Lawmakers in Florida are hoping to pass a $75 million incentive package to attract movie studios to film in Florida, but a little noticed provision could deny tax credits to movies that feature gay or other “nontraditional family values.” The Entertainment Industry Economic Development Act seeks to revise the current incentive program — which already offers a tax credit worth 2% of a movie’s production costs if it is “family friendly” — to specifically exclude movies that depict “nontraditional family values” from receiving the additional credit. Here is the relevant provision:

A certified production determined by the Commissioner of Film and Entertainment, with the advice of the Florida Film and Entertainment Advisory Council, to be family-friendly…Family-friendly productions are those that have cross-generational appeal; would be considered suitable for viewing by children age 5 or older…and do not exhibit or imply any act of smoking, sex, nudity, nontraditional family values, gratuitous violence, or vulgar or profane language. Under the current incentive program, review of the final release version is not required and nontraditional family values, gratuitous violence, and implied acts do not exclude a film from receiving this additional credit.

State representative Stephen Precourt, whose district includes Disney World, says the purpose of the credit is to encourage movies to depict cinematic life from the 1960s. “Think of it as like Mayberry,” Precourt told the Palm Beach Post News. “That’s when I grew up — the ’60s. That’s what life was like. I want Florida to be known for making those kinds of movies: Disney movies for kids and all that stuff. Like it used to be, you know?” Precourt claims that his provision does not specifically target movies with gay characters but “asked if shows with gay characters should get the tax credit, he said, ‘That would not be the kind of thing I’d say that we want to invest public dollars in.’”

Florida’s gay rights groups are accusing Precourt of subsidizing “discrimination” and marginalizing gay families. Indeed, some studies have found that positive portrayals of gay characters can help shape viewers’ attitudes toward homosexuality. One 2002 study concluded that “watching a film about a nontraditional family with homosexual characters resulted in greater acceptance of homosexuality. In addition, German adolescents exposed over the course of a week to talk show segments featuring discussions of homosexuality later expressed more accepting attitudes toward homosexuals than did adolescents in the control group.”

Just weeks after Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA) refused to renew an executive order that would have protected gay and lesbian state workers from discrimination, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is asking the state’s colleges and universities “to rescind policies that ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, arguing in a letter sent to each school Thursday that their boards of visitors have no legal authority to adopt such statements.”

In a letter sent to all of the state’s public colleges and universities, Cuccinelli wrote, “only the General Assembly can extend legal protections to gay state employees — a move the legislature has repeatedly declined to take, including as recently as this week“:

“It is my advice that the law and public policy of the Commonwealth of Virginia prohibit a college or university from including ‘sexual orientation,’ ‘gender identity,’ ‘gender expression,’ or like classification as a protected class within its non-discrimination policy absent specific authorization from the General Assembly,” he wrote. Colleges that have included such language in their policies — which include all of Virginia’s leading schools — have done so “without proper authority” and should “take appropriate actions to bring their policies in conformance with the law and public policy of Virginia,” Cuccinelli wrote.

It’s incredible that Cuccinelli found time to deal with the growing menace of schools protecting their gay students from discrimination in the midst of the state’s economic woes, and his decision will certainly outrage Virginia students and faculty members across the country. In fact, the practice of protecting gays from violence is so widespread that earlier this month, students at John Carroll University, a Jesuit college in Cleveland Ohio, staged a sit-in to protest “the university’s decisions not to include the protection of sexual orientation of in its anti-discrimination statement.” Other Jesuit universities, like “Canisius College, College of the Holy Cross, Georgetown University, Gonzaga University, Le Moyne College, and St. Louis University” all include “sexual orientation in their anti-discrimination policies.” Even conservative schools like Texas Christian University and its divinity school, both protect “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” in their policies. This almost universal adoption of sexual orientation “as a protected class” suggests that violence against gay people is a problem at college campuses and Cuccinelli’s decision to rescind Virginia’s policies could lead to more crime against homosexuals.

This won’t be Cuccinelli’s first brush with controversy. Last month, Cuccinelli joined Texas and right-wing industry groups in challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger the public.

Yesterday, Rep. Susan Davis’ (D-CA) House Subcommittee on Military Personnel held a hearing with the co-chairs of Pentagon’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Working Group. The panel will survey soldiers’ attitudes about serving alongside gay and lesbian troops and make recommendations for how the military can repeal the policy without sacrificing unit readiness or cohesion. “We envision outreach through social media so that a wide variety of individuals both within the Department of Defense and without who will have views on this matter have an opportunity for their voice to be heard,” General Carter Ham, one of the working group’s co-chairs, said.

But this afternoon, in an interview with the Wonk Room, Davis stressed that the personal opinions of military members — who already serve alongside gay and lesbian soldiers — would not determine the policy:

DAVIS: There is something to be said for reaching out to the service members and even their families. But I think that we all know that that’s really, you know, it’s like other surveys that are done in the military, but perhaps not conclusive, in terms of the policies that are taken. It’s not usual for us to go to the military and to have necessarily them believe that their personal feelings are going to determine the policy that moves forward.

Listen:

Davis recalled that the President Truman desegregated the armed forces despite the military’s opposition to integration and allowed women in without regard to military or public opinion. “We’ve had to do a number of things in the military in terms of, you know integrating women, and certainly integrating — racial integration. And I think while it’s good to know about how people care about these things, I think it’s also important that we recognize the validity of the policy itself and I think that’s what the Congress really needs to focus on,” she said.

