Saturday, July 31, 2010

Potter County Library Faced Protests Over Gay Documentary

Thanks to good reporting by the Harrisburg Patriot-News, the truth about the smear campaign being waged by the Potter County Tea Party and the Venango County-based American Family Association of Pennsylvania about a recent screening of OUT IN THE SILENCE in Coudersport is starting to come out.

The whole sad affair reminds us of comments that a Venango County school district superintendent made a few years ago about the American Family Assoc. of Penna.'s president, Diane Gramley:

"She likes to start a fire, then throw gasoline on it."


Potter County Library Faced Protests Over Gay Documentary


by Donald Gilliland for The Patriot-News:

After several hours of people pointing their fingers in her face and telling her she was going to hell, Keturah Cappadonia cracked.

In tears, the 28-year-old librarian in this rural town of 2,500 people typed an e-mail to Joe Wilson and Dean Hamer canceling the planned screening of their award-winning PBS documentary about the challenges of being openly gay in rural Pennsylvania.

Wilson and Hamer are traveling the state with their film “Out In The Silence,” and Perry County is on the list of future venues.

The film recounts the men’s return to Oil City after a plea for help from the mother of a gay high school student being bullied at school.

It has been reviewed favorably by the American Library Association and Christianity Today, but it’s getting resistance in some of the rural counties where Wilson and Hamer think it most needs to be seen.

Several churches in Potter County launched a campaign to force the local library to cancel, and the president of the Potter County Tea Party called for the library’s funding to be revoked if it didn’t comply.

The 58-year-old library board president, Jane Metzger, decided she would have none of it.

Regardless of what she thought of homosexuality, she was not going to compromise the library’s mission “because of the very loud voices of a few folks.”

“Basically we’re looking at intellectual freedom,” said Metzger. “That’s the bottom line. That’s what a library is for.”

A quick series of calls to the other members of the board resulted in a unanimous decision: the screening would go forward as planned.

The leader of the Potter County Tea Party, through a local blogger, claimed the library was allowing conservative Christians to be “attacked for our beliefs at a public library we support with our tax money. This is wrong and cannot be tolerated.” Later, he apologized for using the Tea Party name to express his personal opinion.

In the meantime, the filmmakers issued a press release, and the local blogosphere lit up in a bonfire of anonymous comments and accusations.

By the time people began to arrive for the screening two days later, Cappadonia looked shell-shocked.

“I don’t like controversy,” she said. “I know it’s a conservative community, but I never imagined it would get such a knee-jerk reaction.”

Some were saying Christian views would never be allowed an airing at the library because of separation of church and state. But the the library has six shelves of Bibles and Christian books in the non-fiction section, and Christian fiction is “wildly popular,” said Cappadonia.

Many Christians in Coudersport support the library. One said, “This is not a town that burns books.”

Cars quickly filled the library parking lot. Then they filled the lot for the neighborhood park next door. Then they began pulling onto the grass.

When the lights went down, all seats were full. People were sitting on the floor, sitting on bookshelves, standing between the stacks and against the wall. Many could not see the screen, but stayed just to listen.

As the film neared its conclusion an hour later, there was a flash of lightning outside, a sharp clap of thunder, and a double rainbow filled the sky.

Inside, a few opponents of the film offered their brimstone and walked out.

Applause erupted when a woman told the library board, “I think it’s good what you’ve done here.”

Some attempted to speak at length about “God’s Law,” and expressed frustration when they were asked to let others talk, too.

Openly gay members of the town — teenagers, adults and senior citizens — spoke briefly. Some said they felt embraced by the community and lucky to live there; others much less so.

Walter Baker, former chairman of the local Republican party and a member of the vestry at the Episcopal church, has owned a hotel in the center of town as an openly gay man for over 30 years.

“The people here are probably the most friendly people around,” he said. “They’ve been more than generous to me knowing who and what I am.”

A man from a town nearby said his church was very important to him, but when he came out of the closet “the people who considered themselves the most religious wrote me horrible letters.”

The discussion got loud a few times, but the consensus afterward was it was worthwhile.

When everyone was gone, Keturah Cappadonia locked the door.

Library board member Terri Shaffer sat on the floor and began ripping up the tattered duct tape patching the carpet.

The carpet “was good stuff when it was put in,” said Metzger. “June 1973 to be exact.”

Although the local Tea Party claimed “$1.5 million of local taxes” go to the library, the reality is its total budget last year was $117,000 - with less than $42,000 from local governments.

“I think it was a good experience,” said Shaffer. “Who cares if people get a little loud and speak their mind?”

Maybe the experience will bring in some donations — “especially from Harrisburg” she quipped.

Just then, there was a knock at the door.

