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(08/04/10 9:32pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A federal judge overturned California's same-sex marriage ban Wednesday in a landmark case that could eventually land before the U.S. Supreme Court to decide if gays have a constitutional right to marry in America.Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker made his ruling in a lawsuit filed by two gay couples who claimed the voter-approved ban violated their civil rights.Supporters argued the ban was necessary to safeguard the traditional understanding of marriage and to encourage responsible childbearing.California voters passed the ban as Proposition 8 in November 2008, five months after the state Supreme Court legalized gay marriage."Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples," the judge wrote in a 136-page ruling that laid out in precise detail why the ban does not pass constitutional muster.Both sides previously said an appeal was certain if Walker did not rule in their favor. The case would go first to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, then the Supreme Court if the high court justices agree to review it.Walker heard 13 days of testimony and arguments since January during the first trial in federal court to examine if states can prohibit gays from getting married.The ruling puts Walker at the forefront of the gay marriage debate. The longtime federal judge was appointed by President Ronald Reagan.The verdict was the second in a federal gay marriage case to come down in recent weeks. A federal judge in Massachusetts decided last month the state's legally married gay couples had been wrongly denied the federal financial benefits of marriage because of a law preventing the U.S. government from recognizing same-sex unions.The plaintiffs in the California case presented 18 witnesses. Academic experts testified about topics ranging from the fitness of gay parents and religious views on homosexuality to the historical meaning of marriage and the political influence of the gay rights movement.Former U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson delivered the closing argument for opponents of the ban. He told Judge Walker that tradition or fears of harm to heterosexual unions were legally insufficient grounds to discriminate against gay couples.Olson teamed up with David Boies to argue the case, bringing together the two litigators best known for representing George W. Bush and Al Gore in the disputed 2000 election.Defense lawyers called just two witnesses, claiming they did not need to present expert testimony because U.S. Supreme Court precedent was on their side. The attorneys also said gay marriage was an experiment with unknown social consequences that should be left to voters to accept or reject.Former U.S. Justice Department lawyer Charles Cooper, who represented the religious and conservative groups that sponsored the ban, said cultures around the world, previous courts and Congress all accepted the "common sense belief that children do best when they are raised by their own mother and father."In an unusual move, the original defendants, California Attorney General Jerry Brown and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, refused to support Proposition 8 in court.That left the work of defending the law to Protect Marriage, the group that successfully sponsored the ballot measure that passed with 52 percent of the vote after the most expensive political campaign on a social issue in U.S. history.Currently, same-sex couples can only legally wed in Massachusetts, Iowa, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire and Washington, D.C.
(06/05/08 2:43am)
SAN FRANCISCO – California’s highest court Wednesday refused to stay its decision legalizing same-sex marriage in the state, clearing the final hurdle for gay couples to start tying the knot this month.\nConservative religious and legal groups had asked the California Supreme Court to stop its May 15 order requiring state and local officials to sanction same-sex unions from becoming effective until voters have the chance to consider the issue in November. The justices’ decisions typically become final after 30 days.\nAn initiative to ban gay marriage has qualified for the Nov. 4 ballot. Its passage would overrule the court’s decision by amending the state constitution to limit marriage to a man and a woman.\nIn arguing for a delay, the amendment’s sponsors predicted chaos if couples married in the next few months, only to have the practice halted at the ballot box.\nThe four justices who denied the stay request were the same judges who joined in the majority opinion that found withholding marriage from same-sex couples constituted discrimination. The three dissenting justices said they thought a hearing on whether the stay should be granted was warranted.\nThe majority did not elaborate on its reasons for denying the stay, but simply issued a one-page order saying its original ruling on marriage would be final at 5 p.m. on June 16.\nWednesday’s denial clears the way for gay couples in the nation’s most populous state to get married starting June 17, when state officials have said counties must start issuing new gender-neutral marriage licenses.
