The Financial Situation of LGBT Organizations..read and see how you feel

 

Movement Advancement Project (MAP) presented a report detailing the income and expenditure of the 39 associations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and U.S. most important addition to comparing the data with the corresponding anti-gay groups .

One of the most important are percentages of those represented in the report, is the dramatic decline that occurred between 2008 and 2009.

While in 2008 the associations had entered 147 million euros(about 145.6 millions us$) in 2009 that number dropped to 20% with only 116.9 million euros.

The economic crisis has affected enough to have made donations to these organizations, and that while LGBT groups are supported mainly by citizens of "middle class" with some exceptions, the anti-gay groups have in their ranks with major corporations and billionaires on the American scene.

This means that, while in 2009 the LGBT associations had a budget of 120.1 million (118.7 Millions us $) spent homophobic organizations in the same period, 241.5 million euros (236.5 Million $us).

From Gay Universe we analyzed those numbers to place them in a corresponding percentage. The data show a worrying gap between groups seeking equality, and those seeking to limit it. The first, with 120.1 million euros, compared with homophobic associations have less than half the budget, with a figure of 50.3% less.

Despite these differences in favor of the groups that are against LGBT rights, associations of lesbian, gay, transgender and bisexual show higher returns in terms of expenditure and progress.

79% of LGBT budget is allocated to programs and services, from courses and conferences, to campaigns of visibility and control of diseases such as HIV.

Women represent 46% of members of LGBT groups, while transgender is about 6% of the total.

In addition, the percentage of U.S. adults LGBT who donated a minimum of 25 euros to organizations for equal less than 4%, even though he donates, often continue to do so, unlike large donations, from 725 euros or more, whose donors are declining and not get replaced, remains an important part of the budget reductions of these association

http://www.actup.org

'Fake police' Guy Targeting Gay Community Hunted

A suspected fraudster who is said to pose as a policeman while targeting gay men is being sought by police.

 Matthew Attenborough is wanted by forces across

 the UK in connection with deception offences.

The 43-year-old victim said a man who had been lodging with him for a more than a week had made off with about £600 in cash and credit cards.

Police said he had been identified as Matthew Attenborough, 30, who is wanted in at least nine other force areas.

The victim said he had met the man - who called himself Saul White - online.

The suspect claimed to be a police officer from Avon and Somerset who was transferring to Gloucestershire and needed a place to stay while he sorted out accommodation.

Pc Melanie Earnshaw said: "This man is finding his victims on the internet. Once he has got what he wants he will then move on to his next victim, it seems, in a completely different area of the country.

"It is imperative that we find him before he targets someone else.

"It is also possible that there are people out there who have also been targeted by this man but haven't reported it to police."

Police have released photographs of Attenborough, who is also wanted by forces in Bristol, Birmingham, Newcastle, Liverpool, London, Doncaster, Reading, Coventry and Cardiff.

 Posted on: BBC

Gay Male Flight Attendant Sues Australian Airline for $50,000

A former employee of Australian airline Jetstar is seeking $50,000 (£31,000) compensation, claiming he was sacked because his voice was not “masculine” enough.

Michael Galvin, who is gay, was sacked at the end of February. He is suing the budget airline for unfair dismissal, alleging that his manager lied about his performance at work.

His contract with the company was terminated shortly before he was due to begin cabin crew training. He claims that his manager made several homophobic comments towards him, including telling him that his voice was not “masculine” enough to deal with customers.

According to Galvin, his manager “was completely homophobic. I could tell from his body language.

“He told me, ‘You realise it’s a prerequisite being gay to be cabin crew?’ He was saying ‘the only reason you got the job was because you’re gay.’”

A hearing will take place later this month.


Simon Pollard


http://news.pinkpaper.com

It Seems Bachman is More Ignorant than Palin!

Rep. Michele Bachmann

First, she knew nothing about the men in the iconic photo of the Marines planting the flag on Iwo Jima, then she didn’t know in which state the Revolutionary War started. Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota is a veritable fountain of historical misinformation.

