Florida Agenda

CEDAR RAPIDS, IA – While campaigning during this week’s Iowa Caucuses, GOP presidential candidate and Texas Governor Rick Perry admitted that he didn’t know about the Supreme Court case, Lawrence v. Texas, a case that was decided while he was governor and struck down the state’s anti-sodomy law.

According to ABC News, a voter at a meet and greet asked Perry to defend his criticism of limited government in the case.

“I wish I could tell you I knew every Supreme Court case. I don’t. I’m not even going to try to go through every Supreme Court case, that would be — I’m not a lawyer,”  “We can sit here and you know play I gotcha questions on what about this Supreme Court case or whatever,” said Perry who trailed at 5th in the caucus.

In 2003, the Supreme Court deemed Texas’ anti-sodomy law to be unconstitutional in a 6-3 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, and the case nullified anti-sodomy laws in 13 other states at the same time. Perry, a strong opponent of gay marriage and the ability of homosexuals to serve openly in the military, served as governor when this case was decided.

When told that the Supreme Court case struck down the Texas sodomy law, Perry said, “My position on traditional marriage is clear and I don’t know need a law. I don’t need a federal law case to explain it to me.” The Texas governor referenced Lawrence v. Texas in his 2010 book “Fed Up!,” calling it one of the court cases in which “Texans have a different view of the world than do the nine oligarchs in robes.”

D. W. Schultz: Santorum Scheme Doesn’t Work For Us

By Rory Barbarossa

Member of Congress and Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz says that Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum is “un-American” for his promise to invalidate same-sex marriages that are already on the books through a federal marriage amendment.

Wasserman Schultz, who represents Florida’s 20th Congressional District in the U.S. House, said during an interview at the Des Moines Convention Center on Tuesday, Jan.

3, the day of the Iowa Republican presidential caucus, that Santorum’s scheme “would be un-American, undemocratic, and entirely inappropriate and unacceptable.”

The four-term House member was responding to an earlier comment made by Santorum, who told NBC News’ Chuck Todd that existing same-sex marriages “would be invalid” if an amendment to the U.S. Constitutional was passed that bans marriage equality. Santorum–who narrowly lost to GOP opponent Mitt Romney in Iowa, the nation’s first statewide candidate contest– supports such an amendment.

Speaking of the district she has represented since 2005, Wasserman Schultz said “I represent as a member of Congress one of the largest, most vibrant, gay communities in the entire country. I’m a supporter of same-sex marriage and believe that we need to make sure that we stand up for equality for everyone.”

Asked by  reporter for the Washington Blade what message gay Americans should take away from the Iowa caucus results, Wasserman Schultz replied, “Iowa has been a forerunner when it comes to the civil rights of Americans. So many of the civil rights advances, including same-sex marriage, have begun in Iowa.”

“I think Iowans will continue to uphold the liberty that all Americans believe in, for all Americans, she added.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) was in Iowa During the Republican Primary Caucus on Tuesday

Marcus Bachmann, husband of Tea Party favorite and Republican presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann, told reporters last week what he plans to do as First Husband if his wife is elected president.

At a campaign stop in Iowa on December 16, Bachmann took at swipe at First Lady Michelle Obama, saying “I’ve decided my cause is not going to be happy meals,” a reference to the First Lady’s children’s health initiative. Bachmann said he would use his influence to spearhead a national campaign with an anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage theme.

“We are going to get this message across,” he announced. ” Marriage is between one man and one woman.

We are going to promote families.”

Bachmann and his wife, a Minnesota congresswoman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2006, are the owners of Bachmann & Associates, a Christian counseling practice run by Mr. Bachmann, who holds a PhD in clinical psychology, although he is not a licensed psychologist in Minnesota.

Bachmann denies reports that the counseling business performs conversion therapy, the controversial psychological treatment which attempts to transform gay persons into heterosexuals. The practice has been condemned by the American Psychological Association.

In a July interview with the Minnesota Star Tribune, Bachmann said that “counselors at his clinics follow the wishes of patients and don’t force any treatment.”

The Star Tribune reported that “Bachmann didn’t deny that he or other counselors at Bachmann & Associates have attempted to convert gay patients, but he said it is not a special interest of the business and would only be attempted at the client’s request.”

“Will I address it? Certainly we’ll talk about it,” Bachmann said in the interview. “Is it a remedy form that I typically would use? … It is at the client’s discretion.”

The two leading Republican presidential hopefuls are outlining competing visions for what they see as the future of same-sex marriage if they are elected next November.

Mitt Romney, once considered the unchallenged frontrunner for the 2012 GOP nomination, has outlined a proposal that calls for a three-tier system that specifically defines marriage for LGBT persons.­­­

Speaking to the Boston Herald newspaper, the former Massachusetts governor laid out a plan for a new amendment to the U.S. Constitution that includes maintaining marriage rights for heterosexual couples, recognizing existing same-sex unions, and barring recognition of future same-sex marriages.

