to address whether California law permits backers of ballot initiatives to defend them in such situations. Under ordinary circumstances, courts require a direct stake in the outcome of a legal controversy to qualify for legal standing, a standard muddied in the Proposition 8 case by the usual role of state officials to handle the defense of state laws.
The federal judges, in their request, highlighted a key concern in the case - that a governor and attorney general could “effectively veto the initiative” by refusing to defend it in court.
Proposition 8 supporters say the Supreme Court should reject that scenario, pointing out they’ve defended the law in a series of challenges to California’s gay marriage ban.
“Voters should not be left without any defense just because their officials refused to defend them,” said Austin Nimocks, senior counsel for the conservative Alliance Defense Fund.
In a flurry of legal briefs, gay marriage foes have lined up support for their position, including from former Attorney General Edwin Meese III and various conservative legal groups.
But same-sex marriage advocates also have a stack of arguments on their side. Lawyers for same-sex couples say state law makes it clear the governor and attorney general have the sole responsibility for defending and enforcing state law, not private citizens or groups.
“This unconstitutional harm has gone on for too long,” said Theodore Olson, a lawyer for the couples and former President George W. Bush’s solicitor general.
Harris has backed those arguments in the Supreme Court, saying in court papers that only public officials can defend laws or appeal rulings “in the name of the state.”
A group of local governments, led by Santa Clara County, have urged the Supreme Court to rule against the right of ballot measure sponsors to defend a state law, saying it would “create legal uncertainty for cities and counties” to turn that power over to private citizens.
Legal experts say there is a possibility the 9th Circuit may choose to rule on the substance of the gay marriage case regardless of what the Supreme Court decides. But while the showdown in the Supreme Court will not resolve the struggle over gay marriage rights, it is considered a crucial test that may shape the outcome in the long run.
“In a technical sense, the case may be kind of a sidebar,” said Marc Spindelman, an Ohio State University law professor. “But the law and principles ... are no side show. There’s nothing trifling about them.”
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(c)2011 the San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.)
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AMX-2011-09-05T19:08:00-04:00<
Gay Ugandan refugee finds home in Bay Area
By Matt O’Brien
Contra Costa Times
OAKLAND, Calif. - Being gay in Uganda was never easy for gospel singer Daniel Dyson, but the anti-gay hysteria that erupted in the African nation two years ago forced him to flee.
Prominent Christian pastors had launched a political movement to eliminate homosexuality in the country. They employed professed ex-gays to reveal the names, whereabouts and other identifying details of gay residents in Kampala, the capital city. Dyson was on the list.
“This is a killer dossier,” the tabloid Red Pepper newspaper wrote in an April 2009 article outing Dyson and dozens of others. “A heat-pounding (sic) and sensational masterpiece that largely exposes Uganda’s shameless men and unabashed women that have deliberately exported the Western evils to our dear and sacred society.”
Dyson, who landed in the Bay Area in the spring, is among the first refugees the United States has invited to live in California specifically because of anti-gay persecution abroad. The nonprofit groups that helped him move here - Jewish Family and Children’s Services of the East Bay and the San Francisco-based Organization for Refuge Asylum and Migration - are among the first in the country to take sexual orientation into account in the way they integrate refugees into a new community, aware that the ethnic communities and extended families most refugees rely on for support won’t necessarily accommodate them.
The State Department and the organizations that team with it usually rely on existing immigrant communities to help refugees find a job and become self-sufficient, but local organizations instead are using the gay community as a safety net, said Barbara Nelson of Jewish Family and Children’s Services, which also is working with a few gay refugees from Iran.
Dyson lived for a few months with a host family in Oakland before finding his own place in one of the world’s best-known gay neighborhoods: San Francisco’s Castro district. Volunteers helped him find an office job at a gay advocacy organization. The gregarious 30-something, who speaks near-perfect English, needed little help finding friends and outlets for his gospel singing.
“I am living really freely as a gay man. I’m what I am,” he said. “I have freedom. I’m not afraid for my life anymore. I can sleep peacefully.”
Dyson realized after arriving that “even in the U.S., gay people are fighting for their rights, their marriage rights,” but after attending a celebratory LGBT advocacy function, he also knew that his challenges here would be a world away from the problems in Uganda.
“I said, ‘Oh my God, these people are getting awards.’ Back home, we were running for our life,” he said.
Terrified by a growing movement tinged with violent rhetoric, many in the Ugandan gay community went further underground. Dyson did the opposite, defending his community on radio talk shows and trying to fight common misconceptions.
“They were saying that we were destroying African culture, so I went to the media houses, trying to educate people that gay people, we are African people, we are here,” he said.
He had been involved in low-profile lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender activism for more than five years, but the barrage of venom grew in 2009. On his way back from a radio station that spring, armed men kidnapped and brutally assaulted Dyson, he said, leaving injuries from which he is still recovering. He fled across the Kenyan border several days later.
About 76 countries prohibit homosexuality. In seven, it can be punishable by death.
Uganda is debating whether to imprison gays and execute those with “aggravated homosexuality” offenses. The lawmaker who proposed the bill and other Ugandan anti-gay activists have close ties to U.S.-based evangelical movements, though many American pastors have since distanced themselves from the bill and its proponents.
As more countries threaten to penalize homosexuality with jail or death, the United States and United Nations are breaking down some of the institutional barriers that prevent many gays, lesbians and transgender people from seeking refuge. Most of those awarded refugee status belong to a political, ethnic or religious groups and are in danger in their homeland and have no place to live safely. LGBT status also can be considered a social class in countries where gays and lesbians have a well-founded fear of persecution.
“It hasn’t been a legal obstacle in a long time, but there have been enormous systemic obstacles,” said Neil Grungras, director of the nonprofit Organization for Refuge Asylum and Migration. “Few people, extremely few people, said this is the reason I’m being persecuted. We’re trying to make the system more open, less blocked.”
Kenya was not a safe place for Dyson, especially the cramped refugee camp where he found himself surrounded by refugees from war-torn nations with strict social views.
Dyson, who has changed his last name, in part because his family disowned him, befriended an American social worker from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society while he was living in Kenya. She connected him with Grungras, who encouraged him to move to California.
“They said, ‘Danny would fit here in the Bay Area.’ I love it here,” Dyson said.
For any refugee adjusting to a new country, getting acquainted with American life so quickly is remarkable, Grungras said. For someone without any family or cultural ties here, he added, it is extraordinary.
“I don’t know what it’s like for him every day. He carries a lot of pain around. Those scars just never really go away,” Grungras said.
“But in terms of how he’s doing, the way we measure resettlement success, he has a stable and good housing situation he likes, he has a job that’s completely stable and he likes. He’s completely self-reliant after just four months in the U.S. He’s got community. He’s got friends.”
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(c)2011 the Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, Calif.)
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AMX-2011-09-04T08:01:00-04:00<
Prosecutors vow to retry teen who killed gay classmate
By Catherine Saillant and Richard Winton
Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES - Prosecutors vowed Friday to immediately retry a California middle school student who shot a gay classmate, maintaining that the incident was a premeditated murder and a hate crime despite doubts by some jurors in the initial trial, which ended with a hung jury and a mistrial.
