DADT repeal, obit, NY race, Michele Bachmann, Jane Lynch, B&B denies couple
Articles for your perusal. Time stamps at the end of the story contain the filing date. Take note: DADT officially ends Tuesday!!!
Military society subtlety changes as gay ban ends
By JULIE WATSON
Associated Press
SAN DIEGO (AP) - Night-long celebrations will mark the final countdown to the historic end of the U.S. military’s ban on openly gay troops, and even more partying will take place once it is lifted Tuesday. But in many ways change is already here.
Countless subtle acts over the past months have been reshaping the military’s staunchly traditional society in preparation for the U.S. armed forces’ biggest policy shift in decades. Supporters of repeal compare it to the racial de-segregation of troops more than 60 years ago.
For some gay service members, the fear of discovery and reprisals dissipated months ago when a federal court halted all investigations and discharge proceedings under “don’t ask, don’t tell,” while military leaders prepared the armed services for its end.
Several have come out to their peers and commanders.
A few have since placed photographs of their same-sex partners on their desks and attended military barbecues and softball games with their significant others. In San Diego, about 200 active-duty personnel - both gay and heterosexual - made up the nation’s first military contingency to participate in a Gay Pride march this summer, carrying banners identifying their branches of service. An Army soldier had tears, saying she was touched by the thousands cheering them on, after hiding her identity for so long.
“We’re Gay. Get Over it,” stated the cover page of the Marine Corps Times distributed to bases worldwide a week ahead of Tuesday’s repeal.
The headline offended some but for many troops it echoed their sentiment that repeal is a non-issue for a military that operates by following orders and is busy at war. That sentiment is backed by Pentagon officials who say they have found no evidence the repeal so far has disrupted forces or harmed unit cohesion as predicted by opponents.
Air Force Capt. Diane Cox, whose gay son served in the Navy, said she got into heated debates with service members vowing not to take showers and share rooms with gays before Congress voted to repeal the law, but after the military held sensitivity trainings to explain the new rules “everybody just shut up.”
Jokes are still told about gay people but the harsh remarks have stopped, she said.
“It’s a new Air Force. I’m really surprised how everything settled down as much as it has,” said the emergency room nurse at Travis Air Force base, near Fairfield in northern California. “Some of the best, most honorable people have had the military pin medals of honor on them for combat and then they’ve gotten kicked out over this. It’s shameful. I’m glad it’s done.”
Many no doubt will continue to keep their personal lives private. But gay service members say their jobs already feel easier. They no longer use code words or change pronouns in their conversations to protect their careers. The Associated Press interviewed more than a dozen people who are currently in the military or left within recent months about the changes taking place.
Air Force Lt. Col. Victor Fehrenbach, 42, said the differences may be subtle but the impact is profound. Fehrenbach came out on national TV in 2009 after the Air Force started discharge proceedings, which were later stalled by the repeal process. He reported for duty two days later and was congratulated by colleagues.
“I realized this was the first time I wouldn’t have to lie. There was a great sense of relief, a great sense of pride that I had never felt before,” said Fehrenbach, who retires from service Oct. 1. “They’re going to feel that on Tuesday - every service member who has not come out yet. Even if they choose to keep their private life private, they’re going to have the feeling that a burden has been lifted.”
The United States on Tuesday will join 29 others nations, including Israel, Canada, Germany and Sweden, that allow gay individuals to serve openly in their militaries.
More than 14,000 people were discharged under the 1993 Clinton-era law. President Barack Obama campaigned on the law’s repeal, but efforts stalled in Congress until a federal judge in California last year declared it unconstitutional and briefly blocked its enforcement. Lawmakers in December voted to lift the ban and a federal appeals court overturned the ruling, allowing for a lengthy repeal process monitored by Pentagon officials - which they said helped ensure the change did not disrupt the military. Obama certified in July that repeal would not harm the military’s ability to fight.
Pentagon officials have spent the past 60 days reviewing policies and benefits to iron out details, including how the repeal will affect housing, military transfers and other health and social benefits.
More than 2 million troops have undergone courses on how to deal with possible scenarios for personnel who may, as examples, witness same-sex partners kissing after a deployed ship comes home or see a gay service member hold hands with someone at the mall.
Some adjustments will take time, Fehrenbach said, like seeing troops with their same-sex partners at military balls - which is expected to happen in coming months.
“It will be great if some do it,” he said. “But they should just realize they’ll get some looks. And that’s OK.”
Opponents of the policy change say they worry service members who oppose homosexuality are the ones who will get looks or even get punished by receiving less important assignments or postings, discouraging them from expressing their views.
“I am concerned that some soldiers or military personnel who hold orthodox views about sexuality will no longer feel comfortable attending balls or military functions. Will those persons not be seen as team players or will they be marginalized in some way because they no longer feel comfortable doing the things they were comfortable doing?” said retired Army Col. Ron Crews of Grace Churches International, which has endorsed 20 active-duty chaplains. All chaplains need to be sponsored by a church organization to be in the military.
Crews said the rules are unclear: Chaplains wonder whether they can deny gay service members wanting to sing in the chapel choir or teach in Sunday school as they are allowed to do in their civilian churches. Will they have to invite same-sex partners on retreats as part of the military’s strong bonds program that helps couples dealing with the hardship of deployments, or will they face punishment if they refuse?
Crews says if his chaplains counseled same-sex couples on such retreats they would be in violation of their denominational understanding of marriage, and could have their endorsement revoked and be discharged.
“There are many ramifications of this policy change that are yet to be seen,” he said. “What we’ve told our chaplains is that they’ve got to be very clear with their commanders about what they can and cannot do in this environment.”
Gay marriage is one of the thornier issues.
An initial move by the Navy earlier this year to train chaplains about same-sex civil unions in states where they are legal was shelved after more than five dozen lawmakers objected. The Pentagon is reviewing the issue.
Military officials also say the disparity in benefits between gay married couples and heterosexual couples also must be addressed.
Gays and lesbians will share the same barracks and bathroom facilities as other troops. But those legally married will be treated differently from heterosexual married couples when it comes to assigned housing, relocation packages and some other benefits.
Lance Cpl. Anthony Hernandez, who is stationed at Twentynine Palms in the desert northeast of San Diego, said Marines are still divided over the issue, with opponents worried openly gay Marines will dilute the Corps’ tough image.
“The way I think of it, if you’re willing to put your life on the line for your country, then what’s the problem if you’re gay” the 20-year-old Marine said.
Hernandez’s older brother, Danny, was discharged under “don’t ask, don’t tell” in 2010.
“I cried about it,” Hernandez said. “I didn’t know why I was crying. It wasn’t because I found out he was gay. It was more about the discharge, about what he would do with his life now. I knew he always wanted to be a Marine like me.”
Danny Hernandez plans to apply to re-enlist after celebrating Tuesday.
BISHOP WALTER C. RIGHTER, 87, DIES; FACED HERESY TRIAL
By PAUL VITELLO
(c) Copyright 2011 New York Times News Service
Walter C. Righter, an Episcopal bishop who in 1996 was brought to trial and absolved of a charge of heresy for having ordained an actively gay man as a deacon, died on Sept. 11 at his home outside Pittsburgh. He was 87.
The cause was chronic lung disease, his wife, Nancy, said.
Righter’s trial was a major public skirmish in a battle over homosexuality that has roiled the Episcopal Church for decades and continues to be a source of conflict, both internally and between the church and its worldwide parent body, the Anglican Communion.
The heresy charge was brought against Righter by a group of conservative bishops alarmed that increasing numbers of gay men and lesbians were receiving ordination, despite a resolution adopted by church leaders in 1979 declaring it “not appropriate for this church to ordain a practicing homosexual.”
