Chief Administrative Officer Bill Lee has just announced that gay marriages will once again occur at City Hall, assuming all goes well. That date and time is Wednesday, August 18th, 2010 at 5:00 PM.
So, that will give any judges who want to do anything about it plenty of time to ponder such matters. If no higher judge takes steps to put the kibosh on, it’ll be just like 2004 all over again, starting Wednesday.
Mark your calendars…
From San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera comes the news of the first gay couple in line to get married at City Hall – they waited half the day to see when Judge Walker would lift the stay.
They’ll have to wait at least six more days until August 18th, 2010 to see if they can get married…
Our California Attorney General Jerry Brown can’t abide those who wish to take away the right of same-sex couples to marry in California.
So, in reaction to today’s news about Proposition 8 being ruled unconstitutional…
Vanessa & Maria Heading to City Hall to Get Married by Steve Rhodes
…JB has chirped up. Thusly:
Brown Issues Statement on Today’s Ruling on Proposition 8
Attorney General Edmund G. Brown Jr.’s statement on Judge Walker’s ruling on Proposition 8 today:
“In striking down Proposition 8, Judge Walker came to the same conclusion I did when I declined to defend it: Proposition 8 violates the equal protection guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution by taking away the right of same-sex couples to marry, without a sufficient governmental interest.”
El Protector de la Gente, Jerry Brown:
Wow, Vanessa and Maria are making good progress at City Hall already, it would seem:
Looks like they’ll get hitched, sooner or later.
This is the scene down in Union Square at the Diesel Jeans store on 800 Market these days:
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The people waiting for iPhones 4 around the corner at 1 Stockton didn’t seem to mind…
On It Goes…
Seth Hemmelgarn and Eric Ross are the ones with the deets of the march down Market last Saturday.
Harvey Milk Club Co-President David Waggoner thanking Senator Mark Leno for showing up to the rally:
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This one speaks for itself. There’ll be a rally in the Castro for the benefit of the highly-rated Castro Country Club tomorrow Saturday, April 24, 2010 at 12:30 PM:
“Longtime Home of a Recovery Meeting Place in the Castro to be Sold. Leno, Ammiano, Dufty to Make Appeal for Funds to Save the Club, Keep the Steps in the Castro
WHO: San Francisco Supervisor Bevan Dufty, Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, State Senator Mark Leno as well as Jonathan Vernick, Executive Director, Baker Places
WHAT: Press Conference & Fundraising Rally to Save the Castro Country Club
WHEN: Saturday, April 24, 2010, 12:30 p.m.
WHERE: The Front Steps at 4058 18th Street in San Francisco
WHY: After almost 30 years, the Castro Country Club, a recovery meeting and gathering place, is at risk of closing due to the sale of the building where it is located. Local leaders and members of the recovery community are rallying to raise the funds necessary to save the club from closing.”
More deets:
About the Castro Country Club
Founded in recovery. The volunteer-based Club operates an espresso café on site and is open from early morning until late at night, 365 days a year. It currently hosts over thirty 12-step meetings each week. The Castro Country Club is a program of Baker Places, a nonprofit corporation providing an array of community-based services to residents of San Francisco with mental health, substance abuse and/or HIV/AIDS-related issues. For more information, please visit www.castrocountryclub.org.
See you there!
Seems that a few precincts in San Francisco supported Proposition 8, so some bloggers have been going around town with Equality California to canvass those areas in particular. Tomorrow’s focus is in Visitacion Valley. (If you’re not a blogger already, it takes like five minutes to get started.)
Deets below and right here:
Meet all your favorite internet friends in real life and contribute to a great cause!”
As Visi Valley looks on a clear day:
The deets:
This is a great opportunity to turn just a few hours of easy work into a huge contribution to the fight for equality. Plus it’s a great excuse to meet and mingle with a crowd of awesome online writers, and learn about some of the work being done to restore marriage equality!
What’s a canvass, you ask? We pick neighborhoods that voted majority Yes on 8 to go door to door and talk to people about marriage equality. We start out with a really thorough training and chance to practice, so you’ll learn how to have non-confrontational but productive conversations that will change people’s minds about marriage equality. You’ll go out in teams of two to knock doors for a couple hours, and then we’ll meet up at the end to talk about how it went.
Please come a few minutes early so that we can start on time. After we canvass, we’ll debrief and wrap up by 2:30pm. Bloggers are invited to stick around longer for a special debrief and chance to network with other bloggers.
And of course, your readers and friends are invited to come too — please feel free to post the details on your blog beforehand. The more the merrier!
And you can follow along on Twitter with hashtag #eqwalk.
Just RSVP and let us know if you can make it. We’ll send you the details on when and where to meet. Hope to see you there!
I don’t know, it seems San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is a little hacked off these days because President Barack Obama didn’t want the two of them to be photographed together back in 2004, a time when Gavin was seen as uniquely emblematic of the marriage equality issue. Barack didn’t want photos of the two of them together on the Associated Press wire available for publication in every podunk newspaper all over the country – he didn’t want to deal with that issue.
All right, fair enough. But I can recall a time when Gavin himself was hacked off over a certain photograph depicting marriage equality being on the AP wire.
Leave us travel back to aught-four, when gay weddings were going on all over City Hall. At the time, some folks from Room 200 were very sensitive about the idea of the Mayor being photographed or filmed while he himself was officiating weddings. For whatever reason.
So when he agreed, as a courtesy, to officiate the wedding of a couple of blondes in his elegant office*, the press was emphatically banned despite the fact that they (quite reasonably) felt that they were invited to the ceremony. The media were forced to bide their time waiting just outside the Mayor’s Office.
And this was the scene of the scrum in the hallway afterwards. You might find Waldo in there, but not Gavin:
But look, here he is officiating the ceremony just five minutes before:
This particular photo was processed, emailed, released to the AP, and published in podunk newspapers within hours, to the consequent consternation of the mayor’s people. It seems perfectly cromulent now but, at the time, this kind of scene was seen by some as Too Hot For Publication.
Of course that certainly was a bold move Gavin made in 2004, no doubt about it. I’ll tell you, back in the 1990′s I took a course from a local professor who, in 2003, strongly supported and volunteered for Gavin’s brainy opponent in that year’s mayoral election. But soon thereafter, said professor’s opinion of Mayor Newsom did a 180 solely because of the marriage equality issue - the prof. would go on and on about how much he appreciated Gavin’s actions, and later on, he actually supported Gavin’s reelection (along with the good bulk of everybody else) in 2007.
So nobody doubts the mayor of San Francisco really stuck his neck out on this issue back in the day. But students of history should be foregiven if they can’t square their memories of 2004 100% with what’s being said in 2010.
Just saying.
*Hello, Maureen’s fact-checkers in New Yawk? Starting up a “boutique wine shop in Napa Valley” makes about as much sense as opening a coal shop in Newcastle. How about a Napa Valley wine shop in San Francisco – that would be a lot closer to the mark. Just saying.