However, Ventura County prosecutors said they are considering whether to again try Brandon McInerney as an adult - a choice that legal experts believe made it harder for them to win a conviction.
McInerney, of Oxnard, who was 14 at the time of the killing, would face up to life in prison if convicted as an adult. In the juvenile system, even convicted murderers are typically released at age 25.
“We will consider the fact that this was a very significantly split jury. We will consider everything,” said Chief Assistant District Attorney Jim Ellison. “There are obviously very strong reactions on both sides, and we will consider all those in how we proceed.”
Jurors on Thursday said they were deadlocked on a verdict, with seven favoring a voluntary-manslaughter conviction and five pushing for first- or second-degree murder. The jurors, who have not spoken to the media about the deliberations, told defense attorneys that they did not believe the killing amounted to a hate crime.
Prosecutors on Friday disagreed and said they continue to believe the killing was motivated by victim Larry King’s sexual orientation. They also said they believe that McInerney was lying in wait to kill King, an allegation that automatically qualifies him to be tried as an adult, Ellison said.
Laurie Levenson, a Loyola law professor and former federal prosecutor, said it was possible that jurors thought the charges were too harsh.
“Jurors felt prosecutors overcharged, and they were clearly not comfortable putting the boy away for life. They probably believed the dynamic between two adolescent boys is not the same as two adults,” Levenson said. “With a hate crime, there is usually an agenda to go after a whole group, and this case as presented was a very personal. This was a shooting but not a traditional cold-blooded killing. It had an emotional complexity, especially one associated with adolescents.”
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(c)2011 the Los Angeles Times
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AMX-2011-09-02T17:29:00-04:00<
‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ ruling is moot, government argues
By Carol J. Williams
Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES - The law banning gays from openly serving in the military expires in 19 days, so a federal judge’s ruling that “don’t ask, don’t tell” is unconstitutional should be struck down as moot, government lawyers argued before a federal appeals court Thursday.
But the Log Cabin Republicans who sued the government over the policy seven years ago urged the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the ruling, arguing that it is needed to redress the professional harm inflicted on thousands of soldiers and sailors discharged over the last 17 years for being homosexual.
Dan Woods, a lawyer for the Log Cabin Republicans, warned the judges that without the precedent-setting ruling last year by U.S. District Judge Virginia A. Phillips that “don’t ask, don’t tell” violates gay service members’ free speech and due process rights, those discharged “would have to start from scratch” convincing a court that the policy was discriminatory.
Congress passed a law late last year to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell” after a period of transition and retraining that concludes Sept. 20. But the “collateral consequences” of a less-than-honorable discharge, exclusion from GI Bill benefits and lost income and promotion opportunities aren’t addressed by the repeal act, forcing those with claims against the government to seek relief in the courts, Woods noted.
“That’s why the government is trying to wipe this case off the books,” Woods said after the hearing, referring to the government’s potential liability for actions deemed illegal.
Justice Department attorney Henry Whitaker asked the judges to wait until the repeal becomes effective later this month, then declare Phillips’ ruling moot and have the Log Cabin Republicans’ lawsuit dismissed.
Asked by the judges whether the government continues to defend “don’t ask, don’t tell” as a constitutional statute, Whitaker said it did.
The three 9th Circuit judges who heard arguments in Pasadena gave no indication of when or how they would rule on the matter.
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(c)2011 the Los Angeles Times
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AMX-2011-09-01T15:54:00-04:00<
BC-FACEBOOK-GAYMARRIAGE:OS 08-29
Teacher says he was ‘thrown in the blender’ over gay marriage comments
By Erica Rodriguez
The Orlando Sentinel
MOUNT DORA, Fla. - Jerry Buell, who was reinstated to his Mount Dora High School history teaching position following a Facebook rant about gay marriage, said he felt like he was “thrown in the blender.”
Buell was investigated by the school district to see if his Facebook comments violated a professional code of ethics. He had made a Facebook post saying New York’s legalized gay marriage made him want to throw up and that the unions were part of a “cesspool.” The comments sparked national attention with both the conservative Liberty Counsel and the American Civil Liberties Union backing Buell’s right to make the comments.
Lake Superintendent Susan Moxley chose last week to reinstate Buell after a weeklong investigation.
“It hasn’t been fun,” Buell said. “I was thrown in the blender standing up for those First Amendment rights.”
He was allowed back in his classroom Thursday and described the day as “incredible.” “The key word I used today (Thursday) was ‘I’m going to treat you fairly,’” he said.
Buell’s lawyer said his class syllabus was also called into question during the school investigation because the district believed it violated the doctrine of the separation of church and state. The document offers this warning to students: “I teach God’s truth, I make very few compromises. If you believe you may have a problem with that, get your schedule changed, ‘cause I ain’t changing!”
When asked what a student should do if they don’t agree with Buell’s teaching, he had this to say: “I’m passionate about my faith, I’m very patriotic about my country. I just feel very strongly about certain issues ... basically it comes down to if you’re uncomfortable with that - if it’s a personality thing - then maybe you need to get your schedule changed.”
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(c)2011 The Orlando Sentinel (Orlando, Fla.)
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AMX-2011-08-29T18:24:00-04:00<
West Hollywood development pains the funky
By CHRISTINA HOAG
Associated Press
WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. (AP) - The city is considering holding a Go-Go Dancer Appreciation Day this fall to honor the club “groovers” who helped establish the Sunset Strip as a hub of hipness in the 1960s, and whose successors lend an edgy energy to its gay bars today.
Go-Go day would also highlight the quirky flamboyance that for decades has been the hallmark of this small burg shoehorned into the middle of Los Angeles.
“West Hollywood has been toned down to be family friendly. That’s not what we are,” said Mayor John Duran. “I was concerned there seemed to be a sanitizing of the city. This is the sort of campy, tongue-in-cheek thing we’re known for.”
With a 40 percent gay population, this densely populated enclave has been long known for its dare-to-be different lifestyle that has fostered a funky vibe of artsy boutiques and coffeehouses along leafy streets lined with quaint bungalows and aging apartment buildings.
But intense development pressure has brought a wave of gleaming condo and office towers, tony shops and big-box retailers over the last decade, leading many residents to fear that West Hollywood is falling victim to the bland metropolitan sprawl that typifies much of Los Angeles.
“Our personality is changing,” said Elyse Eisenberg, who heads the West Hollywood Heights Neighborhood Association. “The city’s been pushing out old time residents in favor of upscale residents, and destroying the quality of life. We want to see an urban village, not high rises.”
The swelling backlash has included lawsuits against the city, the formation of residents’ groups and the election of an anti-development councilman earlier this year in a race where gentrification was the hot-button issue.
For many, the city of 35,000 stands at a crossroads to determine its future.
“It’s critical for the city to maintain and forge its own identity,” said council newcomer John D’Amico. “It’s easy to turn into another part of Beverly Hills or Los Angeles.”
That would be anathema to West Hollywood, which takes pride in its renegade history.
Formerly unincorporated, the 1.9-square-mile community was historically a place where Angelenos could let loose with lax liquor and gambling laws. It later became a refuge for gays fleeing the heavy-handed Los Angeles Police Department and for Jews escaping the Soviet Union.