Barry L. Stopfel, the openly gay man ordained by Righter in 1990 as a deacon, the office just below priesthood, was said to be one of dozens of gay and lesbian priests and deacons ordained since the resolution had passed. Since 2003, the church has elected two openly gay bishops.
At the time of the ordination of Stopfel, Righter, the former bishop of Iowa, was working in semiretirement as an assistant to the bishop of Newark, an outspoken supporter of ordaining gay men and lesbians. His accusers brought their charges against him five years later, just before the statute of limitations for violating church rules was set to expire.
Righter reacted with a mix of indignation and insouciant humor to the charge of heresy. It was only the second time in the history of the Episcopal Church that a bishop had faced such a charge.
“Basically, my response is, it’s absurd,” he told The New York Times. “I’m not guilty of heresy. There isn’t anything in the church’s canons or traditions that says you can’t ordain gay people.”
Then 71 and living in retirement in New Hampshire, he scolded his accusers, saying: “I’m retired. I don’t have a secretary. I don’t have a budget. I don’t have a travel allowance. So theoretically, I’m an easy mark.”
To indicate that he would not be such an easy mark, Righter soon obtained a set of vanity license plates that said “HRETIC.” They remained affixed to his Subaru Legacy throughout the church trial that led to his being absolved of violating “core doctrine,” and for years afterward.
Walter Cameron Righter was born in Philadelphia on Oct. 23, 1923, the elder of two sons of Richard and Dorothy Righter. His father and his grandfather were executives for U.S. Steel. After serving in the infantry during World War II, he studied at Yale Divinity School and was ordained in 1951 as a priest in the Diocese of Pittsburgh.
Shortly after being elected bishop of the Diocese of Iowa in 1972, Righter cast the deciding vote at a diocesan convention in favor of the ordination of women.
In a statement issued Monday, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, the chief ecumenical officer of the church, called Righter “a faithful and prophetic servant.” She praised his “steadfast willingness to help the church move beyond prejudices into new possibilities.”
Besides his wife, he is survived by a son, Richard, of Keene, N.H., and a daughter, Becky Richardson of Urbandale, Iowa; and two stepchildren, David DeGroot and Katherine Gallogly, both of Oceanside, N.Y. Four grandchildren and his brother, Richard, also survive.
In interviews and in a 1998 memoir, “A Pilgrim’s Way,” Righter said that while he was pleased to have become something of a hero to gay men and lesbians in his church, he hoped he would not be remembered for what he considered to be an essentially political episode in his life, the heresy charge.
He was most proud of his pastoral work. “I always got a real charge from helping someone with a personal discovery,” he said. “I really enjoyed working one on one.”
AMX-2011-09-17T14:34:00-04:00<
ADD GAY MARRIAGE TO FACTORS CITED IN RESULT OF HOUSE RACE
BY THOMAS KAPLAN
c.2011 New York Times News Service
NEW YORK -- Bob Turner’s victory over Assemblyman David I. Weprin in Tuesday’s special congressional election has been chalked up to many factors: unhappiness with President Barack Obama, the sluggish economy and the Middle East peace process, to name three.
But Brian S. Brown has another explanation: same-sex marriage.
Brown is the president of the National Organization for Marriage, which opposes same-sex marriage. Weprin, a Democrat, voted to legalize it; Turner, a Republican, opposes it.
Weprin was the first Albany lawmaker to appear on a ballot since the Legislature voted in June to legalize same-sex marriage, and his support of it appeared to hurt him with the 9th Congressional District’s substantial Orthodox Jewish community, elements of which were already concerned about whether his party is supportive enough of Israel.
Opponents of same-sex marriage say they plan to use Weprin’s defeat as a springboard as they seek in next year’s legislative elections to defeat lawmakers who voted to allow gay men and lesbians to wed.
Although representatives of the candidates denied the issue had a large impact, Brown said in an interview Friday that Weprin’s defeat was evidence that gay rights advocates were mistaken when they assured lawmakers who voted for same-sex marriage that they would not be hurt by their votes in future campaigns.
“I don’t think a serious person can say that anymore,” Brown said. “I think David Weprin knows that he was sold a false bill of goods, and these other legislators are going to learn the same thing.”
Gay rights advocates, not surprisingly, disagree. They are saying that Weprin’s loss to Turner had little to do with the issue.
“Marriage equality did not play an influential, even modest, role in the outcome of this special election,” said Brian Ellner, a senior strategist for the Human Rights Campaign, which seeks equality. “What people are focused on are jobs.”
The 9th District’s unusual demographics, and the lack of exit polling, make it difficult to determine how much the marriage issue affected the election.
In Queens, Adam Goldsmith, 24, who said he is an Orthodox Jew, said he had been bothered by Weprin’s representation of himself as an Orthodox Jew as he explained his support for same-sex marriage. “He presented himself as a religious Jew,”
Goldsmith said. “But the Jewish community knows we don’t believe in that. We feel he represented us in a very poor way.”
Neither candidate made same-sex marriage a campaign issue. But gay rights groups held a fundraiser in August for Weprin, and the Human Rights Campaign asked its supporters to volunteer for him and donated money to his election effort.
The National Organization for Marriage spent $53,000 on the race, financing mailings and automated phone calls from opponents of the marriage law, including State Sen. Ruben Diaz Sr., a Bronx Democrat, and a Brooklyn rabbi, Zecharia Wallerstein, urging voters to reject Weprin.
In his phone message, Wallerstein asserted that Weprin “defied Jewish law” by supporting same-sex marriage in the Assembly.
A video of Weprin’s 90-second speech in the Legislature, explaining his decision to support same-sex marriage, was widely circulated among Orthodox Jews. In his speech, Weprin said, “My religion is very important to me, personally, but this is not a religious issue.”
Weprin repeatedly faced questions about his vote on the issue on the campaign trail. He defended his vote when asked about it at debates and other appearances, saying same-sex marriage was an issue of civil rights.
The Weprin campaign said it believed that despite the occasional criticism, a majority of voters in the Brooklyn and Queens district were in favor of allowing gay couples to wed.
“Same-sex marriage was not a major factor in the race,” the campaign’s manager, Jake Dilemani, said.
A Turner spokesman agreed that the issue was not a determining factor in the special election.
“We worked hard not to make it an issue in the race,” the spokesman, William O’Reilly, said. “David Weprin’s position on gay marriage probably won him as many votes as it lost him, so in the end it was likely a push.”
Now, supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage are both turning their attention to next year’s elections. The National Organization for Marriage recently put up a roadside billboard in the district of State Sen. Roy J. McDonald of Saratoga County, one of the four Republican senators who voted for the marriage bill, saying “Roy McDonald: You’re Fired!!!” Brown said similar billboards would soon go up in the districts of the other three Republicans.
Three high-profile supporters of same-sex marriage -- Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg; Tim Gill, a philanthropist and former software developer; and Paul E. Singer, a hedge fund manager -- plan to host a fundraiser next month in Manhattan on behalf of the four senators.
AMX-2011-09-16T23:58:00-04:00<
Bachmann defends remarks on gays, HPV vaccine in appearance on ‘Tonight Show’
By Robin Abcarian and Seema Mehta
Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES - Republican presidential contender Michele Bachmann, whose gaffes have made her a favorite punching bag for Jay Leno and other late night comedians, paid Leno a visit Friday.
In her first appearance on “The Tonight Show,” Bachmann of Minnesota tried to show her lighter side - even making a joke about Christian anti-gay therapy, but Leno challenged her on gay rights, the HPV vaccine, her opposition to the debt ceiling and other conservative positions.
The comedian’s gentle persistence could not budge Bachmann from her talking points.
He pressed the congresswoman about why she repeated a story about a mother who claimed a vaccination against the human papilloma virus caused mental retardation in her daughter.
