Landscaper Under Fire for Refusing to Work for Gays (Page 52/65) JohnnyK NOV 14, 10:20 PM quote Originally posted by isthiswhereiputausername?: I agree with you Nick.. Both have no place in my life and never will. For some people in here that are so blinded by being politically correct and hold their rainbow panties high *cough* 84 bill *cough* johnnyk *cough* excuse me, just needed to cough there http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/1052/1052_01.asp I'm sorry if you feel it's wrong that I will fight against hate and prejudice.. At least the rest of the world is starting to see it our way, albeit slowly. Must be whats wrong with the world, right...? isthiswhereiputausername? NOV 14, 10:22 PM quote Originally posted by JohnnyK: I'm sorry if you feel it's wrong that I will fight against hate and prejudice.. At least the rest of the world is starting to see it our way, albeit slowly. Must be whats wrong with the world, right...? hate and prejudice? righttttttt....... JohnnyK NOV 14, 10:52 PM quote Originally posted by isthiswhereiputausername?: hate and prejudice? righttttttt....... Ignorance? That make you feel any better? 84Bill NOV 14, 11:08 PM Ya know.. I tried the ratings and I've used up all 10 today... Theres always tomorow.. isthiswhereiputausername? NOV 14, 11:33 PM quote Originally posted by 84Bill: Ya know.. I tried the ratings and I've used up all 10 today... Theres always tomorow.. Very true, maybe tomorrow you will be waiving your rainbow flag while you head out the door.. Nice red mark going for you there.. Did it hurt your limp wrists clicking the rating button 10 times? Falcon4 NOV 14, 11:42 PM quote Originally posted by isthiswhereiputausername?: I agree with you Nick.. Both have no place in my life and never will. For some people in here that are so blinded by being politically correct and hold their rainbow panties high *cough* 84 bill *cough* johnnyk *cough* excuse me, just needed to cough there http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/1052/1052_01.asp While I completely agree with part of the things that page said, like forcing universal acceptance of ALL "lifestyles" on children in schools being a crock of **** , things like gay people being "demons" and all this "IF YOU LIE YOU WILL BE CAST INTO A SEA OF FIRE" and having all "disagreeable" people being illustrated with "demons" crawling over them... pure bullshit. Geez, in that case, if we have to put up with the people that made that cartoon, for example, then I'm sure we should be forced to put up with gays too... 84Bill NOV 15, 12:00 AM [/quote] November 7, 2006 New York Plans to Make Gender Personal Choice By DAMIEN CAVE Separating anatomy from what it means to be a man or a woman, New York City is moving forward with a plan to let people alter the sex on their birth certificate even if they have not had sex-change surgery. Under the rule being considered by the city’s Board of Health, which is likely to be adopted soon, people born in the city would be able to change the documented sex on their birth certificates by providing affidavits from a doctor and a mental health professional laying out why their patients should be considered members of the opposite sex, and asserting that their proposed change would be permanent. Applicants would have to have changed their name and shown that they had lived in their adopted gender for at least two years, but there would be no explicit medical requirements. “Surgery versus nonsurgery can be arbitrary,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city’s health commissioner. “Somebody with a beard may have had breast-implant surgery. It’s the permanence of the transition that matters most.” If approved, the new rule would put New York at the forefront of efforts to redefine gender. A handful of states do not require surgery for such birth certificate changes, but in some of those cases patients are still not allowed to make the change without showing a physiological shift to the opposite gender. In New York, the proposed change comes after four years of discussion among health officials, an eight-member panel of transgender experts and vital records offices nationwide. It is an outgrowth of the transgender community’s push to recognize that some people may not have money to get a sex-change operation, while others may not feel the need to undergo the procedure and are simply defining themselves as members of the opposite sex. While it may be a radical notion elsewhere, New York City has often tolerated such blurring of the lines of gender identity. And the proposal reflects how the transgender movement has become politically potent beyond its small numbers, having roots in the muscular politics of the city’s gay rights movement. Transgender advocates consider the New York proposal an overdue bulwark against discrimination that recognizes an emerging shift away from viewing gender as simply the sum of one’s physical parts. But some psychiatrists and doctors are skeptical of the move, saying sexual self-definition should stop at rewriting medical history. “They should not change the sex at birth, which is a factual record,” said Dr. Arthur Zitrin, a Midtown psychiatrist who was on the panel of transgender experts convened by the city. “If they wanted to change the gender for all the compelling reasons that they’ve given, it should be done perhaps with an asterisk.” The change would lead to many intriguing questions: For example, would a man who becomes a woman be able to marry