In the 1960s, a shambling stretch of Sunset Boulevard became the epicenter for the burgeoning rock music scene with venues such as the Troubadour, Roxy Theatre and Whisky a Go Go launching legendary bands including The Doors and The Byrds. The area became a hippie haven.
When the county planned to do away with rent control in unincorporated areas, seniors, gays and immigrants banded together to incorporate the city in 1984. Today, 77 percent of residents are renters who enjoy one of the strictest rent-control laws in the nation.
Local leaders cleaned up the city, whose odd boundaries look like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. They got rid of street prostitution, buried utility lines, added landscaping and lighting, and promoted civic events such as an outlandish Halloween parade that attracts 350,000 revelers.
They also made a point of implementing liberal, if sometimes offbeat, policies - stipulating pets be called “companions” and owners “guardians” and barring gasoline-powered leaf blowers - as well as providing a generous array of social services, including taxi vouchers for seniors, free HIV testing, youth scholarships and a transgender advisory board.
Over the past dozen years, as West Hollywood has found its niche in LA’s cosmopolitan landscape, a slew of office, condo and retail projects - large and small - have gone up.
John Heilman, a councilman since the city was formed, attributed at least part of the flood of interest to a waning of homophobia and AIDS fear since the 1980s.
“I think gay communities the world round have seen greater acceptance,” he wrote in an email.
The biggest developments are landing on the famed Sunset Strip.
One project, Sunset Time, entails a hotel-condo tower to be built on the site of the House of Blues nightclub. Nearby, the proposed $300 million Sunset Millennium development would build a hotel, shops and condos at a key intersection.
Residents say these types of developments are ruining West Hollywood’s eclectic neighborhood feel, and adding to traffic and parking woes.
They’re particularly riled by the city’s use of “development agreements,” which allow developers to skirt zoning laws governing issues such as building height and parking spots in return for cash payments to the city.
“I call them bribes,” said community activist Jeanne Dobrin, who sued the city over a five-story office-condo tower and got its height reduced slightly and $300,000 more for the city. “I claim the city is for sale.”
But officials note residents have benefited as the revenue enabled the city to stay in the black - with no cuts in staff or services - and even expand with a $64 million library to be opened next month and an automated parking garage when many other municipalities are being financially squeezed.
“We don’t have overdevelopment, but we want economic development. It’s a question of where you draw the line,” Duran said. “That’s the challenge.”
Critics say the boom has led to a whitewashing of the city’s provocative, adult atmosphere.
They point to instances when the city last year decided not to endorse the annual Erotic Fair Weekend due to the licentious art displayed, and another proposal to replace a building housing a popular addiction recovery center with a preschool. The council relented on both issues after residents complained.
Bar and restaurant owners protested an outdoor smoking ban, arguing it was out of place in anything-goes West Hollywood, which only has about 1,500 children, but that measure was approved.
West Hollywood’s growing pains are far from unique.
Many former cheap-rent neighborhoods have undergone similar evolutions after being revitalized by a Bohemian crowd, said Peter Dreier, director of urban and environmental policy at Occidental College.
He pointed to Brooklyn Heights in New York and San Francisco’s Mission District as two examples of once-dicey neighborhoods that are now fashionable addresses.
“They say ‘first come the gays and artists, then come the croissant restaurants, then come the lawyers.’ I think that’s true,” Dreier said.
Many in West Hollywood say they want to preserve their community’s character.
“We don’t need any more development,” said 20-year resident Karl Klug. “It’s much nicer to walk by a small house with a garden than a big apartment building with generic landscaping and security gates.”
Judge won’t drop charges in Rutgers case
By George Anastasia
The Philadelphia Inquirer
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - A Superior Court Judge ruled Friday that there is more than enough evidence to support invasion-of-privacy and bias-intimidation charges against former Rutgers University student Dharun Ravi, who used the webcam on his laptop computer to watch his male roommate having sex with a man.
The ruling by Judge Glenn Berman came in response to a defense motion to dismiss all charges in the high-profile case.
In rejecting the defense argument, Berman emphasized that his ruling was not a reflection on Ravi’s guilt or innocence, but rather an analysis of the prosecution’s grand jury presentation and the subsequent 15-count indictment handed up against the 19-year-old in April.
Ravi’s roommate, Tyler Clementi, 18, committed suicide shortly after discovering that the fellow freshman and others had viewed his encounter via a laptop webcam.
The case has attracted international attention and has become a rallying point for those concerned with cyber-bullying and the intimidation of gay youth.
Ravi, of Plainsboro, sat quietly through Friday’s hourlong proceeding dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and tie and flanked by two defense attorneys.
Clementi’s parents, Jane and Joseph, sat in the front row of the small third-floor courtroom and declined to comment as they left the courthouse.
Ravi has been charged with invasion of privacy, bias intimidation and tampering with evidence. He has pleaded not guilty and remains free on bail.
Clementi, of Ridgewood, jumped off the George Washington Bridge on Sept. 22, shortly after learning that Ravi and others had spied on him on Sept. 19.
Ravi also is accused of trying to view a second encounter on Sept. 21.
Clementi’s death does not figure in the indictment. Defense attorneys argued that the widespread attention the case has received is linked to Clementi’s suicide and has clouded the prosecution.
In the motion rejected by Berman, Ravi’s attorneys contended that the county prosecutor’s office had overcharged the case and distorted the facts.
Berman has scheduled a hearing for Oct. 20 at which he is expected to set a trial date. Ravi could face up to five years in prison if convicted of the most serious bias-intimidation charges.
The judge ruled on several other defense motions, but he said they would not take effect for seven days to allow the prosecution time to consider appeals.
Over the objections of Assistant County Prosecutor Julia McClure, Berman ruled that the defense should be given the name and birth date of the man who was in the dorm room with Clementi.
In court documents he has been identified only by his initials, “M.B.”
Berman ruled that defense attorney Steven D. Altman could have the information, but barred him from making the man’s name or any other details public.
Altman said he had no desire to publicize anything about M.B. personally, but he would like to question him about Clementi’s “behavior, demeanor and attitude.” That, he said, could help build a defense against the bias-intimidation charges.
The defense would like to show tht Clementi felt neither intimidated nor harrassed by Ravi.
M.B. had indicated, according to the prosecutor, that he might agree to be questioned by the defense, but only in the presence of a representative of the prosecutor’s office.
M.B. has told investigators that he met Clementi through an online chatroom and dating service for gay men. He has no obligation to speak to the defense, Berman pointed out.
The judge withheld rulings on defense motions to gain access to notes allegedly written by Clementi and to Clementi’s computer.
Berman said he tended to agree with the prosecution’s argument that that information was not relevant, but he said he wanted to review Clementi’s notes and the content of his computer privately before deciding.
He said he had the same reservations about a defense request for information gathered by Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police who recovered Clementi’s body.
McClure objected not only to the defense having access to the information, but to the judge reviewing it privately. Berman granted a seven-day delay after McClure said she wanted to consider filing an objection with the New Jersey State Appellate Court.
While lawyers for Ravi concede he exercised poor judgment and may have been insensitive, they claim he never intended to intimidate or harass Clementi because of his sexual orientation.
Ravi dropped out of Rutgers shortly after being arrested in October. He has remained free on bail.