“Something like 30 million people have had this (shot),” said Leno, “and there haven’t been any cases of this (retardation), or at least recorded cases.”
“Well, I wasn’t speaking as a doctor. I wasn’t speaking as a scientist,” said Bachmann, repeating the defense she has used all week. “I was just relating what this woman said.”
Leno asked her about a mental health clinic run by Bachmann’s husband, which has come under fire for offering “reparative therapy” aimed at gay clients.
“It’s a Christian counseling clinic we have,” said Bachmann.
“Well, that whole ‘pray the gay away’ thing,” said Leno. “I don’t get that.”
“Well, see, I think when I heard that,” said Bachmann, “I really thought it was, like, kind of a midlife crisis line - “Pray away the gray.’ That’s what I thought it was.”
“But it sounds like if two gay people want to get married, that’s their business; that doesn’t concern us,” said Leno. “I mean, why is that even an issue?”
“Well, because the family is foundational,” said Bachmann, “and marriage between a man and a woman has been what the law has been for years and years.”
Bachmann ended her appearance by teasing Leno about choosing him for the No. 2 spot on her presidential ticket. “You don’t want a cut in pay, so what can I say?” she joked.
“Well, we’d probably have an argument over that gay thing,” he replied.
Earlier in the day at a rally in Costa Mesa, Bachmann engaged in more routine political rhetoric, sniping at Texas Gov. Rick Perry as she struggled to regain her footing in the GOP presidential contest. She reiterated her accusation, first voiced Monday during a tea party/CNN debate, that Perry abused his power and inappropriately rewarded a political donor when he ordered sixth-grade girls to get the HPV vaccine.
“It’s wrong to abuse executive authority with unilateral action and of course the governor of Texas admitted as much that he made a mistake,” Bachmann told reporters at the Orange County Fairgrounds. “People don’t want a president or a governor making decisions based on political connections. It’s wrong.”
The vaccine, Gardasil, is made by Merck, a company that has donated almost $30,000 to Perry and employed as its lobbyist his former chief of staff.
Although Bachmann had scored debate points Monday when she slammed Perry for his Gardasil executive order, it was after that debate that she told the story about the crying mother who said the vaccine had caused her daughter to suffer “mental retardation.”
Physicians and federal health officials dismissed the story, saying that even the most severe reactions to the vaccine do not include such effects.
On Friday, as he toured a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Atlantic, Iowa, Perry predicted that Bachmann would admit she had erred by repeating the unsubstantiated anecdote.
“I think it was an ill choice of response when she had no scientific backing, to say the least,” Perry told reporters. “And my bet is if Mrs. Bachmann had the opportunity to retrieve those words, that she certainly would.”
But on Friday, Bachmann stood firm, using the line she would later offer to Leno about not being a doctor or scientist.
“I’m not a doctor, I’m not a scientist,” she told reporters. “I was just relating what the woman had told me about her daughter.”
Bachmann has seen a chunk of her support migrate to Perry, who entered the race the same day she won the non-binding Ames straw poll in Iowa. Both are favorites of the tea party movement and evangelical conservatives, and Perry’s popularity among those blocs has halted Bachmann’s momentum.
In reliably blue California, she drew only about 100 supporters to the Orange County fairgrounds. Last week, in nearby Corona del Mar, however, Perry drew about 1,000.
After leaving the “Tonight Show” taping in Burbank, Bachmann was scheduled to end her two-day swing through California with a speech before the California GOP convention.
(c)2011 the Los Angeles Times
AMX-2011-09-16T23:07:00-04:00<
JANE LYNCH FINDS HERSELF
BY JUDITH NEWMAN
c.2011 New York Times News Service
This is like a bad first date, I think. I discreetly dab my face, sweating like Albert Brooks in “Broadcast News,” as Jane Lynch sits quietly beside me, all 8 feet of her.
We are in Atlanta, where Lynch has just wrapped up filming of the Farrelly Brothers’ “Three Stooges” movie, due out next summer. She is gracious but serious, perhaps a little distant. She is thinking about something, but what? It is then that I notice her sweater is inside out. Do I tell her, I wonder?
It’s nerve-racking, being a fan. Long before the cartoonishly malevolent Sue Sylvester terrorized McKinley High on “Glee,” and long before she was, as the actor Michael McKean put it, “everybody’s favorite great big tall weird blonde,” I was enthralled by Jane Lynch.
She was someone who knew how to commit, however outrageous a character was. It was entirely plausible that as the lesbian dog trainer in “Best in Show,” she was so irresistible that she persuaded her wealthy client to play for the other team. And “The 40-Year-Old Virgin"? When everything about that movie had faded from memory, I could still see her towering like a vulture over the terrified Steve Carell, reminding him that if he’d just give her a chance in the sack, “I will haunt your dreams.”
I stand up to go to the restroom to fix my makeup, which I think is running down my face. The heel comes off my shoe. Rather than hop across the Four Seasons dining room, I sit down again. Finally, Lynch’s coffee arrives. She goes to take a sip, and spills it everywhere. “I’m clumsy,” she said, sopping it up with insufficient napkins.
Now everything is much better. Fittingly, social awkwardness and its consequences are the themes of Lynch’s new memoir, “Happy Accidents,” which she wrote with Lara Embry, a psychotherapist and her wife for one year. It’s one of those startling and rare celebrity memoirs that manage to be funny and touching and even inspirational, without making you want to hurl. Because it’s about failure and fear as much as it’s about success. Perhaps more so.
Lynch said her extreme social anxiety was fueled by a sense, from a very early age, that she was not quite as other girls were. An athlete, as compared with her brother, she wished her father would take her to sports events; I’ll be your boy, she thought to herself.
She liked to sneak into his closet and wear his clothes. (She still likes 1960s men’s clothes. Last year for Halloween she was Don Draper.) When she found out, around the age of 12, what “gay” meant, she was horrified. “I knew instinctively it was a disease and a curse,” she writes. “No one could ever, ever know.”
She was never very good at disguising her unease, but she did her best, developing a nasty little drinking habit ("To think I wasted my drinking years on Miller Lite when I could have had good wines,” she said) and a taste for writing earnest angst-ridden songs with titles like “Blood Red Tears Stain My Face.” Years later she was able to perform those songs, to much hilarity, in a one-woman show. But at the time, “I was completely serious about them,” Lynch said, giving me a taste of one dedicated to her ex-partner titled, “I Gave You the Gun to Shoot Me":
I know the timing is right. Please get out of my sight. I gave you the keys to my Corolla. Now I know just why I’ve got a yellow boot on my tire, soy sauce in the glove. Is this what you call love?
“It was really pretty,” she added. “The ending had the same chord as ‘Dust in the Wind."’
She tried on various personas with her clothing, too. In her 20s she went from propriety and the Peter Pan collars of her teens to what she now calls the homeless cowboy look: “Long underwear with boxer shorts over them. It was delightful.”
Eventually, as she became more comfortable in her own skin, she cured the drinking habit with chocolate ice cream, coffee and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and her questionable dressing habits with stylists. But while acknowledging she doesn’t have a fabulous eye for herself, Lynch has always loved fashion, and is fascinated by clothing as a signifier. Take Sue Sylvester’s track suit.
“She sees herself as a warrior, always battling something, and the track suit is her armor,” Lynch said. This season on “Glee,” Sue Sylvester will be running for Congress, as a Christian conservative. “We’ll probably be adding pearls to her suit,” Lynch said. “Or maybe a little American flag.”
Lynch herself is a compulsive shopper with thousands of dollars of clothes in her closet that don’t fit. “When I’m not feeling good about how I look, I figure if I just buy the right piece of clothing, I’ll feel all right,” she said. Feeling good or bad about her body depends on whether she is up or down 5 pounds. On a woman who is 6 feet tall.