Clutching a tea bag in Concord, New Hampshire, Rep. Bachmann told a group of students “You’re in the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord..” Both towns are in Massachusetts, about 30 miles south of Concord, New Hampshire. It really is impossible for a shot to be fired in both town simultaneously, but why quibble? The Tea Party, whose Congressional Caucus Bachmann founded, takes its name from the Boston Tea Party, when a group of revolutionaries badly dressed as Native Americans boarded a cargo ship and dumped the tea in the harbor to protest the high taxes on tea, which were levied to help offset the costs incurred by the British government in fighting the French and Indian War on American soil. Hopefully, Mrs. Bachmann knows where Boston is, though she very definitely does not know that the men and women who fought our Revolution were beyond liberal – they were outright radicals. It’s a distinction that is lost on conservatives who claim they are the moral descendants of our founding fathers. About the only thing the conservatives have in common with the revolutionaries is a reluctance to pay for wars.

 by L. S. Carbonell       http://lezgetreal.com/

tittle,editing, adamfoxie*

Alec Baldwin Tells Charlie Sheen to 'Beg'

Alec Baldwin has some sound advice for Charlie Sheen. 

"Take a nap. Get a shower ... And then beg for your job back. Your fans demand it," the30 Rock star tells Sheen in a first-person piece written for The Huffington Postheadlined "Two and a Half Men Is Better Than None." 

Sheen, who went on outrageous rants and filed a lawsuit for more than $100 million directed at his bosses, "can't win" if he continues on the same bizarre path, according to Baldwin.

http://www.people.com

Update on Carl Kruger Corruption and being Closeted with His Lover Being his Partner..in crime

Carl Kruger is a Democratic senator who voted against marriage equality in 2009, and who is now accused of a widespread public corruption scheme, and also having a secret gay lover. Specifically, he is accused of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, and laundering it through the man that he is alleged to have lived with for years, Michael Turano, as well as using the money to buy everything from Bentleys to household items for Turano and his family. (Read the entire complaint here.) It’s a bizarre piece of news: it combines the politically pertinent with the salacious in a mostly unprecedented way. Even the ‘reputable’ news organizations that would normally report only on the money laundering scheme and leave the rest to speculation have to talk about it; the relationship between Turano and Kruger has been well documented by the investigative team (although its sexual nature hasn’t and maybe cannot be proven) and confirming it will in fact be key to Kruger’s conviction. As Capital explains:

It was to accounts held by Turano that the money was directed, and in those accounts the money stayed, except to be spent on Bentleys and the like. (There’s even a $15,000 light fixture Turano wanted to buy, according to the complaint, but Kruger put the kibosh on it.) Ironically, the state senator who opposed gay marriage is in a position where prosecutors must show that Turano materially benefitting from help Kruger gave to various hospital and healthcare organizations amounts to Kruger benefitting from them directly. And so, the “intimacy” part of the case is crucial.

If light-bulbs and travel snacks—the sorts of things the complaint identifies as purchases of Kruger’s to benefit the Turano family—are not your idea of love-gifts, then consider that prosecutors only need to show that simply by being close to the Turanos, Kruger benefited from and could even direct the spending of money that came into the household.

It’s a weird kind of milestone: where only fifty years ago, or possibly five or one or zero years ago, the accusation of being gay was like a conviction in and of itself. But now it’s just one jigsaw piece of a larger puzzle, a cog in the machine of a man’s life that is being laid bare for the American public. It’s even possible that Kruger is denying the relationship not because he’s committed to the closet for personal reasons, but simply to protect his legal interests: after all, he didn’t have a wife or family or deeply homophobic religious affiliation, like so many closeted self-loathing bigwigs do. Would a man who was ashamed of being gay have lived (apparently fairly openly) with his partner, going so far as to give his own personal phone number for inquiries relating to his partner’s car or job? (If you believe the statements put forth in the complaint, which seem thoroughly researched.)

And of course, there’s the fact that he’s voted against marriage equality – something that the mainstream media seems to have avoided grappling with, except to note that “the phenomenon of hypocritical politicians who live gay lives in secret, but vote against gay issues in public, is not reserved for only one side of the aisle.” Somehow it seems more complicated than that, though.

It has something to do with the fact that there are two kinds of lying happening at once here, two kinds of hurting the people that you vowed to help when you took public office. It’s about the fact that this is different than a classic case of self-loathing; without the possibility of probably ever really knowing, of course, it seems plausible to guess that Kruger wasn’t conflicted about his own relationship at all. He bought snacks for Turano’s mother when she traveled; he barely spent time in his own home. Their relationship is said to have been an “open secret” in Mill Basin, and Kruger has a history of being accosted by gay activists who want his secret to come out. By all appearances, this looks like someone who voted against marriage equality on the Senate floor because he knew it was better for his career, and then went home to his long-term boyfriend every night. We don’t even have a paradigm for that kind of duplicity and amorality yet. We’ve been on guard forever against those whose upbringings or religious convictions have led them to want to hurt us; we’ve learned to spot those people in positions of power whose own sense of inner torment about their sexual identity has them unleashing the damage they want to do to themselves on their own queer community. But someone who dispassionately denies basic rights to people who are (in one specific way) just like him, and then takes thousands of dollars of bribe money to buy his own boyfriend a Bentley? This is a new low, and hopefully now that he’s been exposed we can never go there again.

http://www.autostraddle.com

The Troops are Training for the End of Don't Ask Don't Tell

Military-wide drills to implement repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell have begun. Gay and lesbian service members can now read about how they must be treated equally—but still don’t dare say they are gay for fear of losing their careers, reports Eve Conant.

