The Georgia Supreme Court unanimously struck down the state's four-year-old hate-crimes law, saying it was 'unconstitutionally vague.' According to The New York Times, Justice Carol W. Hunstein wrote in the opinion that hate-crimes laws could be appropriate, but that this one did not give people of ordinary intelligence a specific enough warning of what conduct to avoid. The law's advocates had tried to pass a more specific bill, identifying race, religion, gender, national origin or sexual orientation as the motivation for the crime, but were stymied in the House over the inclusion of sexual orientation.
The conservative groups American Family Association and Focus on the Family hope to extend indefinitely an election-related boycott of Proctor & Gamble, SFGate.com stated. The organizations contend that the consumer products giant is too supportive of gay rights and are urging customers to stop buying Crest, Tide and Pampers. The boycott was sparked by P&G's support of a campaign in its home city of Cincinnati for a ballot measure to repeal a 1993 city charter amendment prohibiting gay-rights laws.
President Bush said in an interview that he disagreed with the Republican Party platform opposing civil unions of same-sex couples and that the matter should be left up to the states, according to the Associated Press. Bush has previously said that states should be permitted to allow same-sex unions, even though White House officials have said he would not have endorsed such unions as governor of Texas. But Mr. Bush has never before made a point of so publicly disagreeing with his party's official position on the issue. Some conservative groups expressed dismay over Bush's tolerance of state-sanctioned civil unions. The Human Rights Campaign said '[a]fter four years of promoting discrimination, President Bush's attempt to reinvent himself a week before Election Day will not persuade voters.'
The granddaughter of former senator Jesse Helms, whom many consider the most anti-gay legislator in U.S. history and who is touting him during her elective campaign, is herself a partnered lesbian, according to Bluelemur.com and Gay City News. Jennifer Knox, granddaughter of the retired North Carolina Republican senator, has been in a committed relationship with her partner Shields Carstarphen for over three years. Knox is vying to become a district judge in North Carolina.
Lambda Legal urged a federal appeals court to grant asylum to a man who faced severe antigay persecution in his native Mexico but was rejected for asylum by an immigration judge who said he didn't seem gay and could hide his sexual orientation to avoid persecution, according to the group's Web site. Lambda Legal represents Jorge Soto Vega, a 35-year-old man from Tuxpan, Mexico, who faced severe harassment and violence from the community and his family from an early age. He was detained and beaten by police who threatened to kill him if they saw him again because they wanted to get rid of gay people.
Lambda Legal has also filed a brief with the Virginia Supreme Court in support of a legal battle to provide birth certificates for children born in Virginia and adopted by gay couples in other states. Richmond Circuit Judge Randall G. Johnson ruled in February that the state is not required to issue new birth certificates for such children.
On the eve of his virtually assured re-election, New York's senior U.S. senator, Charles Schumer, told a closed meeting of LGBT Democratic clubs and leaders that his opposition to same-sex marriage is 'in his gut,' according to Gay City News.
The Georgia Supreme Court ruled not to stop the Nov. 2 vote on a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. The court ruled 5-2 that it did not have authority to halt the scheduled ballot referendum. However, the majority said the proposed amendment 'certainly can be challenged in the event it is enacted by virtue of approval by the voters.'
Two transgendered candidates are vying to become the first trans elected official in this country, according to 365Gay.com . One of them, Robert Haaland, is considered likely to win a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Nov. 2. Haaland was born and raised a female in Austin, Minn.; he then declared himself a lesbian at age 20 and identified as a man after attending the University of California at Berkeley and Hastings Law School.
A federal investigation has uncovered no evidence that a former aide to Gov. James E. McGreevey tried to extort millions of dollars from him, according to the Associated Press. A lawyer representing Golan Cipel said federal officials told him Cipel and a second lawyer acted properly during talks about a settlement in the weeks before McGreevey came out.
A forthcoming book by the late Dr. C.A. Tripp—The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, to be published in the new year by Free Press—makes a powerful case that Lincoln was a lover of men, according to LA. Weekly. Tripp, who worked closely in the 1940s and 1950s with the groundbreaking sexologist Alfred Kinsey, was a clinical psychologist, university professor and author of the 1975 best-seller The Homosexual Matrix, which helped transcend outdated Freudian clichés and establish that same-sex intimacy and sexual orientation are normal and natural.
Tennis legend Martina Navratilova claims that New Jersey politician Joe Renna, a Republican, conned her into taking a photo with him and then suggesting that she endorsed him. The New York Post stated that Renna, who is a freeholder candidate, spotted Navratilova at a street fair in September and asked if she would pose for a picture with him. However, Navratilova may have gotten the last laugh; she recently endorsed Renna's Democratic opponents—and posed for a photo with them.