“Go ahead, laugh!” she said. “But it’s true. I don’t wear particular designers. I wear whoever fits me well. I try to dress the bottom I have. The body I have and the bottom I have. I have the intention of looking fabulous every time, and I care about it a great deal. I’m very vain.”
Looking at Lynch, I can’t help thinking of something Nora Ephron once said about herself: “One of the few advantages to not being beautiful is that one usually gets better-looking as one gets older; I am, in fact, at this very moment gaining my looks.” (And so it is with Lynch. At 51, she’s a knockout.)
Embry has gone a long way toward helping Lynch with self-acceptance, since she strong-arms Lynch into exercising and “she has no issues with my body.”
“Other than, you know, she likes it,” Lynch said.
Lynch is open about her sexuality, yet never expected or wanted to be the beautiful Midwestern face of lesbianism in America. “You know, it’s funny,” she said. “My wife is nine years younger, she went to Smith, she felt comfortable.”
“It’s a generational thing,” she said. “But to this day, well, like, I’ll see a very fey guy on TV and I’ll be thinking, ‘Couldn’t you butch it up a little?’ I want us to make ourselves palatable to the world.”
Which may be one reason that Lynch expects to femme it up at the Emmys on Sunday night. When she hosts the show, she said, there will be no tuxes and no track suits. “David Meister is designing,” she said. “But hopefully I’m not coming out in a different dress every time I walk onstage. I don’t know how women do that, and don’t you think it’s kind of distracting? I think the clothes will serve the show, as opposed to the show serving the clothes.”
But she’s not too worried -- for once. “You know,” she said in parting, “I was filled with angst all the time, but when it came down to it, I dove into what was in front of me and I always did my best. I invested 100 percent. And that’s what saved me.”
AMX-2011-09-18T00:01:00-04:00<
Illinois civil union law pits B&B owners against same-sex couple
By Rex W. Huppke
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO - Not long after ink from the governor’s signature had dried on Illinois’ civil unions law, Todd and Mark Wathen began preparations for a June ceremony.
The couple wanted to hold the event somewhere quaint in central Illinois, a place that would be convenient to family in Kentucky and Indiana and to their home in downstate Mattoon. They reached out to two bed and breakfast establishments - and in each case the owners told the Wathens they were not willing to host a civil union.
The Beall Mansion in Alton told the Wathens via email that they “will just be doing traditional weddings.” The owner of the Timber Creek Bed & Breakfast in Paxton wrote in an email to the couple: “We will never host same-sex civil unions. We will never host same-sex weddings even if they become legal in Illinois. We believe homosexuality is wrong and unnatural based on what the Bible says about it. If that is discrimination, I guess we unfortunately discriminate.”
“After all this happened, I just didn’t even want to talk about the wedding,” said Todd Wathen. “It took an event we had looked forward to for years and ruined it.”
The Wathens wound up holding a ceremony in their backyard soon after the law took effect in June, but they did not let the matter with Beall Mansion and Timber Creek rest.
The couple filed a complaint with the Illinois Department of Human Rights, which investigated and found “substantial evidence” that a civil rights violation had been committed.
The August finding allows the Wathens 90 days to either file a complaint with the state Human Rights Commission or take civil action in circuit court. The Wathens’ attorney, Betty Tsamis of Chicago, told the Chicago Tribune that her clients have chosen the latter path and will file lawsuits against both businesses as early as next week.
This action, should it proceed, could bring to the courtroom a debate over the boundary lines between religious freedom and discrimination in Illinois.
Steven Amjad, an attorney representing Timber Creek, said the state constitution guarantees religious freedoms.
“These are business owners that have strong religious convictions. The legislature has created this (conflict), and the courts will have to sort this out,” he said.
Andrew Koppelman, a professor of political science and law at Northwestern University, said the question is whether the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act - which protects religious freedoms from government intrusion - can trump the state’s Human Rights Act, which includes the protection of people based on sexual orientation.
“The hotels seem pretty clearly in violation of the Human Rights Act,” Koppelman said.
“And if you’re going to say that somebody is exempted from the human rights law under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, that would mean that people could discriminate based on religious views. It’s a slippery slope.”
As civil union and same-sex marriage laws have been enacted in states across the country, similar legal cases have surfaced. In Vermont, for example, a lesbian couple has sued a bed and breakfast for having a “no-gay reception policy.”
“This issue is coming up in many different places,” said Jennifer Pizer, legal director at the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at the University of California at Los Angeles.
“Some people talk about religious freedom being an absolute freedom. But the limits start to come into play when people wish to act in certain ways in furtherance of their beliefs. The Supreme Court has said before that freedom of belief is absolute, but the freedom to act cannot be.”
A similarly themed case recently played out in Illinois when Catholic Charities fought the state over whether the organization discriminated against same-sex couples by not allowing them to adopt foster children.
Attorneys for Catholic Charities said the civil unions bill - formally known as the Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act - provides exceptions for religious groups that don’t recognize civil unions. Attorneys for the state said those exceptions only apply to clergy who do not want to officiate civil unions.
In August, a judge sidestepped the religious freedom issue while ruling that the state could sever its contracts with Catholic Charities. That ruling is likely to be appealed.
Illinois attorney Jason Craddock, a member of the Alliance Defense Fund, a national Christian legal organization that opposes abortion and same-sex marriage, is also representing Timber Creek. He said cases like this one involving the Wathens are critical for people of faith who believe their First Amendment freedom of religion is inviolable.
“I believe strongly that liberty of conscience, particularly religious liberty of conscience, is what our nation was built on and is something that goes deep to our souls,” Craddock said. “Increasingly it’s being pitted against the asserted rights of homosexuals. Now it’s going beyond just asking for tolerance. Now we’re getting into a situation where government is telling people of faith, ‘You can’t live out your faith if it happens to disagree with this particular group.’”
The Wathens’ Chicago-based attorney, Betty Tsamis, said this case isn’t about stifling a person’s religious freedom, it’s about making sure that a public business does not discriminate against people because of their sexuality.
“For the religious right, they view this as a very important case strategically,” Tsamis said. “They’re investing a lot into making sure that the Wathens lose. Our goal is to simply make sure these people are complying with the law. This isn’t about the money. This is about the principle. A business cannot violate someone’s civil rights because of who that person is.”
Pizer, the UCLA professor, said this case and others like it mirror litigation that surfaced during the civil rights era in the wake of laws mandating desegregation
“For each generation or each new issue of inclusion, there can be questions about what the law means and what the law requires of people,” she said. “Sometimes, there’s a simple resistance to the concept. But it also can be sometimes a matter of honest confusion. For example, some of what’s going on now is that people believe - honestly, sincerely believe - that their religious views do trump the civil rights law and give them a legal defense. They believe they’re not breaking the law.”
But the courts have generally not agreed with that thinking: “You do have a constitutional right, but it’s not a free pass to avoid all the laws. People have thought that, but the Supreme Court has often said, ‘No.’”
The owners of the Beall Mansion referred calls to their attorney, John Hopkins of Edwardsville, who said he had no additional comments to make until the Wathens formally proceed with their case. Jim Walder, co-owner of Timber Creek, wrote the following statement in an email:
“Todd Wathen’s inquiry came months before the civil-union law went into effect and we had not yet thought through the implications of how that law might impact our business. After considering the issue, we decided that we would continue to host wedding ceremonies for marriages, but that we would not expand our services to include civil unions of any kind.”
The Wathens met in Kentucky in 2003 and moved to Illinois in 2006. They say they decided to take legal action against the two businesses because they don’t want others to have similar experiences.
“I’m a white male in my early 40s and I’d never experienced discrimination in my life,” said Mark Wathen. “When I came up against this I was like, ‘Whoa. This is not the 1960s.’”
Todd Wathen added: “We just didn’t feel like we could sit back and let this happen.”
