Senator Evan Bayh has earned the award for the lamest, stupidest, and potentially offensive AIDS joke of the month, if not of the year

Senator Bayh And The Disastrous AIDS Joke

05/15/10-by Bridgette P. LaVictoire
Senator Evan Bayh has earned the award for the lamest, stupidest, and potentially offensive joke of the month, if not of the year so far. While at the 2010 Indiana Jefferson Jackson Day Dinner, Senator Bayh made a joke about AIDS. Of course, the Senator believes that he was just misunderstood, but the joke did cause the room to thin out a little bit afterwards when the Indiana Stonewall Democrats got up and left the room. 

I want to say how good it is to be home. I got into that airport and I don’t know about the rest of you but every time I fly into Indianapolis airport I look at that thing and I think to myself, “You know if it weren’t for Bart Peterson, this thing wouldn’t be here.”

[applause]

He was a great Mayor and I’m so proud of him and everybody that helped make his accomplishment possible.

So I’m walking through the airport and people were kinda being nice and making eye contact and a couple come up and say hello. This one person runs up all excited and I’m prepared to say “Hello,” and he says, “Senator Bayh! Senator Bayh!”

I said “Well, yes?” and he looked at me and said, “Do you have AIDS?”

[audible gasps]

I said, “Huh?”

He said, “Yeah. Do you have AIDS?”

I was dumbfounded. I didn’t know what to say.

He said, “I’ve got a letter I want to give you, do you have someone I can hand this to? Do you have an aide with you?”

[laughter]

So you never know what people are going to say.

[more laughter]

Many of you have asked me… You’ve got to be prepared for about anything, you know?

Now, I will absolutely admit that I am one of the hardest people to offend in the world, but really, Senator Bayh, the first thing that comes into your mind is that this person would be talking about AIDS and not aids? It takes a really dense person to make that mistake, or one who has gotten about zero sleep in seventeen days. While you may have had intentions of making yourself look foolish in the joke, all you did was make yourself look foolish because of the joke.

In the interview after the joke, Senator Bayh stated:

BB: Do you have a statement that the Indiana Stonewall Democrats walked out in protest after the AIDS joke?

Sen Bayh: No. Look, I’ve voted for AIDS funding and all sorts of things. And I’ve been for all sorts of things in terms of equality and lifestyle and that sort of thing. I’m sorry they took offense to that. It was certainly not intended.

BB: Can you see that it was rather offensive though? “Do you have AIDS? Do you have AIDS?” as if it’s a bad thing to have AIDS.

Sen Bayh: No, I wasn’t interpreting it as bad, I was just quizzical about it.

BB: Okay.

Sen Bayh: So you misunderstood my comments or they misunderstood my comments.

BB: Okay. Thanks.

Sen Bayh: I was taken by surprise. I did not interpret it as a negative statement.

BB: Okay, thanks for clarifying for me.

Annual AIDS Walk Steps Off In Central Park

By: NY1 News

Thousands of people hit the streets of Manhattan Sunday to join the fight against HIV and AIDS.

The 25th annual AIDS Walk New York started in Central Park, then traveled up to Morningside Heights and back.

Throughout its history, the event has helped raise more than $110 million for regional programs.

The Greater Metropolitan Housing Corporation runs the efforts, where representatives say building awareness is more important than ever.

"One in four New Yorkers does not know who is HIV positive, does not know his or her status. The rates are going up, particularly in communities of color, more and more women are impacted," said GMHC CEO Marjorie Hill.

"I think people have this stigma because we have so many drugs nowadays that it's over. And I think that the walk is here to remind people that it's not over, just because it's not as clear as it was in the 80s, visually clear, the disease is still here and people still need to know about it," said one walk participant.

Many of the participants had a loved one or someone they know suffer from the disease.

Organizers call it the largest AIDS fundraising event in the world and say last year's walk raised more than $5.5 million.

For more information, call 212-807-WALK or visit AIDSWalk.net/newyork.

Posted on Advocate.com May 15, 2010

Sunday Marks 25th NYC AIDS Walk

By Advocate.com

More than 45,000 people are expected to take part in New York City’s 25th annual AIDS Walk Sunday morning.

