Sarah Palin from a Gay Alaskan Perspective

Gay Agenda: Sarah Palin has a very limited relationship with the Alaska LGBT community, due to her short time in office as Governor and her previous background as mayor of a small city in one of Alaska’s more conservative areas. Governor Palin is a conservative politician in a conservative state, and she did not initiate a relationship with the LGBT community as either mayor or governor.
However, one of Governor Palin’s first duties involved 3 pieces of LGBT legislation.As he was leaving office, former Gov. Murkowski called a special legislative session to challenge an Alaska Supreme Court decision granting benefits to same-sex partners of public employees and retirees in Alaska. The court decision was the result of a case filed four years earlier by ACLU on behalf of nine same-sex couples. One partner in each couple was a State employee and the other partner was denied benefits as a result of a 1998 constitutional amendment that defined marriage as between a man and a woman. The equal protection clause of the Alaska Constitution prevailed in that Supreme Court decision, but our Republican legislature was determined to prevent the benefits from being provided on the date of implementation, January 1, 2007.
Because of the implementation deadline, Sarah Palin was required to act on the 3 pieces of legislation prior to taking the oath of office as governor:

1) She vetoed HB 4001 on the grounds that it violated the constitution. HB 4001 would have prohibited the Commissioner of Administration from implementing the regulations that would extend same-sex partner benefits.

2) She let a resolution stand that urged the court to delay implementation of same-sex partner benefits. The court did not grant the delay.

3) In the most detrimental move for the LGBT community, she signed into law HB 4002, calling for a statewide advisory vote on the provision of same-sex partner employment benefits.

That advisory vote occurred on April 3, 2007 at the cost of $1.2 million to the State of Alaska.

What the UK is saying about Sarah Palin

FirstPostUK: Comment: Sarah Palin ‘affair’: big media stays quiet as ‘lover’ named

While America’s respectable media focus on John McCain’s acceptance speech to the Republican faithful, blogs and gossip sites continue to lead the feeding frenzy surrounding the National Enquirer’s allegation, reported here yesterday, that McCain’s running mate Sarah Palin had an affair with her husband’s business partner.

Alaskan Abroad, the blog of an Alaskan journalist, reports that the allegation refers to the time when Palin became mayor of Wasilla in the mid-1990s. Palin’s husband Todd owned a snowmobile dealership with his business partner Brad Hanson. Apparently Hanson, who was also married, and Sarah got on famously; Alaskan Abroad’s sources say the two were “flirtatious but never consummated the relationship”.

“When Todd found out, he reportedly dissolved the partnership and sold the dealership. Hanson is now a member of the Palmer City Council.”

The Enquirer’s own anonymous source claims there was an affair. The paper reports: “Todd discovered the affair and quickly dissolved his friendship and business associations with the guy. Many people in Alaska are talking about the rumour and say Todd swept it under the rug.”

Further allegations continue to emerge from the original Enquirer story, including the suggestion that Palin had attempted to force her pregnant teenage daughter Bristol to marry the father of her child before the story of the pregnancy broke. Bristol refused, leaving her mother with a messy situation to deal with in the run up to her speech to the Republican convention.

Even before the ‘Palin affair’ story broke on Wednesday night, John McCain’s former rival for the Republican presidential candidacy Mike Huckabee was continuing the party’s attack on the media’s portrayal of Palin. “I’d like to thank the elite media for doing something that quite frankly I wasn’t sure could be done: and that’s unifying the Republican Party and all of America in support of McCain and Palin,” he said. “The reporting of the past few days has proved tackier than a costume change at a Madonna concert.”

If a hand-wringing news piece entitled “Media on the defensive over Sarah Palin coverage” in today’s LA Times – which doesn’t even mention the Enquirer’s allegations – is anything to go by, the media big fish will leave this potential scandal to the supermarket tabloids.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post is showing the way for mainstream media nervous of Palin’s lawyers. Reporters there are pursuing slightly less tawdry scandals in the ongoing evaluation of her suitability for the post of Vice President. The paper has printed emails sent by Palin which criticise the official inquiry into her ex-brother-in-law, State Trooper Mike Wooten. The ‘Troopergate’ scandal concerns allegations that Palin got rid of her public safety commissioner Walt Monegan for failing to heed her demands to fire Wooten.

