New York Court: State Must Recognize Out of State Same Sex Marriages

A New York appeals court ruled Friday, Feb. 1 that the state of New York must recognize same sex marriages from other states. In other words, same sex couples who get married in states where same sex marriage is allowed should be recognized, in New York, as legally married. The courts ruling was unanimous. The case arose out of the denial of health benefits to the female spouse of a female employee at Monroe Community College. The couple had been legally married in Ontario, Canada in 2004. The community college could appeal the decision. Read more about it at JURIST-Paper Chase.

Idiots To Picket Heath Ledger's Funeral

The Westboro Baptist Church, best known for picketing funerals and hiding their own latent homosexuality has announced they will show up at Heath Ledgers funeral, to be held in Manhattan, because of his role in Brokeback Mountain. I can only hope these bigots get lost on the subway and end up in the West Village and maybe realize their deepest urges they are so painfully bottling up. At the very least they will, hopefully, face a pretty sizeable counter protest. Here is their disgusting announcement:


link

Remember the Ultimate Warrior? He's an idiot too.

House of Representatives Protects Gays in the Workplace

Well, it seems as thought the House has finally realized that it is probably a good thing to have protections for homosexual workers from being harassed by their neanderthalish coworkers. 184 members of the House, including 25 Democrats voted against the bill. Undoubtedly much of the rationalized justification for voting against such a bill is a fear of more lawsuits. I'll take a few more lawsuits to stop some moron from taunting his gay coworker, wouldn't you? The Senate will likely bring up a similar bill sometime soon.

The one unfortunate thing about the bill is the language that had to be removed in order to make it more palpable and more likely to pass. Originally included were protections for transsexuals and the transgendered by protecting against discrimination based on sexual identity.

Here is a list of the yeahs and Hell No!s

Art and Anger

Plastic sent me this link to a New York Times article about a group of Swedish nationalists who vandalized the Kulturen gallery in Sweden on Friday. The group destroyed the work of photographer Andreas Serrano, a shock artist who is perhaps most remembered for his work, "Piss Christ," and the controversy that arose around it in 1989 due the fact that it was funded by a grant from The National Endowment for the Arts.

This most recent exhibit by Serrano, called "A History of Sex," is racy, but it is scary that it could provoke this kind of violence with such unrestrained bravado and conviction. Oh yeah, did I mentioned that the vandals video taped the act and posted it on YouTube? It is quite disturbing. I was particularly unsettled by the fact that the cameraman focuses on the destruction of a photo of an interracial gay couple for the majority of the video, despite the other "objectionable" photographs in the show, including a depiction of a woman fondling a stallion. That just smacks of hate to me.

Here is a link to the video, which has been removed from YouTube "due to terms of use violation," but can still be found on google video.