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(c)2011 The Philadelphia Inquirer
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SUNS’ CHIEF EXECUTIVE QUITS, CALLING DECISION PERSONAL
BY HOWARD BECK
c.2011 New York Times News Service
Rick Welts is resigning as the president and chief executive of the Phoenix Suns, only four months after becoming the most prominent sports executive to acknowledge that he is gay.
Welts will step aside on Sept. 15, after nine years as the Suns’ top business executive. He is not leaving for another job, and is framing the decision as more personal than professional. He told The Arizona Republic that he would move to Sacramento to be closer to his partner.
“The most important thing for me is to get my personal and professional lives better aligned,” Welts was quoted as saying. “They’ve probably never been aligned. I’m 58 years old and it’s time to do that. This isn’t one of those departures to see greener pastures. It really is completely a personal situation. These guys have been tremendously accommodating and any other inference than that is absolutely crazy.”
Before joining the Suns, Welts spent 17 years working in business and marketing for the NBA league office in New York. He is credited with creating All-Star weekend in 1984.
In May, Welts stunned many around the league by disclosing his sexual orientation. “This is one of the last industries where the subject is off limits,” Welts said in a New York Times article. “Nobody’s comfortable in engaging in a conversation.”
AMX-2011-09-09T22:06:00-04:00<
ACLU’s ‘Don’t Filter Me’ campaign makes sense
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
The following editorial appeared in the Los Angeles Times on Thursday, Sept. 8:
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The Trevor Project is an organization devoted to preventing suicides among gay and lesbian teenagers. It has been honored by the White House. But some students have been barred from accessing the group’s website using school computers, even though the schools allow them to view all sorts of other sites, including some with anti-gay messages. This censorship of gay-themed, non-sexually explicit sites has resulted in an American Civil Liberties Union campaign called “Don’t Filter Me!” It’s good advice, and not just because it might spare a school district a lawsuit.
The original culprits in this snafu are not the schools but commercial Internet filtering programs that block gay-themed sites, however innocuous, along with more explicit sites that may include material - heterosexual or homosexual - that would be inappropriate for students. It’s the schools, however, that make the final decision on what is filtered. Some schools may have consciously banned sites such as the Trevor Project on the erroneous assumption that students can (and should) be shielded from discussions of homosexuality. Others genuinely thought they were blocking only pornography. Either way, the result has been censorship.
Filtering programs also have blocked the sites of PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) and GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network, another White House honoree). That’s fine with some social conservatives, who see such sites as propagating a “homosexual agenda,” a fair charge only if one defines the agenda as preaching respect for gay people. But even if one sees such sites as polemical, the same is true of anti-gay-rights websites such as the Family Research Council and the National Organization for Marriage, which students are free to view.
As a result of the “Don’t Filter Me!” campaign, some providers of filters are changing their software, and several school districts have agreed to unblock non-sexual, gay-themed content. The ACLU is also suing a school district in Missouri over its filtering policy, arguing that it violates students’ rights under a 1982 Supreme Court decision preventing schools from removing controversial books from their libraries.
That is a weighty legal argument, but the paramount reason for schools to stop blocking these sites is educational. Within sensible limits (such as a restriction on sexually explicit material), allowing students to browse the Web expands their horizons and, in the case of sites like the Trevor Project, could save their lives. It shouldn’t take a warning letter from the ACLU to convince school administrators of that proposition.
(c) 2011, Los Angeles Times. Visit the Los Angeles Times on the Internet at http://www.latimes.com/ Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
AMX-2011-09-09T08:00:00-04:00<
IN IMMIGRANT AREAS, A CULTURE CLASH OVER GAY MARRIAGE
BY DAN BILEFSKY
c.2011 New York Times News Service
NEW YORK -- Molly Blooms, a Victorian-accented Irish bar in Sunnyside, Queens, recently raffled off a free same-sex wedding reception, with a three-hour open bar, a D.J., a photographer and a horse-drawn gilded carriage to deliver the winning couple to the festivities. The bar’s owner thought the idea would be good for business and for the largely working-class and immigrant neighborhood.
But some in the community disagreed.
Neighbors said they would boycott the bar. Bloggers posted reports of past health violations there. Larry Yang, a Korean-American owner of a hardware store next door, said he resented such a public promotion of same-sex marriage. He said many among the large number of Korean-American Christians in Queens felt similarly but feared that if they spoke out they would be demonized by a liberal majority.
“If that horse-drawn carriage rides by my store, I will make sure my kids do not see it,” Yang, 45, said. “I am worried about what kind of message gay marriage is sending.”
The legalization of same-sex marriage in New York has been embraced by many in the city. But in some neighborhoods heavily populated by immigrants from countries where homosexuality is less accepted, the idea is stirring feelings of unease or, at times, outright disgust.
Sunnyside has been transformed in recent decades, first by immigration, and more recently byurban professionals priced out of Manhattan. As in some other parts of the city, same-sex marriage has laid bare the clash between the social conservatism of many immigrants and the values of the often wealthier and more liberal newcomers to the neighborhood.
Many immigrants in Sunnyside are Muslims from Turkey, where the military, the guardian of the country’s secular state, regards homosexuality as a disorder.
On a recent day, a group of men hunched over Turkish newspapers next to a mosque in a part of the neighborhood that includes kebab shops, a Jewish community center, a Romanian restaurant and a Russian hairdresser.
AliihsanSimcek, 63, a former police officer from Ankara, said many Turks in New York opposed same-sex marriage because Islam regards homosexuality as a sin. “Here in America, everything is possible,” he said. “I am not against gays, just gay marriage. I don’t want to see two guys kissing or two men adopting a child. I’ll never go to this Molly Blooms. What they do behind four walls is their business.”
Dean Sirigos, 50, a Greek-American writer for The National Herald, a Greek newspaper based in Long Island City, Queens, said that among the 450,000 Greek-Americans in the New York metropolitan region, the debate over same-sex marriage had created a culture clash and a generational divide. Even the younger people, reared on Internet dating and MTV, are struggling to reconcile secular values absorbed in America with the teachings of the Greek Orthodox Church, which opposes same-sex marriage.
In a National Herald poll late last month, about 1,000 Greek-Americans were asked, “Do you approve of gay marriage?” Eighty-six percent of the respondents said no.
“Many in the Greek community are conservative and traditional, and marriage is viewed as a sacrament of the church, not as a civil right,” Sirigos said.
In Flushing, Queens, one of New York’s most polyglot neighborhoods, with one of the largest Asian communities in the country, opponents of same-sex marriage said they had felt sidelined during the debate over it.
Dian Song Yu, executive director of the Flushing Business Improvement District, said many Chinese-Americans did not support same-sex marriage, especially those from mainland China, which has socially conservative Communist rulers. Yu said many Chinese-Americans had imported the values of their homeland, where gay-oriented websites are blocked, gay characters are largely absent from television and coming out remains rare.
“If someone were to open a gay club in Chinatown here, most people won’t go,” he said. “The younger generation might be more accepting, but for the older generation, it would be viewed as horrible.”
Even some who back same-sex marriage expressed ambivalence. The Rev. Joseph D. Jerome, a Haitian-American who is the rector at All Saints Episcopal Church in Sunnyside, said that though he supported the right of same-sex couples to wed, he was not ready to officiate at such marriages. He said he had yet to come to terms with the language and liturgy for such ceremonies.