Said Romney, 64, with respect to his plan: “I think it would keep intact those marriages which had occurred under the law but maintain future plans based on marriage being between a man and a woman,” Romney said.

California’s 2008 passage of its Marriage Protection Act — Proposition 8 — which barred same-sex marriage, led to similar conditions in the Golden State: an end to future weddings between gay couples, along with recognition of the 18,000 same-sex unions that had already been performed.

The aspiring Matchmaker-in-Chief’s plan for a Federal mandate contradicts his earlier political position. In 1994, during his unsuccessful challenge to the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Romney said that “the authorization of marriage on a same-sex basis falls under state jurisdiction.”

Romney’s proposal has also been criticized by members of his party. On December 15, the Log Cabin Republicans released a statement calling the plan “unworkable, unnecessary, and entirely foreign to the United States’ founding principle of equality under the law.”

The group’s Executive Director, R. Clarke Cooper, wrote that “Governor Romney is contorting himself into a pretzel trying to avoid the simplest solution to a purely political problem. The best way to strengthen all families is to grant equal access to civil marriage for all couple regardless of their orientation.”

Meanwhile, the man who has emerged as the most serious threat to Romney’s nomination aspirations has taken a completely different turn on the issue, with former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich singing the National Organization for Marriage’s (NOM) “marriage pledge,” also on December 15.

NOM’s pledge states that candidates will work to support an amendment to the Constitution barring same-sex marriage, as well as “establish[ing] a presidential commission on religious liberty to investigate and document reports of Americans who have been harassed or threatened for exercising key civil rights to organize, to speak, to donate, or to vote for marriage, and to propose new protections, if needed.”

According to NOM’s website, the pledge also requires that, if elected president, the candidate will appoint federal judges and an attorney general who “will respect the original meaning” of the Constitution’s definition of marriage as between a man and a woman.

Gingrich’s own marriage history includes two divorces, each of which reportedly ended after the 67-year-old former Georgia congressman’s infidelities, and while each of his wives was seriously ill. He married his third wife, former congressional aide Callista Bisek, in 2000 after a six-year extramarital affair he has acknowledged.

In 2010, Esquire.com reported that when asked how he could act unfaithfully towards two seriously ill wives and still give a speech on family values, Gingrich replied that “people need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live.”

Gingrich’s half-sister, Candace Gingrich-Jones, a gay woman and LGBT rights activist, said during an interview with MSNBC that her older half-brother “is definitely on the wrong side of history when it comes to [gay rights] issues.” Gingrich-Jones says that she will support President Obama’s reelection in 2012.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson is the second GOP presidential contender to officially embrace same-sex marriage, making the announcement during a recent town hall hosted by the pro-gay Republican group, GOProud.

According to Think Progress, Johnson said that as a believer in individual freedom and keeping government out of personal lives, he simply cannot find a legitimate justification for federal laws, such as the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage. He said that the definition should be left to religions and individuals

and not government. He feels that government’s role when it comes to marriage is one of granting benefits and rights to couples who choose to enter into a marriage contract. He said that he has examined this issue, consulted with folks on all sides and views it through the lens of individual freedom and equal rights.

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By Marc Paige

For those who believe the national Republican Party is progressing on LGBT issues, think again. With the rise of the Tea Party, the GOP has never been more homophobic. While gay Democrats and progressive allies have pushed the Democratic Party closer to embracing full equality, gay Republicans from Log Cabin and GOProud continue failing to bring their party into the twenty-first century.

Since conservative Republicans took control of the House of Representatives after the elections in 2010, they have focused not on jobs and the economy, but on their old standbys, God, guns, and gays. When President Obama declared that his administration would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court, the “deficit-obsessed” Republicans in Congress tripled the salary cap for lawyers to defend DOMA, from $500,000 to $1.5 million.

As House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi leads 130 members of her Democratic caucus in filing a friend-of-the-court brief challenging Republican determination to maintain the federal ban on marriage equality, House Republicans continue developing other ways to energize their base by attacking the LGBT community.

The Obama administration’s Depart-ment of Defense has authorized that military facilities be made available for private functions and ceremonies “on a sexual-orientation neutral basis.” So the House Armed Services Committee has passed an amendment forbidding U.S. military bases to be used to solemnize same-sex unions, and prohibiting military chaplains on base from performing these unions. All 35 Republican committee members supported the amendment; 23 of 26 Democrats were against it.

Eighty-six House Republicans have sent a letter urging the Senate leadership to pass similar legislation, declaring, “The use of federal property or federal employees to perform anything but opposite-sex ceremonies is a clear contravention of the law,” meaning DOMA. One of the signatories of this letter was Florida’s anti-gay Representative from District 22, Allen West.