___
(c)2011 the Chicago Tribune
Visit the Chicago Tribune at www.chicagotribune.com
AMX-2011-09-16T17:16:00-04:00<
Military society subtlety changes as gay ban ends
By JULIE WATSON
Associated Press
SAN DIEGO (AP) - Night-long celebrations will mark the final countdown to the historic end of the U.S. military’s ban on openly gay troops, and even more partying will take place once it is lifted Tuesday. But in many ways change is already here.
Countless subtle acts over the past months have been reshaping the military’s staunchly traditional society in preparation for the U.S. armed forces’ biggest policy shift in decades. Supporters of repeal compare it to the racial de-segregation of troops more than 60 years ago.
For some gay service members, the fear of discovery and reprisals dissipated months ago when a federal court halted all investigations and discharge proceedings under “don’t ask, don’t tell,” while military leaders prepared the armed services for its end.
Several have come out to their peers and commanders.
A few have since placed photographs of their same-sex partners on their desks and attended military barbecues and softball games with their significant others. In San Diego, about 200 active-duty personnel - both gay and heterosexual - made up the nation’s first military contingency to participate in a Gay Pride march this summer, carrying banners identifying their branches of service. An Army soldier had tears, saying she was touched by the thousands cheering them on, after hiding her identity for so long.
“We’re Gay. Get Over it,” stated the cover page of the Marine Corps Times distributed to bases worldwide a week ahead of Tuesday’s repeal.
The headline offended some but for many troops it echoed their sentiment that repeal is a non-issue for a military that operates by following orders and is busy at war. That sentiment is backed by Pentagon officials who say they have found no evidence the repeal so far has disrupted forces or harmed unit cohesion as predicted by opponents.
Air Force Capt. Diane Cox, whose gay son served in the Navy, said she got into heated debates with service members vowing not to take showers and share rooms with gays before Congress voted to repeal the law, but after the military held sensitivity trainings to explain the new rules “everybody just shut up.”
Jokes are still told about gay people but the harsh remarks have stopped, she said.
“It’s a new Air Force. I’m really surprised how everything settled down as much as it has,” said the emergency room nurse at Travis Air Force base, near Fairfield in northern California. “Some of the best, most honorable people have had the military pin medals of honor on them for combat and then they’ve gotten kicked out over this. It’s shameful. I’m glad it’s done.”
Many no doubt will continue to keep their personal lives private. But gay service members say their jobs already feel easier. They no longer use code words or change pronouns in their conversations to protect their careers. The Associated Press interviewed more than a dozen people who are currently in the military or left within recent months about the changes taking place.
Air Force Lt. Col. Victor Fehrenbach, 42, said the differences may be subtle but the impact is profound. Fehrenbach came out on national TV in 2009 after the Air Force started discharge proceedings, which were later stalled by the repeal process. He reported for duty two days later and was congratulated by colleagues.
“I realized this was the first time I wouldn’t have to lie. There was a great sense of relief, a great sense of pride that I had never felt before,” said Fehrenbach, who retires from service Oct. 1. “They’re going to feel that on Tuesday - every service member who has not come out yet. Even if they choose to keep their private life private, they’re going to have the feeling that a burden has been lifted.”
The United States on Tuesday will join 29 others nations, including Israel, Canada, Germany and Sweden, that allow gay individuals to serve openly in their militaries.
More than 14,000 people were discharged under the 1993 Clinton-era law. President Barack Obama campaigned on the law’s repeal, but efforts stalled in Congress until a federal judge in California last year declared it unconstitutional and briefly blocked its enforcement. Lawmakers in December voted to lift the ban and a federal appeals court overturned the ruling, allowing for a lengthy repeal process monitored by Pentagon officials - which they said helped ensure the change did not disrupt the military. Obama certified in July that repeal would not harm the military’s ability to fight.
Pentagon officials have spent the past 60 days reviewing policies and benefits to iron out details, including how the repeal will affect housing, military transfers and other health and social benefits.
More than 2 million troops have undergone courses on how to deal with possible scenarios for personnel who may, as examples, witness same-sex partners kissing after a deployed ship comes home or see a gay service member hold hands with someone at the mall.
Some adjustments will take time, Fehrenbach said, like seeing troops with their same-sex partners at military balls - which is expected to happen in coming months.
“It will be great if some do it,” he said. “But they should just realize they’ll get some looks. And that’s OK.”
Opponents of the policy change say they worry service members who oppose homosexuality are the ones who will get looks or even get punished by receiving less important assignments or postings, discouraging them from expressing their views.
“I am concerned that some soldiers or military personnel who hold orthodox views about sexuality will no longer feel comfortable attending balls or military functions. Will those persons not be seen as team players or will they be marginalized in some way because they no longer feel comfortable doing the things they were comfortable doing?” said retired Army Col. Ron Crews of Grace Churches International, which has endorsed 20 active-duty chaplains. All chaplains need to be sponsored by a church organization to be in the military.
Crews said the rules are unclear: Chaplains wonder whether they can deny gay service members wanting to sing in the chapel choir or teach in Sunday school as they are allowed to do in their civilian churches. Will they have to invite same-sex partners on retreats as part of the military’s strong bonds program that helps couples dealing with the hardship of deployments, or will they face punishment if they refuse?
Crews says if his chaplains counseled same-sex couples on such retreats they would be in violation of their denominational understanding of marriage, and could have their endorsement revoked and be discharged.
“There are many ramifications of this policy change that are yet to be seen,” he said. “What we’ve told our chaplains is that they’ve got to be very clear with their commanders about what they can and cannot do in this environment.”
Gay marriage is one of the thornier issues.
An initial move by the Navy earlier this year to train chaplains about same-sex civil unions in states where they are legal was shelved after more than five dozen lawmakers objected. The Pentagon is reviewing the issue.
Military officials also say the disparity in benefits between gay married couples and heterosexual couples also must be addressed.
Gays and lesbians will share the same barracks and bathroom facilities as other troops. But those legally married will be treated differently from heterosexual married couples when it comes to assigned housing, relocation packages and some other benefits.
Lance Cpl. Anthony Hernandez, who is stationed at Twentynine Palms in the desert northeast of San Diego, said Marines are still divided over the issue, with opponents worried openly gay Marines will dilute the Corps’ tough image.
“The way I think of it, if you’re willing to put your life on the line for your country, then what’s the problem if you’re gay” the 20-year-old Marine said.
Hernandez’s older brother, Danny, was discharged under “don’t ask, don’t tell” in 2010.
“I cried about it,” Hernandez said. “I didn’t know why I was crying. It wasn’t because I found out he was gay. It was more about the discharge, about what he would do with his life now. I knew he always wanted to be a Marine like me.”
Danny Hernandez plans to apply to re-enlist after celebrating Tuesday.
BISHOP WALTER C. RIGHTER, 87, DIES; FACED HERESY TRIAL
By PAUL VITELLO
(c) Copyright 2011 New York Times News Service
Walter C. Righter, an Episcopal bishop who in 1996 was brought to trial and absolved of a charge of heresy for having ordained an actively gay man as a deacon, died on Sept. 11 at his home outside Pittsburgh. He was 87.
The cause was chronic lung disease, his wife, Nancy, said.
Righter’s trial was a major public skirmish in a battle over homosexuality that has roiled the Episcopal Church for decades and continues to be a source of conflict, both internally and between the church and its worldwide parent body, the Anglican Communion.
The heresy charge was brought against Righter by a group of conservative bishops alarmed that increasing numbers of gay men and lesbians were receiving ordination, despite a resolution adopted by church leaders in 1979 declaring it “not appropriate for this church to ordain a practicing homosexual.”