(05/15/08 5:41pm)
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) _ The California Supreme Court has overturned a gay marriage ban in a ruling that would make the nation’s largest state the second one to allow gay and lesbian weddings.\nThe justices’ 4-3 decision Thursday says domestic partnerships are not a good enough substitute for marriage. Chief Justice Ron George wrote the opinion.\nIn the city of San Francisco, two dozen gay and lesbian couples and gay rights groups sued in March 2004 after the court halted San Francisco’s monthlong same-sex wedding march.
(12/04/07 2:27pm)
SAN FRANCISCO – The DNA Lounge was a real circus the night The Mutaytor came to town. The band looked like a bunch of clowns. Young contortionists folded their limbs like fortune cookies above and around the stage.\nThere were no complaints from the 500 or so cognoscenti who paid $20 each to watch acrobats and aerialists on ropes perform to a live percussion beat.\nOnce a month, the techno dance club hosts the Bohemian Carnival, an informal gathering of troupes from the Bay Area’s underground circus scene and a bellwether of a subculture trend taking hold in a city near you.\n“People are ready to be entertained on a much more visceral and darker level. There is this hunger to see something fancier,” said Mutaytor front man Buck Down, explaining why the group made clown costumes, fire spinners and jugglers part of its trance music act.\nInspired by Cirque du Soleil and possessed of an advanced sense of the absurd, young adults who got their first taste of trapezes, tightropes and red noses at Burning Man or other indie art festivals are joining a growing number of small, alternative circuses with Big Top dreams.\nSan Francisco, with at least 15 groups, appears to be the American center of the nouveau circus movement – a form that owes more to buskers and burlesque than Barnum and Bailey.\nLos Angeles, home of the Mutaytor-affiliated Cirque Bezerk, the Stilt Circus and the Lucent Dossier Vaudeville Cirque, also has a thriving indie circus scene. \nExplaining what separates the urban circus subgenre from a traditional circus or the stylized drama of Cirque du Soleil can be difficult. Unlike Ringling Bros., there are no animal acts. The big top’s trademark three rings are abandoned for compact spaces where dancers, bands and acrobats do their thing simultaneously, or open-air venues where stilt-walkers and aerialists suspended from oversized sculptures mingle with the crowds.\n“I think of it as ‘omnitainment,’” said Robbie Kowal, a San Francisco disc jockey and music promoter who helps put on the Bohemian Carnival. “There are very few firsts left in music. The answer is visual stimulants.”
(08/30/07 3:19am)
SAN FRANCISCO – Burning Man became Burnt Man four days early on Tuesday. A San Francisco performance artist was arrested on suspicion of igniting the signature figure of the counterculture festival in the remote Nevada desert.\nThe early morning fire scorched about 85 percent of the structure, Burning Man spokeswoman Andie Grace said. Event engineers decided it would be best to dismantle it and rebuild a less elaborate version, accomplishing in two days what normally takes weeks so the figure would be finished in time for Saturday night’s scheduled burning, she said.\nThe about 40-foot-tall wood and neon structure was supposed to go up in flames in the ceremonial climax of the weeklong annual event. Burning Man, an art, music and performance festival that draws thousands of people, began in San Francisco in 1986 and moved to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert in 1990.\nMany festival-goers who were awake watching Tuesday’s lunar eclipse said they saw a man deliberately ignite the figure at about 3 a.m., Grace said.\n“It was in plain sight of many people,” Grace said. “Everyone is looking at it this morning, this big black figure in the sky that wasn’t supposed to burn, saying, ‘Now what do we do?’”\nNo injuries were reported, and the festival’s in-house fire department, the Black Rock City Emergency Services Department, extinguished the fire in less than half an hour, Grace said. The fire also damaged part of the Green Man Pavilion, the exhibition space on which the figure was perched, Grace said.\nPaul Addis, 35, of San Francisco, was booked into the Pershing County, Nev., jail on suspicion of arson, illegal possession of fireworks, destruction of property and resisting a public officer, according to the sheriff’s department. He posted a $25,632 bond, a sheriff’s dispatcher said.\nSheriff’s officials did not know whether he had a lawyer. No one answered at two phone numbers listed in his name.\nAddis is an actor and writer who is active in the San Francisco arts scene and recently portrayed Hunter S. Thompson in a play about the late journalist who is known for his drug-fueled lifestyle, according to entertainment listings posted on the Internet.\nGrace said she assumed the early burn was timed to coincide with the eclipse.\n“It’s obviously a pretty selfish act, and people are disappointed about that, but spirits overall are pretty high,” she said.