It was one of the local ministers who spoke against the “homosexual lifestyle.”

When Cappadonia opened the door, he apologized to her.

“I feel badly about people coming in and badgering you,” he said.

Then he addressed Shaffer, saying “Terri, I hope I didn’t disappoint you too much.”

“It’s not my job to judge you,” she said with a smile.

Pa. Tea Party Apologizes for Documentary Controversy

By Jeffrey Gerson for The Advocate:


George Brown, president of the Potter County Tea Party, has issued a public apology for his protest of the acclaimed documentary Out in the Silence when it screened at a local library on its tour throughout Pennsylvania.

In an interview with The Advocate, Joe Wilson, co-director of Out in the Silence, explained the project’s mission: “The purpose of the whole tour was really to use this film to raise awareness and visibility about the lives of LGBT people in rural communities and small towns and help strengthen the ability of LGBT people in these communities to begin organizing for change.” The tour has so far covered over half of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties. Yet upon setting up shop in Coudersport, Pa., Wilson and Dean Hamer, his partner and codirector, met with controversy.

The film was set to be screened at the public library, Wilson explained, emphasizing, “just as any community group can do, or any citizen can use the public library for a program.” All was well until the duo received a call from the library director announcing that the event would have to be canceled. “She was receiving angry calls from local pastors for having scheduled a gay and lesbian program at the library. They were making threats that they were going to call for the library to be defunded,” Wilson said

An article that ran Monday on CoudyNews.com provides quotations both from Pete Tremblay, pastor of the Free Methodist Church and the Tea Party's Brown. Tremblay issued a request for people to “call the library ... and in a Christian manner inform them that this event is not a benefit to our community, and ask that it be canceled.” Brown took a different approach: “Should this agenda be continued, we may need to ask if the library should be defunded.”

The library's board of directors ultimately supported the film, saying they would not be threatened. The event was a success, Wilson reported: “It was the largest event in the library in a long time. We had a very supportive crowd from high school students all the way up to elderly people. There were conflicting viewpoints present during the discussion, though Hamer believes these were positive as well, as it made it clear how challenging it can be to be LGBT in that kind of environment.”


Brown issued an official apology for his actions Thursday, stating, “The Tea Party is not concerned with a gay movie, but I as a person was concerned with the library being the venue for the movie, and frankly that had little to do with our Tea Party mission either. In retrospect I should of used my personal email to voice my opinion.”

Thursday, July 22, 2010

OUT IN THE SILENCE - Banned In Brockway? - Now Playing In Elk & Clearfield Counties

Franklin, PA: Are You Listening? Learning?

This example from New Zealand about how to deal with discrimination in the educational setting might be helpful for Venango County's Franklin Area School District, whose board promoted to the position of principal, rather than investigated or fired, an assistant principal widely alleged to have engaged in abusive and discriminatory behavior against LGBT students and students of color.

NZ School Sanctioned for Firing Gay Sports Coach

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) -- A New Zealand Christian school has been ordered to pay undisclosed compensation and apologize to a sports coach it fired because he was gay.


Board members of Middleton Grange School in Christchurch -- on New Zealand's South Island -- will also attend courses on human rights awareness, school principal Richard Vanderpyl said Thursday.

''We're thinking of the impact on him,'' Vanderpyl said. ''We care for him and respect him.''

He said he offered to rehire the 28-year-old coach, but the man had already found a new job at another Christchurch school.

The coach, whose identity has been withheld, was employed in February to coach the girls' netball team but was dismissed when the school board discovered he was gay.

''At first I was shocked. I've never felt so small in my life,'' the man told New Zealand media Thursday. ''It's hard enough to go through finding yourself and accepting yourself and being 'out' in the first place. Having to go through discrimination doesn't help.''

The school board refused to comment, citing a confidentiality agreement.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Big Lies

Anti-equality forces don't just lie about gays, they lie about democracy as well

by Sean Bugg

As gays and lesbians, we're not unused to hearing lies told about us. For decades, homophobes and anti-gay activists have relied on the big lies to stoke fear of equality: the myth of recruitment, the specter of deviancy. In more recent years, foes of marriage equality such as Maggie Gallagher and the National Organization for Marriage, have told different lies: lies about our relationships, lies about our children, lies about their own heterosexual marriages.


Each lie is a slap in the face, but to some extent tolerable because we're confident that eventually our truth will win. The untruths spread by Anita Bryant in 1970s, Jerry Falwell in the 1980s, and James Dobson in the 1990s, have lost much of their sting as society has grown in its acceptance of gay and lesbian people. It's not unreasonable to think that the lies that led to the passage of Proposition 8 will lose their sting over time as well.