Barry L. Stopfel, the openly gay man ordained by Righter in 1990 as a deacon, the office just below priesthood, was said to be one of dozens of gay and lesbian priests and deacons ordained since the resolution had passed. Since 2003, the church has elected two openly gay bishops.
At the time of the ordination of Stopfel, Righter, the former bishop of Iowa, was working in semiretirement as an assistant to the bishop of Newark, an outspoken supporter of ordaining gay men and lesbians. His accusers brought their charges against him five years later, just before the statute of limitations for violating church rules was set to expire.
Righter reacted with a mix of indignation and insouciant humor to the charge of heresy. It was only the second time in the history of the Episcopal Church that a bishop had faced such a charge.
“Basically, my response is, it’s absurd,” he told The New York Times. “I’m not guilty of heresy. There isn’t anything in the church’s canons or traditions that says you can’t ordain gay people.”
Then 71 and living in retirement in New Hampshire, he scolded his accusers, saying: “I’m retired. I don’t have a secretary. I don’t have a budget. I don’t have a travel allowance. So theoretically, I’m an easy mark.”
To indicate that he would not be such an easy mark, Righter soon obtained a set of vanity license plates that said “HRETIC.” They remained affixed to his Subaru Legacy throughout the church trial that led to his being absolved of violating “core doctrine,” and for years afterward.
Walter Cameron Righter was born in Philadelphia on Oct. 23, 1923, the elder of two sons of Richard and Dorothy Righter. His father and his grandfather were executives for U.S. Steel. After serving in the infantry during World War II, he studied at Yale Divinity School and was ordained in 1951 as a priest in the Diocese of Pittsburgh.
Shortly after being elected bishop of the Diocese of Iowa in 1972, Righter cast the deciding vote at a diocesan convention in favor of the ordination of women.
In a statement issued Monday, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, the chief ecumenical officer of the church, called Righter “a faithful and prophetic servant.” She praised his “steadfast willingness to help the church move beyond prejudices into new possibilities.”
Besides his wife, he is survived by a son, Richard, of Keene, N.H., and a daughter, Becky Richardson of Urbandale, Iowa; and two stepchildren, David DeGroot and Katherine Gallogly, both of Oceanside, N.Y. Four grandchildren and his brother, Richard, also survive.
In interviews and in a 1998 memoir, “A Pilgrim’s Way,” Righter said that while he was pleased to have become something of a hero to gay men and lesbians in his church, he hoped he would not be remembered for what he considered to be an essentially political episode in his life, the heresy charge.
He was most proud of his pastoral work. “I always got a real charge from helping someone with a personal discovery,” he said. “I really enjoyed working one on one.”
AMX-2011-09-17T14:34:00-04:00<
ADD GAY MARRIAGE TO FACTORS CITED IN RESULT OF HOUSE RACE
BY THOMAS KAPLAN
c.2011 New York Times News Service
NEW YORK -- Bob Turner’s victory over Assemblyman David I. Weprin in Tuesday’s special congressional election has been chalked up to many factors: unhappiness with President Barack Obama, the sluggish economy and the Middle East peace process, to name three.
But Brian S. Brown has another explanation: same-sex marriage.
Brown is the president of the National Organization for Marriage, which opposes same-sex marriage. Weprin, a Democrat, voted to legalize it; Turner, a Republican, opposes it.
Weprin was the first Albany lawmaker to appear on a ballot since the Legislature voted in June to legalize same-sex marriage, and his support of it appeared to hurt him with the 9th Congressional District’s substantial Orthodox Jewish community, elements of which were already concerned about whether his party is supportive enough of Israel.
Opponents of same-sex marriage say they plan to use Weprin’s defeat as a springboard as they seek in next year’s legislative elections to defeat lawmakers who voted to allow gay men and lesbians to wed.
Although representatives of the candidates denied the issue had a large impact, Brown said in an interview Friday that Weprin’s defeat was evidence that gay rights advocates were mistaken when they assured lawmakers who voted for same-sex marriage that they would not be hurt by their votes in future campaigns.
“I don’t think a serious person can say that anymore,” Brown said. “I think David Weprin knows that he was sold a false bill of goods, and these other legislators are going to learn the same thing.”
Gay rights advocates, not surprisingly, disagree. They are saying that Weprin’s loss to Turner had little to do with the issue.
“Marriage equality did not play an influential, even modest, role in the outcome of this special election,” said Brian Ellner, a senior strategist for the Human Rights Campaign, which seeks equality. “What people are focused on are jobs.”
The 9th District’s unusual demographics, and the lack of exit polling, make it difficult to determine how much the marriage issue affected the election.
In Queens, Adam Goldsmith, 24, who said he is an Orthodox Jew, said he had been bothered by Weprin’s representation of himself as an Orthodox Jew as he explained his support for same-sex marriage. “He presented himself as a religious Jew,”
Goldsmith said. “But the Jewish community knows we don’t believe in that. We feel he represented us in a very poor way.”
Neither candidate made same-sex marriage a campaign issue. But gay rights groups held a fundraiser in August for Weprin, and the Human Rights Campaign asked its supporters to volunteer for him and donated money to his election effort.
The National Organization for Marriage spent $53,000 on the race, financing mailings and automated phone calls from opponents of the marriage law, including State Sen. Ruben Diaz Sr., a Bronx Democrat, and a Brooklyn rabbi, Zecharia Wallerstein, urging voters to reject Weprin.
In his phone message, Wallerstein asserted that Weprin “defied Jewish law” by supporting same-sex marriage in the Assembly.
A video of Weprin’s 90-second speech in the Legislature, explaining his decision to support same-sex marriage, was widely circulated among Orthodox Jews. In his speech, Weprin said, “My religion is very important to me, personally, but this is not a religious issue.”
Weprin repeatedly faced questions about his vote on the issue on the campaign trail. He defended his vote when asked about it at debates and other appearances, saying same-sex marriage was an issue of civil rights.
The Weprin campaign said it believed that despite the occasional criticism, a majority of voters in the Brooklyn and Queens district were in favor of allowing gay couples to wed.
“Same-sex marriage was not a major factor in the race,” the campaign’s manager, Jake Dilemani, said.
A Turner spokesman agreed that the issue was not a determining factor in the special election.
“We worked hard not to make it an issue in the race,” the spokesman, William O’Reilly, said. “David Weprin’s position on gay marriage probably won him as many votes as it lost him, so in the end it was likely a push.”
Now, supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage are both turning their attention to next year’s elections. The National Organization for Marriage recently put up a roadside billboard in the district of State Sen. Roy J. McDonald of Saratoga County, one of the four Republican senators who voted for the marriage bill, saying “Roy McDonald: You’re Fired!!!” Brown said similar billboards would soon go up in the districts of the other three Republicans.
Three high-profile supporters of same-sex marriage -- Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg; Tim Gill, a philanthropist and former software developer; and Paul E. Singer, a hedge fund manager -- plan to host a fundraiser next month in Manhattan on behalf of the four senators.
AMX-2011-09-16T23:58:00-04:00<
Bachmann defends remarks on gays, HPV vaccine in appearance on ‘Tonight Show’
By Robin Abcarian and Seema Mehta
Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES - Republican presidential contender Michele Bachmann, whose gaffes have made her a favorite punching bag for Jay Leno and other late night comedians, paid Leno a visit Friday.
In her first appearance on “The Tonight Show,” Bachmann of Minnesota tried to show her lighter side - even making a joke about Christian anti-gay therapy, but Leno challenged her on gay rights, the HPV vaccine, her opposition to the debt ceiling and other conservative positions.
The comedian’s gentle persistence could not budge Bachmann from her talking points.
He pressed the congresswoman about why she repeated a story about a mother who claimed a vaccination against the human papilloma virus caused mental retardation in her daughter.
“Something like 30 million people have had this (shot),” said Leno, “and there haven’t been any cases of this (retardation), or at least recorded cases.”