(11/28/05 3:20pm)
BERKELEY, Calif. -- Tony Kushner doesn't mind when critics call him a "political" playwright, a polemicist who mines humor and hypocrisy, and condoles human truths from the rougher chapters in world history.\nBut when he decided to translate a 1938 Czech opera about a greedy town bully who meets his match in a pair of poor children, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Angels in America" knew the project called for restraint.\nAs an allegory on Hitler's rise to power and a story once performed by Jewish children who would eventually be killed by the Nazis, the last thing "Brundibar" needed was a heavy rhetorical hand.\n"What great political art does is marry the personal and the political in a way that one isn't clobbering the other," Kushner says between rehearsals at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, where "Brundibar" and another Nazi-era theater piece he adapted, "Comedy on the Bridge," opened Nov. 16. "You don't want people saying, 'Oh, this is a play about Hitler.'"\n"Brundibar" is based on the 2003 picture book of the same name on which Kushner collaborated with his friend and literary hero, children's author-illustrator Maurice Sendak. It tells the story of a brother and sister who need to raise money to buy milk for their ailing mother and are hindered by a hostile organ grinder named Brundibar.\nCzech composer Hans Krasa created the opera for children in a Jewish orphanage in the years leading up to World War II. It was eventually performed 55 times at the Terezin concentration camp and was featured in a 1944 Nazi propaganda film, "The Führer Presents the Jews With a City." Krasa, and most of the children who performed in "Brundibar," died at Auschwitz or other concentration camps.\nSendak designed the sets for the Berkeley Rep production, which moves on to the Yale Repertory Theatre in February and New York's New Victory Theater in April. Euan Morton, who starred as Boy George in the Broadway production of "Taboo," plays the title role. School-age children from the San Francisco Bay area make up the 29-member chorus.\nKushner had done theatrical adaptations before (he is currently at work on a production of Bertolt Brecht's "Mother Courage" for Meryl Streep), but never one from an opera libretto. It posed special challenges, including the fact that he didn't speak Czech. And since Krasa's estate still owned the copyright, he could not take many artistic liberties.\n"My problem was to make it sound like it was written from an English text for modern American stage actors," Kushner said.\nEven if there hadn't been that limitation, however, the playwright saw little room to improve on the original by Krasa and librettist Alan Hoffmeister. For a simple, 30-minute fable on the triumph of good over evil, it packs a surprisingly profound punch that becomes almost unbearable with the knowledge of the genocide that would darken the world after it was written, Kushner says.\nOne of those moments comes during a lullaby the two siblings, Aninku and Pepicek, sing with their friends: "Now you are very old, your hair is soft and gray. Mommy, the cradle's cold. Blackbird has flown away."\nIn the Berkeley Rep production, the group performs against a backdrop drawn by Sendak that shows children happily flying through a forest on the backs of oversize blackbirds. The timeless song of loss and love offers an unsentimental view of how bereft parents can feel after their children grow up and leave home, but its historical context colors it for modern audiences.\n"We can't imagine what listening to that song would be like without thinking about the kids in Terezin singing it," Kushner said. "You listen to that and you can't get it out of your head and you shouldn't get it out of your head."\nDirector Tony Taccone, who co-directed the world premiere of "Angels in America" and oversaw three Berkeley Rep productions of other Kushner plays, set the production in an unnamed ghetto instead of Terezin, the setting for the Chicago Opera Theater's 2003 version of the Kushner-Sendak collaboration.\nTaccone made a similarly unsentimental decision when Devynn Pedell, the third-grader who plays Aninku, asked if she could wear the yellow Jewish star her grandfather had worn in a concentration camp.\n"I was the one who had to say 'no,' Taccone says. "I don't want this to be a story only one community has access to."\nMorton, who earned a Tony Award nomination for his portrayal of gender-bending 1980s pop star Boy George, was drawn to the Brundibar role partly because of the chance to play a character of over-the-top evil. At Taccone's urging, however, he tempered his temptation to play Brundibar as a caricature of Adolf Hitler by imagining him as a pathetic, selfish boy.\nStill, the 28-year-old actor debated Taccone for hours about how much darkness to bring to the role. Although he wears the same mustache as Hitler, Morton ditched a German accent for his native Scottish brogue. But he won the argument to include a subtle Nazi salute in his movements.