Madonna’s Brother Christopher Sticks Up For Kim Davis, Calls Gay People “Sore Winners”

— Christopher Ciccone, Madonna’s younger brother who is gay, has worked with his superstar sister as both a backup dancer and set designer and wrote a scorching tell-all in 2008, in a logic-defying, spelling error-riddled message about Kentucky clerk Kim Davis posted on his Facebook page (he posted a sarcastic follow-up that reads: I love everyone and everything and I have no opinion whatsoever about anything. Everyone happy now?)

Jeremy Kinser

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Kim Davis lawyers file appeal

The legal team for jailed Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis filed a notice of appeal against her contempt charges.

‘The contempt order itself was unlawful,’ Roger Gannam, a lawyer for Davis, said to Reuters.

According to the news organization Gannam is an attorney with Liberty Counsel, a Christian religious advocacy organization backing her legal challenge.

The appeal was filed today, 6 September, in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.

Last month, District Judge David Bunning ordered Davis to issue  marriage certificates to LGBTI applicants. She appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court. The high court denied her emergency request to not issue marriage licenses to any couples – gay or straight – as she fought in the lower court.

Despite losing, she continued to defy Bunning’s order and he found her in contempt. The 49-year-old Democrat been in jail since Thursday.

This Tuesday, 8 September, there will be a ‘#ImWithKim Liberty Rally’ held in front of the jail Davis is in, the Carter County Detention Center in Grayson, Kentucky.

The event is sponsored by GOP presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee and a number of anti-LGBTI equality groups, including including the Family Research Council, National Organization for Marriage, and Concerned Women for America.

The post Kim Davis lawyers file appeal appeared first on Gay Star News.

James Withers

www.gaystarnews.com/article/kim-davis-lawyers-file-appeal/

John Kasich Thinks Kim Davis Should Do Her Job, Rick Santorum Says She’s a Hero: VIDEOS

John Kasich and Rick Santorum have both weighed in on the Kim Davis drama and their responses offer a revealing look at the GOP’s differing approaches to LGBT issues this election season.

Speaking to George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week, Kasich said Davis should follow the law and do her job:

“The court has spoken, the court has ruled as everyone knows. I believe in traditional marriage but the court has ruled…When we see these kind of battles going on I get a little bit afraid that it turns people off to the idea of faith in God, what it means to be a Christian. For me, it’s given me a solid foundation to deal with the strong winds in life, to be a better person, a better guy. Now I respect the fact that the lady doesn’t agree, but she’s also a government employee. She’s not running a church. I wouldn’t force this on a church but in terms of her responsibility I think she has to comply. I don’t like the fact that she’s sitting in a jail—that’s absurd as well—but I think she should follow the law.”

Rick Santorum, meanwhile, had a very different perspective on Davis, telling CNN he believes the Kentucky clerk is a hero:

I would agree that what Kim Davis did in my opinion was heroic and she suffered the consequences for it. I think putting her in jail was rediculous and an extreme position. But you know what? That’s sometimes what it takes – for people to stand up and conduct civil disobedience because the law is unjust and suffer the consequences of that. So I commend her for actually standing up for her principles.

A recent Monmouth poll put Kasich at 2% and Santorum at 0%.

The post John Kasich Thinks Kim Davis Should Do Her Job, Rick Santorum Says She’s a Hero: VIDEOS appeared first on Towleroad.

Kyler Geoffroy

John Kasich Thinks Kim Davis Should Do Her Job, Rick Santorum Says She’s a Hero: VIDEOS

Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis To Appeal Contempt Ruling

Sept 6 (Reuters) – The lawyer for a Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses said his team filed on Sunday a notice of appeal over a contempt ruling that landed her in jail.

Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis, 49, who refused to issue the licenses due to her Apostolic Christian belief that marriage can only be between a man and a woman, said she was prepared to remain in jail where she has been reading a Bible since her incarceration for contempt on Thursday, her lawyers said.

Davis was jailed for contempt of court for refusing to follow the orders of U.S. District Judge David Bunning.

Davis’ stance has come to symbolize the cultural gap over gay marriage in the United States. Some social conservatives say she is being denied religious freedom. Others say that with the U.S. Supreme Court decision in June making same-sex marriage legal nationwide, Davis is defying her duty as a public servant by refusing to implement the law of the land.