In the Senate where the Democrats still hold a slim majority, the Judiciary Committee on November 10 voted to recommend passage of a bill to nullify DOMA. The Respect for Marriage Act would repeal DOMA, and offer federal benefits to same-sex couples married in states that recognize their relationships. It was passed on a straight party line vote: every Democrat voted in favor; every Republican opposed.

Reactions from two politicians over this Senate committee vote highlights the partisan divide on gay issues. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat from New York, described her support for The Respect for Marriage Act this way: “Every loving, committed couple deserve the basic human right to get married, start a family, and have access to all the same rights and privileges that my husband and I enjoy.” In contrast, Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley showed his complete disdain for gay families by maintaining that marriage should be limited to heterosexuals to “foster unions that can result in procreation, create incentives for husbands and wives to support each other and their children,” and to promote “stable families, good environments for raising children, and religious beliefs.”

The Respect for Marriage Act has 31 co-sponsors in the Senate who are all Democrats, and 133 co-sponsors in the House, 132 Democrats plus one Republican, Florida’s Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. There is zero chance for this bill to become law while Republicans maintain control of the House.

Gay Republicans are quick to point out that the two most notoriously anti-gay pieces of legislation, the now repealed DADT, and DOMA, were signed into law by Bill Clinton, a Democratic president. But since the 1990s, the national Democratic Party has moved closer to the American ideal of equality for all; the Republican Party, not so much.

Republican presidential candidates Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney have all signed an anti-marriage equality pledge from the National Organization for Marriage. According to Brian Brown, president of NOM, “Gay marriage is going to be a bigger issue in 2012 than it was 2008, because the difference between the GOP nominee and President Obama is going to be large and clear.”

Brown is correct in noting the stark difference between the candidates on marriage equality. While President Obama has yet to embrace full marriage equality for gays, he supports federal recognition and all federal rights for gay couples, and opposes changing the U.S. Constitution to ban marriage equality. Mitt Romney, the likely Republican nominee, has pledged to support amending the Constitution to ban gay marriage, and to nominate Supreme Court justices, federal judges, and an attorney general committed to “rejecting the idea our Founding Fathers inserted a right to gay marriage into our Constitution.”

In his November 6 column, Miami Herald writer Leonard Pitts spoke to right wing incredulousness over the Democratic Party’s hegemony with black voters: “So why don’t blacks vote Republican? The answer is simple. Black people are not crazy. Being not crazy, they understand a simple truth about conservatives: They have never stood with, or up for, black people. Never.”

In the last ten years, the gay community has seen progress on LGBT issues at the federal level and in many states, when the Democrats hold the reigns of power. But too often we’ve seen our rights stagnate or even reversed when Republicans are in charge. One day, when the national Republican Party ends their war on LGBT people, the GOP will earn our voting consideration.

Until then, gays will also be “not crazy.”

Marc Paige is a writer, LGBT activist, and an AIDS prevention educator who is based in Fort Lauderdale. He can be reached at marcpaige@msn.com

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MIAMI, FL – Despite the Christian Family Coalitions attempts to discredit U.S. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, those taking part in a CFC poll overwhelmingly said she should not be removed from her GOP leadership position.

An online poll by the Christian Family Coalition asked the question: “Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen has come out – for ‘homosexual marriage.’ As a Republican leader, she is bound by the party platform which supports marriage as one man, one woman. Should she be removed from her leadership position in the party?”

A vast majority of those participating in the poll felt she should not be removed from GOP leadership position. The results were: 8.4% said yes, 91.3% responded no and 0.3% had no opinion.

In a written statement from SAVE Dade, “In what was a clear effort to attack Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen for simply representing all of her constituents, the Christian Family Coalition asked their constituents to vote whether or not she should be stripped of her leadership role in the Republican Party. To their surprise 91.3% of their constituents voted NOT to remove her and only 8.5% think she should.

In late September, Ros-Lehtinen joined 124 of her colleagues in Congress to co-sponsor the Respect for Marriage Act, which would repeal the discriminatory federal ban on marriage for gay and lesbian Americans. Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen became the first Republican to co-sponsor this historic legislation, opening the door to further bi-partisan support.

“The Christian Family Coalition now has their own data pointing to what we already knew; most Americans are in support of full equality for people who are LGBT,” said C.J. Ortuno, Executive Director of SAVE Dade. “This poll should send a clear message to their leadership that their hatred and prejudice is outdated and founded on drunk science – apparently their membership agrees.”