Organized by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the AIDS Walk has raised more than $110 million to fight AIDS in New York since 1986.

GMHC hopes to raise $5.3 million through this year’s event, which kicks off at 10 a.m. in Central Park.

Click here for more information, to register for the walk, or to sponsor a participant.

Hundreds of gay and lesbian activists In Havana, Cuba

Cubans march against homophobia

By ANDREA RODRIGUEZ (AP) – 5 hours ago

HAVANA — Hundreds of gay and lesbian activists, some dressed in drag and others sporting multicolored flags representing sexual diversity, marched and danced through the streets of Havana on Saturday along with the daughter of Cuban President Raul Castro as part of a celebration aimed at eliminating homophobia around the world.

Some of the marchers played drums and others walked on stilts as they made their way down a wide avenue in the capital's hip Vedado neighborhood, where they have held a series of debates and workshops ahead of the May 17 celebration of the International Day Against Homophobia, which participants say marks the day in 1990 when the World Health Organization stopped listing homosexuality as a mental illness.

"We have made progress, but we need to make more progress," said Mariela Castro, a campaigner for gay rights on the island and the leader of Cuba's National Sexual Education Center. She is also the daughter of Cuban President Raul Castro.

Cuba has come a long way in accepting homosexuality. In the 1960s, shortly after the revolution, homosexuals were fired from state jobs and many were imprisoned or sent to work camps. Others fled into exile.

But that began to change in the 1980s, in large part to the work of Mariela Castro's center. Recently, the government has even agreed to include sex change operations for transsexuals under its free national health system, another project championed by the center.

The workshops and debates held Saturday dealt with issues such as adoption by gay and lesbian couples and whether to legalize gay marriages, a step Mariela Castro has been pushing for years, so far without success. The week of celebrations culminates Monday.

Stand by Your Man?

With Laura Bush's announcement that she supports marriage equality, she joins a list of political wives, including Elizabeth Edwards and Cindy McCain, who differ from their husbands on gay rights.

By Advocate.com Editors

Laura Bush has hinted in previous interviews that she’s more supportive of gay rights than her husband, but Tuesday she made it official when she told Larry King she supports marriage equality.

The former first lady isn’t the first political spouse to differ from her husband on gay issues. From Elizabeth Edwards to Cindy McCain, take a look at a few other political wives who have distanced themselves from their husbands when it comes to equal rights.

Teresa Heinz Kerry — In 2004, while supporting her husband’s presidential campaign at a stop in San Francisco, Heinz Kerry said with time, Americans would support marriage equality. She said her support of equal rights came from the perspective of a mother who had watched many friends come to terms with children who are gay. Though both she and her husband vocally opposed the Bush-sponsored Federal Marriage Amendment, John Kerry supported civil unions but said he did not support same-sex marriage.

Cindy McCain — In January 2010, more than a year after her husband, John McCain, lost the 2008 presidential race, Cindy McCain posed for the No H8 Campaign, declaring her support for marriage equality. In posing for the campaign, Cindy aligned her thoughts with those of her daughter Meghan — and directly opposed those of her husband, who doesn’t support marriage equality and is currently opposing the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Elizabeth Edwards — Elizabeth Edwards made it clear in June 2007 that she supports same-sex marriage — six months after her husband, John Edwards, announced his candidacy for president in the 2008 election. “I don’t know why someone else’s marriage has anything to do with me,” Elizabeth Edwards said at a news conference before the San Francisco pride parade. “I’m completely comfortable with gay marriage.” She said her position put her at odds with her husband, who himself had admitted to being “conflicted” on the issue. John Edwards supported civil unions during his campaign but not marriage equality.

Hillary Clinton — Former first lady Hillary Clinton first made an effort to oppose the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy enacted under her husband Bill Clinton’s administration in her 2003 autobiography, Living History, calling it a terrible “compromise.” She’s since become one of the most vocal supporters of repealing the military’s gay ban and taken an active role in the effort to end violence against gays and lesbians around the globe. 

