There’s nothing less tasteful than a company that uses the Bible to defend its anti-gay policies and then bears what seems to be false witness. Because of Chick-fil-A’s condemnations of marriage equality advocates, the Jim Henson Company announced that it would not engage in future partnerships with the restaurant and would donate proceeds from the current puppet toy partnership to GLAAD. How did Chick-fil-A respond? By “voluntarily recalling” the toys because of a supposed safety complaint. This sign has been circulating the web from a store in Texas:

We apologize for any inconvenience but as of 7/19/2012 Chick-fil-A has voluntarily recalled all of the Jim Henson’s Creature Shop Puppet Kids Meal toys due to a possible safety issue. Please be advised that there have not been any cases in which a child has actually been injured, however there have been some reports of children getting their fingers stuck in the holes of the puppets. We are offering a substitution of a complimentary kids icedream cone in its place until a replacement toy is available.

Another store in Virginia posted a similar explanation on its Facebook page. Both confirm that the recall took effect just one day before the Henson company’s announcement.  ThinkProgress obtained this official comment from Tiffany Greenway, Corporate Public Relations for Chick-fil-A, confirming a nationwide withdrawal:

We can confirm that it is true that Chick-fil-A voluntarily withdrew the Jim Henson kids meal toys nationwide because of a potential safety concern. This is unrelated to the Jim Henson announcement.

As indicated by the sign, this “potential safety concern” seems to entail children getting their fingers stuck in the finger puppets. Given the company’s history of duplicitous public relations in regards to its anti-gay controversy, its decision to decline offering further explanation for the safety concern, and its admission that there hasn’t actually been any injury, this claim is highly dubious. Despite the company’s claim to the contrary, the timing and nature of this decision still raises the question of whether it is retaliation for the Henson Company breaking ties and supporting GLAAD. Regardless, Chick-fil-A is doing little to minimize its current anti-gay PR crisis.

A North Dakota paper that currently bans same sex marriage announcements is reviewing its policy after an outpouring of support for one lesbian couple whose announcement was turned down.

Allison Johnson and Kelsey Smith posted a screen shot of the email from the paper, The Forum, turning them down — and it went viral. Someone even started a Change.org petition for the women, which currently has over 2,000 signatures. Johnson and Smith described to Jezebel how the news spread:

“We thought, ‘Hmm, we’ve never seen an ad like this before, so we’ll be the first. Cool!” Johnson told us. “We certainly didn’t expect to get rejected.” [...]

Johnson was shocked by the letter; she describes Fargo as a “phenomenal,” supportive and forward-thinking community, and says she would never have expected to be shamed for her sexuality by anyone in the area, much less its most popular local paper. She said she initially planned to send a screencap of the email to her partner, but later decided to post it on her Facebook as well, hoping she could rally some of her friends to write letters to the paper. It didn’t take long for the outrageous (yet incredibly bland) missive to spread through Facebook and Twitter, inspiring outrage among Fargo residents and all over the globe. By Monday night, The Forum’s Facebook page was filled with angry comments and promises of canceled subscriptions.

In an article today, The Forum editor Matthew Von Pinnon said, “The Forum is reviewing its policy about publishing same-sex announcements. …This is the second such request in recent months. We will communicate a decision once it’s made.” Presumably, the decision should not take very long at all, since it only requires the paper’s editors to concur that the paper should print same-sex marriage announcements.

Smith and Johnson will be getting married August 1 in New York City, since same sex marriage is still illegal in North Dakota.

Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA)

Today, Republican Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA) attacked the Pentagon’s decision to allow soldiers to march in uniform in San Diego’s pride parade last Saturday. Forbes, a senior Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, accused the Pentagon of working to advance President Obama’s “social agenda” in a press release today:

FORBES: I am calling on the DoD to halt these dangerous exceptions to policy for political purposes. This decision was an outrageous and blatantly political determination issued solely to advance this Administration’s social agenda. Sadly, this is yet another violation in what has become a pattern of this Administration’s assault on the longstanding history of the Department of Defense as a nonpolitical organization.

For weeks ahead of the parade, soldiers built momentum to march in uniform but were uncertain whether they would receive Pentagon approval to do so. The Pentagon approved the request two days before the parade, but did not change its policy requiring approval.

Despite Forbes’ claims, there is no evidence that the White House had any hand in the Pentagon’s decision. At Saturday’s parade, the military contingent drew the loudest cheers from the 200,000 attendees. Sean Sala, a former Navy Sailor who organized the parade’s military contingent, said of the Pentagon’s decision: “These are people that have laid down their lives for their country…and they deserve recognition for their service regardless of their sexuality.”

– Ben Sherman

Our guest blogger is Andrew Cray, health policy consultant for LGBT Progress.