\n"I do think it's important not to patronize children," Morton says. "It's something I've been fighting for throughout this production."\nKushner hired a Columbia University graduate student to translate Hoffmeister's libretto from the Czech and spent hours listening to a recording of Krasa's score while he crafted English rhymes to fit the music.\n"It's like being in deep conversation with an interesting writer. You get to discover more and more how they made choices and why they make sense," he says.\nThe result was a very faithful translation, Kushner says. The only change he felt compelled to make was adding a chilling poem Brundibar recites after the happy ending, when he is foiled by the children, stripped of the stilts and imposing uniform he wears, and run out of town in his underwear: "They believe they've won the right/They believe I'm gone -- not quite/Nothing ever works out neatly/Bullies don't give up completely."\nAlthough he wrote a role for first lady Laura Bush in his play, "Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy" (her character speaks with dead Iraqi children), Kushner says he never felt the urge to draw parallels between past and current world conflicts.\n"The worst thing we could do is make Brundibar look like Bush and strangle the power in the words," Kushner says with a wry smile. "We can all enjoy the expression of our fear and anxiety and get that there is a recidivist, political evil in the land, but there is always a relevance to this kind of allegory."\n"Comedy on the Bridge," which on the surface chronicles the infidelities of two squabbling couples caught on a bridge in wartime, has a similar double meaning that Kushner took pains to expose without squashing. Taccone staged it as musical burlesque, as if Lucy, Ricky, Fred and Ethel were doing "Much Ado About Nothing."\nKushner and Sendak met about a decade ago when "Angels in America" was the toast of Broadway. Sendak read an interview in which Kushner described himself as a big Herman Melvin fan and since he was, too, he requested meeting with the young playwright through a mutual friend.\nThe Berkeley Repertory Theatre production was designed for family audiences. In writing his first theatre piece for children, Kushner says he took cues from Sendak on how to make the anti-totalitarian message clear to adults without giving kids nightmares or being condescending.\n"Maurice has always said to kids, 'Look, you have this incredibly tough job. You have to grow up in a world where safety is not guaranteed, and you are not immortal and you have to face these things."\nBut Kushner will be satisfied if most of the younger people who see "Brundibar" don't immediately "get" what it's about.\n"How much of the Holocaust do you want to tell a 5-year-old? The answer is not much," he says. "At 5 years old, you can't know what went on at Auschwitz and you don't need to know"
(09/19/05 3:33am)
Cool temperatures and overcast skies hindered the fund-raising efforts of the IU Hurricane Katrina Relief Program, which raised less than a quarter of its targeted goal at Friday's Hurricane Katrina Relief Festival.\nCoordinators of the festival named bad weather as the primary reason for not meeting their $15,000 goal. Festival co-coordinator and junior Natalie Borg said while nearly 1,000 students came through Dunn Meadow during the six-hour festival, the inclimate weather kept them from staying for any length of time or spending much money.\n"It was for a great cause and that's all that matters," Borg said. \nThe total money raked in at the festival was more than $2,500, which coordinators said was still a hefty part of about $10,000 that various student groups have raised over the course of last week's relief efforts. All programming was donation-based, and the proceeds from the festival will go to an as-yet-undecided local charity.\n"For what it was, it turned out really well," said relief program coordinator and senior Catie Eggert. "The greek turnout was really amazing." \nThe Helene G. Simon Hillel Center's Mardi Gras bead sale has so far garnered between $4,000 and $6,000, and the Red Cross Hurricane Katrina wristband sale has raised upwards of $5,000.\nEducational and fund-raising booths from 20 different student organizations were set up around Dunn Meadow Friday. Students flocked to the Pi Kappa Phi dunk tank and Chi Omega kissing booth, two of the more popular fund-raisers on the field. \n"It doesn't get old," said Pi Kappa Phi member Todd Waldman as he watched a student run up and hit the red button, promptly dunking one of his brothers. "Everyone's really coming out to support this effort."\nSenior Megan Selby, a member of White Anti-Racist Allies, said her group was attempting to inform students about racism and poverty in the New Orleans area and how it was affecting the relief effort. \n"Hopefully, people will feel more invested when they have more information about what's going on," she said.\nIn addition to the dance group Sequal, four bands, ranging from the Mitchell Street Band to The Nicotones, performed from 6 to 9 p.m. Other groups, such as the Student Recreational Sports Association and the Global Sales Leadership Club, gave out certificates, T-shirts, candy and made intricate balloon creations.