SAVE Dade:  LGBT Voters Should Be Considered in Re-Districting Debate

MIAMI, FL – Florida, the fourth most populous state in the union, has yet to elect an open LGBT state legislator. The three larger states, California, Texas and New York, have had an openly LGBT representative serve in state elected office. Other, more traditionally conservative states, including Montana, North Carolina, Utah and Wyoming, all have elected LGBT state legislators.
Florida is considered to have the fourth highest population of LGBT people, but gay and transgender people are still not represented in Florida’s state or federal politics.  Florida’s redistricting process could change this if maps are drawn to make concentrated LGBT populations a “community of interest”.

“Florida’s legislative districts unfairly disadvantage LGBT people from being elected to state and federal office and we want to change that,” said C.J. Ortuno, executive director of SAVE Dade. “We have an opportunity to right a wrong by ensuring the redistricting process fairly includes the number of LGBT communities around the state that are recognized by their residents as a community of common interests.

“Not many states have passed statewide legal protections without an openly gay or transgender person carrying the torch in the halls of state or federal government – we want to make sure that the LGBT community is given equal representation for their equal responsibility as productive citizens of our great state,” said Ortuno.

Coastal Cleanup

BROWARD COUNTY, FL – Broward County will be participating in the annual International Coastal Cleanup, sponsored by the Ocean Conservancy. The Cleanup takes place in over 104 countries around the world, typically on the 3rd Saturday of September.

The next event is scheduled for Saturday, September 17th,  from 9 a.m. to noon. Participants should dress accordingly for the weather and be prepared for rain or shine. The Cleanup will only be cancelled due to a tropical storm or hurricane watch or warning.

Last year, almost 1,700 volunteered their time to help clean the beaches in Broward County as part of the 25th Annual International Coastal Cleanup.

Cleanup locations include: Deerfield Beach, Pompano Beach, Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, Oakland Park, Hugh Taylor Birch State Park, Fort Lauderdale Beach Park, John U. Lloyd State Park, Dania Beach, Hollywood Beach and Hallandale Beach.

To participate, bring a hat, gloves, sunscreen and water to one of the cleanup locations. For check-in areas and more information, visit www.Broward.org or call 954) 519-1270.

Womenfest Key West

KEY WEST, FL – For over 20 years, Key West has welcomed women from all over the world to Womenfest Key West, the southernmost party for lesbians and their friends. Womenfest offers a wide range of activities guaranteed to appeal to a broad range of interests. Golfing with palm trees and iguanas, clothing-optional pool parties, a sizzling dance club scene and women-only water excursions that range from jet skis to dolphin watching all promising to pique the interest of the more adventurous, while film, live music and special comedy shows offer the opportunity to enjoy paradise at a slower pace. All of this on a tropical island that is close to perfect and far from normal.

Womenfest Key West will be held from September 6th through 11th and is being hosted by the Key West Business Guild.
For more information, visit www.womenfest.com.

Same-Sex Households Up 60% in Tampa Bay Area

TAMPA, FL – The Tampa Tribune reported that the number of same-sex couples living in the Tampa Bay area is up 60% over the last decade, according to results from the 2010 Census. Nearly a fifth of those couples were raising children, also according to the Census.

The Census counted 10,261 same-sex households in Hillsborough, Pinellas and Pasco counties, up from just under 6,500 in 2000. However, this dramatic growth only represents 1% of total households in the region and the state.

Wilton Manors had the highest percent of same-sex households in the entire state with 6,200 households, or 12%.
Teacher Suspended for Anti-Gay Facebook Comments

MOUNT DORA, FL – A Mount Dora teacher was suspended from the classroom and reassigned pending an investigation by the Lake County School Board after controversial comments he made about same-sex marriages on Facebook.

According to the Orlando Sentinel, Jerry Buell, a long-time Lake County social studies teacher who was chosen Mount Dora High School’s Teacher of the Year, said during a recent Facebook exchange that he “almost threw up” in response to a news story about legalized same-sex marriage in New York. He also posted that same-sex marriages were part of a “cesspool”.

The comments were made on Buell’s personal Facebook page and visible to friends in his network.

Florida G.O.P. U.S. Senate Candidates Vow Gay Marriage Opposition

ORLANDO, FL – Though the Republicans keep saying the next election will be about “jobs, jobs, jobs,” it really appears to be more about social issues.

All of the current Republican Senate candidates, former U.S. Senator George LeMieux, former state Representative Adam Hasner, retired Army Colonel Mike McAlister and businessman Craig Miller, have come out against gay marriage.

According to the Tallahassee Democrat, when asked about New York’s recent legalization of gay marriage, the four Republicans said they supported the federal “Defense of Marriage Act,” which defines marriage as a union of one man and one woman.

Orlando attorney John Stemberger, a founder of the Family Policy Council and who ran the constitutional amendment campaign on marriage three years ago, said the four Republicans articulated strong conservative positions in the debate and that support of social conservatives and Tea Party activists was crucial to electing Florida Governor Rick Scott and Florida’s U.S. Senator Marco Rubio last year, along with some members of the U.S. House and local governing boards.