This past Monday at 7:30 a.m., Air Force officer JD Smith noticed on his work computer that training was about to begin. He was excited, and logged in right away for the online session.

Jung Yeon-Je / Getty Images

It was the beginning of the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell—but only, as it turns out, yet another beginning.

He clicked through slides for about 25 minutes, filled with “basic info that all people will be held to the same standards with repeal coming.” The overarching point: Everyone must maintain professional respect for military colleagues and harassment won’t be tolerated. Smith says the slides were simultaneously thrilling, with repeal looking like a reality; mundane like any HR computer course, and upsetting because he was essentially being trained in how limited his options will be.

The biggest “Ugh” moment for gays and lesbians reached by The Daily Beast who completed their training this week? That they can read how they will be treated equally and professionally, but still not dare say they are gay, or risk losing their careers.

For example, JD Smith is actually a pseudonym. It’s a name he has adopted as co-director of OutServe, an underground network of some 2,700 active-duty gay and lesbian service members (about 5 percent of the estimated 60,000 gays and lesbians currently serving). Of the five LGBT active-duty service members interviewed for this piece (four in the Air Force, one at West Point), all were afraid to have their full names or identifying details published. “I can’t give my real name yet, I’m so sorry,” says Smith.

“The training kept saying, ‘In the future you’ll be working with gay people.' Guess what? You areworking with gay people.”
—Air Force service member

The military-wide training (Smith posted examples of his training on the OutServe site ) signals the final death throes of DADT, and has commenced in all branches. “We'll do this quickly, we will do this responsibly,” Pentagon spokesperson Eileen Lainez tells The Daily Beast, adding that repeal may lead to some changes in policies while others—such as taking a neutral approach to sexual orientation, and not asking questions about it, will stay the same. The legislation that Congress passed in December repeals DADT 60 days after the president, secretary of Defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff all certify that DOD is ready to make this change. Force-wide training is an “essential component,” Lainez says, that includes “slides, narration, vignettes and Q&A ” and could include mobile training teams. The training of as much of the 2.2-million strong force as possible is expected to wrap up over the summer months, says Lainez, and “does not have to be 100 percent complete” for certification to begin.

Some gay service members are already taking small steps toward coming out. In Smith’s hidden OutServe network (“you couldn’t find it if you tried”) 20 percent of those recently surveyed said the new law had led them to begin talks with more people in their military units. That can be both good and bad. Despite the lengthy training and certification process, it can be easy to think DADT has been lifted, and such a mistake has such potentially devastating career consequences that the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network warns on its site in red lettering:

“***SLDN WARNING TO SERVICE MEMBERS - DADT is STILL in EFFECT***

…Click here to contact SLDN's legal hotline and set up a free, confidential call with an attorney to discuss your options.”

For some, the training serves as both a morale boost and reminder of how far they have yet to go. Jennifer, who just returned home from a tour in Iraq and serves in the Air Force, completed her training last Saturday. “I’m glad to see they are talking about zero tolerance for discrimination. But they made it clear that because of the Defense of Marriage Act, we don’t have benefit rights and won’t be getting any.” A source at West Point, who also has not come out, says that, “When DADT is repealed it will be awesome, it will be life-changing. But the part of the training that’s so hard to swallow is how a same-sex partner of many years can be treated the same as a girlfriend or boyfriend of a few weeks. It just boils down to the fact that little will change until DOMA changes.”

SLDN Executive Director Aubrey Sarvis understands the need for training but raises two major objections: “First, the timeline is too long. The majority of the force may be trained and educated, but they are being sent two messages. One is that open service ‘looks like this’ the other is DADT is still the law and people can’t come out. It is…challenging.” Second, he adds, “we feel there should be a place for all service members with discrimination complaints to go outside of their chain of command, because their problems could be within their chain of command. We feel the proper place is Military Equal Opportunity.” (Complaints will go through existing procedures but not through the MEO office that handles issues involving race, color, sex, religion and national origin).