“To pronounce someone ‘spouse and spouse’ would be difficult for me,” he said.
For all the dissenting voices in Sunnyside, the neighborhood is represented by a gay city councilman, Jimmy Van Bramer, a Democrat. He said he understood that some immigrants were uncomfortable with same-sex marriage, but he added that it was a sign of the times that he had been embraced by many of them.
“Today you can see two young gay men holding hands and walking down Queens Boulevard, and no one cares,” he said.
The owner of Molly Blooms, Ciaran Staunton -- a heterosexual married father of two and a Roman Catholic -- said he was determined to be part of what he called “the last great civil rights battle.”
He said most in the neighborhood had welcomed the idea of a free same-sex wedding reception.
“There are always going to be some naysayers who don’t like it,” said Staunton, 48, who came to New York from County Mayo, Ireland, nearly 20 years ago.
The pub was overflowing with Guinness-fueled revelers when the winners of the wedding reception, Janice Velten, 59, a mail carrier in Queens, and her girlfriend of 24 years, Pat Pfirman, 54, a civilian worker in the Police Department, were announced.
They said their biggest worry was that Molly Blooms was not large enough to host all the guests they planned to invite to their October celebration.
Velten recalled that when she moved to Sunnyside 30 years ago, it was largely Irish and Italian, and Catholic and conservative. Back then, coming out as gay was seen as debilitating, both personally and professionally, she said. But since the announcement of the raffle result, Velten said, residents of all backgrounds have high-fived her when she delivers the mail.
“Today, Sunnyside is no longer Archie Bunker land,” she said.
Around the neighborhood, though, some immigrants said they were still not ready for such stark social change. Yang, the hardware store owner, dismissed the free wedding reception as a cynical ploy.
“It’s a business thing, because a lot of gay people live here,” he said. “I have no problem with my gay customers. But we are Korean. We are conservative. No one says, ‘This gay marriage is a good thing.’ What is this world coming to?”
AMX-2011-09-07T23:12:00-04:00<
A Daring Take on Repression, Lesbianism in Iran
By Mark Jenkins
Special to The Washington Post
In the 1980s, before Iran’s cultural defenses were battered by the Internet, Maryam Keshavarz was a preteen threat to national purity. The U.S.-born filmmaker remembers traveling to her parents’ homeland to visit her cousins, bearing such prohibited gifts as pop-music cassettes.
“I would be sweating bullets going through customs,” she says. “In the old airport in Tehran, there was a bathroom area before you went through customs. And sometimes there would be a rumor, ‘Today they’re cracking down.’ As a kid once, I took all these Michael Jackson tapes, and I was breaking them, trying to shove them down the toilet, because I had heard that today was the day they were going to get you.”
Keshavarz, 36, doesn’t expect to go through Iranian customs any time soon. Her feature film debut, “Circumstance,” is about lesbian romance and abuse of religious authority, both taboo subjects in Iran. The director and the stars of the personal-is-political melodrama think they will probably be banned from the country for the near future.
“Circumstance” follows two high school classmates as they fall in love and explore Tehran’s underground youth culture of rave parties, recreational drug use, graffiti-painting expeditions and grooving to Le Tigre, the American lesbian electroclash trio. It’s “based on my experiences with my cousins,” Keshavarz says. “I was in awe of these women who were really pushing the boundaries.”
Among the story’s illicit locales is a clandestine DVD store. “Once my film is released on DVD, I know it will be available there,” Keshavarz says. “I’ve gotten hundreds of e-mails from kids in Iran. They ask, ‘We tried to download your film on this site. How can we download it?’ “
Although a few of the movie’s smaller parts are played by actors who still live in Iran, Keshavarz deliberately cast the three central characters from the Iranian diaspora. Lovers Afafeh and Shireen are played by Nikohl Boosheri and Sarah Kazemy, and Afafeh’s manipulative brother, Mehran, by Reza Sizo Safai.
“I auditioned about 2,000 people for the three leads,” the director says. “People could audition from Skype and on video. Nikohl was just out of high school, living in a small town outside of Vancouver. Sarah, I found in Paris. She was not an actor; she was at the Sorbonne. And Reza I found through traditional casting, in L.A.”
Keshavarz decided that the players had to be native Farsi speakers. “Aside from Nikohl, who’s never really been to Iran -- her parents escaped when she was an infant -- all of us had spent a significant part of time there. The actors were in Iran just before the shoot. Sort of a last-goodbye sort of thing. So when production ended, it was quite an emotional feeling on set.”
The director helped her brother, Hossein Keshavarz, make his 2010 film, “Dog Sweat,” in Iran. But she knew she couldn’t get script approval to shoot “Circumstance” there. So she gambled on Lebanon.
“It’s considered the gay mecca of the Middle East, the French Riviera of the Middle East,” the filmmaker says. “If you’re just a tourist, it’s very liberal. When you try to make a film, it’s more hairy. But it added to the authenticity.
“We had to bend a lot of rules. We basically censored our own script to get a permit to shoot,” she says. “We had some run-ins with the law. I was just amazed that everybody kept a level head. Because we knew, if the film was confiscated, that would be the end of it. There’s no budget to reshoot an independent film.” (Begun as Keshavarz’s New York University film school master’s thesis, “Circumstance” was made for less than $1 million.)
The character of Mehran, who works with the morality police to fulfill his personal desires, would be controversial in Iran. But Atafeh and Shireen’s kisses and caresses ( the movie shows nothing more than that) could shock viewers throughout the region.
“I can’t even show this film in the Middle East, except in Turkey and Israel,” Keshavarz says. “In Iranian culture, Muslim culture in general, we are so afraid of women’s sexuality. The film, for me, is not necessarily about queer sexuality, but just about sexuality.”
Underlining the movie’s critique is a subplot in which Atafeh and Shireen’s friend Hossein, an Iranian American like Keshavarz, dubs the Harvey Milk movie “Milk” for an Iranian bootleg. “I met someone who dubs ‘Gandhi’ into different languages for conflict zones,” Keshavarz says. “I thought that was a great idea, but when I was a kid, ‘Gandhi’ was shown in Iran. He’s the ultimate anti-imperialist, anti-British figure. Often the Iranian government will co-opt these figures. They even co-opted Che.
“So I thought, ‘Who is the figure they really can’t co-opt?’ When I was in Iran previously, ‘Brokeback Mountain’ was really popular. People really connected to the forbidden love. And Iranians really love Sean Penn. I thought there was a crossover between the democracy movement in Iran, and the gay movement in the U.S.”
That doesn’t mean that Keshavarz identifies more strongly with Hossein than with Atafeh and Shireen. “I identify with everyone!” she says, laughing. “But the character of Hossein is sort of a nod to my own perspective. Someone who knows the culture but is outside. He’s trying to engage in a dialogue that brings these two worlds together.”
AMX-2011-09-08T14:24:00-04:00<
COURT WEIGHS WHO DEFENDS CALIFORNIA’S MARRIAGE MEASURE
By JESSE McKINLEY
(c) Copyright 2011 New York Times News Service
SAN FRANCISCO -- In a hearing that suggested no quick resolution to the long-contested legal battle over Proposition 8, the same-sex marriage ban in California, several members of the state’s highest court seemed skeptical of arguments Tuesday that the measure’s supporters should not have a chance to defend it in federal court.