Some Catholics fight move to deny schooling to children of lesbians, gays

By Dan Gilgoff, CNN

May 15, 2010 1:06 a.m. EDT

Catholic activists are asking Boston Cardinal Sean O'Malley CNN) -- Progressive Catholic groups vented outrage Friday over the decision of a Roman Catholic school in Massachusetts to rescind the admission of an 8-year-old student because his parents are lesbians."The idea that a child might be punished because he does not live with his two biologic parents is antithetical to notions of Christian charity and Catholic social justice," said Patrick Whelan, president of Catholic Democrats, in a statement Friday.Other liberal Catholic and gay groups issued similar statements Friday, responding to news reports this week that a child accepted to St. Paul Elementary School in Hingham, Massachusetts, for the fall was told he couldn't enroll after the school learned that his parents are gay.In addition to pressuring the Massachusetts school to reverse itsdecision and accept the student, progressive Catholic activists are attempting to do something much more dramatic: get the Archdiocese of Boston, which includes the Hingham school, to set a precedent for how the American church treats students with gay parents.In March, the Archdiocese of Denver, Colorado, supported a decision by a Catholic school in Boulder to block two students with gay parents from re-enrolling.While the Denver archbishop who backed that decision, Charles J. Chaput, may be the most outspokenly conservative bishop in the nation, progressive Catholics think they can get more moderate Boston Cardinal Sean O'Malley to speak against Catholic schools rejecting students over their parents' sexual orientation."I'm very disappointed in Chaput's actions, but he has a history of politicizing issues," said Chris Korzen, executive director of the progressive Catholics United, which has asked O'Malley to intervene in the Hingham case and to allow the child to attend St. Paul."Cardinal O'Malley understands that there's a place to assert church teachings but that it doesn't make sense to discriminate against a child because of his parents' background," Korzen said.Korzen and other left-leaning Catholics said they were concerned that the Hingham school was following the example of the Denver Archdiocese in the Boulder case."While the relationship between the events in Boulder and Hingham [is] not known, Catholic Democrats is concerned that a narrative will develop that legitimizes the exclusion of children of same sex parents from Catholic schools," the group Catholic Democrats, which is based in Boston, said Friday.Conservative Catholic groups, meanwhile, have been mostly silent on the matter. "I don't really have a strong opinion on this one," said Deal Hudson, a prominent conservative Catholic activist, in an e-mail on Friday. "It's a matter of the individual bishop's discretion."O'Malley has not publicly weighed in on the case, but the Boston Archdiocese said Thursday that the Hingham school was not acting in compliance with archdiocesan policy."The archdiocese does not prohibit children of same-sex parents from attending Catholic schools," said Mary Grassa O'Neill, the archdiocese's secretary for education and superintendent of Catholic schools. "We will work in the coming weeks to develop a policy to eliminate any misunderstandings in the future."O'Neill said that the Boston Archdiocese met with one of the child's parents on Thursday and that it has offered to help enroll him in another Catholic school in the archdiocese.The parents of the St. Paul student have insisted on anonymity for them and their son in press reports of the situation.The Catholic Schools Foundation, a Boston-based group whose board is chaired by O'Malley, said Thursday that it would not support schools that discriminated against students based on their parents' sexual orientation.`
"[N]o school that promotes an exclusionary admissions policy or practice will be considered for support," said the foundation's executive director, Michael Reardon, in a Thursday letter to school administrators. "We believe a policy or practice that denies admissions to students in such a manner as occurred at St. Paul's is at odds with our values as a foundation, the intentions of our donors, and ultimately with Gospel teaching."to get more involved in the matter.

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For The First Time amFar gets Funds For The Cure Of HIV/AIDS

amfAR Funds New Grants to Find a Cure for HIV/AIDS

The new amfAR Research Consortium on HIV Eradication (ARCHE) has awarded its first-round research grants to four teams that will develop collaborative strategies for curing HIV/AIDS.

“amfAR has a long history of funding breakthrough research, and developing this consortium gives me great hope that we will catalyze the research for a cure for HIV/AIDS,” said amfAR CEO Kevin Robert Frost. “We believe that a collaborative research effort has the potential to dramatically accelerate the search for a cure.”