This week, the return of the International AIDS Conference to the United States is bringing a renewed focus on the HIV epidemic and the rights of populations that have been most impacted by HIV and AIDS. Policies upholding unfair prejudice against these populations, such as the continued lifetime ban on blood donation by men who have sex with men (MSM), encourage discriminatory attitudes without adding any benefit to public health. HIV advocates should continue to be concerned about U.S. blood donation standards, precisely because they shift attention from effective interventions against HIV, and reinforce outdated and inaccurate stereotypes that are harmful to public policy.

There is a stark contrast between the lifetime deferral for potential MSM donors and policies addressing the many non-MSM donors who are also considered to be high risk. The deferral periods for potential donors who have engaged in high-risk heterosexual sexual conduct are limited to one year. For example, a person who has heterosexual sexual contact with an injection drug user may not donate blood for 12 months.

Since its inception, the lifetime deferral policy for MSM blood donors has been called into question for its roots in anti-gay bias and its lack of scientific basis.  Significant criticisms of the donation ban include:

• Developments in blood screening and record keeping technologies since the donation ban was put in place may make the policy unnecessary. Current blood screening tests are so effective that the probability of HIV transmission through blood transfusion is one in 1.5 million. This is a significant decrease from the risk levels in the mid 1990s: one in 450,000–600,000 donations.
• The blood donor questionnaire used to exclude MSM focuses inappropriately on the identity and type of partners a potential donor has, rather than on the actual sources of risk from sexual contact. It uses imprecise questions about sexual practices, and does not ask about use of barrier contraceptives or the particular sexual contact they participated in. This is despite the fact that risk of transmitting HIV varies widely based on the type of sex people are having, and use of condoms clearly reduces these risk figures significantly.
• The ban excludes a large donor base while exacerbating the nation’s blood shortage. Illustrating how significant the exclusion of MSM donors is for the blood supply, the Williams Institute estimates that lifting the donation ban could increase the blood supply by more than enough to keep the blood supply out of critical shortage. That increase in donations would amount to 219,000 pints of blood, which could save over 650,000 lives annually.

While the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently proposed a pilot study designed to explore alternative donation deferment policies for MSM, which is a step in the direction of evidence-based donor screening practices, it is not enough to reduce the harmful, homophobic message that the current donation policy sends. For the study, HHS proposes alternative donor acceptance criteria: MSM who have had a one or five year period of abstinence from sex with other men. While this may help in assessing HIV prevalence among these subsets of the MSM population, retaining the lifetime ban holding gay, bisexual, and other potential MSM donors to a different standard than other potentially high-risk individuals is both outdated and unfairly discriminatory. Additionally, the alternatives proposed by the study do not encourage development of more precise behavioral screening questions that get at the true sources of donor risk.

It is unquestionable that the task of balancing the safety and adequacy of the nation’s blood supply is an important one. The discriminatory policy of excluding potential MSM donors does not serve either of these goals. Instead, the MSM blood donation ban promotes homophobic attitudes and inaccurate assumptions about gay and bisexual men that drive the HIV epidemic and prevent rational evidence-based health policy. Under any framing of what is at issue in the lifetime blood donation deferral for MSM, the policy fails to fulfill its role. Maintaining a safe supply of donated blood will require refocusing on developing donor deferral standards that accurately measure risk equally among all potential donors, and dropping a donation ban that is decades behind scientific evidence.

Chick-fil-A might be pretending to distance itself from president Dan Cathy’s anti-gay remarks condemning marriage equality activists as “prideful” and “arrogant” for “inviting God’s judgment” with the “audacity to define what marriage is about,” but that was not the last of Cathy’s remarks. Today, Jeremy Hooper found a clip of him speaking at Hope Community Church last month, again employing the mission of the company to attack the gay community as “foolish,” “twisted up,” “tragic,” and “left to a deprived mind”:

CATHY: It’s very clear in Romans chapter 1, if we look at society today, we see all the twisted up kind of stuff that’s going on. Washington trying to redefine the definition of marriage and all the other kinds of things that we go—if you go upstream from that, in Romans chapter 1, you will see that because we have not acknowledged God and because we have not thanked God, that we have been left victim to the foolishness of our own thoughts, and as result, we are suffering the consequences of a society and culture who has not acknowledged God or not thanked God—he’s left us to a deprived mind. It’s tragic and we live in a culture of that today.

Watch it:

It’s no coincidence that those defending Chick-fil-A this past week, including Mike Huckabee, Tony Perkins, the National Organization for Marriage, and Rep. Joe Pitts (R-PA), have all ignored Cathy’s odious “inviting God’s judgment” comments as if they were never made. NOM’s Jonathan Baker even said that Chick-fil-A wasn’t “objectionable” and didn’t “denigrate people,” they “simply shared that they are Christians.” But of course, everything about Cathy’s comments are objectionable and denigrating, and pretending they don’t exist doesn’t undo their existence.

