With the legislative session half over, Hawaii’s civil unions bill, HB444 HD1, is still stuck in the Senate Judiciary Commitee, where a 3-3 split vote prevented the bill from moving to the floor. All that is needed is for 9 of the 25 sentators to vote to pull the bill from committee, but the pressure from [...]

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Pat Gozemba If one did nothing but read even the half-baked right-wing screeds about the effects of same-sex marriage, life could be pretty scary. Take for example Brian Camenker’s insane piece “The Effects of Same-Sex Marriage on Massachusetts” and put it in the hands of the Hawaii Family Forum and these folks: Parents for Righteousness [...]

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Kath Sands, former professor of religion at UMass-Boston, and her partner Linda Krieger, an attorney, have a marriage license in Massachusetts. But last year, they moved to Honolulu, where they both teach at the university–Kath in American Studies, and Linda at the Richardson School of Law. Linda grew up in Hawaii, and so it was [...]

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Patricia A. Gozemba Brad Ka’iwi Lum became the first Native Hawaiian chanter and kumu hula (teacher of hula) to speak out in favor of HB 444 for Civil Unions at a hearing of the Hawaii Senate Judiciary Committee on February 24th. In coming out as a gay man he broke a long silence in his [...]

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Patricia A. Gozemba Honolulu, February 22–Misguided Christian fundamentalists, many of whom are politicians, rallied approximately 2,000 of their flock to the Hawai’i state capitol to try to give credence to the point that the downfall of civilization is epitomized by the granting of the civil right of civil unions to same-sex couples. Across town, LGBT [...]

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Honolulu, HI–Being blessed by being in the middle of the Pacific, I could at an early hour channel surf between the glitz of the 80th Annual Oscars and The L-Word where Captain Tasha Williams, a decorated Iraq veteran, was getting drummed out of the military for homosexual conduct. I kept hoping that in my ADD [...]

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Well it took another commission in yet another state to make clear that civil unions are not marriages and thus do not give all the rights, benefits, and privileges of marriage. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer which obtained an early copy of the findings of the NJ Civil Union Review Commission, civil unions in the [...]

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from the Washington Blade Online ‘Family man’ tries to overturn Wis. gay marriage ban Wants state to vote on marriage, civil unions as separate questions (AP) | Dec 10, 3:10 PM Few people took Bill McConkey seriously when he filed a lawsuit in July trying to overturn Wisconsin’s new ban on gay marriage and civil [...]

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