“Well, I wasn’t speaking as a doctor. I wasn’t speaking as a scientist,” said Bachmann, repeating the defense she has used all week. “I was just relating what this woman said.”
Leno asked her about a mental health clinic run by Bachmann’s husband, which has come under fire for offering “reparative therapy” aimed at gay clients.
“It’s a Christian counseling clinic we have,” said Bachmann.
“Well, that whole ‘pray the gay away’ thing,” said Leno. “I don’t get that.”
“Well, see, I think when I heard that,” said Bachmann, “I really thought it was, like, kind of a midlife crisis line - “Pray away the gray.’ That’s what I thought it was.”
“But it sounds like if two gay people want to get married, that’s their business; that doesn’t concern us,” said Leno. “I mean, why is that even an issue?”
“Well, because the family is foundational,” said Bachmann, “and marriage between a man and a woman has been what the law has been for years and years.”
Bachmann ended her appearance by teasing Leno about choosing him for the No. 2 spot on her presidential ticket. “You don’t want a cut in pay, so what can I say?” she joked.
“Well, we’d probably have an argument over that gay thing,” he replied.
Earlier in the day at a rally in Costa Mesa, Bachmann engaged in more routine political rhetoric, sniping at Texas Gov. Rick Perry as she struggled to regain her footing in the GOP presidential contest. She reiterated her accusation, first voiced Monday during a tea party/CNN debate, that Perry abused his power and inappropriately rewarded a political donor when he ordered sixth-grade girls to get the HPV vaccine.
“It’s wrong to abuse executive authority with unilateral action and of course the governor of Texas admitted as much that he made a mistake,” Bachmann told reporters at the Orange County Fairgrounds. “People don’t want a president or a governor making decisions based on political connections. It’s wrong.”
The vaccine, Gardasil, is made by Merck, a company that has donated almost $30,000 to Perry and employed as its lobbyist his former chief of staff.
Although Bachmann had scored debate points Monday when she slammed Perry for his Gardasil executive order, it was after that debate that she told the story about the crying mother who said the vaccine had caused her daughter to suffer “mental retardation.”
Physicians and federal health officials dismissed the story, saying that even the most severe reactions to the vaccine do not include such effects.
On Friday, as he toured a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Atlantic, Iowa, Perry predicted that Bachmann would admit she had erred by repeating the unsubstantiated anecdote.
“I think it was an ill choice of response when she had no scientific backing, to say the least,” Perry told reporters. “And my bet is if Mrs. Bachmann had the opportunity to retrieve those words, that she certainly would.”
But on Friday, Bachmann stood firm, using the line she would later offer to Leno about not being a doctor or scientist.
“I’m not a doctor, I’m not a scientist,” she told reporters. “I was just relating what the woman had told me about her daughter.”
Bachmann has seen a chunk of her support migrate to Perry, who entered the race the same day she won the non-binding Ames straw poll in Iowa. Both are favorites of the tea party movement and evangelical conservatives, and Perry’s popularity among those blocs has halted Bachmann’s momentum.
In reliably blue California, she drew only about 100 supporters to the Orange County fairgrounds. Last week, in nearby Corona del Mar, however, Perry drew about 1,000.
After leaving the “Tonight Show” taping in Burbank, Bachmann was scheduled to end her two-day swing through California with a speech before the California GOP convention.
(c)2011 the Los Angeles Times
AMX-2011-09-16T23:07:00-04:00<
JANE LYNCH FINDS HERSELF
BY JUDITH NEWMAN
c.2011 New York Times News Service
This is like a bad first date, I think. I discreetly dab my face, sweating like Albert Brooks in “Broadcast News,” as Jane Lynch sits quietly beside me, all 8 feet of her.
We are in Atlanta, where Lynch has just wrapped up filming of the Farrelly Brothers’ “Three Stooges” movie, due out next summer. She is gracious but serious, perhaps a little distant. She is thinking about something, but what? It is then that I notice her sweater is inside out. Do I tell her, I wonder?
It’s nerve-racking, being a fan. Long before the cartoonishly malevolent Sue Sylvester terrorized McKinley High on “Glee,” and long before she was, as the actor Michael McKean put it, “everybody’s favorite great big tall weird blonde,” I was enthralled by Jane Lynch.
She was someone who knew how to commit, however outrageous a character was. It was entirely plausible that as the lesbian dog trainer in “Best in Show,” she was so irresistible that she persuaded her wealthy client to play for the other team. And “The 40-Year-Old Virgin"? When everything about that movie had faded from memory, I could still see her towering like a vulture over the terrified Steve Carell, reminding him that if he’d just give her a chance in the sack, “I will haunt your dreams.”
I stand up to go to the restroom to fix my makeup, which I think is running down my face. The heel comes off my shoe. Rather than hop across the Four Seasons dining room, I sit down again. Finally, Lynch’s coffee arrives. She goes to take a sip, and spills it everywhere. “I’m clumsy,” she said, sopping it up with insufficient napkins.
Now everything is much better. Fittingly, social awkwardness and its consequences are the themes of Lynch’s new memoir, “Happy Accidents,” which she wrote with Lara Embry, a psychotherapist and her wife for one year. It’s one of those startling and rare celebrity memoirs that manage to be funny and touching and even inspirational, without making you want to hurl. Because it’s about failure and fear as much as it’s about success. Perhaps more so.
Lynch said her extreme social anxiety was fueled by a sense, from a very early age, that she was not quite as other girls were. An athlete, as compared with her brother, she wished her father would take her to sports events; I’ll be your boy, she thought to herself.
She liked to sneak into his closet and wear his clothes. (She still likes 1960s men’s clothes. Last year for Halloween she was Don Draper.) When she found out, around the age of 12, what “gay” meant, she was horrified. “I knew instinctively it was a disease and a curse,” she writes. “No one could ever, ever know.”
She was never very good at disguising her unease, but she did her best, developing a nasty little drinking habit ("To think I wasted my drinking years on Miller Lite when I could have had good wines,” she said) and a taste for writing earnest angst-ridden songs with titles like “Blood Red Tears Stain My Face.” Years later she was able to perform those songs, to much hilarity, in a one-woman show. But at the time, “I was completely serious about them,” Lynch said, giving me a taste of one dedicated to her ex-partner titled, “I Gave You the Gun to Shoot Me":
I know the timing is right. Please get out of my sight. I gave you the keys to my Corolla. Now I know just why I’ve got a yellow boot on my tire, soy sauce in the glove. Is this what you call love?
“It was really pretty,” she added. “The ending had the same chord as ‘Dust in the Wind."’
She tried on various personas with her clothing, too. In her 20s she went from propriety and the Peter Pan collars of her teens to what she now calls the homeless cowboy look: “Long underwear with boxer shorts over them. It was delightful.”
Eventually, as she became more comfortable in her own skin, she cured the drinking habit with chocolate ice cream, coffee and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and her questionable dressing habits with stylists. But while acknowledging she doesn’t have a fabulous eye for herself, Lynch has always loved fashion, and is fascinated by clothing as a signifier. Take Sue Sylvester’s track suit.
“She sees herself as a warrior, always battling something, and the track suit is her armor,” Lynch said. This season on “Glee,” Sue Sylvester will be running for Congress, as a Christian conservative. “We’ll probably be adding pearls to her suit,” Lynch said. “Or maybe a little American flag.”
Lynch herself is a compulsive shopper with thousands of dollars of clothes in her closet that don’t fit. “When I’m not feeling good about how I look, I figure if I just buy the right piece of clothing, I’ll feel all right,” she said. Feeling good or bad about her body depends on whether she is up or down 5 pounds. On a woman who is 6 feet tall.
