The march continues. The AP reports…

A U.S. judge in Boston has ruled that a federal gay marriage ban is unconstitutional because it interferes with the right of a state to define marriage.

U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro on Thursday ruled in favor of gay couples’ rights in two separate challenges to the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act.

The state had argued the law denied benefits such as Medicaid to gay married couples in Massachusetts, where same-sex unions have been legal since 2004.

Tauro agreed, and said the act forces Massachusetts to discriminate against its own citizens.

Like other efforts to abridge civil rights in America’s past, this one will eventually completely fail. It is inevitable that in a few years all will be complete, i.e. DOMA undone, DADT undone and full legal gay-marriage in all 50 states, with much ugly resistance in some states.

No words necessary. Just watch.

As if you you didn’t already have enough reasons to not shop at Wal-Mart, The Advocate reports,

Back in March, 18-year-old Fernando Gallardo got a seasonal job at a Las Vegas Walmart, hoping to make a few extra dollars. But a few weeks into the job, Gallardo says, his immediate supervisor asked him “point-blank” in front of four of his coworkers if he was gay, and from then on alienated him from the 50 other associates at that location.

“I told her yes, and after that she was very rude and short with me,” he tells The Advocate.

Gallardo says that soon after the incident, he was stripped of many of his daily duties and asked to wear a yellow vest and walk around the store. By mid May his supervisor and two other managers stopped talking to him completely.

“I was completely ignored and shunned,” he wrote in a complaint to the Nevada Equal Rights Commission. “I had nothing to do all day but wander around the store wearing a yellow vest no one else had to wear, much like Jews had to wear a yellow star of David in Hitler’s Germany.”

Gallardo says he went to a human resources manager and filed a report, but to no avail. He also accuses the store’s management of attempting to bribe some of his temporary coworkers with permanent positions, in exchange for saying he volunteered the information about his sexual orientation. However, Gallardo says he felt pressured into telling his boss that he is gay, by the pointed way in which she asked.

“It shouldn’t even matter what my personal life is, but what was I supposed to say, other than the truth?” he says. “I didn’t want to lie. This is who I am.”

I have a new State Senator. This past weekend a vacancy committee appointed Lucia Guzman to fill a vacancy for Colorado’s 34th senatorial district, which is also my home district. My former State Senator Paula Sandoval resigned her seat after winning a recent special election to the Denver City Council after my former City Councilman Rick Garcia accepted an appointment as HUD Regional Director. Guzman was already running for the State Senate in an open-seat election this November. She will continue to run, however now as an incumbent.

Guzman is an ordained minister and former member of the Denver Public Schools Board of Education.

Colorado is one of only three states, along with Massachusetts and Wisconsin, with openly LGBT elected officials at the municipal, county, state and federal levels. Colorado’s Congressman Jared Polis is the first openly gay man to be elected to Congress.

This just in…

LISBON, Portugal — Portugal’s conservative president says he has decided to ratify a law allowing gay marriage in the predominantly Catholic country.

The head of state’s decision to permit the enactment of a bill passed by Parliament in January makes Portugal the sixth European country allowing same-sex couples to wed.

President Anibal Cavaco Silva announced his decision Monday.

The Socialist government’s bill was backed by all of Portugal’s left-of-centre parties, who together have a majority in Parliament. Right-of-center parties opposed the measure and demanded a national referendum.

Portugal’s constitutional Court validated the bill’s legality last month.

In light of the anti-gay gay George Alan Rekers’ RentBoys.com kerfuffle, Michelle Goldberg at The Daily Beast cites a study which supports what many of us know already, those most hostile to gay people are often driven by terror and shame about their own desires.

Goldberg cites a 1996 study by researchers from the University of Georgia published a study in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology about the links between homophobia and homosexual arousal.

The authors, Henry E. Adams, Lester W. Wright, Jr., and Bethany A. Lohr, started with 35 straight men identified as homophobic and 29 straight men that were not. Both groups were shown heterosexual, lesbian and gay male porn while their erectile responses were measured. “Only the homophobic men showed an increase in penile erection to male homosexual stimuli,” reported the researchers.

Does being anti-gay mean one is gay? Of course not. We are talking about folks who are passionately anti-gay.

Goldberg concludes her piece by saying,

Satisfying as it is to see such a man unmasked, Rekers deserves a measure of pity as well as scorn. If he portrayed homosexuality as a life-destroying temptation that only the strictest of measures could contain, that’s because, for him, it was. /* My emphasis */ He seems like he’s devoted his life to a hysterical battle to preserve his own threatened sense of masculinity, and now he stands defeated and exposed.

I often say, if you know anyone who is vehemently anti-gay, he is probably gay himself. We find story after story of these anti-gay creeps lurking about in the gay shadows, if you will.

Well here is another one. The Miami New Times reports Family Research Council co-founder and anti-gay activist George Alan Rekers was spotted leaving Miami International Airport on April 13 with a 20-year-old he met on a gay escort site.  Am I surprised by this story? If you could see me right now you would see my shocked face.

The pictures on the Rentboy.com profile show a shirtless young man with delicate features, guileless eyes, and sun-kissed, hairless skin. The profile touts his “smooth, sweet, tight ass” and “perfectly built 8 inch cock (uncut)” and explains he is “sensual,” “wild,” and “up for anything” — as long you ask first. And as long as you pay.

On April 13, the “rent boy” (whom we’ll call Lucien) arrived at Miami International Airport on Iberian Airlines Flight 6123, after a ten-day, fully subsidized trip to Europe. He was soon followed out of customs by an old man with an atavistic mustache and a desperate blond comb-over, pushing an overburdened baggage cart.

