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Beginning this morning, lesbian and gay Iowans are able to sign a marriage contract with their partners and receive all the rights, duties, and protections afforded by the state. From Radio Iowa:

Andrew Mahoney-Lamb and his partner Grant Lamb were the first in line, but didn’t plan it that way.

“No, we figured there’d be a lot of people here, so we figured we’d show up early and try to beat the rush,” Mahoney-Lamb says. Mahoney-Lamb talked his feelings about the wait. “Anxious, I just want to get it over with and have the piece of paper in my hand to show me that it’s actually true,” he says. Lamb says it’s important to them to see the license.

“Definitely once that paper is signed, it’s sealed, then the reality will hit. That’s really what we’re waiting for, the seal from the recorder that says it’s all true,” Lamb says. The two say they’ve been a “couple” for three years and had a commitment ceremony a year ago. Ingrid Olson and Reva Evans waited in line with their son Jamison.

“You know walking up the stairs today, I mean, I got a big pit in my stomach,” Olson says. “I got a big smile on my face,” Evans says, “and it was just like, like I didn’t expect it, it was pretty powerful, it was just a great feeling.” Olson and Evans had tried to get a license four years ago, and were one of the couples who challenged Iowa’s gay marriage ban after being denied.

From the Des Moines Register.

In Des Moines, Lori Blachford was among the people applying for marriage licenses. As television cameras surrounded the dozens of couples in line, she talked about how life with her partner of 25 years, Karen Utke, is going to change.

“We’re living the married life, same as our parents did, painfully and traditionally boring,” said Blachford, who is 45.

But even though they’ve been together so long, the concept of marriage didn’t seem to have fully set in. Blachford first introduced her partner as “my friend,” then stuttered and settled on “my Karen.” They have two sons, age 13 and 17, conceived with an anonymous sperm donor.

“They’ve grown up with us just acting like a married couple and in a normal family,” Blachford said. “But they understand the legal issues. They realize the inequity. They don’t understand why we should be treated any different.”

The couple plan to get married in the summer. “It’s a little anti-climactic to us,” Blachford said. “Twenty-five years of married life, it kind of seems silly to organize a ceremony. But we’re thrilled to be able to do it.”

Denny Schrock and Patrick Phillips-Schrock wore tuxedos to the recorder’s office. They’ve been together five years, and had a commitment ceremony three years ago at the Unitarian Universalist church in Des Moines.

“I didn’t think this would happen in my lifetime,” the 58-year-old Phillips-Schrock, a retired high school French teacher who is originally from Jefferson but now lives in Urbandale, said. “It’s incredible. In Iowa, of all places!”

Six weeks ago, I brought your attention to Presbyterian Amendment 08-B, which would open ordination to all called Presbyterians, including lesbian and gay members of the church. There had been an early indication of record numbers of Presbyteries voting to in favor of the amendment, but More Light Presbyterians, the denomination’s LGBT advocacy group, announced Saturday that the “no” votes have won the day.

This national vote continues until May 19, but the ratification decision became clear today as the “no” votes from presbyteries reached the majority number of 87.

More Light Presbyterians laments this loss of the 218th General Assembly’s Ordination Amendment 08-B that would have restored ordination standards based upon faith and character, not marital status and sexuality. Amendment 08-B reflects a Reformed understanding of ordination and put into perspective church membership and service by making faith in Jesus Christ central in ministry. Amendment 08-B gave our Church a faithful way to reconcile one’s faith and sexuality.

“More Light Presbyterians offer our deep gratitude for the thousands of Presbyterians who want the Presbyterian Church (USA) to be a Church for all of God’s people. So far, 48.6% of all votes cast supported a church that embraces and recognizes God’s image in every person,” said Michael Adee, Executive Director and Field Organizer.

As Michael points out, there is reason to hope for the future of the Presbyterian Church (USA).

In what has been a much closer situation than in 2002, 2 oppositional votes today meant defeat for the national ratification of 08-B. However, the good news is that 69 presbyteries have voted in favor with 14 presbyteries yet to vote. The final tally of support for policy change in 2002 was 42. It is important to recognize that 110 presbyteries out of the 155 presbyteries that have voted thus far demonstrate pro-LGBT equality shifts.

Change often comes more slowly than we “radicals” would like. It sometimes seems unconscionable that people who just want to participate in the life of their church are callously turned away, not unlike modern-day lepers. As my own United Methodist Church begins a similar process of declaring whether God’s church is inclusive or exclusive, I thank the minority of Presbyterians who voted for inclusiveness. With faith, hope, love, and a little bit of elbow grease, someday we’ll all be welcomed by our churches.