“The contempt order itself was unlawful,” Roger Gannam, a lawyer for Davis, told Reuters. Gannam is an attorney with Liberty Counsel, a Florida-based Christian religious advocacy organization that said it would back her legal fight.

The notice of appeal was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky and officially starts the appeals process.

In Davis’ absence on Friday, deputy clerks issued marriage licenses to at least four same-sex couples at the offices in Morehead, Kentucky, where rival groups of demonstrators supporting Davis and the applicants protested outside.

Bunning had ordered Davis in August to issue the licenses. Her request for a stay of his order was denied by a U.S. appeals court and by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, she is waiting for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati, Ohio, to rule on her request to set aside Bunning’s ruling. In denying the request for a stay on the order, the appeals court said there was little chance she would prevail.

On Saturday up to 500 supporters gathered outside the Kentucky jail where Davis is being held to offer their support.

(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz in Austin, Texas; Editing by Phil Berlowitz and Cynthia Osterman)

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Mike Huckabee compares anti-gay Kentucky clerk jailing to Dred Scott slavery ruling

Today (6 September) anti-marriage equality Republican Mike Huckabee compared Kentucky clerk Kim Davis to abolitionists who once fought the US Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision.

The GOP presidential candidate was a guest on the ABC News show This Week with George Stephanopoulos. The host asked Huckabee to respond to Republicans critical of the Rowan County’s clerk’s decision to ignore a federal judge’s ruling she distribute marriage certificates to LGBTI couples.

The former Arkansas governor compared Davis’ fight to abolitionists who disagreed with the Dred Scott ruling.

‘…You obey it [a court ruling] if it’s right,’ Huckabee said.’ So I go back to my question. Is slavery the law of the land? Should it have been the law of the land because Dred Scott said so? Was that a correct decision? Should the courts have been irrevocably followed on that? Should Lincoln have been put in jail? Because he ignored it.’

In 1857 the Supreme Court ruled, in Dred Scott v Stanford, blacks could not be citizens of US states and they were ‘beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.’

The decision also made slavery legal in all of the country’s territories.

Huckabee warned the courts are overstepping boundaries set down by the Founding Fathers.

‘I think what we’ve seen here is the overreach of the judiciary,’ the Republican said. ‘This, if allowed to stand without any congressional approval, without any kind of enabling legislation, is what Jefferson warned us about. That’s judicial tyranny.’

Trailing in the polls, Huckabee is sponsoring an event for Davis this week. The ‘#ImWithKim Liberty Rally,’ will be this Tuesday (8 September) in front of the Carter County Detention Center in Grayson, Kentucky.

The 49-year-old Democrat been held in that jail since Thursday. Last month, District Judge David Bunning ordered her to issue certificates to LGBTI applicants. She appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court. The high court denied her emergency request to not issue marriage licenses to any couples – gay or straight – as she fought in the lower court.

Despite losing, Davis continued to defy Bunning’s order. She was held in contempt.

Below is a video of Huckabee’s interview:

The post Mike Huckabee compares anti-gay Kentucky clerk jailing to Dred Scott slavery ruling appeared first on Gay Star News.

James Withers

www.gaystarnews.com/article/mike-huckabee-compares-anti-gay-kentucky-clerk-jailing-to-dred-scott-slavery-ruling/

Just As You Hoped, Twitter Hijacks #FreeKimDavis

The Internet delivers once again on the #FreeKimDavis hashtag.

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Lucas Grindley

www.advocate.com/marriage-equality/2015/09/06/just-you-hoped-twitter-hijacks-freekimdavis

Hundreds Gather To Support Kim Davis: 'She Won't Bow'

GRAYSON, Ky. (AP) — They stood chanting outside the jail house, “Thank you, Kim; Thank you, Kim,” and prayed that the defiant county clerk locked inside could hear them.

As Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis began her third day as an inmate at the Carter County Detention Center on Saturday, having chosen indefinite imprisonment over licensing gay marriage, around 300 people gathered on the lawn outside.

“She won’t bow, I promise you,” Davis’ husband, Joe, told the crowd. “She sends her love to each and every one of you all. And this is what she said, `All is well. Tell them to hold their head high because I am.'”