The hearing, at California Supreme Court here, came at the behest of a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Court of Appeals, which is reviewing a 2010 decision by a federal judge who found Proposition 8 to be unconstitutional.
The appellate court had asked the state court if the backers of Proposition 8 -- which passed in 2008 -- had legal standing to defend the measure under state law, because both the current and previous governors and attorneys general of California have repeatedly refused to argue for Proposition 8. And opponents of the measure say that without standing, there is no case, something that could mean a resumption of gay marriage in the state, where it was briefly legal in 2008.
But while no decisions were issued at the hearing Tuesday -- the seven-member Supreme Court has 90 days to do so -- there were indications that several California justices were wary of finding that supporters of Proposition 8 had no right to defend their measure.
The steady stream of questions from the judges seemed to cheer the backers of Proposition 8. Andrew P. Pugno, general counsel for the measure’s proponents, said that the court had shown that it was “very uncomfortable that voters go completely unrepresented.”
It was not the first time the California Supreme Court has heard arguments on same-sex marriage. In spring 2008, the court legalized such unions, setting off a flurry of some 18,000 marriages. That lasted until November 2008, when Proposition 8 passed with 52 percent of the vote. Since then, California has watched some other states make such unions legal, most notably New York this year.
On Tuesday, Theodore B. Olson, the conservative lawyer who has helped lead the federal legal challenge of Proposition 8, acknowledged that even with a quick decision -- either for standing or against -- there were still many days in court ahead, including what many people expect will be an eventual trip to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“We would all like this to move faster,” he said.
AMX-2011-09-06T20:04:00-04:00<
BC-GAYCOUPLES-DEPORT:CC 09-06
Deportation tide changing for gay couples
By Matt O’Brien
Contra Costa Times
OAKLAND, Calif. - When a judge last month closed a deportation case against Filipino immigrant Raul Sinense, he and his husband, Peter Gee, celebrated by having coffee together on Berkeley’s Solano Avenue.
The low-key celebration suited the low-key couple, who married on a Big Sur beach during the six-month window in 2008 when same-sex marriage was legal in California.
The occasion, however, also marked a turning point: The Oakland pair is one of just three gay couples nationwide to benefit from a new Obama administration policy that orders immigration officials to reconsider deporting illegal immigrants who have strong community and family ties.
“This is a really pivotal case,” Gee said. “It seems like the tide is changing in the U.S. toward inclusion, toward equality, toward human.”
Immigration Judge Tue Phan-Quang ordered the case against Sinense closed on Aug. 16 because the immigration service said a few days earlier it was no longer seeking to deport Sinense to the Philippines. The problems are not over for Sinense - his case is not decisively terminated, just on indefinite hold - but the action means the couple won’t be separated and Sinense can reapply for a work permit.
“San Francisco right now is really the center of this policy shift,” said Camiel Becker, the couple’s lawyer. “We have judges who don’t want to deport people if they’re in a same-sex marriage. It’s not just by chance. The trial attorneys and the judges understand this is a human right. If we were in the Harlingen, Texas, court, this would not be happening. This is all discretionary.”
A June 17 memorandum from John Morton, the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was the first sign of major changes happening within the nation’s complicated immigration enforcement apparatus, which deported a record 393,000 people last year.
Morton listed new guidelines for agents to use “prosecutorial discretion” when deciding whom to deport, and said special consideration should be made for students and other upstanding immigrants, especially when their removal from the country would split a family apart. For much of the summer, however, lawyers across the country remained unclear about whether the agency would show same-sex spouses the same discretion it shows opposite-sex spouses and other immediate family members.
Six states allow same-sex marriages but the federal government does not recognize them.
On June 29, a federal immigration judge in New Jersey was the first to halt the deportation of a gay spouse, a Venezuelan man who had married a U.S. citizen in Connecticut.
On July 13, San Francisco-based immigration Judge Marilyn Teeter halted the deportation of another Venezuelan man, Alex Benshimol, who had married his Southern California partner in Connecticut. Teeter gave immigration officials two months to contest her decision.
The answer came Aug. 11, when Aaron Keesler, a lawyer for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, wrote back that the agency was dropping its case against Benshimol.
On the same day, Keesler said the deportation case against Sinense was being dropped, and a judge formally closed that case Aug. 16.
That made Sinense, 46, and Gee, 49, one of the first three binational gay couples to be spared from separation as a result of the new policy.
“I see myself growing old with Peter,” Sinense said. “It would have been difficult starting my whole life over again.”
White House officials and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano made the new discretionary policy more explicit Aug. 18 when they announced they would begin a case-by-case review of the nation’s 300,000 pending deportation cases and close those against many illegal immigrants who are not criminals or repeat violators of immigration laws. The White House also made clear, for the first time, that same-sex marriages would be treated as a family tie.
Gee said the reprieve brought closure to a difficult time for the couple, who moved to East Oakland from Southern California less than two years ago.
“We were so naive about the whole process, what the options were, what to do,” Gee said. “We don’t have O.J. Simpson’s legal budget.”
Sinense has lived in California for about 15 years and had been working to get a green card. An insurance company agreed to sponsor him for an employment-based visa, he said, and he was able to get a legal work permit as he waded through the application process. In the meantime, he also met Gee, a native Californian and professional artist, and fell in love.
At their wedding ceremony in 2008, Sinense told guests of Gee’s “gentle aura.” Gee described how he was immediately connected by Sinense’s smile that put him at ease, and talked of their journey into a “most ordinary and simple life” together.
They learned the next year that it wouldn’t be so simple. The work visa plans fell through in the recession and Sinense received a deportation notice in 2009. They talked about what would happen if Sinense was forced to leave.
For Becker, their lawyer, keeping the couple together wasn’t just a matter of legal prowess. It was also personal.
A decade ago, Becker fell in love with a Salvadoran man while he was working in El Salvador. The pair wanted to move together to the United States, but the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which bans same-sex marriage, made it impossible for Becker to apply for a green card on his partner’s behalf, as he could have done if he married a Salvadoran woman. The same law made it impossible for Gee to apply for a green card for Sinense, though their marriage is considered legally valid in California.
Becker wrote about his experience last year in an essay for a local news outlet. Gee and Sinense read that essay and, after having contacted dozens of lawyers, decided it was Becker they wanted helping them.
Months after he took on their case, Becker began to sense that the Defense of Marriage Act was cracking when the Justice Department announced in February that it would stop defending it because it considered the act unconstitutional.
“At that point, I felt there was no way I was going to let Raul be deported. I just wasn’t going to let that happen,” Becker said.
He argued in court that the Constitution requires the couple’s same-sex marriage license to be recognized under immigration law. He encouraged Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, a friend of the couple, to write a letter on their behalf, which she did.
Gee and Sinense said they began to see their legal battle as a civil rights cause.
“I just see it as a right and I feel like it’s happening, it’s going to happen, it has to happen,” Gee said.
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(c)2011 the Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, Calif.)
