Monday, June 22, 2009

Guy couple win $15,000.00 compensation from bullying neighbours

A Vancouver family has been forced to pay $15,000 to a gay couple following two years of homophobic abuse.
Rod Boggs and his partner of 30 years Bill Hart moved to the condo in 2006. According to their testimony, their neighbours, the Harrisons, them that gays "weren't welcome"
According to the Vancouver Sun, the family went on to play loud music, report false accusations to the police, tried to instigate fights, deflated the couple’s tires, and threatened their to kill their cat.
The Harrisons denied all charges, claiming the couple had made them remove their basketball hoop, trampoline, glass sound barrier and other furniture from the front veranda.
In his statement at the British Columbia Supreme Court, Justice Doug Halfyard said that although these constituted “rational reasons” for the family to resent Boggs and Hart, the Harrisons had still behaved in “malicious and intolerable” ways and would have to pay $7,500 to each man in damages.
During the six-day trial, Hart claimed Mrs Harrison told him: "You two have ruined this place. It is disgusting. And so are you. I have so much on you. You are going to be very sorry.”
However, Boggs and Hart were told that they would not receive greater damages because "to a limited extent" they had provoked the Harrisons.

Thanks http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/articles/2005-12907.html

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

METROSEXUAL

Metrosexual is a neologism of the 2000s generally applied to heterosexual men with a strong concern for their appearance, and/or a lifestyle that displays attributes stereotypically related to gay men. - Wikipedia

The term originated in an article by Mark Simpson ("Here come the mirror men"[1]) published on November 15, 1994, in The Independent. Simpson wrote:

Metrosexual man, the single young man with a high disposable income, living or working in the city (because that’s where all the best shops are), is perhaps the most promising consumer market of the decade. In the Eighties he was only to be found inside fashion magazines such as GQ, in television advertisements for Levis jeans or in gay bars. In the Nineties, he’s everywhere and he’s going shopping.

A metrosexual also is a clotheshorse wrapped around a dandy fused with a narcissist. Like soccer star David Beckham, who has been known to paint his fingernails, the metrosexual is not afraid to embrace his feminine side. Why "metrosexual"? The metro- (city) prefix indicates this man's purely urban lifestyle, while the -sexual suffix comes from "homosexual," meaning that this man, although he is usually straight, embodies the heightened aesthetic sense often associated with certain types of gay men.

Mark Simpson invented this term in 1994 (see the earliest citation), and it drifted slowly from one media source to another throughout the rest of 1990s and early 2000s. Then Simpson wrote another article about metrosexuals in the online magazine Salon.com on July 22, 2002, and the term took off. Since then it has been picked up by thousands of media outlets, has made numerous TV appearances, has spawned at least a couple of books, and has been dropped in untold numbers of cocktail party conversations. There is no escaping the metrosexual.

The typical metrosexual is a young man with money to spend, living in or within easy reach of a metropolis — because that's where all the best shops, clubs, gyms and hairdressers are. He might be officially gay, straight or bisexual, but this is utterly immaterial because he has clearly taken himself as his own love object and pleasure as his sexual preference. Particular professions, such as modeling, waiting tables, media, pop music and, nowadays, sport, seem to attract them but, truth be told, like male vanity products and herpes, they're pretty much everywhere.

Friday, May 29, 2009

Lawyers take on gay marriage ban

Two lawyers who squared off in the legal battle over the 2000 US presidential election teamed up on Wednesday to challenge California's gay marriage ban in a move that, if successful, would allow same-sex couples to wed anywhere in the United State.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of two same-sex California couples barred from marrying under the voter-approved ban known as Proposition 8, puts them at odds with gay rights advocates who see a federal court challenge as too risky.

Lawyers Ted Olson and David Boies, who opposed each other in the Bush vs Gore US supreme Court case that put George W. Bush in the White House, said that gay people who cannot marry were turned into second-class citizens by Proposotion 8 in violation of the US Constitution. Olson Represented Bush and Boies represented Vice-President Al Gore in the case that settled the disputed 2000 election.

If this lawsuit prevails, it would establish the right of gay couples to marry as the law of the land, upending laws in many US states that specifically prohibit same-sex marriage.

Five of the 50 US states have legalised gay marriage. Opponents, including many religious conservatives, see gay marriage as a threat to the "Traditional family."

California's Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld Proposition 8, which defines marriage exclusively as between a man and a woman, as a valid amendment to the state's constitution. The same court last May struck down a state law prohibiting same-sex marriage, opening the way for an estimated 18,000 gay couples to wed before the proposition was approved by California voters in november. - Reuters.
Article Source : theSun