Grant recipients will undertake projects in three areas: the search for a sterilizing cure that would eliminate all HIV in the body; the search for a functional cure that would achieve permanent viral suppression without therapy; and the study of viral reservoirs, which must be overcome to achieve a cure.

The ARCHE-funded research teams include: the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease and Karolinska Institutet in Solna, Sweden; the University of California at San Francisco; Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore; and the Beckman Research Institute of City of Hope in Duarte, California.

Search: amfAR, research, HIV/AIDS, cure, grants, Kevin Robert Frost, project

Canadian Judge Rules HIV-Negative Man Not at “Significant Risk”

May 14, 2010

Canadian Judge Rules HIV-Negative Man Not at “Significant Risk”

In a groundbreaking HIV criminalization case, a Canadian judge ruled that an HIV-negative insertive partner is not at “significant risk of serious bodily harm” if he had unprotected anal sex with an HIV-positive receptive male partner, aidsmap reports.

Because the risk of transmission was low, Justice Lauri Ann Fenion ruled, the positive person could not be charged with aggravated sexual assault in what was otherwise a consensual act, even though he failed to disclose his positive status.

As the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network writes in a statement, the ruling “reinforces the basic point that not every risk of transmission will be considered ‘significant,’ and illustrates the importance of ensuring that courts consider carefully the scientific evidence before them in determining when there is a ‘significant risk’ of harm, rather than simply criminalizing non-disclosure in all circumstances.”

Fenion also ruled that the harm of HIV infection has diminished over the years because the virus “can generally be treated and held in check.”

The ruling is important in the history of HIV criminalization cases, wrote the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, “because as the severity of the possible harm decreases, the higher the risk of harm must be in order to warrant criminal prosecution.”

According to aidsmap’s details of the Vancouver case, the positive man did not reveal his status to his partner. They had sex three times, and in each case, the positive man was the receptive partner.

The prosecution’s expert witness testified that the cumulative risk of transmission for the insertive partner was 12 in 10,000. (The per-act risk for an insertive partner for both anal and vaginal sex is 0.04 percent, or 4 in 10,000.)

In other HIV criminalization cases involving nondisclosure, positive people have been convicted regardless of the risk of infection. The Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network said the Vancouver case illustrates the need for clear guidelines for HIV prosecution cases

Facebook And The New Privacy Mess

The latest mess started last month, when the social network unveiled a program to let developers and third-party sites connect with user profiles. One part of the plan, called "instant personalization," will let three sites—Pandora, Yelp, and Microsoft Docs—look at your profile information so that you can have a "personalized" experience the first time you visit those pages (for example, Pandora will play music you like based on your Facebook profile). Every Facebook user automatically has instant personalization turned on—if you don't actively turn it off, your profile will get shared. (Facebook describes the project as an experiment; a spokeswoman told me that the company will inform users as new sites are added to the instant personalization program.

Facebook also pushed users to publicly declare their affiliations: employer, hometown, interests, and other biographical information. These changes followed December's "improvement" to Facebook's privacy settings page that encouraged people to make many parts of their pages public—the site's new settings page preselected loose controls over many categories of information. If you didn't want your posts made public by default, you had to check to keep your "old settings"; if you missed that part, you could have inadvertently made all your posts available to everyone online. Sure, Facebook offers lots and lots of ways for people to control these settings, but you'd need months of study to be able to understand all of the fine-grained tweaks.

Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004 as a social network for students at Harvard. The site's ambitions have steadily increased: In short order, it expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale; then to the full Ivy League; then to colleges everywhere; then to everyone online; and finally, over the last few years, it's grown beyond Facebook.com, with Like and Connect buttons flooding sites across the Web. Over the same time, Facebook has added tools to let people share more stuff on the site, and it has loosened its policies governing the privacy of that information, making more of your information available to more people by default.

Each of these expansions was met with fierce grumbling, occasionally prompting a mea culpa letter from Zuckerberg. But never, in that time, did Zuckerberg backtrack from his general aim of pushing users to share more stuff more often, and Facebook never paid a price for it. Indeed, the numbers tell the opposite story—Facebook's gradual erosion of privacy correlates precisely with growing activity on the site. Facebook now has more than 400 million members, and it is the most-visited Web site in the country. The looser the rules, the more we use it. Facebook's executives naturally take this as confirmation that their changes were a good idea. And then, once we've become comfortable with the social network's latest settings, they decide to change their policies once again—and the same drama unfolds once more.