Visit the Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, Calif.) at www.contracostatimes.com
AMX-2011-09-06T08:05:00-04:00<
Esoteric legal details come to forefront in gay marriage battle
By Howard Mintz
San Jose Mercury News
SAN JOSE, Calif. - At least for now, the fate of the legal battle over California’s ban on gay marriage no longer turns on the constitutional rights of same-sex couples to wed.
Instead, the latest chapter in the ongoing drama over gay nuptials rests on an arcane but critical legal procedure that dazzles legal scholars, torments first-year law students and forms the DNA of most every lawsuit that unfolds in the nation’s courts.
On Tuesday, the California Supreme Court will hear arguments over how that procedure, known as legal “standing,” applies in the ongoing tussle over Proposition 8, the 2008 voter-approved law that restored the state’s ban on same-sex marriage. Specifically, the justices will consider whether sponsors of Proposition 8 have a legal right, or standing, to defend the state law and appeal a federal judge’s ruling striking it down when California’s governor and attorney general refuse to do so.
The stakes are high. If the Supreme Court concludes that Proposition 8 backers do not have the right to appeal the ruling, it could slam the door on their efforts to keep the law in place and pave the way for same-sex weddings to resume in California. And if the Supreme Court sides with Proposition 8 sponsors, it would propel the legal battle forward, with the case widely expected to ultimately reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
Experts say it is anybody’s guess what the state Supreme Court will do.
“There are strong policy arguments on both sides,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California-Irvine’s law school. “I think it’s very difficult to predict what the California Supreme Court is going to do on this issue.”
The Proposition 8 case has taken a tortured path back to the state Supreme Court, which upheld the law after it was approved by a 52-to-48 percent vote. Last summer, after conducting an unprecedented trial in federal court, former San Francisco Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker struck down the law, finding it violated the federal equal protection rights of same-sex couples.
But Proposition 8 sponsors appealed Walker’s ruling to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on their own because state officials, including Gov. Jerry Brown and state Attorney General Kamala Harris, agreed with Walker’s conclusion. The attorney general ordinarily defends challenges to state laws, but in this rare case opted to drop any appeals.
The 9th Circuit then asked the state Supreme Court to address whether California law permits backers of ballot initiatives to defend them in such situations. Under ordinary circumstances, courts require a direct stake in the outcome of a legal controversy to qualify for legal standing, a standard muddied in the Proposition 8 case by the usual role of state officials to handle the defense of state laws.
The federal judges, in their request, highlighted a key concern in the case - that a governor and attorney general could “effectively veto the initiative” by refusing to defend it in court.
Proposition 8 supporters say the Supreme Court should reject that scenario, pointing out they’ve defended the law in a series of challenges to California’s gay marriage ban.
“Voters should not be left without any defense just because their officials refused to defend them,” said Austin Nimocks, senior counsel for the conservative Alliance Defense Fund.
In a flurry of legal briefs, gay marriage foes have lined up support for their position, including from former Attorney General Edwin Meese III and various conservative legal groups.
But same-sex marriage advocates also have a stack of arguments on their side. Lawyers for same-sex couples say state law makes it clear the governor and attorney general have the sole responsibility for defending and enforcing state law, not private citizens or groups.
“This unconstitutional harm has gone on for too long,” said Theodore Olson, a lawyer for the couples and former President George W. Bush’s solicitor general.
Harris has backed those arguments in the Supreme Court, saying in court papers that only public officials can defend laws or appeal rulings “in the name of the state.”
A group of local governments, led by Santa Clara County, have urged the Supreme Court to rule against the right of ballot measure sponsors to defend a state law, saying it would “create legal uncertainty for cities and counties” to turn that power over to private citizens.
Legal experts say there is a possibility the 9th Circuit may choose to rule on the substance of the gay marriage case regardless of what the Supreme Court decides. But while the showdown in the Supreme Court will not resolve the struggle over gay marriage rights, it is considered a crucial test that may shape the outcome in the long run.
“In a technical sense, the case may be kind of a sidebar,” said Marc Spindelman, an Ohio State University law professor. “But the law and principles ... are no side show. There’s nothing trifling about them.”
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(c)2011 the San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.)
Visit the San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.) at www.mercurynews.com
AMX-2011-09-05T19:08:00-04:00<
Gay Ugandan refugee finds home in Bay Area
By Matt O’Brien
Contra Costa Times
OAKLAND, Calif. - Being gay in Uganda was never easy for gospel singer Daniel Dyson, but the anti-gay hysteria that erupted in the African nation two years ago forced him to flee.
Prominent Christian pastors had launched a political movement to eliminate homosexuality in the country. They employed professed ex-gays to reveal the names, whereabouts and other identifying details of gay residents in Kampala, the capital city. Dyson was on the list.
“This is a killer dossier,” the tabloid Red Pepper newspaper wrote in an April 2009 article outing Dyson and dozens of others. “A heat-pounding (sic) and sensational masterpiece that largely exposes Uganda’s shameless men and unabashed women that have deliberately exported the Western evils to our dear and sacred society.”
Dyson, who landed in the Bay Area in the spring, is among the first refugees the United States has invited to live in California specifically because of anti-gay persecution abroad. The nonprofit groups that helped him move here - Jewish Family and Children’s Services of the East Bay and the San Francisco-based Organization for Refuge Asylum and Migration - are among the first in the country to take sexual orientation into account in the way they integrate refugees into a new community, aware that the ethnic communities and extended families most refugees rely on for support won’t necessarily accommodate them.
The State Department and the organizations that team with it usually rely on existing immigrant communities to help refugees find a job and become self-sufficient, but local organizations instead are using the gay community as a safety net, said Barbara Nelson of Jewish Family and Children’s Services, which also is working with a few gay refugees from Iran.
Dyson lived for a few months with a host family in Oakland before finding his own place in one of the world’s best-known gay neighborhoods: San Francisco’s Castro district. Volunteers helped him find an office job at a gay advocacy organization. The gregarious 30-something, who speaks near-perfect English, needed little help finding friends and outlets for his gospel singing.
“I am living really freely as a gay man. I’m what I am,” he said. “I have freedom. I’m not afraid for my life anymore. I can sleep peacefully.”
Dyson realized after arriving that “even in the U.S., gay people are fighting for their rights, their marriage rights,” but after attending a celebratory LGBT advocacy function, he also knew that his challenges here would be a world away from the problems in Uganda.
“I said, ‘Oh my God, these people are getting awards.’ Back home, we were running for our life,” he said.
Terrified by a growing movement tinged with violent rhetoric, many in the Ugandan gay community went further underground. Dyson did the opposite, defending his community on radio talk shows and trying to fight common misconceptions.
“They were saying that we were destroying African culture, so I went to the media houses, trying to educate people that gay people, we are African people, we are here,” he said.
He had been involved in low-profile lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender activism for more than five years, but the barrage of venom grew in 2009. On his way back from a radio station that spring, armed men kidnapped and brutally assaulted Dyson, he said, leaving injuries from which he is still recovering. He fled across the Kenyan border several days later.
About 76 countries prohibit homosexuality. In seven, it can be punishable by death.
Uganda is debating whether to imprison gays and execute those with “aggravated homosexuality” offenses. The lawmaker who proposed the bill and other Ugandan anti-gay activists have close ties to U.S.-based evangelical movements, though many American pastors have since distanced themselves from the bill and its proponents.