\nIndiana Memorial Union Catering Services donated $2,000 worth of cookout food to the festival, and more than 60 prizes were raffled off throughout the evening's band performances.\nSenior Claire Tramm, the head of the Red Cross wristband effort, said she was pleased with the turnout and the support she's seen from the student body. \n"It was great to see all the student organizations come out for this event," she said. \nSales of the Red Cross Katrina wristbands and Hillel's Mardi Gras beads will continue throughout the week at sporting events and the Bloomington Lotus Festival.\nAs for the future fund-raising efforts of the IU Hurricane Katrina Relief Program, Eggert said the group will be meeting later this week to choose a charity and investigate more local fund-raising opportunities. \n"We're going to give it a couple weeks to figure out where we are going to go from here," Eggert added.
(09/14/04 4:08am)
BERKELEY, Calif. -- Alyn Libman won a $15,000-a-year scholarship to the University of California at Berkeley with a resume that showed more than just Libman's athletic achievement and academic potential.\nIt also showed years of ridicule, beatings and threats, along with Libman's decision to become a boy in 11th grade.\n"It felt amazing to actually be embraced by someone who didn't just dismiss me for being different," said Libman, a 19-year-old aspiring civil rights lawyer and the first transgendered person to win a scholarship from The Point Foundation, a Chicago nonprofit organization that has awarded more than $1 million to college-bound homosexuals since 2002.\nFor those seeking financial aid to attend college, it doesn't necessarily hurt to be homosexual or transgender. An increasing number of charities, professional groups and universities offer scholarships on the basis of sexual orientation.\nMore than 50 such scholarships are available nationwide -- from the $1,000 scholarships that Zami, an advocacy group in Atlanta, is giving to 21 black homosexuals this year, the $2,000 awards the United Church of Christ distributed to homosexual seminarians, and the $3,000 fellowships George Washington University administers so homosexuals can spend a semester studying politics in the nation's capital.\nMany of these organizations recognize that youngsters who come out of closet are sometimes cut off by their families and suffer financially because of it.\nSome groups, such as Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, also make financial aid available to children of homosexual parents or to straight students who have worked to reduce homophobia in their communities.\n"We want to be a beacon for some kid who is out there and feeling really lost and ashamed because society says they are nothing and nobody," said Zami Executive Director Mary Anne Adams, who launched her group's Audre Lorde scholarship program, named for the late lesbian poet, in 1997.\nSexual orientation alone usually is not enough to get these scholarships. Success against the odds, scholastic aptitude, extracurricular activities and leadership also are needed to qualify -- the same qualities philanthropists have always sought to celebrate by endowing college scholarships.\nBut the essays these students write in their applications are something different -- they tend to include tales of confusion and rejection. Many of the recipients are estranged from their families or were tormented in high school.\n"The ability to take individuals who have had enormous disadvantage and to give them the ability to succeed in life is what's important to society," said Point Foundation creator Bruce Lindstrom, 59, who made a fortune as a membership warehouse executive. He was abandoned by his own family when he revealed he was gay in his mid-20s.\nSo far, the foundation has handed out multiyear scholarships covering tuition, housing and books to 27 undergraduate and graduate students.\n"We try very hard to balance the issue of need versus the issue of leadership ability," he said. "We are trying to identify those who have the capacity to make change in the world, to increase tolerance, and it's a hard thing to balance those two things."\nJulie Schell, 30, a doctoral student at Columbia University's Teachers College, came out as a lesbian 10 years ago while she was an undergraduate at the University of Nevada-Reno. The disclosure alienated her from her family and college roommates. One day she found "dyke" scrawled on her car.\nNow in her second year as a Point Foundation scholar, Schell said the money has allowed her to continue her studies, but the emotional support is what enables her to succeed. The foundation pairs students with openly homosexual professional mentors. Schell's is the president of Roosevelt University in Chicago.\n"I had someone to call and say, 'I got three A-pluses at one of the world's greatest educational institutions,' and have that be validated by people who aren't saying, 'Well, you got three A-pluses, but you're gay, so it doesn't count,'" Schell said.