But perhaps the most pernicious lie being foisted on the nation by those opposed to gay and lesbian equality is the lie about democracy -- namely, the idea that the value of our lives should be determined by majority vote.

It wasn't that long ago that anti-gay groups lamented the fact that the gay movement had achieved many of its gains through the court system -- overturning Colorado's Amendment 2, ending sodomy laws with Lawrence v. Texas -- claiming that any pro-gay action by a court amounted to judicial activism. Legitimacy, we were told, could only come through the legislative process.

So when we began achieving victories through legislation as well, the definition of legitimacy changed. For those opposed to marriage equality, convincing a democratically elected legislature is now no longer enough.

Tuesday night, Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle (R) vetoed the civil-unions bill that had been passed by the state's legislature, calling it ''marriage by another name,'' and saying that it ''would be a mistake to allow a decision of this magnitude to be made by one individual.''


Well, of course it would be a mistake for one person to make a decision of that magnitude. That's why a legislature -- pretty much by definition consisting of more than one person -- considered, debated and passed the legislation.

Lingle attempts to cloak her cowardice in the symbols of democracy, claiming the decision on civil unions should be decided ''by all the people of Hawaii behind the curtain of the voting booth.''

I wish I could say that I was surprised by what is either ignorance of or disinterest in the American political system. We don't live in a direct democracy in which every issue, from the most pressing to the most frivolous, is put to the vote. As P.J. O'Rourke wrote, majority rule is ''not only worth dying for; it can make you wish you were dead. ... Every meal would be a pizza. Every pair of pants...would be stone-washed denim.''

And, it seems, every family would be ethnically homogenous and heterosexual. Of course, easy divorce and other things that actually have an impact on marriage rates and stability would continue to be legal because the majority tends to keep things cozy for itself.

But, flippancy aside, it's depressing to watch as people try to chip away at the fundamentals of representative democracy. I can only take some small comfort in knowing that no matter how feverishly they move the goalposts, in the end we'll still win.

Sunday, July 18, 2010

Towns Fill Void On Gay Rights In Pennsylvania

With no state law like New Jersey's, students and others are winning local bans on LGBT discrimination.

By Julia Terruso for The Philadelphia Inquirer

Jason Goodman didn't set out last year to be the face of gay rights in Lower Merion. He was just a college student looking for a summer job.


But as he flipped through employment manuals, the openly gay resident made a discovery he deemed "shocking."

Basically, he had no equal-employment rights. And state and federal legislators weren't about to give him any.

Anyone could deny Goodman a job because of his sexual orientation, with no law to stand in the way. Nothing federal, nothing statewide - nothing even, the University of Pennsylvania senior said, "in the community that I love and have grown up in."

Fast-forward one year, and Goodman, 21, who lives in Bala Cynwyd in the township, finds himself at the fore of a small but growing trend in Pennsylvania. He is prodding Lower Merion to join 16 other municipal and county governments in Pennsylvania that have enacted laws protecting members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community from discrimination.

On July 7, Goodman and members of his group, Equality Lower Merion, watched as 13 township commissioners voted without dissent to draft an ordinance he proposed.

Next month in Doylestown, the Borough Council is poised to pass an LGBT antidiscrimination ordinance.

And in Radnor, another college student - Pennsylvania State University sophomore Taj Magruder - is trying to replicate Goodman's success in his hometown.

"We're ready to change the world, and we're not afraid to go out and to start doing it," Goodman said of this youth-driven activism.

In 21 states - New Jersey, Delaware, New York, and Maryland among them - his ardor could have been spared for other causes. But Pennsylvania legislators have been loath to consider adding an LGBT clause to the state's antidiscrimination statute.

"The whole world is inexorably headed in the direction of recognizing civil rights for these folks," said State Rep. Dan Frankel (D., Allegheny), who has introduced such legislation for the last 10 years. "As usual, Pennsylvania is late to the table on anything with even a semblance of progressiveness."

On one hand, Frankel said, most Fortune 500 companies provide employment protections for LGBT people. On the other, "I have colleagues who insist that they've never met [an LGBT] person."

In increasing numbers, local governments have begun to fill that void. Area municipalities that have passed laws include Philadelphia, Lansdowne, Swarthmore, West Chester, and New Hope.


Typically, the laws forbid discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations based on sexual preference or gender identity. Most set up human relations commissions to investigate and adjudicate complaints, and to assess civil damages if necessary. Many include a public education component as well.

Federal and state laws have long banned discrimination based on race, age, religion, ethnicity, and disability.

"If you fire someone and say, 'I fired you because you're black,' you've got three laws that apply," said lawyer Katie Eyers, who drafted several of the ordinances. "If you say, 'I fired you because of your sexual orientation,' there's no claim that can be brought."

