Last Week in Gays

A round up of only some of the numerous interesting stories about the progress of gay civil rights covered this week by Box Turtle Bulletin:

Ireland now has civil partnerships “with many (but not all) of the rights, priveleges, and responsibilities to same-sex couples.”

In Texas, 57% now support some sort of recognition of gay unions.

Senator Chris Dodd came out in favor of marriage equality.  (The gays must have offered him a sweet deal on his mortgage.)

The government apologizes for firing astronomer Frank Kameny for being gay in 1957:

Yesterday, more than fifty years after his firing, Frank was on hand at a special ceremony to receive a formal letter of apology from John Berry, the openly gay Director of the Office of Personnel Management. Kameny was also bestowed the Teddy Roosevelt Award, the department’s highest honor. Upon receiving the apology, Frank Kameny tearfully replied, “Apology accepted.”

A respected Christian researcher generates interesting results from his study of gays, including that

70% consider themselves to be Christian,
60% describe their faith as “very important” in their life,
58% have made “a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important in your life today”,
About 40% are absolutely committed to the Christian faith, and
27% qualify as born again Christians

“People who portray gay adults as godless, hedonistic, Christian bashers are not working with the facts,” declared the best-selling author of numerous books about faith and culture. “A substantial majority of gays cite their faith as a central facet of their life, consider themselves to be Christian, and claim to have some type of meaningful personal commitment to Jesus Christ active in their life today.”

A prominent leader of the “ex-gay” movement was exposed as having an all-too-recent record of complaints from males claiming he solicited sex from them.

A new report explored the possible evolutionary reasons for survival of homosexual genes.

In Maine there are allegations of fraud as people are being asked to sign a petition to support gay marriage which actually is a petition to oppose it.  Timothy Kincaid aptly calls this, “just another example in a long line of instances that illustrates the base immorality of those who will crawl through the gutter to demonstate just how Special They Are To God by denying civil equalities to others.”

Moderate Mormons apologize for their fellow LDS members’ heavy involvement in passing Proposition 8 in California.

And of course, The Colbert Report had crucial coverage of the dangers of loose gay demons, recent tensions between Obama and the LGBT community, and the history of Stonewall.