Russia discriminates

Copied from an email from the Courage Campaign.

Aeroflot, Russia's largest airline, discriminates against its gay and lesbian employees as an official policy, according to published reports. Gay flight attendant Maxim Kupreev decided to organize an LGBT employee group to push for equal treatment of LGBT people by the airline. Aeroflot's answer? Marry a woman or you are fired.
Aeroflot is part of the SkyTeam alliance co-founded by Delta and Air France, both of which market heavily in the LGBT community. Ask Delta and Air France to suspend Aeroflot until the airline treats all their employees with respect.
I care about this issue because, since 1983, I've spent a number of years in the USSR and then Russia. Even after I came out in the early 1990s, I was careful about being too "public" in Russia. My sexuality was used against me in business, with some people mocking and attacking my reputation simply because I'm a gay man. So when I read that -- over twenty years later -- Aeroflot was still oppressing gay employees, I had to stand up.
Will you stand with me and Maxim Kupreev and tell Delta and Air France to suspend its alliance with Aeroflot until the company apologizes and sets standards for fair treatment of LGBT employees?
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton historically announced last month that LGBT rights are human rights. Still, major Russian companies refuse to allow their gay citizens to live as real people. Imagine if your employer forced you to marry someone you did not love. We have to stand up for human rights violations wherever they take place, including Russia.
Tell Delta and Air France to set a better example and demand that Aeroflot treat all of its employees with dignity and respect.

Joel Burns

We are not free.

It's Memorial Day today in dear old America. And yesterday, at church, I heard something during the Intentions that kind of threw me, something about all the brave soldiers that died to protect our freedom.
But we aren't free.
Don't get me wrong. Those men and women who died were very brave and deserve recognition, and they died for many freedoms we should all be grateful for. We have freedom of religion, of the press, equal rights for all races and both genders, and even the right to elect our own leaders. These freedoms are precious and should not be taken lightly.
But we won't be completely free until gender identity and sexual orientation matter as little as biological gender or skin color.
We will not be free until laws allowing same-sex marriage, allowing gay people to serve in the military openly, preventing employers from firing people because they are gay or transgender, are made federal.
We must fight for our freedom. We might not be soldiers on the battlefield, but we can still fight.

If you want to tell the Democrats all this, you might read and sign the Courage Campaign's letter.

Please help end DADT!

When you sign a petition from the Courage Campaign, they ask you to send an automatic email to your friends. Here's one.

I just signed on to a letter from Gov. Howard Dean to President Obama asking him to end "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" this year.

With DADT repeal legislation being delayed indefinitely, it is now more important than ever that President Obama use the power of his office to repeal DADT as a part of the Defense Authorization bill currently under consideration in Congress.

Will you join me in signing Gov. Dean's letter to President Obama? Just click on the link below to add your name:

http://www.couragecampaign.org/DontWaitDontDelay

Thanks!

And meanwhile, on the Supreme Court...

I received an email from Rick Jacobs and the Courage Campaign just now. It was about GLBT people being potentially banned from serving on the Supreme Court. This is ridiculous. Here are some quotes included in the email.

"[A] gay judge's sexual preference will, without any question whatsoever, 'interfere with their job.' It's not possible for it to be otherwise... We simply should not elevate to the highest court in the land people who are known for engaging in sexually abnormal behavior which would technically make them felons in a quarter of the states over which they will have jurisdiction." -- Bryan Fischer, American Family Association

"We can assure you that we recognize that homosexual behavior is a sin and does not reflect God's created intent and desire for humanity. Further, we at Focus do affirm that character and moral rectitude should be key considerations in appointing members of the judiciary, especially in the case of the highest court in the land." --Focus on the Family
(The email's punctuation and emphasis, my inserted credit to the second quote)

I signed the Courage Campaign's petition to keep sexual orientation from being a consideration in appointees to the Supreme Court. They offered me the chance to send an email urging my family and friends to do the same. And I copied and pasted that email here.

Have you heard that right-wing groups like Focus on the Family and the American Family Association are insisting that gays and lesbians should be disqualified from serving on the Supreme Court?

It's outrageous. With a Supreme Court vacancy opening up after the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens, I just signed a letter to President Obama insisting that sexual orientation should NOT be a factor in selecting his Supreme Court nominee.

Will you join me? It only takes a minute to sign:

http://www.couragecampaign.org/NotAFactor

The religious right is firing up their massive lobbying machine and we need as many people to combat their outrageous attacks on LGBT people.

Thanks!

Cleve and the Courage Campaign

Today I got an email from Cleve Jones.
It was about repealing the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which of course, only applies to opposite-sex marriages. As important as that is, it's not what I'm here to talk about today.
For those of you to whom the name, Cleve Jones, seems familiar, he's the guy with the Afro and glasses in the movie Milk.
Unfortunately, it's an R-rated movie, mostly for profanity. But beyond the surface, it's a heartbreaking story, one that anyone (over 17) should see. It won Sean Penn an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role and Dustin Lance Black one for Best Original Screenplay. Watch the video of Black's acceptance through Courage Campaign. You won't regret it.
For those of you who are wondering how he got my email address, the email was a global, sent by way of the Courage Campaign. Who knows whether Cleve actually wrote the email or just signed his name? But, for the first time, a Courage Campaign email had a personal feel, apart from them mostly being for a cause (obviously) dear to my heart, because I'd heard of the person it was said to be from. Though I'd gotten an email from him before, that time I hadn't known who he is.
The Courage Campaign sends updates on events important to the GLBTQ community, like the status of Prop 8, and the story of Lt. Dan Choi, an army lieutenant, who was fired for refusing to lie about his sexual orientation and, very often, a request for donations. Among other things.
In its own words, the Courage Campaign is "the online organizing hub for progressive Californians. We are a network of more than 700,000 grassroots and netroots citizens empowered to leverage online tools for offline activism." Even if you're not a Californian (I'm not) it's good to be up-to-date.
If you read this post, but decided not to click on any of the links, go back and do it. Some of them are just FYI, but some of them are because I want you to see it. The video of Black's acceptance is one of them. It's not very long. It's worth your time. Let Black inspire you, in the movie whose screenplay he wrote and his speech both, to give your time to me. To us.