“The training says being gay can’t be used against us for our jobs or promotions. But we won’t have an outlet to say we’re being discriminated against the way women and minorities do,” says Jim, who serves in the Air Force in Idaho and took the training last Saturday. “If it’s going to happen—and we know it will—there will be nothing we can do about it.” (OutServe details the vignettes used in the training). “It was slightly disappointing, but it gave me an idea of how people outside my situation might have to change their views—not their religious views, but their professional behavior. It might have been better to have more case scenarios, this was mostly dryly going down a spreadsheet.”

James, also with the Air Force, has served in Iraq and is currently overseas. He says the training “ just reiterated that I’m a second-class citizen, that if I move, the government won’t pay for my partner to join me, and they kept referencing the DOMA even though Obama says he won’t defend it anymore. When they talked about medical readiness and HIV it made me think that all straight people who go through the training will think we all have it.” OutServe’s Smith agrees that “it’s pretty demeaning to service members to say they have to ‘train’ about health and HIV with repeal of DADT. Instead they should say ‘it’s a false stereotype, get it out of your head.’”

Jim, the man serving in Idaho, adds: “The training kept saying, ‘In the future you’ll be working with gay people.' Guess what? You are working with gay people.”

Eve Conant is a Newsweek staff reporter covering immigration, politics, social and culture issues.

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For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

R.I. couple’s fight for gay marriage is deeply personal

By Karen Lee Ziner

Journal Staff Writer

Pat Baker of Johnston, left, who has lung cancer, with her wife, Deborah Tevyaw.

The Providence Journal / Connie Grosch

JOHNSTON –– Pat Baker has lung cancer and believes she has little time left. But twice this week, Baker dragged herself, her oxygen tank and a few extra pain pills to the State House, where she hoped to persuade lawmakers to vote for same-sex marriage.

On Thursday night, accompanied by her wife, Deborah Tevyaw, whom she married in Massachusetts, Baker testified at a Senate hearing.

“Every American is entitled to their civil rights under our Constitution. And it’s Rhode Island’s time to do the right thing,” Baker said. “I don’t feel any Rhode Islander wants to see another deprived of their civil rights. I hope I live to see this dream come true.”

Baker, a 51-year-old correctional officer, was never a gay-rights activist. But after doctors diagnosed her with incurable lung cancer in December, she got an added jolt. The federal Defense of Marriage Act [currently under legal challenge] precludes Tevyaw from collecting the Social Security benefits Baker earned for a surviving spouse.

Legalizing same-sex marriage in Rhode Island will not change that for now.

Nonetheless, the discovery stunned Baker, leading her to embark on what may well be her first and last act of bravery in the name of marriage equality.

“I worked for those benefits. And when I say worked, I worked hard. You name it, it’s happened. I’ve found inmates hanging; I’ve found inmates dead from suicide. I’ve been traumatized mentally and physically, only to get to this point in my life when I’m terminally ill … and I find out my wife is being begrudged $1,861 a month,” Baker said.

“I’m going to fight until my last breath,” Baker said in an interview at home this week. “Give ’em hell.” She added, “This kind of bigotry has to be rectified.”

A week or so ago, Baker addressed fellow correctional officers at 7 a.m. roll calls at the Adult Correctional Institutions. First, Baker told them, “Smoking kills. I’m living proof.” Then, noting that the issue is one of “fairness, equality and human rights,” she asked them to sign petitions. She said, “Ninety-eight percent of them signed it.”

Baker and Tevyaw said state Sen. Frank Lombardo III, and Rep. Deborah A. Fellella, whom they voted for, were less receptive, and raised religious issues when they spoke with them earlier this week at the State House.

Baker said politicians who cannot separate church and state “should find another career.” She added, “He [Lombardo] didn’t ask us if we were gay or straight when he was knocking on doors, looking for our vote.”

A justice of the peace married the couple in Provincetown, Mass., on Aug. 4, 2005. It was Baker’s first marriage. Tevyaw was previously married: this is her first marriage to a woman.

Married life drew Baker into a close-knit family that cherishes holidays and frequent get-togethers. Baker is also close with Tevyaw’s two children and two grandchildren.

But in a chair a few feet from a picture of those grandchildren, Baker sits and writes letters, as small-cell lung cancer shoots pain through her chest and steals her breath.