General Petraeus’ Dilemma: Obama and McCain

Journalist Steve Coll discusses his article, “The General’s Dilemma” in the September 8th The New Yorker

…Indeed, because of the reductions in Iraq’s violence, General Petraeus has been cast in the Presidential campaign’s emerging narrative as a sort of Mesopotamian oracle, one that must be consulted or honored by the two remaining candidates. In July, Senator Barack Obama went to Iraq and saw the General; he was rewarded, courtesy of Petraeus’s energetic press aides, with an iconic photograph, printed in many dozens of newspapers, which showed the Senator aboard a command helicopter, smiling confidently at the General’s side. A few weeks later, Senator John McCain, while speaking at a nationally televised forum hosted by the evangelist Rick Warren, invoked Petraeus as one of the three wisest people he knew; McCain called the General “one of the great military leaders in American history.” Afterward, on the campaign trail, the Republican Senator attacked Obama for not being as staunch an acolyte of Petraeus as McCain has been.

Within the Army itself, as the field commander who has presided over the only sustained drop in Iraq’s death toll since the war began, Petraeus has become the most influential general of his era…

During our last meeting in Baghdad, in his office at the Embassy, we talked about the issue of political and military uncertainty—in Iraq and in the United States. Even if the next American President accepted Petraeus’s conditions-based formula for troop reductions, and if Iraq’s government acquiesced, I asked him, what would that mean, as a practical matter? How would the size and timing of troop withdrawals actually be determined?

In reply, the General spoke with some energy about the military planning process he oversees—how a forward headquarters in one Iraqi province can be closed and consolidated, for example, and how one can carefully “thin out” U.S. troops by building advisory teams with Iraqi brigades, and how his own knowledge of particular Iraqi commanders and units shapes his thinking as he constructs a transition to full Iraqi control. After a few moments, however, the General paused. The kind of planning he was describing was fairly technical, he said; he would probably never discuss that sort of detail with an American President. Like the invasion of Iraq, and like the surge, the withdrawal will have to proceed, ultimately, from a President’s best instincts, with the advice of his generals. “The truth is, at the end of the day, some of that has to be subjective,” Petraeus said. “I mean, there’s no magic formula.” (full article)

In a September 2nd episode of NPR’s Fresh Air, Coll spoke more on both presidential candidates and General Petraeus, and the influence each holds over the other. General Petraeus And The Road Out Of Iraq

Dr. Marci Bowers and her surgery

CBS Sunday Morning: Correspondent Seth Doane travels to Trinidad, Colo. where the first private practice for gender reassignment surgery, more commonly called “sex-change surgery” was begun almost 40 years ago.

A frontier town of about 10,000 in the southern Rockies, Trinidad was a stop on the Santa Fe Trail, and continues to be a destination for the transgendered – those that feel their gender doesn’t match their genitalia.

But for all the controversy and media attention that the surgery practice has brought, the folks of Trinidad just shrug and say their small town is more than just the sex-change capital of the United States — it’s a place with a lot of heart.

The Denver Post: The town’s deep and unlikely attachment to the procedure could have ended in 2003, when Dr. Stanley Biber, a one-man industry, put down his scalpel after 35 years of performing his signature surgery.

But Marci Bowers, a gynecological surgeon in Seattle, decided to train with Biber shortly before he retired. And that’s when sex-change in Trinidad moved from a cottage industry into the big time.

Bowers already was intimate with the procedure. Until about a decade ago, she was Dr. Mark Bowers, a man.

The transformation of Marci Bowers, technically, began in childhood when she somehow understood that while her appearance said male, everything inside – her heart, her head, her spirit – said female.

