News Round-Up: May 3, 2017

Some news items you may have missed:

• A pensive Pietro Boselli is giving you morning mood via photographer Mariano Vivanco.

• Housing Works, New York City’s groundbreaking housing project for people with HIV, turns 20.

• Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed a bill into law today that allows faith-based adoption agencies to discriminate against same-sex couples.

• The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals says a gay couple denied a marriage license in 2015 by noted homophobe Kim Davis can sue her for legal fees 🙂

• Police in Chechnya are reportedly telling parents to kill their gay children, or else they’ll murder them themselves.

• Netflix’s next Marvel series brings together Daredevil, Iron Fist, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage as “The Defenders.” The series drops August 18th, but you can watch the snazzy new trailer below.

Sean Spicer Dodges Questions On Anti-LGBT Executive Order

You can watch the Washington Blade‘s Chris Johnson try to get a straightforward answer about tomorrow’s impending anti-LGBT executive order from President Trump.

Note the self-satisfied look on Sparky Spicer’s face.

Good on you, Chris, you tried.

#deflection

FBI Director: “It Makes Me Mildly Nauseous To Think We Might Have Had Some Impact On The Election”

During his testimony today in front of a Senate committee, FBI Director James Comey said it makes him “mildly nauseous” to think his actions in October of 2016, when he reopened the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, “might” have had “some” impact on the election.

Note to Comey: it’s not “might,” it’s “did.”

And “mildly nauseous” hardly encompasses the range of feelings his actions caused this nation.

Senator Dianne Feinstein asked him why he chose to announce, 11 days before the election, the FBI investigation: “Why wouldn’t you just do the investigation as you would normally,” Feinstein asked, “with no public announcement?”

Answered Comey: “I would have made the same decision. I sat there that morning and I could not see a door labeled ‘no action here.’ I could see two doors, they were both actions. One was labeled ‘speak’ and the other was labeled ‘conceal.’”

What he doesn’t bother to mention is the fact that the FBI was also investigating the Trump campaign for collusion with Russian agents.

Somehow, he found the door labeled “conceal” on that one.

Watch below.

New Music: Bria Skonberg “With A Twist”

The euphoric buzz of New York, over cocktails on the edge of evening, alive with possibilities… anything goes.

Vocalist, trumpeter and songwriter Bria Skonberg re-imagines it all on her new album, With a Twist. Coming off a recent Juno Award (Canada’s version of The Grammys) for her first collection, Bria, Skonberg spins her cool and confident vocal style—and her sleek and timeless jazz chops—into a program that playfully nods to tradition while always looking ahead.

With a Twist is available May 19, 2017.

Of the mood she was going after on With a Twist Skonberg says: “The inspiration was love and adventure, and the many twists and turns and tunnels you can get into. It’s a little about my time in New York, a little bit of cocktail culture. The musical inspiration was a modern-day Esquivel, Perez Prado, maybe some Spike Jones. It’s just important to me to put some love and positivity out into the world right now.”

I think this sounds great – boppy, bouncy, fresh and fun.

Hailed by The Wall Street Journal as one of the “most versatile and imposing musicians of her generation,” Bria Skonberg was recognized last summer as one of “25 for the Future” by DownBeat magazine and Vanity Fair cited her as a Millennial “Shaking Up the Jazz World.”

Mississippi Funeral Home Sued For Refusing To Cremate Deceased Married Gay Man

For anyone who thinks we don’t need laws to protect us.

Last May, Robert Huskey, of Mississippi, passed away at the age of 82 after coping with a longtime heart condition.

With the outcome becoming clearly imminent, Huskey’s nephew made arrangements at the local funeral home for after his passing.

But on the day of his death, the Picayune Funeral Home refused to pick up and cremate Huskey’s body. The refusal was based on the fact the funeral home had discovered Huskey was gay, and had lived with his husband, Jack Zawadski for 52 years.

According to Lambda Legal:

Since the nursing home could not keep Bob’s body on site, Jack and John had to scramble to locate another funeral home with an on-site crematorium. They located one in Hattiesburg, some 90 miles away. By that time, because Bob’s body could not be housed at the nursing home for the hours it would take for the Hattiesburg hearse to arrive, they had to find yet another funeral home in Picayune willing to transport Bob’s body to Hattiesburg.

The family has now filed a lawsuit against the funeral home with the help of Lambda Legal.

In a statement released Tuesday, Zawadski said, “I felt as if all the air had been knocked out of me. Bob was my life, and we had always felt so welcome in this community. And then, at a moment of such personal pain and loss, to have someone do what they did to me, to us, to Bob, I just couldn’t believe it. No one should be put through what we were put through.”

This is why we need The Equality Act to pass in Congress. Mississippi has NO discrimination protections for LGBT folks at all.

(source)

Trump Slaps Back At Hillary Clinton For Asserting She’d Have Won If Not For Comey Letter and Russia

You knew Hillary Clinton would be on Donald Trump’s Twitter menu last night after she candidly pointed out that she would have won the presidential election had it not been for interference by FBI Director James Comey and Russian/Wikileaks.