“Go ahead, laugh!” she said. “But it’s true. I don’t wear particular designers. I wear whoever fits me well. I try to dress the bottom I have. The body I have and the bottom I have. I have the intention of looking fabulous every time, and I care about it a great deal. I’m very vain.”
Looking at Lynch, I can’t help thinking of something Nora Ephron once said about herself: “One of the few advantages to not being beautiful is that one usually gets better-looking as one gets older; I am, in fact, at this very moment gaining my looks.” (And so it is with Lynch. At 51, she’s a knockout.)
Embry has gone a long way toward helping Lynch with self-acceptance, since she strong-arms Lynch into exercising and “she has no issues with my body.”
“Other than, you know, she likes it,” Lynch said.
Lynch is open about her sexuality, yet never expected or wanted to be the beautiful Midwestern face of lesbianism in America. “You know, it’s funny,” she said. “My wife is nine years younger, she went to Smith, she felt comfortable.”
“It’s a generational thing,” she said. “But to this day, well, like, I’ll see a very fey guy on TV and I’ll be thinking, ‘Couldn’t you butch it up a little?’ I want us to make ourselves palatable to the world.”
Which may be one reason that Lynch expects to femme it up at the Emmys on Sunday night. When she hosts the show, she said, there will be no tuxes and no track suits. “David Meister is designing,” she said. “But hopefully I’m not coming out in a different dress every time I walk onstage. I don’t know how women do that, and don’t you think it’s kind of distracting? I think the clothes will serve the show, as opposed to the show serving the clothes.”
But she’s not too worried -- for once. “You know,” she said in parting, “I was filled with angst all the time, but when it came down to it, I dove into what was in front of me and I always did my best. I invested 100 percent. And that’s what saved me.”
AMX-2011-09-18T00:01:00-04:00<
Illinois civil union law pits B&B owners against same-sex couple
By Rex W. Huppke
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO - Not long after ink from the governor’s signature had dried on Illinois’ civil unions law, Todd and Mark Wathen began preparations for a June ceremony.
The couple wanted to hold the event somewhere quaint in central Illinois, a place that would be convenient to family in Kentucky and Indiana and to their home in downstate Mattoon. They reached out to two bed and breakfast establishments - and in each case the owners told the Wathens they were not willing to host a civil union.
The Beall Mansion in Alton told the Wathens via email that they “will just be doing traditional weddings.” The owner of the Timber Creek Bed & Breakfast in Paxton wrote in an email to the couple: “We will never host same-sex civil unions. We will never host same-sex weddings even if they become legal in Illinois. We believe homosexuality is wrong and unnatural based on what the Bible says about it. If that is discrimination, I guess we unfortunately discriminate.”
“After all this happened, I just didn’t even want to talk about the wedding,” said Todd Wathen. “It took an event we had looked forward to for years and ruined it.”
The Wathens wound up holding a ceremony in their backyard soon after the law took effect in June, but they did not let the matter with Beall Mansion and Timber Creek rest.
The couple filed a complaint with the Illinois Department of Human Rights, which investigated and found “substantial evidence” that a civil rights violation had been committed.
The August finding allows the Wathens 90 days to either file a complaint with the state Human Rights Commission or take civil action in circuit court. The Wathens’ attorney, Betty Tsamis of Chicago, told the Chicago Tribune that her clients have chosen the latter path and will file lawsuits against both businesses as early as next week.
This action, should it proceed, could bring to the courtroom a debate over the boundary lines between religious freedom and discrimination in Illinois.
Steven Amjad, an attorney representing Timber Creek, said the state constitution guarantees religious freedoms.
“These are business owners that have strong religious convictions. The legislature has created this (conflict), and the courts will have to sort this out,” he said.
Andrew Koppelman, a professor of political science and law at Northwestern University, said the question is whether the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act - which protects religious freedoms from government intrusion - can trump the state’s Human Rights Act, which includes the protection of people based on sexual orientation.
“The hotels seem pretty clearly in violation of the Human Rights Act,” Koppelman said.
“And if you’re going to say that somebody is exempted from the human rights law under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, that would mean that people could discriminate based on religious views. It’s a slippery slope.”
As civil union and same-sex marriage laws have been enacted in states across the country, similar legal cases have surfaced. In Vermont, for example, a lesbian couple has sued a bed and breakfast for having a “no-gay reception policy.”
“This issue is coming up in many different places,” said Jennifer Pizer, legal director at the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at the University of California at Los Angeles.
“Some people talk about religious freedom being an absolute freedom. But the limits start to come into play when people wish to act in certain ways in furtherance of their beliefs. The Supreme Court has said before that freedom of belief is absolute, but the freedom to act cannot be.”
A similarly themed case recently played out in Illinois when Catholic Charities fought the state over whether the organization discriminated against same-sex couples by not allowing them to adopt foster children.
Attorneys for Catholic Charities said the civil unions bill - formally known as the Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act - provides exceptions for religious groups that don’t recognize civil unions. Attorneys for the state said those exceptions only apply to clergy who do not want to officiate civil unions.
In August, a judge sidestepped the religious freedom issue while ruling that the state could sever its contracts with Catholic Charities. That ruling is likely to be appealed.
Illinois attorney Jason Craddock, a member of the Alliance Defense Fund, a national Christian legal organization that opposes abortion and same-sex marriage, is also representing Timber Creek. He said cases like this one involving the Wathens are critical for people of faith who believe their First Amendment freedom of religion is inviolable.
“I believe strongly that liberty of conscience, particularly religious liberty of conscience, is what our nation was built on and is something that goes deep to our souls,” Craddock said. “Increasingly it’s being pitted against the asserted rights of homosexuals. Now it’s going beyond just asking for tolerance. Now we’re getting into a situation where government is telling people of faith, ‘You can’t live out your faith if it happens to disagree with this particular group.’”
The Wathens’ Chicago-based attorney, Betty Tsamis, said this case isn’t about stifling a person’s religious freedom, it’s about making sure that a public business does not discriminate against people because of their sexuality.
“For the religious right, they view this as a very important case strategically,” Tsamis said. “They’re investing a lot into making sure that the Wathens lose. Our goal is to simply make sure these people are complying with the law. This isn’t about the money. This is about the principle. A business cannot violate someone’s civil rights because of who that person is.”
Pizer, the UCLA professor, said this case and others like it mirror litigation that surfaced during the civil rights era in the wake of laws mandating desegregation
“For each generation or each new issue of inclusion, there can be questions about what the law means and what the law requires of people,” she said. “Sometimes, there’s a simple resistance to the concept. But it also can be sometimes a matter of honest confusion. For example, some of what’s going on now is that people believe - honestly, sincerely believe - that their religious views do trump the civil rights law and give them a legal defense. They believe they’re not breaking the law.”
But the courts have generally not agreed with that thinking: “You do have a constitutional right, but it’s not a free pass to avoid all the laws. People have thought that, but the Supreme Court has often said, ‘No.’”
The owners of the Beall Mansion referred calls to their attorney, John Hopkins of Edwardsville, who said he had no additional comments to make until the Wathens formally proceed with their case. Jim Walder, co-owner of Timber Creek, wrote the following statement in an email:
“Todd Wathen’s inquiry came months before the civil-union law went into effect and we had not yet thought through the implications of how that law might impact our business. After considering the issue, we decided that we would continue to host wedding ceremonies for marriages, but that we would not expand our services to include civil unions of any kind.”
The Wathens met in Kentucky in 2003 and moved to Illinois in 2006. They say they decided to take legal action against the two businesses because they don’t want others to have similar experiences.
“I’m a white male in my early 40s and I’d never experienced discrimination in my life,” said Mark Wathen. “When I came up against this I was like, ‘Whoa. This is not the 1960s.’”
Todd Wathen added: “We just didn’t feel like we could sit back and let this happen.”
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