It’s a major moment when the most mainstream of celebrity mags, People, devotes its cover and many pages inside to the highest-profile gay wedding of our time, that of Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi. It helps that the pair are supremely telegenic and Ellen has gone from showbiz pariah to media darling, but the accomplishment is no less astounding when you consider that we are just a few months from one of the most important elections of our time and shamelessly flirting with an issue that helped sink the Dems just four years ago.
Mark Pasetsky’s Cover Awards calls the moment “historic.” He writes, “When you see this cover of People magazine hitting newsstands on Wed, take a second to let it sink in. It’s Ellen DeGeneres getting married to Portia de Rossi on the cover of People. Who would have ever thought that we would see this day? For all the lesbian and gay partners in the United States, this is more than a magazine cover. It’s another sign that this country is finally getting its act together and treating all people as equal.” He ends his piece by praising People editor Larry Hackett.
DeGeneres’s marriage wasn’t the only hallmark event in gay and lesbian news making the papers. The California supreme court is seemingly unstoppable, issuing another historic ruling this week. Weighing in on a case against conservative Christian doctors who used the First Amendment as a cloak, the court ruled that doctors can’t refuse treatment based on religious grounds. In the original case, the doctors (giving all Christians a bad name everywhere) refused to artificially inseminate a lesbian, ostensibly because she was unmarried. This story was carried by many major outlets, including USNEWS.com, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times.
Guadalupe T. Benitez of Oceanside sued the doctors when they refused to perform the insemination. She lives with her partner. The Los Angeles Times reported that Christine Brody, an obstetrician and gynecologist at the North Coast Women's Care Medical Group in Vista, refused Benitez's request because “her religious views prevented her from providing the procedure to a lesbian.”
Benitez told the Times, "This isn't just a win for me personally and for other lesbian women. "It's a win for everyone because everyone could be the next target if doctors choose their patients based on religious views about other groups of people."
A Times report from three years ago says Brody and fellow doctor Douglas Fenton refused to perform the procedure because Benitez was single, not because she was gay: “The physicians asserted that they would refuse to artificially inseminate any unmarried woman, regardless of her sexual orientation.”
The Times continued its run of great GLBT coverage with a piece about gay marriage and the black vote and a new ad that is indirectly about the forthcoming vote on Proposition 8 -- which aims to ban gay marriage again in the state. In Timothy Stewart-Winter's op-ed piece about the black vote he ponders Barack Obama’s black supporters coming face-to-face with the gay marriage question. Stewart-Winter thinks all this fretting might be much ado about nothing. He posits, “When constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage were on 11 state ballots in November 2004, blacks in Arkansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Ohio and Oklahoma were at least one percentage point less likely than whites to vote for them, according to CNN exit polls. Only in Georgia were blacks slightly more likely to vote for the amendment. (The remaining four states had too few blacks to make a meaningful comparison.)”
He also cites a study by Gregory B. Lewis of Georgia State University that concluded “blacks appear to be more likely than whites both to see homosexuality as wrong and to favor gay-rights laws."
The story about the anti-Prop. 8 advertisement running on TV in California -- which depicts a man and a woman meeting a million and one physical obstacles at the altar before ending by asking the question, "What if you couldn't marry the person you love?" -- addresses whether the advert violates federal laws restricting campaign ads by tax-exempt organizations. Produced by Let California Ring, the ad has no mention of Prop. 8, but Frank Schubert, leader of the pro-Prop. 8 effort, quipped, “"It ain't for wedding gowns. Of course it is a campaign ad."
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