I’m surprised it took him to 7PM to comment.

Stephen Colbert Trends On Twitter After Trump Rant

Social media going insane over Stephen Colbert’s rant tonight. The hashtag #FireColbert is trending.

Good for Colbert.

I think, given the crass things Donald Trump has said and done, I’m not bothered by it.

Trump To Legalize LGBT Discrimination In Executive Order Signing On Thursday

Well, we all saw this coming.

Politico is reporting that President Trump has invited conservative leaders to a signing at the White House Thursday. Most observers expect this will be the long-awaited executive order on promoting religious liberty over LGBT rights.

Two senior administration officials confirmed the plan, though one cautioned that it hasn’t yet been finalized, and noted that lawyers are currently reviewing and fine-tuning the draft language. Thursday is the National Day of Prayer, and the White House was already planning to celebrate the occasion with faith leaders.

The signing would represent a major triumph for Vice President Mike Pence—whose push for religious-freedom legislation backfired mightily when he served as governor of Indiana—and his allies in the conservative movement.

According to the above-linked report, the order is only slightly revised from the sweeping anti-LGBT order that was leaked to the press in February.

In February, The Nation obtained a draft of the executive order. “The draft order seeks to create wholesale exemptions [from antidiscrimination laws] for people and organizations who claim religious or moral objections to same-sex marriage, premarital sex, abortion, and trans identity, and it seeks to curtail women’s access to contraception and abortion through the Affordable Care Act,” the progressive magazine reported at the time.

The ACLU has already weighed in:

“The ACLU fights every day to defend religious freedom, but religious freedom does not mean the right to discriminate against or harm others. If President Trump signs an executive order that attempts to provide a license to discriminate against women or LGBT people, we will see him in court.”

(h/t JoeMyGod)

Hillary Clinton: The Comey Letter & Wikileaks “Scared Off” Voters

I was listening to this as it happened, and I was struck almost numb listening to such a competent, thoughtful, articulate person address the issues at hand.

And to think we have Trump for a president.

Business Insider reports:

Hillary Clinton told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour during a women’s event on Tuesday that she believes she was “on the way to winning” the 2016 presidential election until the FBI announced 11 days before the election that it was revisiting the investigation into her emails.

The former Secretary of State said that while she takes “absolute personal responsibility” for her defeat, “a combination of [FBI Director] Jim Comey’s letter on October 28 and Russian Wikileaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me and got scared off.”

“The evidence” that those two “intervening events” were carried out to harm her candidacy is “compelling and persuasive,” Clinton told Amanpour on Tuesday. But she said she is “proud” of her campaign for overcoming an “enormous barrage of negativity, of false equivalence, of so much else.”

Regarding the comments on the campaign, Comey and Wikileaks, I absolutely agree with Hillary.

Yes, she and her team made mistakes, and she cops to them here taking responsibility.

But she definitely was on the cusp of winning before Comey came out with his stunning public statement about “new” (not new) emails 11 days before the election.

The clip about the campaign is below, but I really urge you to watch the full 34 minutes. It’s striking to think what an intelligent president we almost had.

Details For The June 11th Equality March For Unity And Pride

The organizer’s of the upcoming Equality March for Unity and Pride, to be held June 11th in Washington, DC, have revealed their new logo, plus details about the event.

The theme of the logo, you can see above, is “‘intersectionality.’ The eight colors in ‘equality’ are the original 8 colors of the rainbow flag in honor of its creator, the late Gilbert Baker.”

From the event’s Facebook page:

The Equality March for Unity and Pride named a diverse group of leaders with years of advocacy and community mobilization in LGBTQ+ liberation movements across the country and the world as 12 of its national co-chairs. The co-chairs will be responsible for guiding the ongoing development of the march, which will take place on June 11 in Washington, DC.

“This is the most diverse national executive committee of any of the past five LGBTQ+ marches in Washington” said San Diego City Commissioner and National Co-Chair Nicole Murray Ramirez, who has served on the national organizing committees of all five past Marches in Washington.

“From queer youth, Two-Spirit members, Transgender, Black Lives Matter activists, Undocumented, Immigrant, to HRC, AmFar, and various organizations. The Equality March and the rally stage will indeed truly represent the changing faces of the U.S. and of our LGBTQ+ movement.”

Inspired by the queer liberation movement’s history of diverse, inclusive, and politically resonant public demonstrations, the Equality March for Unity and Pride will elevate and mobilize LGBTQ+ communities by highlighting those who, historically, have been actively silenced and neglected in the fight for full liberation, so that we may find unity and strength through diversity.

The march is centered on the principle that in order to heal from the decades of neglect and erasure of marginalized people in the community, we must center transgender and gender expansive communities, and people of color. The co-chairs demand the inclusion of those left behind by social justice movements, including Black, Latinx, Bisexual, and differently-abled individuals.

The co-chairs firmly believe that the community finds strength in diversity, and that the current political and social movement demands not just solidarity, but work towards intentional equity, representation, and protection of the most vulnerable. Equality March planners are working in coordination with the National Parks Service. Further details on the logistics of the march will be released in the coming weeks.