Weekly Political Roundup

U.S. National News

• The National Equality March is taking place this weekend, and the biggest news to come out of it so far is President Obama’s upcoming speech at the HRC dinner tomorrow night. HuffPo has lined up a panel of bloggers to tell us what they think Obama should say. My favorite piece so far? That of former GLAAD president and lesbian mom Joan Garry, who says in part:
  

  I want the President to walk a few paces in our shoes tomorrow night. Perhaps he could talk about how he would feel if he had been Janice Langbhen sitting with her three kids in a hospital waiting room for 8 hours with absolutely no information of access while her partner died of a sudden brain aneurism because the hospital saw Janice as a legal stranger. Mr. President, put yourself in her shoes. How would it have felt to be sitting there in that waiting room? With Sasha and Malia at your side.

• The U.S. House passed the FY 2010 Defense Authorization bill, with the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act attached. It now goes to the Senate for a final vote, where it is also expected to pass. President Obama has said he will sign it.
• A new study from the University of California shows that women represented just over one-third of the servicemembers discharged under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, even though they make up only 15 percent of active and reserve duty servicemembers. The Air Force had the largest discrepancy, with women as a majority of those dismissed, even though they made up only 20 percent of personnel.
• In a case of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Teach, Lt. Col. Edith A. Disler, an Air Force officer with 25 years of service, was disciplined and barred from teaching at the United States Air Force Academy after she invited three gay Air Force Academy combat veterans to speak to her class about DADT.
• Wrapping up DADT news for the week, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs (who, incidentally, is not nearly as awesome as C. J. Cregg) told the Advocate “that there was no change in White House policy and that the president is working with the Pentagon on how to overturn the policy statutorily.
• The Supreme Court refused to hear two LGBT-related cases: The first was the appeal of a Michigan school district seeking to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the parents of a student who was harassed with anti-gay slurs. This means the case will proceed to trial in a federal district court. The second was an appeal from an Episcopal parish in Los Angeles that sought to break away from the national denomination because of the consecration of a gay bishop. The parish tried to take church property with them, and the denomination fought back. The California Supreme Court backed the denomination, and the SCOTUS refusal means their ruling will stand. Lisa Keen at Bay Windows has full details.
• Steve Ralls gives us an update on LGBT-inclusive immigration reform, one of the priorities set by organizers of the National Equality March.
• President Obama nominated openly gay attorney David Huebner to be Ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa. (Is it just me, or does he look a lot like Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who plays one of the gay dads on ABC’s new show Modern Family?)

State News

• Seventy-five percent of Connecticut marriage licenses issued to same-sex went to couples from outside of the state.
• Same-sex couples can now apply for marriage licenses in New Hampshire, although they cannot wed until January 1, 2010. So far, no locusts, famines, or strange horsemen have been reported in the Granite State.
• Washington, D.C. council member David Catania (I-At Large) introduced legislation to legalize marriage for same-sex couples in the District. Nine other members of the 13-member council have co-sponsored the measure, making it likely to pass, and Mayor Adrian M. Fenty has said he will sign it. Congress is not expected to block it.

Around the World

• Belarus, not the most LGBT-friendly of nations, allowed the country’s largest LGBT conference to take place at the end of September.
• Groups vulnerable to human rights abuses face added risk since a June coup in Honduras, reports the New York Times. Since the coup there have been six murders of “gay men or transvestites,” whereas until 2008, “the average number of such killings each year was three to six.”
• A Russian district court upheld the decision of a registry office to deny a marriage license to two women who sought to marry last May. The women’s attorney says they plan to fight the ruling, and will marry in Canada later this month.
• An estimated 15,000 people attended Gay Pride in Johannesburg, South Africa. Rod McCullom notes, “South Africa is the only African nation where same-sex marriage is legal but the reality is often less tolerant for blacks in the impoverished townships.”
• Turkey’s two largest gay and lesbian Internet communities have been shut down by the Telecommunication Directorate without providing any information to the owners, site managers said.