Now, there is even more evidence of Cathy’s odious beliefs, and the case against him and his company is harder to ignore. He has said in no uncertain terms that he believes gay people are inviting the complete destruction of society and culture by pursuing marriage equality. That is quite a step beyond simply identifying as “Christian,” as most Christians aren’t anti-gay to begin with, let alone anti-gay enough to condemn an entire “twisted up” population for inviting “suffering” upon society. Those willing to stand by Chick-fil-A must be prepared to own all of Cathy’s remarks, not just the gentle ones they pick and choose.

Many supporters of Sen. Jim DeMint have demanded that Charleston area television stations  pull a recent ad that features his past comments that gay and lesbian teachers should not be allowed in the classroom in public schools. Highlighting DeMint’s anti-gay convictions, the ad equates DeMint’s anti-gay statement with the same logic that was previously used to fuel anti-Semitism. Specifically, the ad begins with a hypothetical question: “What if you saw this headline? ‘Senator Jim DeMint: Jews Should Not Teach Public School’” The ad announcer than replaces the word “Jews” with “Gay” in the headline, reflecting DeMint’s actual statement.

According to the Alliance for Full Acceptance, the gay rights advocacy group that funded the ad campaign, local television stations have ignored the calls to remove the ad and have continued to air the 30-second piece. Although DeMint supporters have argued that the ad falsely presents the Senator as anti-Semitic, DeMint’s original comments were widely panned as highly discriminatory and controversial. The Senator made the remarks in 2004 after he was asked about a state GOP platform item which said that homosexuals should not teach in schools — DeMint replied, “I don’t think they should. We need the folks that are teaching in schools to represent our values.”

Warren Redman-Gress, the directer of the Alliance for Full Acceptance, indicated that he was pleased with the way that Charleston stations have handled the matter — “We are really thankful the TV stations see the value in what we’re doing, and, in that first salvo, have stood by us.”

The ad is part of a campaign that began last month to raise public awareness of how commonly discriminatory attitudes towards the LGBT community are often more accepted and normalized than similar feelings towards other racial or social groups. Senator DeMint, in particular, has had a history of controversial and anti-gay comments. From falsely claiming that the chief military officials did not want DADT to be repealed to opposing hate crimes legislation to delaying confirmation of gay judicial nominees, DeMint is no stranger to opposing equality.

By worrying whether he comes off as anti-Semitic without concern that he’s anti-gay, DeMint’s supporters prove the very point the ad is trying to make. Watch it:

–Angela Guo

Judge Sophia Hall

Some of the Right’s most extreme anti-gay voices are up in arms this week because the judge set to hear the challenge to Illinois’ ban on same-sex marriage is gay herself. Judge Sophia Hall was a charter member of the Alliance of Illinois Judges, a group committed to “promoting and encourage respect and unbiased treatment for LGBT individuals as they relate to the judiciary, the legal profession, and the administration of justice.” This alone, these hate group leaders argue, should disqualify her. Peter LaBarbera of American for Truth About Homosexuality rounded up responses from Rena Lindevaldsen of Liberty University, who defended ex-gay child kidnapper Lisa Miller, and Scott Lively, who has promoted homophobia in Uganda and believes homosexuality is responsible for the Nazi party:

LINDEVALDSEN: If the tables were turned and she was a charter member of an organization that had as its mission to overturn Roe v. Wade and she was presiding over a case where the validity of Roe was in question, there would be incredible outcry to have her removed from the case. Given the significance of the case before her, Judge Hall should take steps to avoid even the perception of a conflict of interest, and recuse herself.

LIVELY: Judicial recusal to prevent the appearance of bias is an essential component of our legal system. Its authority depends on public confidence in its impartiality. Can anyone reasonably expect an open lesbian and member of a “gay rights” advocacy group to be impartial on the issue of “gay marriage”? If this judge has any respect at all for our judicial system, she must recuse herself.

Both comparisons are fallacious and insulting. Judge Hall helped found an organization committed to promoting professional respect, not a legal player or party to the case. It would be just as offensive to suggest that a woman could not rule on a case about women’s issues (as Lindevaldsen essentially does), that a person of color could not rule on an issue of racial civil rights, or that a person with any religious affiliation (like the many Catholic members of the Supreme Court) would be biased on any question of religion. Besides, if heterosexuals have a stake in “defending marriage,” as conservatives claim, then by their own argument no heterosexual could be unbiased either. LaBarbera, Lindevaldsen, and Lively stand appalled that Hall would admit she fights the “injustice of racism, gender bias, bias against gays and lesbians, and other stereotypes,” because they know that if she actually stands for justice — as her job demands — they will lose.