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GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE
November 6, 2009
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www.GayPeoplesChronicle.com
Ban on HIV-positive people entering the U.S. will end
by Darlene Superville
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Washington, D.C.-President Barack Obama said on October 30 the U.S. will overturn a 22-year-old travel and immigration ban against people with HIV early next year.
The order was to be finalized on Novem-
Kalamazoo
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in Maine, however, where the effort to cast a "people's veto" of the state's same-sex marriage law appeared to pass by a three percent margin.
The anti-gay campaign to repeal the law, however, was met with challenges before the state's election commission, where the National Organization for Marriage was accused of violating state financial disclosure laws.
No on 1, the organization fighting to keep the same-sex marriage law, is not conceding defeat, however. At press time, they argued, absentee and early votes had not been counted, and the full results of the towns and villages were not tallied.
In areas not yet reported, there were more than enough registered voters to easily sway the results.
Ready for the parade
ber 2, Obama said, completing a process begun during the Bush administration.
The U.S. has been among a dozen countries that bar entry to travelers with visas or anyone seeking a green card based on their HIV status.
"If we want to be the global leader in combatting HIV/AIDS, we need to act like it," Obama said at the White House before
Unlike 31 other states including Ohio where voters have passed constitutional amendments to ban marriage, the Maine vote was only to repeal a law. The legislature is free to pass the measure again.
With only one exception, the gay side has lost every time marriage has been put to a public vote. The exception is Arizona, which defeated a marriage and domestic partnership ban in 2006. Two years later, however, voters there passed a marriageonly version of the ban.
Five other states have full same-sex marriage: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont and in January, New Hampshire. Washington's "everything-but-marriage" measure joins similar ones in New Jersey, Oregon and California, where marriage was legal for five months last year until a ban amendment was passed.
ROBERT OLAYAS
The Blazing River Freedom Band practices on an autumn Wednesday night for their upcoming holiday concert.
President Tommy Casarona points to the band as one of the most inclusive LGBT organizations in the area, open not only to members of the LGBT community, but also to musically talented allies.
The band performed in January's inaugural parade for President Barack Obama, as well as at last month's Southern Decadence Parade in New Orleans, the Village Halloween Parade in New York in 2008, and at Pride celebrations across the country in the last few years.
In 2014, they will participate in the cultural festival at the Gay Games, which is being held in Cleveland that year.
The holiday concert will be December 16 at Franklin Circle Christian Church, at Franklin and Fulton Roads in Ohio City.
For more information about the Blazing River Freedom Band, go to www.bfrb.org.
Nancy Marcus, S.J.D.
Attorney at Law
Berkman, Gordon, Murray & DeVan
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Free Initial Consultation (216) 781-5245 nmarcus@bgmdlaw.com 55 Public Square, Suite 2200 Cleveland, OH 44113-1949
-Robert Olayas
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signing a bill to extend the Ryan White CARE Act. Begun in 1990, the program provides medical care, medication and support services to about half a million people, most of them low-income.
The bill is named for an Indiana teenager who contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion at age 13. White went on to fight AIDS-related discrimination against him and others and help educate the country about the disease. He died in April 1990 at the age of 18.
His mother, Jeanne White-Ginder, attended the signing ceremony, as did several members of Congress and AIDS activists.
In 1987, at a time of widespread fear and ignorance about HIV, the Department of Health and Human Services added the disease to the list of communicable diseases that disqualified a person from entering the U.S.
The department tried in 1991 to reverse its decision but was opposed by Congress, which went the other way two years later and made HIV infection the only medical condition explicitly listed under immigration law as grounds for inadmissibility to the U.S.
The law effectively has kept out thousands of students, tourists and refugees and has complicated the adoption of children with HIV. No major international AIDS conference has been held in the U.S. since 1993, because HIV-positive activists and researchers cannot enter the country.
Obama said that by lifting the ban, the U.S. will take a step toward ending the stigma against people with HIV and AIDS, something he said has stopped people from getting tested and has helped spread the disease. More than 1 million people live with the virus in the U.S., and more than 56,000 new infections are reported every year.
Obama noted his own effort several years ago to help combat the stigma. During a 2006 visit to Kenya, his father's native country, then-Sen. Obama and his wife, Michelle, publicly took an HIV test.