School abuse is getting national attention since the suicides of 11-year-olds Carl Walker-Hoover and Jaheem Herrera. I’m not going to say much here, just link to a few videos that are important to watch.

First is a clip from last Friday’s Anderson Cooper 360 with Carl’s mother, Sirdeaner Walker, and Rev. Dr. Mel White, co-founder of Soulforce, an advocacy group for gay Christians.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2915uPdYiw[/youtube]

Next is Anderson’s coverage of Jaheem Herrera’s death. Also appearing is Barbara Coloroso, author of The Bully, the Bullied, and the Bystander.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcvCFnYiy1Q[/youtube]

Finally, Ms. Walker appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show yesterday to bring attention to the problem of school abuse. I can’t tell you how impressed I am by Ms. Walker’s strength.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJJF7d2gatc[/youtube]

I’ve been quiet about the Miss California gay marriage thing because, quite frankly, it seemed like a distraction. Still does, in fact. But since the battle line of the week seems to be drawn on the incident, I suppose I’ll chime in.

First, here’s a video of the question/answer, followed by the transcript of her answer.

Well, I think it’s great that Americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite [sic] marriage. And you know what, in my country, and in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that’s how I was raised, and that’s how I think it should be between a man and a woman. Thank you.

I’m totally okay with this. I’m glad she said what she really thinks about marriage equality instead of lapsing into a canned “world peace” answer. She did chicken out a bit when she caught herself and changed “in my country” to “in my family”, though.

How long till they announce the Playboy deal?

The biggest problem I have with Miss California’s answer is that Americans aren’t able to choose same marriage or opposite marriage. It’s just not so. In fact, that’s why the question was asked.

And by the way, it apparently isn’t even true in her family, as her sister is a gay rights activist, so really her answer was built on a lie.

She's sweat, wet, got it goin' like a turbo vette

Frankly, as many gays are involved with and enamored by pageants and such, Miss California may have trouble in the pageant world after this.

And you know what? I’m okay with that too. Actions have consequences, and that might be one of them.

The oddest part of all of this is that she’s been so embraced by the Religious Right. She made an appearance on the Gospel Music Awards and got a standing ovation. She’s already made it into articles of the anti-gay American Family Association. She even has kind words from Peter LaBarbera, and he’s got an award named after him!

They're totally real, I swear!

I mean, I understand that it seems like an obvious endorsement, what with Miss California wanting to keep The Homosexuals down and everything, but what happens when their ultra-conservative audience gets a look at the photographs she had made showcasing her ass and her fake boobs?

It just seems like a disaster waiting to happen is all.

Somebody’s finally getting around to thoroughly debunking the 1979 book Homosexuality in Perspective, a seminal weapon in the ex-gay industry’s arsenal. One of the original “we can make people not-gay anymore–with SCIENCE” studies, authors Masters and Johnson claimed that the book was a result of 14 years of research with gay men and lesbians.

But in an article published yesterday by Scientific American, Thomas Maier looks at the suspicions that arose in the research team’s office even before the book even hit the shelves.

Prior to the book’s publication, doubts arose about the validity of their case studies. Most staffers never met any of the conversion cases during the study period of 1968 through 1977, according to research I’ve done for my new book Masters of Sex. Clinic staffer Lynn Strenkofsky, who organized patient schedules during this period, says she never dealt with any conversion cases. Marshall and Peggy Shearer, perhaps the clinic’s most experienced therapy team in the early 1970s, says they never treated homosexuals and heard virtually nothing about conversion therapy.

When the clinic’s top associate, Robert Kolodny, asked to see the files and to hear the tape-recordings of these “storybook” cases, Masters refused to show them to him. Kolodny—who had never seen any conversion cases himself—began to suspect some, if not all, of the conversion cases were not entirely true. When he pressed Masters, it became ever clearer to him that these were at best composite case studies made into single ideal narratives, and at worst they were fabricated.

Eventually Kolodny approached Virginia Johnson privately to express his alarm. She, too, held similar suspicions about Masters’ conversion theory, though publicly she supported him. The prospect of public embarrassment, of being exposed as a fraud, greatly upset Johnson, a self-educated therapist who didn’t have a college degree and depended largely on her husband’s medical expertise.

With Johnson’s approval, Kolodny spoke to their publisher about a delay, but it came too late in the process. “That was a bad book,” Johnson recalled decades later. Johnson said she favored a rewriting and revision of the whole book “to fit within the existing [medical] literature,” and feared that Bill simply didn’t know what he was talking about. At worst, she said, “Bill was being creative in those days” in the compiling of the “gay conversion” case studies.

HT to Twittererer DorianWright.

(And if you’re still giggling at my use of the word seminal… me too.)