Tevyaw said, “My problem is that I watch her struggle every day. She sleeps three or four hours a night, and she’s on this computer, writing letters to senators and this one and that one, and she isn’t getting to live any dream that she had, because she’s fighting for what’s hers. And there’s not enough quality time for me and her to do things, go places …

“I feel she’s going to wind up dying behind that computer, and fighting and never getting to enjoy whatever she had. Other people out there, husbands and wives, I should say, they don’t have to do any of this.”

Karen Loewy, senior staff attorney with GLAD (Gay and Lesbian Advocates & Defenders), said Baker and Tevyaw are facing, at the worst possible moment, the fact that same-sex marriages obtained in other states are “inconsistently recognized” by public and private entities in Rhode Island. They are not entitled to the full scope of protections with regard to “end-of-life issues, disposition of remains, who is considered next of kin, who gets to make decisions of medical care, organ donations,” and more.

Noting that the couple has spent “thousands of extra dollars” trying to put in place such protections, Loewy said, “I hope it’s a reminder to the legislators that this is not an abstract. This is a really tragic illustration of how these vulnerable situations are made so much more difficult because these same-sex couples are not treated like everybody else.”

kziner@projo.com

In Kansas Dorothy Can Not Be Lesbian: Law Forbidding Homosexuality Stays on the Books

 Members of Kansas' gay community aren't happy as lawmakers in Topeka, KS, have decided to leave on the books laws banning homosexuality.

Laws banning gay sex have been ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, but the law remains in place in Kansas. 

An effort to repeal the law was killed this week, leaving gay and lesbian Kansans outraged.

"Good people make bad decisions, and I believe this was a very bad decision," said Jackie Carter of Metropolitan Community Church.

Carter is a leader of the gay and lesbian community in Wichita, KS, and the pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church. 

She said she's saddened by the move to leave the law on the books, and that it leaves thousands of gay Kansans under the impression they are unwelcome in the Sunflower State.

"I read that message quite clearly: you really don't matter so if you move to another state we really won't care," Carter said.

The House Judiciary Committee was considering a bill to clean up Kansas' criminal code when a pair of lawmakers, Jan Paul from Hutchinson and Lance Kinzer from Olathe, removed an amendment from the bill that would have repealed the law banning homosexual acts.

"I think their motivation is pretty clear," said Thomas Witt, chair of Kansas Equality Commission. "They don't like gay people and they're going to make sure in the eyes of the law we're still considered criminals."

A rally is planned for next week to protest leaving the law on the books.

Copyright 2011 NBC. All rights reserved.

(Source: NBC)

  

Republicans Budget Cuts Target Tsunami Warning Center

PST WASHINGTON, (AP) --
A spending plan approved by the House would slash funding for a tsunami warning center that issued an alarm after the devastating earthquake in Japan.
The plan approved by the GOP-controlled House last month would trigger deep cuts for the National Weather Service, including the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii.
A union representing workers at the tsunami center said the proposed cuts could result in furloughs and rolling closures of National Weather Service offices.
Barry Hirshorn, Pacific region chairman of the National Weather Service Employees Organization, said the GOP bill would affect the center's ability to issue warnings similar to those issued after Friday's earthquake in Japan.
Democratic Rep. Colleen Hanabusa of Hawaii called the GOP cuts reckless and even dangerous.


Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/03/11/national/w101828S98.DTL#ixzz1GL7LNfhg

NY Dem Who Helped kill Gay Marriage, Used Gay Lover To Help With Bribes

 

New York state Senator Carl Kruger is one of the four notorious Democrats who killed David Patterson’s push to legalize gay marriage in the state last year. So it should come as no surprise that he is utterly corrupt and lives with his gay lover and his gay lover’s mother. According to the charges against him, Kruger accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in exchange for support in the legislature, and his lover Michael Turano set up fake companies to accept the money. It’s still unclear why a gay man like Kruger whose party even supported gay marriage saw the need to kill it with the help of a few friends, unless he was just trying to be the worst state senator humanly possible.

A big chunk of that illicit cash came from well-known New York lobbyist Richard Lipsky — who in return got Kruger to sponsor bills, lobby other elected officials and direct state money to projects that benefited Lipsky’s clients, prosecutors said. [...]

The criminal complaint revealed that on Monday, FBI agents raided Lipsky’s Upper West Side residence, where they found $102,000 in cash from a safe in a closet and $4,000 “in crisp, large denominational bills from the pocket of a suit belonging to Lipsky.”

When New York finally legalizes gay marriage, they should make an exception for this guy. He doesn’t deserve gay rights, but then again, he will be locked up in prison anyway.

By JACK STUEF

http://wonkette.com