another man? (Probably.) Would an adoption agency be able to uncover the original sex of a proposed parent? (Not without a court order.) Would a woman who becomes a man be able to fight in combat, or play in the National Football League? (These areas have yet to be explored.) The Board of Health, which weighs recommendations drafted by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, is scheduled to vote on the proposal in December, and officials say they expect it to be adopted. At the final public hearing for the birth certificate proposal last week, a string of advocates and transsexuals suggested that common definitions of gender, especially its reliance on medical assessments, should be abandoned. They generally praised the city for revisiting its 25-year-old policy that lets people remove the sex designation from their birth certificate if they have had sexual reassignment surgery. Then they demanded more freedom to choose. Michael Silverman, executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, said transgender people should not have to rely on affidavits from a health care system that tends to be biased against them. He said that many transgender people cannot afford sex-change surgery or therapy, and often do not consider it necessary. Another person who testified, Mariah Lopez, 21, said she wanted a new birth certificate to prevent confusion, and to keep teachers, police officers and other authority figures from embarrassing her in public or accusing her of identity theft. A few weeks ago, at a welfare office in Queens, Ms. Lopez said she included a note with her application for public assistance asking that she be referred to as Ms. when her turn for an interview came up. It did not work. The woman handling her case repeatedly addressed her as Mister. “The thing is, I don’t even remember what it’s like to be a boy,” Ms. Lopez said, adding that she received a diagnosis of transgender identity disorder at age 6. She asked to be identified as a woman for this article. The eight experts who addressed the birth certificate issue strongly recommended that the change be made, for the practical reasons Ms. Lopez identified. For public health studies, people who have changed their gender would be counted according to their sex at birth. But some psychiatrists said that eliminating identification difficulties for some transgender people also opened the door to unwelcome advances from imposters. “I’ve already heard of a ‘transgendered’ man who claimed at work to be ‘a woman in a man’s body but a lesbian’ and who had to be expelled from the ladies’ restroom because he was propositioning women there,” Dr. Paul McHugh, a member of the President’s Council of Bioethics and chairman of the psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in an e-mail message on the subject. “He saw this as a great injustice in that his behavior was justified in his mind by the idea that the categories he claimed for himself were all ‘official’ and had legal rights attached to them.” The move to ease the requirements for altering one’s gender identity comes after New York has adopted other measures aimed at blurring the lines of gender identification. For instance, a new shelter policy approved in January now allows beds to be distributed according to appearance, applying equally to postoperative transsexuals, cross-dressers and “persons perceived to be androgynous.” The Metropolitan Transportation Authority also agreed last month to let people define their own gender when deciding whether to use the men’s or women’s bathrooms. Joann Prinzivalli, 52, a lawyer for the New York Transgender Rights Organization, a man who has lived as a woman since 2000, without surgery, said the changes amount to progress, a move away from American culture’s misguided fixation on genitals as the basis for one’s gender identity. “It’s based on an arbitrary distinction that says there are two and only two sexes,” she said. “In reality the diversity of nature is such that there are more than just two, and people who seem to belong to one of the designated sexes may really belong to the other.” [/quote] 84Bill NOV 15, 12:06 AM quote Originally posted by isthiswhereiputausername?: Very true, maybe tomorrow you will be waiving your rainbow flag while you head out the door.. Nice red mark going for you there.. Did it hurt your limp wrists clicking the rating button 10 times? Shouldnt you be preaching to your kids about how vile and filthy the gay lifestyle is.. maybe teach them to spit on them and other cool things.. You know.. a mini hitler youth program and whatnot. 84Bill NOV 15, 12:15 AM South Africa Bill OKs Gay Marriage Tuesday, November 14, 2006 CAPE TOWN, South Africa — The South African parliament passed legislation recognizing gay marriages Tuesday in an unprecedented move on a continent where homosexuality is taboo. African National Congress veterans heralded the Civil Union bill for extending basic freedoms to everyone and equated it with liberation from the shackles of apartheid. The bill's supporters had to overcome criticism from both traditionalists and gay activists and warnings that the legislation may be unconstitutional. "When we attained our democracy, we sought to distinguish ourselves from an unjust painful past, by declaring that never again shall it be that any South African will be discriminated against on the basis of color, creed culture and sex," Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula told the National Assembly. But a Christian