Asked if she would settle for a moratorium if repeal failed in the Senate, Davis said, “we want to go for repeal, but it is important that they look at some of the issues around discharges.” “I think it would be a good idea if they put discharges on hold right now, I think that’s fine, but the goal is to repeal the policy.”

The co-chairs of the Pentagon’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Working Group reassured Congress today that they would consider the opinions of gay soldiers while conducting their review of the policy but admitted that they had yet to develop a system of consulting with gay members without inadvertently outing them. “We envision outreach through social media so that a wide variety of individuals both within the Department of Defense and without who will have views on this matter have an opportunity for their voice to be heard,” General Carter Ham, one of the working group’s co-chairs, said during testimony before the House’ Military Personnel Subcommittee. Ham and Jeh Johnson, the other chairman of the study group, refrained from offering their personal feelings about the policy and deferred all procedural questions to Congress.

Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) tried to discredit the study group for following the orders of the President and exploring ways to repeal the law. “I’m concerned the direction given to you by the Secretary of Defense will not result in your study group examining two fundamental questions — whether current law threatens or undermines readiness in any significant way and, two, whether appeal of current law would improve readiness in measurable ways,” Wilson asked, but was assured that the study group would in fact examine how a repeal would affect the military. At another point, Rep. John Fleming (R-LA) dismissed the 13,000 DADT-related discharges and suggested that the policy was working. “You would agree that the primary purpose [of the military] is not to invoke social change, but to be ready for war, which we do frequently around here, as you know,” Fleming quipped without allowing the witnesses to respond.

The co-chairs said that they had consulted with their foreign counterparts about their efforts in integrating the services, but stressed that foreign experiences may not apply to the American military. “I think we have a good way ahead to look at foreign militaries. Having said that, we must understand that our military is our military and we have our uniquely American culture in the approach to how we do things, but I think this working group’s effort will be informed about it experience of others,” Ham said.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and 11 other Senate Democrats have introduced a bill to replace the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law — which bars gay and lesbian service members from openly serving in the military — with a new nondiscrimination policy that “prohibits discrimination against service members on the basis of their sexual orientation.” The new legislation, called the Military Readiness Enhancement Act of 2010, mirrors Rep. Patrick Murphy’s (D-PA) repeal bill in the House but goes several steps further, laying out a timeline for repeal and setting benchmarks for the Pentagon’s ongoing review of the policy.

Under the Senate bill, repeal would need to be fully implemented within 13 months of enactment:

- Day of enactment: discharges would have to stop.

- Within 270 days of the bill’s enactment: the Pentagon working group must make its final recommendations on implementing repeal (the bill calls for a formal report to be submitted to Congress).

- Within 60 days of the final report to Congress: the Department of Defense must provide revised regulations reflecting repeal.

- Within another 60 days: each military branch must provide revised regulations reflecting repeal.

The bill’s sponsors — Carl Levin (D-MI), Mark Udall (D-CO), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Roland Burris (D-IL), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Arlen Specter (D-PA), Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Diane Feinstein (D-CA) — told the Advocate Magazine that they hope to include their repeal legislation in this year’s defense authorization act and remained confident that they would attract greater Republican support. “In my opinion, this is non-ideological. In some sense, it’s libertarian, in the sense that it’s freedom – it’s giving people the right to serve their country. So this seems to be quite a consistent thing for the party of Abraham Lincoln,” Lieberman said.

At a press conference unveiling the legislation, lawmakers admitted that they did not yet have 60 votes for a repeal, but promised to ” fight for as much support as we can get.” “If we cannot get the votes [for repeal] … we would then at our markup try to see if we can get enough votes to at least suspend the discharges during this period,” Levin said.

A Florida lawmaker has filed an amendment in the Florida House of Representatives urging Congress to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) and adopt a nondiscrimination policy. “It’s past time to end the failed policy of ’Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’” Rick Kriseman, a Democrat said, noting that the policy has ended the careers of “a great number of lesbian and gay military servicemembers” and “hindered the military.”

Kriseman’s amendment urges Congress to adopt Rep. Patrick Murphy’s (D-PA) repeal bill or “similar legislation“:

That the Congress of the United States is urged to adopt, and the President of the United States is urged to sign into law, H.R. 1283, the Military Readiness Enhancement Act of 2009, or similar legislation, that institutes a policy of nondiscrimination based on sexual orientation with respect to service in the United States military and repeals the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

The legislation also notes the broad support for repealing DADT within the military and the public and cites numerous studies that have found that the policy has cost taxpayers millions of dollars and forced the military to discharge more than 13,000 qualified men and women during a time of war. “There are at least 65,000 gay and lesbian servicemembers on active military duty today and another 1 million gay and lesbian veterans who have served our nation proudly,” the bill says. “Every study authorized by the Department of Defense on the subject of the relationship between sexual orientation and participation in military service has shown that there is no correlation between sexual orientation and unit cohesion in the Armed Forces.”

Momentum for repealing DADT has slowed after Marine Commandant James Conway expressed his support for DADT and the Navy and the Army testified that a moratorium on discharges could complicate the Pentagon’s review of the policy. Still, in an interview with DC Agenda today, Murphy reiterated his belief that Congress would repeal DADT in this year’s defense authorization bill. “We usually don’t pass that into law until October of that year,” Murphy said. “October is about seven months away. That’s plenty of time for the folks to get ready to just put out to the troops that you need to respect not just one another’s race, one another creed, but also one another’s sexual orientation.”

Tomorrow, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Carl Levin (D-MI), Mark Udall (D-CO), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), and Roland Burris (D-IL) will hold a press conference to introduce legislation to repeal DADT and the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee will hold a hearing on DADT.