Weekly Political Roundup

• Why is the military prepared to shell out $150,000 in retention bonuses to service members who are proficient in Arabic, when it has used the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy to dismiss more than five dozen qualified and willing Arabic speakers? Steve Ralls, PFLAG’s director of communications, who also held that role for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, asks this very good question at HuffPo.
• Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), a supporter of Hillary Clinton, has announced that she is now backing Barack Obama for president. She will now chair his LGBT Steering Committee along with University of Pennsylvania law professor Tobias Wolff.
• The total number of LGBT delegates to the Democratic National Convention is up 27% from 2004, according to the National Stonewall Democrats, accounting for 6% of total delegates. The Washington Blade adds, however, that many states missed their voluntary goals for the number of LGBT delegates.
• A California judge ruled that the ballot description of Proposition 8, a measure to ban marriage of same-sex couples, is accurate in stating that it “eliminates (the) right of same-sex couples to marry.” Supporters of a ban argued that the description was biased.
• The Advocate has updated numbers on donations for and against California’s Prop. 8.
• California’s Attorney General said, however, that even if Prop. 8 passes, the marriages of same-sex couples conducted since their legalization on May 15 would “probably remain valid.”
• In contrast to the Grossmont Union High School District, which voted to support Prop. 8, the San Leandro, CA school board may vote in favor of a resolution to oppose it. The board has sent the measure to an advisory committee for further discussion.
• Brandon McInerney pled not guilty to first degree murder for the killing of fellow Oxnard, CA student Larry King. His attorney is asking that he be tried on the lesser charge of manslaughter.
• Moving beyond the Golden State: The Weld County, CO district attorney said he would prosecute the murder of 18-year-old transwoman Angie Zapata as a hate crime.
• Florida Governor Charlie Crist said he supports Amendment 2, a ballot measure that would make not only marriages, but domestic partnerships, unconstitutional for same-sex couples.
• Keisha Waites, who would have been the first openly gay African-American woman elected to a state legislature in the country, lost her race for the Georgia House, despite backing from the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund.
• Inga Taylor, a lesbian from Wichita, KS, lost the Democratic primary for a state house seat to an opponent who made an issue of her sexuality and her ties to the DC-based Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund.
• If a referendum to repeal Maryland’s anti-discrimination protections based on gender identity and expression is successful, conservatives hope their strategy could become a “template to repeal similar measures across the country.” (Thanks, Gay & Lesbian SmartBrief.)
• Steven Goldstein, head of New Jersey’s Garden State Equality, doesn’t think residents of his state will rush to Massachusetts to marry. For one thing, he says, NJ won’t recognize the marriages. For another, he expects full marriage equality in his state soon.
• New Yorkers, on the other hand, are heading to nearby Massachusetts to marry, knowing their home state will at least recognize their nuptials.
• Republicans (yes, Republicans!) in the New York State Senate introduced legislation to ban bullying in public schools, including harassment based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
• Not only that, but New York Assembly Republicans who voted to legalize same-sex marriage in the state have garnered a flood of donations from across the country, with over half of their individual contributions in the latest filing cycle from donors outside the state.

Around the world:

• Not LGBT-specific news, but health workers at the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City said the global response to the AIDS epidemic has short-changed children, with not enough of the large donations to fight the epidemic reaching children in the developing world.
• The government of the Australian Capital Territory passed the Parental Leave Amendment Bill, giving same-sex couples equal access to the leave that is available to people in opposite-sex relationships.
• A gay man was forced to sell the French home he and his deceased partner shared, after authorities refused to recognize his U.K. civil partnership. He was forced to sell the home, unable to pay the 60% inheritance tax. The French equivalent of a British civil partnership, the pacte civil de solidarité, is fully recognised in Britain.
• Indian health minister Anbumani Ramadoss, speaking at the International Conference on AIDS this week, said that his country should overturn laws criminalizing gay sex.
• A U.S. immigration judge ruled that a Jamaican lesbian living in Florida could stay in the U.S. because her sexual orientation could cause her to be tortured if she returned to her home country. Waymon at Bilerico notes, “This is an extremely rare decision, but the judge’s decision comes as more and more reports of antigay violence come out of Jamaica.”
• The Norwegian Islamic Council has been waiting since November for a reply from the European Fatwa Council on whether the death penalty is a permissible punishment for homosexuality. The head of the Norwegian Islamic Council says he does not believe the European group will rule against European law, but feels it is important to know their attitude before making its own decision.
• Two Filipino men have been arrested in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for “homosexual acts.”
• Only 1% of civil partnerships in the U.K. have ended in divorce, versus approximately 45% of opposite-sex marriages. The article in Pink News also notes that the 2011 U.K. Census will have an option to indicate a civil partnership (cf. the U.S. Census Bureau’s handling of same-sex marriages, which it will downgrade to “unmarried partners.”)
• At last week’s Lambeth Conference in the U.K., the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, upheld the orthodox Anglican position that “homosexual practice” is incompatible with Scripture. In a rediscovered letter written eight years ago, however, he wrote, “an active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex might therefore reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage, if and only if it had about it the same character of absolute covenanted faithfulness.”