The 11 other countries that ban HIVpositive travelers and immigrants are Armenia, Brunei, Iraq, Libya, Moldova, Oman, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Sudan, according to the advocacy group Immigration Equality.
newsbriefs
Census to 'un-marry' same-sex couples
San Francisco The U.S. Census Bureau is making an unprecedented effort to include samesex couples in next year's national population count, but legally married gay couples won't show up as such in the official once-a-decade tally, bureau representatives said October 22.
Statistical problems related to the development of the 2010 census form and the evolving legal state of same-sex relationships led Census officials to conclude that trying to include married lesbian and gay couples in the overall snapshot of household marital status could yield an inaccurate number, said Gary Gates, a University of California, Los Angeles demographer who has been advising the bureau on gay issues. Instead, same-sex married couples will be added into the category for unmarried partners, just as they were for the 2000 census. But in a marked policy departure, the agency plans to make the data on same-sex couples who described themselves as married available on a state-by-state basis.
The decision to develop separate sets of numbers was a compromise position that was "less about politics and more about accurate data," he said.
Gates stressed that it was important for gay couples to participate in the Census, noting that information drawn from the last one had been used in lawsuits dealing with same-sex marriage and to lobby congressional representatives who may wrongly assume they do not have many gay constituents.
The Census is also reaching out to LGBT citizens like never before, including direct appeals to the community. In mid-October, they placed advertising stickers on the front cover of the Philadelphia Gay News, saying that participating in the census could bring more benefits to the community.
Governor to Ammiano: Fuck
you
Sacramento, Calif.-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger typically attaches a message to bills he signs or vetoes telling lawmakers why he took the action.
A Democratic assemblyman who heckled the governor during a recent event in San Francisco actually received two messages: the veto letter itself and a not-so-subtle rebuke creatively hidden within it.
Like a find-the-word puzzle, the second message was visible by stringing together the first letter of each line down the left-hand margin. Taken alone, those letters spelled out "f-u-c-k y-o-u."
"My goodness. What a coincidence," said Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear. Schwarzenegger's veto messages are sent to the lawmakers who authored the bills, and posted on the governor's Web site. McLear noted that the left-hand margin of past veto messages has
spelled out words such as "poet" and "soap."
The target of the October 12 message was openly gay San Francisco Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, who had sponsored AB 1176. The bill, which passed unanimously in the Assembly and Senate, would have granted the Port of San Francisco expanded financing power to redevelop a former shipyard into a new neighborhood known as Pier 70.
On a video clip of the governor's surprise appearance at an October Democratic Party fundraiser, Ammiano can be heard shouting "You lie" and other derogatory phrases as other attendees booed and heckled Schwarzenegger's brief speech.
After the governor left, Ammiano took the stage and gave a rambling diatribe in which he criticized Schwarzenegger for a wide variety of perceived offenses. In part, the freshman lawmaker was upset that Schwarzenegger had vetoed bills in 2005 and 2007 that would have legalized same-sex marriage.
Anti-gay mailing targeted Kurt
Akron-Sandra Kurt, who was elected Ward 8 city councilor in the November 3 general election, faced an outrageous anti-gay mailing late in the campaign.
The piece, which was signed "A Concerned Neighbor," made typical accusations about the "gay agenda," claiming that people would be prosecuted for reading anti-gay Bible verses in church.
It was also filled with lies, half-truths and
errors.
It refers to the Stonewall Riots, for which the Stonewall Democrats and other LGBT organizations are named, as being "where homosexual activists assaulted and seriously injured police officers who were attempting to serve a lawful warrant at the Stonewall Inn, which was a well known homosexual brothel that entertained members of the mafia and served alcohol to children."
It also "accuses" Kurt of being a founding board member and co-chair of Out in Akron, the LGBT cultural festival now under the auspices of the Akron Pride Center, but confuses it with the website www.outinakron.com, an LGBT news and social site that is part of the Out in America network.
Pro football player barred for epithet
Kansas City, Mo.-The Kansas City Chiefs have barred running back Larry Johnson from team activities pending an investigation into his use of an anti-gay slur last week.
Johnson, a two-time Pro Bowl running back for the Chiefs, apologized on October 27 to his team, fans and the NFL "for the words I used," although not to the LGBT community.
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