Gay News You Can Use: jilted edition

South Carolina so NOT gay

Someone made a big “oops” down in the Palmetto State when she approved an expenditure of less than one-half of one-tenth of 1 percent of South Carolina’s tourism promotions budget on a London advertising campaign to bill the Southern state as a destination for gay tourists. Gov. Mark Sanford ordered the advertisement canceled, and the employee who approved it was called into a management meeting where she resigned, reports Q-Notes, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender publication for the Carolinas.

The advertisement, which was mounted in a London subway station, read, “South Carolina is so gay.” The campaign was part of a larger campaign paid for by travel people to promote tourism in specifically gay-friendly locations, including Las Vegas.

According to the report in Q-Notes, the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism has a budget of over $10 million, and the ad cost the state $4,942.50. The state told Q-Notes it had no intention of paying the bill for the advertisement, which was created by Out Now, an ad agency.

Out Now CEO Ian Johnson spoke to Q-Notes in his first interview with a U.S. media outlet regarding the upset from his gay marketing agency’s branch office in Brussels, Belgium. “The reaction from the South Carolina politicians is quite disturbing,” he said. “I felt sorry for the gay and lesbian community there.”

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Ironically City Council members in Columbia, S.C., gave gay pride organizers $10,000 this year to promote the city’s pride celebration.The organization has not wasted any time in jumping on the controversy to promote its event, either, launching a new “South Carolina will be so gay” advertising campaign for its Sept. 20 celebration.

Sanford’s actions, while a slap in the face of LGBT tourists, has also drawn national attention to the issue because the governor is considered a strong contender in the Republican veepstakes. Sanford is mentioned with names like Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee in most political spin zones as a potential running mate for the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

Obama campaign plays coy in flirtation with faith-based initiatives office

The presidential campaign of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, is playing coy when it comes to answering questions from the gay and lesbian press about its newly proposed Council for Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Obama announced the program in a July 1 appearance in Ohio, but when members of the gay and lesbian press began asking how the candidate’s proposal would prevent grants from funding anti-gay discrimination and harassment, the campaign went mysteriously silent, reports the Gay People’s Chronicle, Ohio’s newspaper for the LGBT community.

Nonprofits working for LGBT youth and issues have complained bitterly about funding from the federal government being drained away to fund faith-based programs that have no obligation to hire or serve LGBT people. Obama’s campaign told the newspaper that it would prevent discrimination in the operations of programs funded by forcing those funded to follow the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The only problem with that, LGBT advocates point out, is that sexual orientation and gender identity and/or expression are not covered by the law.

The Obama camp’s answer to this little oversight?

The campaign also said in a written statement that Obama “appreciates that the LGBT community has concerns about ensuring access to critical social services.”

However, the campaign stops short of saying how that would happen under the present law. When pressed, representatives (instead of they) answer: (colon subbed for that) “Senator Obama has been working to pass a fully-inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act, so that employment discrimination on the bases of sexual orientation or gender identity is not permitted. He will continue to fight for ENDA’s passage as president.”

By press time — 14 days after their announcement — the campaign has not answered questions about what happens if ENDA doesn’t pass, or it doesn’t pass for years into his presidency, or it passes without including protection for gender identity and expression.

Translation: Gay people, vote for me and shut up about your concerns already.

Which, by the way, is a message a lot of us in the LGBT community have heard for many years from many politicians. That’s how we ended up with the Bill Clinton/Sam Nunn “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. Been there, done that, got the T-shirts.

This is not the first time Obama’s campaign has tangled with the LGBT community and come out looking bad, either. For most of the Democratic primary, Obama refused to grant interviews with LGBT-specific media, while at the same time courting the African-American press and Latino press. The closest his campaign came to providing an interview to a statewide or local LGBT newspaper was a written interview with Q-Notes in North Carolina before the vote in that state. Other than that, Obama has stuck it out with The Advocate, a national news magazine targeting the LGBT community.

His campaign created a dust-up when it hosted an event featuring an ex-gay evangelical, Donny McClurkin. Obama did not rebuff the ex-gay movement, as many in the LGBT community would like to see him do, nor did he say he did not agree with it. Instead, he relied on striking a chord of agreeing to disagree with the ex-gay leader.

Don’t ask about this piece

And from the maybe-you-should-ask category, while the U.S. military brass are resting on their laurels claiming that kicking LGBT service members out of the service is serving the best interest of our country, the SacBee.com, the Web site for the Sacremento Bee newspaper is reporting those brash armchair warriors have decided ex-convicts are fine to serve in the military. The outlet spent a year following the stories of hundreds of troops, focusing on 250 who were listed as suspect soldiers. Of those, 120 had questionable backgrounds including felony convictions and drug and alcohol abuse.

But wait, it gets better. The Bee reports that the number of people enlisting with a moral conduct waiver rose from 4.6 percent in 2003 to 11.2 percent in 2007.

Others, The Bee found, were able to enlist because they had no official criminal record of arrests or convictions, their records were overlooked or prosecutors suspended charges in lieu of military service – akin to a now-defunct Vietnam-era practice in which judges gave defendants a choice between prison and the military.

“How in the hell can they legally possess a gun?” asked Montgomery County, Ala., Sheriff D.T. Marshall, when questioned about a soldier from his county.

Why is the sheriff upset?

Before Army Sgt. 1st Class Randal Ruby was accused in Iraq of beating prisoners and of conspiring to plant rifles on dead civilians, he amassed a 10-year criminal record documenting assaults on his wife in Colorado and Washington state and a drunken high-speed police chase in Maine for which he remains wanted.

Before Lance Cpl. Delano Holmes stabbed an Iraqi private to death with a bayonet, he was hospitalized after threatening suicide in high school, accused of assault, disorderly conduct and trespassing, and, in the months leading up to deployment, was twice linked to drug use.

Before Army Spc. Shane Carl Gonyon was convicted of stealing a pistol at Abu Ghraib prison, he was convicted twice on felony charges and arrested four times, once for allegedly giving a 13-year-old girl marijuana in exchange for oral sex. He enlisted weeks after his release from a federal prison in Oregon.

And of course there were hundreds more just like these.

Meanwhile, the folks over at Servicemembers Legal Defense Fund, are reporting that in 2007:

According to statistics obtained from the Pentagon for Fiscal Year 2007, the armed forces continue discharging nearly two service members per day. The separation data shows the number of discharges under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” have fallen by 50% since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the beginning of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. In FY 2007, at least 627 military personnel were dismissed under the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” ban on openly gay service members, up from 612 in FY 2006.