This has been a long and on-going process...Who would've thought that we'd have so many amazing local poets in the city of Nashville just dying to perform at a Human Rights event?

Today's a special day in California and the USA. One month after the California State Supreme Court struck down a ban on gay marriage, today at 5:01 PM county clerks will begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Let me start out with a little bit about myself. I am a student at Minnesota State University, Mankato. I recently graduated this May with a Bachelor of Arts in Mass Communications: Public Relations and Spanish. I love college so much that I am staying for my Master’s Degree in Educational Leadership with an emphasis on university student affairs. I was a 2007 YP4 Fellow and will start an internship this summer with YP4. I LOVE activism and will fight for the rest of my life to put an end to all forms of oppression, discrimination and all the other nasty crap that puts people down!

The question we must address is whether, under these circumstances, the failure to designate the official relationship of same-sex couples as marriage violates the California Constitution.

In 2000, too young to vote, my stomach sank when the Knight Initiative [Added: Proposition 22] — a marriage ban written by a man with a gay son — and an "anti-gang" measure sure to disproportionately target young people of color passed in California.

Organizing around the marriage ban those initiatives was one of my introductions to the world of activism. Now the Supreme Court of my home state has ruled the ban unconstitutional!

Liberal indoctrination, gun bans and “pro-homosexual clubs”... it’s another Right Wing Watch on Campus round-up!

But first: What do you do when Ann Coulter comes to your campus? 2008 fellow Betsy Ott at Northern Michigan University organized a Truth Rally with the Progressive Student Roundtable “to promote diversity, tolerance [and] acceptance.”

Read on for more.

PageOneQ just posted about a principal in Memphis, Tennessee who maliciously outed at least one same-gender couple to their parents, classmates and teachers:

According to Nicholas' mother Nichole, the principal said that she didn't tolerate homosexuality in the school and repeatedly asked if she knew her son was gay. The honor student underwent further humiliation, in addition to verbal harassment, when taken out of the running for a class trip to New Orleans related to rebuilding efforts, as a risk to the school's image; Nicholas was told that there were fears he'd embarrass the school by engaging in "inappropriate behavior."

Cathy Renna over at Bilerico Project has a post about the work GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) and others did to keep the Catholic Church from blaming the child abuse scandal on gay priests. That work paid off, among other places, in the Pope's talking points yesterday.

My Facebook engagement lasted less than 24 hours.

I was one of the many whom, during the social networking website’s early development when two profiles first began to link to one another through a declaration of a relationship status, light-heartedly proposed an “engagement” to a female friend from high school.

As a new student at college where not everyone I knew was familiar with the nature of my relationship to my freshly declared “fiancé” and perhaps because these “comical
engagements” were not quite as rampant as they currently are, my relationship status caused confusion. I received several inquiries about “the lucky lady” as well as a sweet but misguided congratulatory email for my impending nuptials.