That man was George Alan Rekers, of North Miami — the callboy’s client and, as it happens, one of America’s most prominent anti-gay activists. Rekers, a Baptist minister who is a leading scholar for the Christian right, left the terminal with his gay escort, looking a bit discomfited when a picture of the two was snapped with a hot-pink digital camera.

Reached by New Times before a trip to Bermuda, Rekers said he learned Lucien was a prostitute only midway through their vacation. “I had surgery,” Rekers said, “and I can’t lift luggage. That’s why I hired him.” (Medical problems didn’t stop him from pushing the tottering baggage cart through MIA.) /* who sincerely buys this? */

Yet Rekers wouldn’t deny he met his slender, blond escort at Rentboy.com — which features homepage images of men in bondage and grainy videos of crotch-rubbing twinks — and Lucien confirmed it. /* so this slimy hypocrite he goes to a site called Rentboys.com with a splash page featuring a cut young body and claims that he only discovered he as a ‘prostitute only midway through their vacation’?  Yeah OK. */

At the small western Miami townhome he shares with a roommate, a nervous Lucien expressed surprise when we told him that Rekers denied knowing about his line of work from the beginning. “He should’ve been able to tell you that,” he said, fidgeting and fixing his eyes on his knees. “But that’s up to him.”

For decades, George Alan Rekers has been a general in the culture wars, though his work has often been behind the scenes. In 1983, he and James Dobson, America’s best-known homophobe, formed the Family Research Council, a D.C.-based, rabidly Christian, and vehemently anti-gay lobbying group that has become a standard-bearer of the nation’s extreme right wing. Its annual Values Summit is considered a litmus test for Republican presidential hopefuls, and Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter have spoken there. (The Family Research Council would not comment about Rekers’s Euro-trip.)

He has also influenced American government, serving in advisory roles with Congress, the White House, and the Department of Health and Human Services and testifying as a state’s witness in favor of Florida’s gay adoption ban. A former research fellow at Harvard University and a distinguished professor of neuropsychiatry at the University of South Carolina, Rekers has published papers and books by the hundreds, with titles like Who Am I? Lord and Growing Up Straight: What Families Should Know About Homosexuality.

“While he keeps a low public profile, his fingerprints are on almost every anti-gay effort to demean and dehumanize LGBT people,” says Wayne Besen, a gay rights advocate in New York City and the executive director of Truth Wins Out, which investigates the anti-gay movement. “His work is ubiquitously cited by lobby groups that work to deny equality to LGBT Americans. Rekers has caused a great deal of harm to gay and lesbian individuals.”

Rekers is a board member of the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), an organization that systematically attempts to turn gay people straight. And the Huffington Post recently singled out Rekers as a member of the American College of Pediatricians — an official-sounding outfit in Gainesville that purveys lurid, youth-directed literature accusing gays of en masse coprophilia. (In an email, the college’s Lisa Hawkins wrote, “ACPeds feels privileged to have a scholar of Dr. Rekers’ stature affiliated with our organization. I am sure you will find Prof. Rekers to be an immaculate clinician/scholar, and a warm human being.”)

Rekers lectures worldwide, from Europe to the Middle East, on teen sexuality. Yet during his ten-day sojourn with Lucien to London and Madrid, he had no lectures scheduled. Both men deny having sex on the trip, and emails exchanged between the two before their jaunt are cautiously worded.

“I’d like to propose another trip to Rome, Italy, for a week or more,” Rekers wrote in an email dated March 21 obtained by New Times. “This is so exciting to have a nice Travel Assistant and traveling companion! Wow! I’m so glad I met you.” /* yeah I bet */

“I called and talked to the reservation guy in London and reserved a room with two twin beds,” Rekers wrote on March 26.

“Now that I’m packed, tomorrow I’ll work on completing my income tax return,” Rekers wrote two days later. “Not fun… But I’ll just remind myself that the fun trip is coming soon.”

In his interview with New Times, Lucien didn’t want to impugn his client, but he made it clear they met through Rentboy.com, which is the only website on which he advertises his services. Neither Google nor any other search engine picks up individual Rentboy.com profiles, any more than they pick up individual profiles on eHarmony or Match.com. You cannot just happen upon one.

BOYS BEWARE! One never knows when the homosexual is about. He may appear normal.

via Unreasonable Faith

You know those scary lesbians, how dare they want to go to the prom just being themselves.  Well that’s how a Louisiana school feels after they canceled the senior prom because student Constance McMillen threatened to wear a tuxedo and bring a girl as her date. The horrors!

A generous New Orleans hotelier Sean Cummings has come to save the day.  Outraged by these dopey reactionary school administrators, Cummings has offered to bus the kids to the Big Easy and host the prom at one of his hotels.  I bet these kids will have one hell of a night to remember and I’m sure this will beat the school-sponsored prom they would have had.  McMillen, first reviled by her classmates for provoking the cancellation, will now be a hero. Funny how things work out sometimes.

Add another one of these right-wing gay bashers to the list of outed homosexuals.  Honestly, who is really surprised? It’s always the most obsessive gay bashers who are repressed self-loathing homosexuals themselves.  We all know this.

California GOP state lawmaker Roy Ashburn gets pulled over driving drunk from a gay bar and now admits he’s gay.

I could be hard on this guy, but I’ll resist the temptation.  Maybe this poor guy can finally find some personal solace.  He still stands by his anti-gay voting record but perhaps he’ll think this over and and make amends for his ill-founded advocacy.  I can hope.