It took a dramatic turn when she started growing her hair long and dressing as a woman, and another after a surgery by someone other than Biber that finally, and officially, made her a woman.

But then Bowers moved to Trinidad, and, like so many others who come to this town seeking metamorphosis, she found it.

These days, she whips around town in her silver Porsche Boxster, shuttling between surgeries and routine gynecological exams, between socializing with her Trinidad- native partner and heading north to the airport for one more stop in the parade of public appearances that now thread through her life.

During the middle of a newspaper interview in June, Bowers took a call from her secretary. A television studio had just called and asked Bowers to fly to Los Angeles at the end of the month to appear on a show.

“Yeah, right,” said Bowers, unleashing an almost scandalously sly laugh from the side of her mouth, a throaty, lusty, sardonic outburst that occurs every few minutes. “That will happen.”

Other surgeons had pilgrimaged to Trinidad to learn Biber’s procedure from the master. But Bowers, now 49, was the first to whom he handed the knife in the middle of a procedure. At that point, he’d effectively chosen his heir.Bowers didn’t quite understand this at the time, although she did grasp the power of the moment: “I shuddered. It was incredible.

“This is the frontier; this is the edge of something important,” she says. “The smallness of (Trinidad) also is nice. I can really control the local environment. People know me. I’m not demonized. I’m not some abstraction that can be loathed from afar.” (full article)

September 2008: Sex Change Hospital
The World of Wonder six-part documentary, Sex Change Hospital, filmed in Trinidad CO, is scheduled to be aired on WEtv in October.

• Episode 1: 10/14 @ 11 pm and 2 am, and 10/21 @ 12 midnight
• Episode 2: 10/21 @ 11 pm and 2 am, and 10/28 @ 12 midnight
• Episode 3: 10/28 @ 11 pm and 2 am
• Episode 4: not yet scheduled
• Episode 5: not yet scheduled
• Episode 6: not yet scheduled

Locker room jocks and Rosie O’Donnell to feature in Little Britain USA

Pink News: The American version of hit comedy show Little Britain will introduce a host of outrageous new characters and even boasts of a guest appearance by comedy queen Rosie O’Donnell.

David Walliams and Matt Lucas have taken their show stateside and hope their new characters appeal to their new audience, taking into consideration that the American approach to comedy differs from British humor.

“We talked about American comedy being a little cooler and Britain being a bit sadder,” Lucas told the Daily Mail.

“”But also we’re not afraid to dress as women which is a little bit rarer in American comedy,”” Walliams said.

In true American style, two of the new characters are jocks Tom and Mark who the Daily Mail report will have “surprise packages in store which will no doubt shock viewers”.

We are also introduced to Ellie-Grace, a misguided child beauty pageant hopeful, and her pushy mother, who should leave the audience in stitches.

Lucas’ favourite character is Bing Gordyn, the eighth man on the moon.

Played by Walliams, Bing is bitter because of the lack of acknowledgment of his accomplishments compared to other astronauts.

Chortle: Rosie O’Donnell is to make a guest appearance in the American version of Little Britain.

Matt Lucas and David Walliams poke fun at the talk show host’s sexuality and well-publicized weight problems in the scene, set at the Fat Fighters club.

Lucas’s brutally rude Marjorie Dawes character asks O’Donnell if she is a lesbian because her weight made it hard to find a man.

Walliams said that O’Donnell was a ‘good sport’ about the gag and did not ask for any changes to the script.

‘I think the boundary is, if it’s funny,’ Walliams told the Reuters news agency, ‘and I think it’s helpful that we’re doing it in front of an audience because if, for example, we’d done that Rosie O’Donnell sketch and people weren’t laughing, if it was uncomfortable, I don’t think we’d want to show it.’

‘I hope that even though that’s pretty outrageous, it’s done with warmth. We’re obviously sort of exaggerating people and it’s got to have some feeling of silliness about it, which stops it from being unpleasant.’

Little Britain USA will air on HBO in September and later in the year on the BBC.