Supreme Court To Rule On Gay Marriage Spree


LOS ANGELES -- The California Supreme Court is scheduled to issue a nervously awaited ruling Thursday on whether Mayor Gavin Newsom exceeded his authority by allowing gay couples to get married in the city earlier this year.

Legal experts -- and even the Democratic mayor -- assume the court will say that Newsom's actions violated state laws defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman. What's less clear is how the seven justices will treat the thousands of same-sex marriages that were sanctioned before the court intervened in March.

"It appears quite obvious the court is going to rule against the mayor," said Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. "We think that's unfortunate and it's wrong, but of course the more human question is what to do with 4,037 marriage licenses that belong to couples in relationships and with families."


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Two Utah groups form to fight same-sex marriage


Two groups have formed to support a Utah state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. The Constitution Defense of Marriage Alliance registered Monday with the state Elections Commission, and Yes for Marriage formed late last month. The two campaigns have the same goal but slightly different philosophies.

"We'll complement each other," Gayle Ruzicka, director of Constitution Defense, said. "Their group is concentrating more on scientific issues, scientifically why same-sex couples are not good for families. We'll touch on that; we're also working on moral issues."

The director of an opposition group, the Don't Amend Alliance, said studies that suggest gays and lesbians are not good parents are "out of context, not scientific, or the vast majority of people in these professions simply disagree with the conclusions of these studies."


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NFL pro likens gay men to rats, implies Garcia is gay
Christopher Curtis, PlanetOut Network


Football player Terrell Owens, the receiver for the Philadelphia Eagles, is being quoted as comparing gay men to rats in an excerpt from a Playboy article published Tuesday in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The comparison came up when the interviewer asked Owens if he believed Jeff Garcia, the former San Francisco quarterback, when Garcia denied rumors he's gay.

The article quoted Owens: "Like my boy tells me: 'If it looks like a rat and smells like a rat, by golly, it is a rat.'"


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Guilty of gay taunts at pub

A FORMER Wodonga publican, who told people that one of his workers “likes boys”, has been found guilty of sexual harassment.

The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal found Rodney Keogh, the former manager of City Hall, had discriminated against the male worker, 19, and encouraged another man to do so.

The tribunal heard after an all night drinking session in November, 2002, Keoghs friend, Mr Gavin Levy, unbuttoned his pants and asked the worker if he wanted to “play a game”.


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New York Lockdown
While anti-Bush activists in New York are adopting new techniques to try and disrupt the Republican party convention later this month, the police have got some new strategies of their own
by Michelle Goldberg


If you're a delegate attending the Republican national convention at Madison Square Garden later this month, Jamie Moran knows where you're staying. He knows where you're eating and what Broadway musical you plan on seeing. For the past nine months, Moran has been living off savings earned as an office manager at a nonprofit and working full-time to disrupt the RNC.

His small anarchist collective, RNCNotWelcome.org, runs a snitch line and an email account where disgruntled employees of New York hotels, the Garden and the Republican party itself can pass on information about conventioneers. So far, the collective has received dozens of phone calls and hundreds of emails with inside dirt on GOP activities.

Recently, a woman with a polished, middle-aged sounding voice left a message saying, "For some God-unknown reason I'm on the Republican mailing list, and they sent me what they call a list of their inner-circle events." The events hadn't been publicized elsewhere, she said, and she wanted to fax the list to Moran.

Moran feeds information like this to a cadre of activists desperate to unleash four years' worth of anger at the Bush administration. By dogging the delegates wherever they go, RNC Not Welcome hopes to make the Republicans' lives hell for as long as they're in New York.