Some tech observers insist that Facebook has really done it this time. "You can only screw people for so long before it catches up to you," Web entrepreneur Jason Calacanis warned Zuckerberg in a recent blog post. "Facebook's Gone Rogue; It's Time for an Open Alternative,"Wired declared over the weekend. Both posts call for techies to come together to devise a new social network that will give people more control over their own information. Many have high hopes for a project called Diaspora*, which describes itself as "the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network." Diaspora* aims to tack against the centralized control of Facebook by letting people set up their own "nodes" to store their private information.

Lesbian Couple Sues Iowa Officials Over Birth Certificate 

By Advocate.com Editors

A lesbian couple is suing Iowa state officials for printing on their daughter’s birth certificate that she only has one parent and was born out of wedlock.

Heather Lynn Martin Gartner, 38, and Melissa McCoy Gartner, 39 filed suit against two state health department officials on behalf of their daughter Mackenzie, who was born in September, because her birth certificate only lists Heather as the mother.

The Iowa Department of Public Health rejected the couple’s request in March, according to the lawsuit, claiming Melissa had not legally adopted Mackenzie and was not biologically related.

Though same-sex marriage is legal in Iowa, birth certificate laws “expressly recognize the biological reality that women and men each play a distinct but equally necessary role in human reproduction and have corresponding rights, duties and obligations to their child,” according to the Department of Health letter cited in the lawsuit.

NationalGeogThink you know the outcome when its shark versus octopus? Think again!

Episcopal church in LA to ordain 2nd gay bishop

Anonymous / AP FILE - In this undated portrait provided by the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, the Rev. Mary Glasspool is shown. The Rev. Canon Mary Glasspool, of Baltimore, will be ordained and consecrated on Saturday May 15, 2010, making her the second openly gay bishop in church history and one of the first two female bishops in the Diocese of Los Angeles' 114-year history. (AP Photo/Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, File) NO SALES

  

updated 6:34 a.m. ET, Sat., May 15, 2010

LONG BEACH, Calif. - Seven years after the Episcopal Church caused an uproar by consecrating its first openly gay bishop, it's set to do the same thing again — only this time with a woman.

The Rev. Canon Mary Glasspool, of Baltimore, will be ordained and consecrated on Saturday, making her the second openly gay bishop in church history and one of the first two female bishops in the Diocese of Los Angeles' 114-year history.

The Rev. Canon Diane M. Jardine Bruce, of San Clemente, Calif., will also be ordained Saturday.

---

The two women were elected last December to serve as assistant bishops in the diocese's six-county territory but conservative Episcopalians had urged the church not to ordain Glasspool. The decision to do so highlights a continued Episcopal commitment to accepting same-sex relationships despite enormous pressure from other Anglicans.

The Episcopal Church, which is the Anglican body in the United States, caused turmoil in the church in 2003 by consecrating the first openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.

Breakaway Episcopal conservatives have formed a rival church, the Anglican Church in North America.

Several overseas Anglicans have been pressuring Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the world's 77 million Anglicans, to officially recognize the new conservative entity.

In 2004, Anglican leaders asked the Episcopal Church for a moratorium on electing another gay bishop while they tried to prevent a permanent break in the fellowship.

Since the request was made, some Episcopal gay priests have been nominated for bishop, but none was elected before Glasspool. In July 2009, the Episcopal General Convention, the U.S. church's top policy making body, affirmed that gay and lesbian priests were eligible to become bishops.

Glasspool and Bruce, who leaves her post as pastor of St. Clement's Episcopal Church in San Clemente, will also be the 16th and 17th women to be elected bishops since the first was selected for such a post in Massachusettsin 1988.

Glasspool, 56, an adviser, or canon, for eight years to the Diocese of Maryland's bishop, said in an essay on the Los Angeles diocese Web site that she had an "intense struggle" while in college with her sexuality and the call to become a priest.