lawmaker, Kenneth Meshoe, said it was the "saddest day in our 12 years of democracy" and warned that South Africa "was provoking God's anger." One Church leader in Nigeria denounced the move as "satanic," reflecting the views on a deeply conservative continent where some countries are debating constitutional amendments to ban same-sex marriages. But gay rights groups in Europe hailed South Africa as a shining example of progressiveness. The National Assembly passed the Civil Union Bill, worked out after months of heated public discussion, by a vote of 230 to 41 with three abstentions. The outcome was expected given the ANC's huge majority. It now has to be approved by the National Council of Provinces, which is expected to be a formality, before being signed into law by President Thabo Mbeki. The bill provides for the "voluntary union of two persons, which is solemnized and registered by either a marriage or civil union." It does not specify whether they are heterosexual or homosexual partnerships. But it also says marriage officers need not perform a ceremony between same-sex couples if doing so would conflict with his or her "conscience, religion and belief." South Africa recognized the rights of gay people in the constitution adopted after apartheid ended in 1994 -- the first in the world to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The bill was drawn up in order to comply with a Constitutional Court ruling last December that said existing marriage legislation was unconstitutional, as it discriminated against same-sex couples. The court gave the government a Dec. 1 deadline to change the laws, saying that otherwise same-sex marriages would be legalized by default. "In order to give effect to the Constitutional Court ruling, same-sex couples have to be allowed to marry so that they can enjoy the status, obligations and entitlements enjoyed at the moment by opposite sex couples," Mapisa-Nqakula said. The Roman Catholic church and many traditional leaders objected to the use of "marriage" saying this denigrated the sanctity of traditional marriages. In an effort to ease some of these concerns, the drafters of the bill allowed both religious and civil officers to refuse to marry same-sex couples. Gay rights groups criticized this "opt-out" clause, saying they should be treated the same as heterosexual couples. But in general, they hailed the new measure. "It demonstrates powerfully the commitment of our lawmakers to ensuring that all human beings are treated with dignity," said Fikile Vilakazi of the Joint Working Group, a national network of 17 gay and lesbian organizations. In Africa, homosexuality is still largely taboo. It is illegal in Zimbabwe, Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Tanzania, Ghana and most other sub-Saharan countries. Even in South Africa, gays and lesbians are often attacked because of their sexual orientation. Denmark in 1989 became the first country to legislate for same-sex partnerships and several other European Union members have followed suit. In the United States, only the state of Massachusetts allows gay marriage, Vermont and Connecticut permit civil unions, and more than a dozen states grant lesser legal rights to gay couples. 84Bill NOV 15, 12:19 AM Jerusalem holds gay pride rally The event highlights deep divisions between Israeli communities A controversial gay pride rally has taken place in Jerusalem despite calls from religious leaders to ban it. About 4,000 gay men, lesbians and civil rights supporters gathered at the Hebrew University stadium. Security was tight in the city with 3,000 Israeli police drafted in to stop clashes between the demonstrators and orthodox Jews. About 30 gay protesters who tried to march illegally through the city were arrested by Israeli police. The proposed march was cancelled by Israeli police on Thursday after Palestinian threats to attack Israel after the shelling in Gaza in which 18 Palestinian civilians were killed. HAVE YOUR SAY People have the right to partake in loving relationships of their choice Matthew, Bethlehem Gay men speak out In pictures: Gay gathering Event organisers agreed to move the event to the stadium after Israeli police said they needed to divert forces to deal with the security threat. Permission for the proposed march through Jerusalem had provoked controversy because of religious Jewish views of homosexuality as an abomination. Religious sensibilities Ultra-orthodox Jews clashed with Israeli police earlier this week after calling for the march to be cancelled, saying it defiled the holy city. The proposed march was also criticised by the Muslim and Christian religious communities. The Vatican called for it to be scrapped for fear of offending "the sensibilities of religious communities". As the event got under way, thousands of gay people poured into the stadium to hear a series of speeches. Many wore T-shirts celebrating their sexuality while others held banners and flags. One banner read: "There are different ways to be a Jew." Two men dressed as sperm handed out condoms to participants. One man at the rally told that the BBC that "that people need to be more accepting of homosexuality". The four-hour event passed off without any reports of violence. At last year's march, three participants were injured when they were stabbed by an orthodox Jew who opposed the event. This year's gathering had already been postponed because of the conflict with Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas during the summer.