Part revival, part political rally, a series of speakers denounced the government and the judiciary, and hailed Davis a Christian hero in a war against the godless. They waved signs that read “Kim Davis for President,” “no to sodomite perversion” and “God gives his hardest battles to his strongest soldiers.”

Some traveled from states away to support of the embattled clerk, held in contempt of court by U.S. District Judge David Bunning on Thursday and sent to jail until she agrees to follow the court’s order. She has pledged she never will.

News of her imprisonment rocketed around the world, igniting a furious debate over religious freedom and the place of God in government.

As the temperature topped 90 degrees in Grayson, Kentucky, Davis’ supporters sweated and shouted for more than an hour.

“More fear man, they don’t fear God,” Matthew Trewhella, a pastor from Wisconsin, preached from the stage. “She said that she was doing this under God’s authority. She is 1,000 percent correct. She is echoing what western man has said for over 1,500 years now. And that is that divine law trumps human laws.”

Davis refused to issue marriage licenses for two months since the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage across the nation. Despite a series of court orders, she continued turning couples away.

Bunning told Davis Thursday that she’d left him no choice.

The judge, appointed to the court by President George W. Bush, became a target of the crowd’s rage. A man carried a sign as big as a bathtub: “Judge Bunning is an abomination,” it read and pointed to a Bible passage that says, “Acquitting the guilty and condemning the innocent — the Lord detests them both.” 

Local evangelist Randy Smith called on the judge to “get saved and repent from his sin.” He bashed the governor, the attorney general and local officials — all for declining to help Davis’ crusade. And he asked God to see to it that the five Supreme Court justices who voted to legalize gay marriage be unseated.

He asked Christians across the globe to spend Thursday fasting and praying for Davis, to mark “one week of unlawful tyranny.” He asked them to be ready for war against religious oppression.

The couples Davis turned away for two months finally received their licenses Friday, and said they spent Saturday celebrating their lives together, in peace for the first time since the controversy erupted around them.

But on the jailhouse lawn, the rally’s organizers distributed fliers that listed what Davis’ supporters should do: pray for her release, write the judge and demand she be set free, send Davis postcards to jail, where she remains in a cell alone though allowed a Bible to read.

“The wicked are trying to make an example of her but God can turn it around,” the flier reads. “Pray that America repents of the sin of celebrating sexual perversion and imprisoning Christian dissidents.”

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Appeals Court Grants Asylum To Mexican Transwoman In Landmark Decision

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals granted asylum to an undocumented trans Mexican woman last week in a landmark decision for asylum seekers reports The Advocate.

The Board of Immigration Appeals initially denied trans Mexican Edin Carey Avandano-Hernandez’s immigration request on the basis that her felony drunk driving conviction invalidated her appeal for asylum. Avandano-Hernandez sought asylum after claiming her relatives both raped and assaulted her.

Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Jacqueline Nguyen, who was appointed by President Obama, along with two other judges on a panel granted Avandano-Hernandez’s request and condemned U.S. Immigration officials and the immigration judge in the first case on their transphobic treatment of Avandano-Hernandez. The immigration judge classified Avandano-Hernandez as male even though she has identified as a female for a decade and takes female hormones.

Although the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued new guidelines on the detention of LGBT immigrants in June, many LGBT immigrants suffer harsh treatment despite the successes of Avandano-Hernandez and other immigrants in obtaining asylum or citizenship.

The post Appeals Court Grants Asylum To Mexican Transwoman In Landmark Decision appeared first on Towleroad.

Anthony Costello

Appeals Court Grants Asylum To Mexican Transwoman In Landmark Decision

Federal Judge Denies Trans Student the Right to Use Male Restroom

The battle for trans-inclusive K-12 education heats up after a federal judge denies a high school student’s request to use the boy’s restroom.

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Cleis Abeni

www.advocate.com/transgender/2015/09/06/federal-judge-denies-trans-student-right-use-male-restroom

Julianne Moore Had A Lot Of Frank Questions For Ellen Page When She Came Out Publicly

— Julianne Moore in an interview with Out about the costar of her new fact-based queer-themed film Freeheld (watch the trailer here)

Jeremy Kinser

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