As more countries threaten to penalize homosexuality with jail or death, the United States and United Nations are breaking down some of the institutional barriers that prevent many gays, lesbians and transgender people from seeking refuge. Most of those awarded refugee status belong to a political, ethnic or religious groups and are in danger in their homeland and have no place to live safely. LGBT status also can be considered a social class in countries where gays and lesbians have a well-founded fear of persecution.
“It hasn’t been a legal obstacle in a long time, but there have been enormous systemic obstacles,” said Neil Grungras, director of the nonprofit Organization for Refuge Asylum and Migration. “Few people, extremely few people, said this is the reason I’m being persecuted. We’re trying to make the system more open, less blocked.”
Kenya was not a safe place for Dyson, especially the cramped refugee camp where he found himself surrounded by refugees from war-torn nations with strict social views.
Dyson, who has changed his last name, in part because his family disowned him, befriended an American social worker from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society while he was living in Kenya. She connected him with Grungras, who encouraged him to move to California.
“They said, ‘Danny would fit here in the Bay Area.’ I love it here,” Dyson said.
For any refugee adjusting to a new country, getting acquainted with American life so quickly is remarkable, Grungras said. For someone without any family or cultural ties here, he added, it is extraordinary.
“I don’t know what it’s like for him every day. He carries a lot of pain around. Those scars just never really go away,” Grungras said.
“But in terms of how he’s doing, the way we measure resettlement success, he has a stable and good housing situation he likes, he has a job that’s completely stable and he likes. He’s completely self-reliant after just four months in the U.S. He’s got community. He’s got friends.”
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(c)2011 the Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, Calif.)
Visit the Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, Calif.) at www.contracostatimes.com
AMX-2011-09-04T08:01:00-04:00<
Prosecutors vow to retry teen who killed gay classmate
By Catherine Saillant and Richard Winton
Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES - Prosecutors vowed Friday to immediately retry a California middle school student who shot a gay classmate, maintaining that the incident was a premeditated murder and a hate crime despite doubts by some jurors in the initial trial, which ended with a hung jury and a mistrial.
However, Ventura County prosecutors said they are considering whether to again try Brandon McInerney as an adult - a choice that legal experts believe made it harder for them to win a conviction.
McInerney, of Oxnard, who was 14 at the time of the killing, would face up to life in prison if convicted as an adult. In the juvenile system, even convicted murderers are typically released at age 25.
“We will consider the fact that this was a very significantly split jury. We will consider everything,” said Chief Assistant District Attorney Jim Ellison. “There are obviously very strong reactions on both sides, and we will consider all those in how we proceed.”
Jurors on Thursday said they were deadlocked on a verdict, with seven favoring a voluntary-manslaughter conviction and five pushing for first- or second-degree murder. The jurors, who have not spoken to the media about the deliberations, told defense attorneys that they did not believe the killing amounted to a hate crime.
Prosecutors on Friday disagreed and said they continue to believe the killing was motivated by victim Larry King’s sexual orientation. They also said they believe that McInerney was lying in wait to kill King, an allegation that automatically qualifies him to be tried as an adult, Ellison said.
Laurie Levenson, a Loyola law professor and former federal prosecutor, said it was possible that jurors thought the charges were too harsh.
“Jurors felt prosecutors overcharged, and they were clearly not comfortable putting the boy away for life. They probably believed the dynamic between two adolescent boys is not the same as two adults,” Levenson said. “With a hate crime, there is usually an agenda to go after a whole group, and this case as presented was a very personal. This was a shooting but not a traditional cold-blooded killing. It had an emotional complexity, especially one associated with adolescents.”
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(c)2011 the Los Angeles Times
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AMX-2011-09-02T17:29:00-04:00<
‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ ruling is moot, government argues
By Carol J. Williams
Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES - The law banning gays from openly serving in the military expires in 19 days, so a federal judge’s ruling that “don’t ask, don’t tell” is unconstitutional should be struck down as moot, government lawyers argued before a federal appeals court Thursday.
But the Log Cabin Republicans who sued the government over the policy seven years ago urged the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the ruling, arguing that it is needed to redress the professional harm inflicted on thousands of soldiers and sailors discharged over the last 17 years for being homosexual.
Dan Woods, a lawyer for the Log Cabin Republicans, warned the judges that without the precedent-setting ruling last year by U.S. District Judge Virginia A. Phillips that “don’t ask, don’t tell” violates gay service members’ free speech and due process rights, those discharged “would have to start from scratch” convincing a court that the policy was discriminatory.
Congress passed a law late last year to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell” after a period of transition and retraining that concludes Sept. 20. But the “collateral consequences” of a less-than-honorable discharge, exclusion from GI Bill benefits and lost income and promotion opportunities aren’t addressed by the repeal act, forcing those with claims against the government to seek relief in the courts, Woods noted.
“That’s why the government is trying to wipe this case off the books,” Woods said after the hearing, referring to the government’s potential liability for actions deemed illegal.
Justice Department attorney Henry Whitaker asked the judges to wait until the repeal becomes effective later this month, then declare Phillips’ ruling moot and have the Log Cabin Republicans’ lawsuit dismissed.
Asked by the judges whether the government continues to defend “don’t ask, don’t tell” as a constitutional statute, Whitaker said it did.
The three 9th Circuit judges who heard arguments in Pasadena gave no indication of when or how they would rule on the matter.
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(c)2011 the Los Angeles Times
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AMX-2011-09-01T15:54:00-04:00<
BC-FACEBOOK-GAYMARRIAGE:OS 08-29
Teacher says he was ‘thrown in the blender’ over gay marriage comments
By Erica Rodriguez
The Orlando Sentinel
MOUNT DORA, Fla. - Jerry Buell, who was reinstated to his Mount Dora High School history teaching position following a Facebook rant about gay marriage, said he felt like he was “thrown in the blender.”
Buell was investigated by the school district to see if his Facebook comments violated a professional code of ethics. He had made a Facebook post saying New York’s legalized gay marriage made him want to throw up and that the unions were part of a “cesspool.” The comments sparked national attention with both the conservative Liberty Counsel and the American Civil Liberties Union backing Buell’s right to make the comments.
Lake Superintendent Susan Moxley chose last week to reinstate Buell after a weeklong investigation.
“It hasn’t been fun,” Buell said. “I was thrown in the blender standing up for those First Amendment rights.”
He was allowed back in his classroom Thursday and described the day as “incredible.” “The key word I used today (Thursday) was ‘I’m going to treat you fairly,’” he said.
Buell’s lawyer said his class syllabus was also called into question during the school investigation because the district believed it violated the doctrine of the separation of church and state. The document offers this warning to students: “I teach God’s truth, I make very few compromises. If you believe you may have a problem with that, get your schedule changed, ‘cause I ain’t changing!”
When asked what a student should do if they don’t agree with Buell’s teaching, he had this to say: “I’m passionate about my faith, I’m very patriotic about my country. I just feel very strongly about certain issues ... basically it comes down to if you’re uncomfortable with that - if it’s a personality thing - then maybe you need to get your schedule changed.”
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(c)2011 The Orlando Sentinel (Orlando, Fla.)
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AMX-2011-08-29T18:24:00-04:00<