Cheryl Chow served on the Seattle City Council. She was a school principal and a school board member. And before she dies, Chow wants to do one more public service: Come out, and encourage others to feel more comfortable to do the same.

Despite a ten-year relationship with her partner, Sarah — the two even have a child they are raising together — Chow has kept her sexuality secret from her family and the public. But now that she’s facing cancer of the central nervous system, the 66 year-old woman is coming out. She said she wants to be a role model for young gay people, including the girls on her Chinese Community Drill team. “I wanted them to feel good about themselves and I wanted them to have a role model that wasn’t afraid to say anymore. I’m gay and that’s okay,” she said:

Asked if she still thinks she’ll get some pushback from the Chinese community, Chow says, “No, they can’t do anything to me now. What are they going to do, kill me?” [...]

“If I can save one child from feeling bad or even committing suicide because they felt terrible because they were gay, then I would have succeeded in my last crusade,” said Chow.

Watch it:

The city of Atlanta has agreed to pay a HIV-positive police officer $250 thousand in damages after the Atlanta Police Department denied him a job simply because of his HIV status.

Greg Nevins, an attorney at Lambda Legal’s Atlanta office who helped represent the officer, said he was glad the court reached a settlement decision that doesn’t play into misguided stigma surrounding HIV-positive individuals:

NEVINS: We are glad that the City of Atlanta has moved to right its wrong. We expect that the City, after paying out settlements in both [a previous LGBT-related case] and now this case, has learned to avoid the unnecessary costs of failing to treat LGBT people and those living with HIV fairly and appropriately.

The officer, going by the pseudonym “Richard Roe” to protect his privacy, applied for a position with the APD in 2006. However, after a round of medical screenings revealed Roe was HIV-positive, the ADP told him that his HIV status disqualified him from the position. Roe sued the city for workplace discrimination, but the court ruled in the city of Atlanta’s favor, saying Roe did not produce enough evidence to prove his HIV status will not present a direct threat to others while serving in the police force. Lambda Legal appealed and argued that, by considering Roe a “direct threat,” the city was discriminating against Roe.

Stigma surrounding HIV only helps maintain the HIV epidemic by hampering efforts for HIV advocacy and outreach. It’s important for cases like the one in Atlanta to help model a society that does not attach unfair stigma to HIV-positive individuals.

The anticipated debate between “It Gets Better” Project founder Dan Savage and the National Organization for Marriage’s Brian Brown, which came about after Savage made provocative statements noting that the Bible supports the practice of slavery, is now online for all to view. Savage and his family hosted Brown for dinner in their home, and afterward, Mark Oppenheimer of the New York Times hosted a dinner-table debate over the issue of same-sex marriage. Savage offered an articulate explanation of the many conflicts presented in the Bible, pointing out how it fails to align with the 21st Century Zeitgeist of morality and so serves no authority on the question of same-sex marriage. Brown, immediately citing the shooting at the Family Research Council (which happened the same day the debate was recorded), focused entirely on assuming the status of victim, claiming that the primary consequence of marriage equality is that individuals like him will be labeled as “bigots.” This passage seems to sum up Brown’s primary argument:

BROWN: What I see attempted here, and sometimes in other things that you’ve said that I think are much more colorful than what you’ve just laid out, is the notion that we are deserving — that those of us who know that marriage is the union of a man and a woman — that we are deserving of treatment less than others because we are bigots and we deserve what we get. And I don’t think that’s true. And I don’t think that that helps further the debate. And I think that the attack on Christianity, as I said earlier — I don’t think people look at that and say, “Hey, you know, Dan Savage has a point.” If anything, it makes people say, “Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this? This doesn’t further your argument.”

Watch the full hour-long debate:

For Brown’s point to be valid, there would have to be an actual campaign against the rights of Christians, which of course there isn’t, though there is very much a fight against the rights of gays and lesbians. What is most compelling about the debate is that Brown never mentions the existence of same-sex couples or their children, despite having just dined with such a family and continuing to sit in their household. Instead, he resorts to self-victimization and blatant refutations without any supporting evidence, simply saying “Dan, You’re wrong” time and time again. The few examples Brown cited to defend his arguments, such as the flawed Mark Regnerus study or the Ocean Grove Pavilion in New Jersey, were skillfully debunked by Savage.

Toward the end of the debate, Oppenheimer cornered Brown on what the actual fallout of same-sex marriage would be for heterosexual couples beyond the fact that he would be called a bigot, to which he had no meaningful response. Brown then admitted that decades of nationwide same-sex marriage without consequence still would not convince him to change his position.

Unfortunately, Brown largely talks past Savage, sticking to his talking points and refusing to consider any of the arguments made. NOM seems to believe it can capitalize off of the debate, judging from the graphic-riddled website it dedicated to the matter. In reality, all Brown managed to demonstrate is his ability to ignore the very existence of same-sex families while emphasizing his own self-righteousness.

As the Family Research Council continues to politically exploit last Wednesday’s tragic shooting to attack the Family Research Council, the hate group is struggling to find allies beyond its fellow anti-gay organizations. In a newsletter sent out Tuesday, Tony Perkins boasted that two columnists have come to its defense against the “hate group” label, Dana Milbank — who essentially argued that promoting hate against LGBT people simply isn’t as bad as promoting hate against people of color — and James Kirchick, who Perkins describes as a “leading voice on gay politics.” In his column, Kirchick gave a pass to people who oppose marriage equality just because they are concerned about the “familial breakdown”:

As for gay marriage opponents, many of them object in name only; that is, they have no problem extending all of the same legal benefits to gay couples but are made uncomfortable by calling same-sex partnerships “marriage.” Such a position, no matter how intellectually confused, is not on the same level as calling blacks and Hispanics members of “mud races” who should be shipped back to the lands of their ancestors.

To be sure, there are many people whose opposition to gay rights is motivated by hate. They are less animated by the specter of familial breakdown than they are by the perceived degeneration of the culture at the hands of “godless sodomites.”

Kirchick seems to only be known as a “leading voice on gay politics” on his own Wikipedia page [citation needed]. His post conflates all anti-LGBT positions, ignoring the very clear distinction between those who may have a privately held religious belief against same-sex marriage and those who dedicate millions of dollars to advocating against the very lives of LGBT people. Regardless of how they package their rhetoric, groups like FRC that proactively campaign against equality demonize the LGBT community as second-class citizens who would destroy society (or “the family,” or “the institution of marriage”) if given the opportunity to participate in it fairly and safely. Like Milbank, Kirchick whitewashes this denigration and arbitrarily decrees that it simply isn’t as dangerous or deplorable as similar judgments of race.

Any claim FRC might make in the mainstream media that it only cares about “the specter of familial breakdown” is folly. This is an organization whose spokespeople regularly call for the deportation and imprisonment of homosexuals, comparing them to people who engage in pedophilia and bestiality. Such rhetoric is no more benign than the racist language Kirchick and Milbank compare it to, and the incendiary impact is easily measurable. As The Advocate’s editor Lucas Grindley points out this week, the magazine dedicates an entire section for crimes against LGBT people that is often overflowing. In fact, The Williams Institute found that gay men face inordinately high rates of hate-motivated violence — at five times the rate of African Americans and Jewish Americans. The motivation for such animus isn’t spontaneous and random.

Perkins may have found a few people he can convince to ignore his decades of anti-gay vitriol, but that doesn’t minimize the hateful impact of his organization’s work.