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Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family gave $727,250 in cash and services to the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 campaign in California, according to records released by the California secretary of state, including a $100,000 check in late October, just days before the evangelical media empire announced it planned to lay off nearly 20 percent of its employees. While there has been public scrutiny of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for its attempts to influence the campaign to reverse a California Supreme Court ruling allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry, Focus on the Family and related donors pumped more than six times as much as the Mormon church did into the ProtectMarriage.com campaign, records show.
Altogether, donations supporting Proposition 8 from Focus on the Family, one of its major benefactors and an offshoot lobbying organization totaled more than $1.251 million — just shy of the $1.275 million contributed by ProtectMarriage.com’s largest donor, the Knights of Columbus, the Connecticut-based political arm of the Catholic Church. In addition to $727,250 reported by Focus on the Family, major backer and board member Elsa Prince, the billionaire heiress of Holland, Mich., donated $450,000 to ProtectMarriage.com in two cash chunks and the Washington, D.C.-based Family Research Council, a Christian-right lobbying organization spun off from Focus on the Family and founded in part by Prince’s foundation, chipped in $74,400.
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The Mormon church donated $189,000 in nonmonetary expenditures — mostly staff time and airline tickets — to help pass the ballot measure, according to the latest disclosure from the California secretary of state. The church remains “under investigation” by the California Fair Political Practices Commission after a complaint was filed against the church by the anti-Proposition 8 group Californians Against Hate, the Salt Lake Tribune reported Monday.
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If you know [Bob]Beamon's name it's almost certainly because he won the long jump gold medal in legendary fashion at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.

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But you may not know that Beamon almost never made it to Mexico City. Along with eight other teammates, Beamon had his track and field scholarship revoked from the University of Texas at El Paso, the previous year. They had refused to compete against Brigham Young University. Beamon and his teammates were protesting the racist practices of the Mormon Church, and their coach at UTEP, Wayne Vanderburge, made them pay the ultimate price.

They weren't alone. As tennis great Arthur Ashe wrote in his book, Hard Road to Glory, "In October 1969, fourteen black [football] players at the University of Wyoming publicly criticized the Mormon Church and appealed to their coach, Lloyd Eaton, to support their right not to play against Brigham Young University. . . . The Mormon religion at the time taught that blacks could not attain to the priesthood, and that they were tainted by the curse of Ham, a biblical figure. Eaton, however, summarily dropped all fourteen players from the squad."

The players, though, didn't take their expulsion lying down. They called themselves the Black 14 and sued for damages with the support of the NAACP. In an October 25th game against San Jose State, the entire San Jose team wore black armbands to support the 14.

One aftershock of this episode was in November 1969, when Stanford University President Kenneth Pitzer suspended athletic relations with BYU, announcing that Stanford would honor what he called an athlete's "Right of Conscience." The "Right of Conscience" allowed athletes to boycott an event which he or she deemed "personally repugnant." As the Associated Press wrote, "Waves of black protest roll toward BYU, assaulting Mormon belief and leaving BYU officials and students, perplexed, hurt, and maybe a little angry." [Course they were angry. How dare anyone tell them that they and their religion were bigoted little twerps. And of course, the mainstream media is SO sympathetic of the oppressors' feelings you see, and the oppressed, what THEY have feelings? Who cares?]

On June 6th, 1978, as teams were refusing road trips to Utah with greater frequency, and the IRS started to make noises about revoking the church's holy tax-free status, a new revelation came ...

Whether a cynical ploy to avoid the taxman or a coincidence touched by God, the results were the same: Black people were now human in the eyes of the Church. An idea for the gay comm. and its allies to pursue?

This stance by the United States is stunning on several levels, and shows the disconnect between our self-described identity as a beacon of democracy and freedom and the reality when the rubber hits the road. Under Bush's watch, our nation is the only major Western nation to refuse to sign a resolution that would decriminalize homosexuality worldwide.

In all, 66 of the U.N.'s 192 member countries signed the nonbinding declaration - which backers called a historic step to push the General Assembly to deal more forthrightly with anti-gay discrimination. More than 70 U.N. members outlaw homosexuality, and in several of them homosexual acts can be punished by execution. Co-sponsored by France and the Netherlands, the declaration was signed by all 27 European Union members, as well as Japan, Australia, Mexico and three dozen other countries. There was broad opposition from Muslim nations, and the United States refused to sign, indicating that some parts of the declaration raised legal questions that needed further review.
"It's disappointing," said Rama Yade, France's human rights minister, of the U.S. position - which she described as in contradiction with America's long tradition as a defender of human rights...

The first thing that came to my mind when reading about this travesty was that this country's inability to sign on to this is saying the United States under this administration is fine with the criminalization of homosexuality within its own borders, and that the only thing standing in the way was the little bit of legal business called Lawrence v. Texas. That the "activist" U.S. Supreme Court made a grave mistake. That it would like to return to the days of the law peeping into the bedrooms of a private home and arresting two consenting adults. What was the explanation given by our government?MORE

One story that we haven't followed this week is the implosion of the New York State senate over the possibility of a same sex marriage bill. The latest: The rabidly anti-gay and controversial Sen. Ruben Diaz Sr. says claims he's being "threatened" by gay rights advocates and may jump ship to the Republicans. The Bronx Pentecostal minister, a fierce opponent of gay rights and same-sex marriage, threatened incoming Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith against bringing a marriage bill up for a vote next year. Diaz claims, "The gays are calling my office. They're jamming my phones. They're going to see what we can do." (Diaz made the accusations in an incoherent rant to Liz Benjamin of the Daily News, but "set the record straight" in a another incoherent press release naming Post gossip maven Liz Smith.) The anti-gay clergyman and minister says he will either join the Republicans—whom he often endorses—stay neutral to create an impasse, or join the Democratic conference.MORe

The gay and lesbian community is reassessing their efforts in light of a flurry of reports that question No on 8's tactics and commitment and the decision to hold the discussion, as well as the closed off nature of its format, are a tacit admission that the gay community is demanding answers from their leaders.
The Advocate has published a searing new report (see, we say nice things from time to time), revealing that over the summer Lori L. Jean of the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center went on vacation for a month and Geoff Kors of Equality California left for two and a half weeks.


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In addition LGBT leaders from the black & latino community are hopping mad they were never included in the No on 8 campaign. Jeffrey King, executive director of In The Meantime Men’s Group, a South Los Angeles outreach organization for gay black men told the LA Weekly:

“We told them what should be done. We told them what they shouldn’t do — and they did what they wanted to do. This clearly is not the time to call black folks out and say we were to blame. There was not enough outreach. Period.”

Richard Zaldivar, former City Council Aide, director The Wall Las Memorias Project, who successfully led a grassroots effort to build the first publicly funded AIDS Memorial in East Los Angeles was told by No on 8 staffers that the Latino vote “wasn’t a priority.”

“I drove by the [Our Lady of the Angeles] cathedral on Sunday and I saw young people protesting. But they need to hold the gay and lesbian leadership accountable as much as the Mormon Church and the Catholic Church…If Latinos were playing such an important role in the presidential campaign what was the No on 8 strategy?”

Your editor questioned the Prop. 8 campaign before the election, particularly the lack of a get out the vote effort. The campaign focused on television ads and phone-banking and actively discouraged grassroots efforts to do one-on-one canvassing across the state, even mocking the Yes on 8 campaign's door to door operation.MORE