(02/13/04 5:22am)
SAN FRANCISCO -- In a bold political and legal challenge to California law, city authorities officiated the marriage of a lesbian couple Thursday and said they will issue more gay marriage licenses.\nMeanwhile, in Massachusetts, legislative leaders met Thursday to try and find words banning gay marriage -- but legalize civil unions -- expressing optimism as they reconvened their constitutional convention.\nThe act of civil disobedience in San Francisco was coordinated by Mayor Gavin Newsom and top-city officials, and was intended to beat a conservative group to the punch.\nThe group, Campaign for California Families, had planned to go to court Friday to get an injunction preventing the city from issuing marriage licenses to gay couples.\nLongtime-lesbian activists Phyllis Lyon, 79, and Del Martin, 83, were hurriedly issued a license and were married just before noon by City Assessor, Mabel Teng, in a closed-door civil ceremony at city Hall, Newsom's spokesman, Peter Ragone said. The two have been a couple for 51 years.\nRagone said beginning at noon, officials would begin issuing marriage licenses to any gay couple applying for one. One lesbian couple had already lined up outside city hall, one of the women wearing a white wedding dress.\nLyon and Martin said after the brief ceremony they were going home to rest and did not plan anything to celebrate. The couple seemed proud of what they had done.\nThursday's marriage runs counter to a ballot measure California voters approved in 2000 defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman.\nNo state legally sanctions gay marriage, though Massachusetts could become the first, this spring. The Massachusetts high court has ruled gays are entitled under the state constitution to marry.\nState lawmakers later passed a domestic partner law -- that, when it goes into effect in 2005 -- will offer the most generous protections to gays outside Vermont.\nMayor Newsom was not present for the wedding Thursday. The two official witnesses were Kate Kendell, director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights and former city official Roberta Achtenberg.\nThe CCF did not immediately respond to a request for comment.\nIn Massachusetts, leaders said they hoped to finally reach an agreement after two other versions of a proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages were narrowly defeated during the much-anticipated convention's opening day Wednesday.\n"Things break down in this building by the minute, but it's going to be interesting," said Senate minority leader, Brian Lees, a republican. "I'm cautiously optimistic."\nMassachusetts was thrust into the epicenter of the contentious social, political, religious and legal debate over gay marriages in November when the state's Supreme Judicial Court ruled 4-3 it was unconstitutional to ban gay couples from marrying, a decision reaffirmed last week.\n"We're talking about a wide, wide variety of options and potential amendments," said House Speaker Thomas Finneran, an ardent opponent of gay marriage. "Nobody's in a position, really, to insist on anything other than good faith efforts on all sides. We're open to all sorts of ideas."\nAny constitutional amendment would have to get 101 votes in the constitutional convention -- which is a joint session of the state House and Senate. It would have to get 101 votes again in the 2005-06 legislative session, and would then need the approval of voters in November 2006.