As municipalities consider these laws, the questions are almost always the same, said Stephen Glassman, chairman of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission. "Is it necessary? Is it legal? And how much will it cost?"

To be sure, some of the laws seem more public statement than public necessity.

New Hope, long known for diversity and tolerance, passed its law in 2002 but has yet to handle a complaint.

"We said, 'If New Hope doesn't pass it, who will?' " Borough Councilwoman Geri Delevich said. "So we really passed it to set an example and to deliver a message."

Activists in nearby Doylestown, however, say they saw a need, even in a town with a progressive reputation.

Marlene Pray said a group of LGBT youths had been asked to leave a restaurant several years ago - and had been called "fags" on the way out.

"They called me and asked me what they could do," said Pray, long involved with social-justice and sexuality issues. "But there was no law that had been broken."

Doylestown resident Nancy Reilly, a lesbian, said she and a date twice had been served much more slowly than heterosexual diners seated well after them - by the same server in the same restaurant.

"We said, 'Did that just happen?' " Reilly said. "But it happened twice. We kind of blew it off the first time."

While such incidents might not be fodder for a full-blown human-relations hearing, educating business owners "would make people aware that Doylestown is not a town that will accept that type of behavior," Reilly said. "It is only 8,000 people, but how many thousands of others come here to have dinner, to shop, to do other things?"

Some Doylestown Borough Council members questioned the cost of possibly hiring a full-time human relations staffer - estimated by Glassman to be $50,000 to $60,000 a year.

Councilman Don Berk, the law's leading proponent, responded: "I'm hard-pressed to think of where I would rather spend my money other than fighting discrimination."

Not everyone agrees.

In June, Lancaster County Commissioner Scott Martin proposed dismantling the county's $500,000-a-year Human Relations Commission after activists began demanding that LGBT rights be added to its purview.

Martin said he had acted after discovering that the county's commission duplicated many of the roles of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission. "Tight budget times" demanded letting the state handle the complaints, he said.

As for adding LGBT rights to the county's laws, Martin said that "would not be initiated by me. That's not an issue that I support."

Philadelphia was the first to pass a local LGBT ordinance in 1982; many others popped up after a 2005 Commonwealth Court opinion that affirmed the right of local governments to enact such laws.

Most ordinances tend to pass in "pretty accepting areas," but that doesn't water down their importance, Goodman said.

"Preventing cases and addressing them sends the message that we value you, you're a part of this community, we will stand with you, we will not tolerate homophobia," Goodman said, "just like we will not tolerate racism or any other form of discrimination."

Saturday, July 17, 2010

"The Passion" of "Traditional Family Values"

The Good News About Christian-Right Darling Mel Gibson

By Frank Rich


FOR Fourth of July weekend fireworks, even Macy’s couldn’t top the spittle-spangled eruptions of Mel Gibson. The clandestine recordings of his serial audio assaults on his gal pal were instant Web and cable-TV sensations — at once a worthy rival to Hollywood’s official holiday releases and a compelling sequel to his fabled anti- Semitic rant of 2006. A true showman, Gibson offered vitriol for nearly all tastes, aiming his profane fusillade at women, blacks and Latinos alike. The invective was tied together by a domestic violence subplot worthy of “Lethal Weapon.” There was even a surprise comic coda, courtesy of Whoopi Goldberg, who, alone among Gibson’s showbiz peers, used her television platform on “The View” to defend her buddy’s good character.

The Gibson tapes — in plain English and not requiring the subtitles of some of the star’s recent spectacles — are a particularly American form of schadenfreude. There’s little we enjoy more than watching a pampered zillionaire icon (Gibson’s production company is actually named Icon) brought low. The story would end there — just another tidy morality tale in the profuse annals of Hollywood self-destruction from Fatty Arbuckle to Lindsay Lohan — were it not for Gibson’s unique back story.

Six years ago he was not merely an A-list movie star with a penchant for drinking and boorish behavior but also a powerful and canonized figure in the political and cultural pantheon of American conservatism. That he has reached rock bottom tells us nothing new about Gibson. He was the same talented, nasty, bigoted blowhard then that he is today. But his fall says a lot about the changes in our country over the past six years. We shouldn’t take those changes for granted. We should take stock — and celebrate. They are good news.

Does anyone remember 2004? It seems a civilization ago. That less-than-vintage year was in retrospect the nadir of the American war over “values.” The kickoff fracas was Janet Jackson’s breast-baring “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl, which prompted a new crackdown against televised “indecency” by the Federal Communications Commission. By December Fox News and its allies were fomenting hysteria about a supposed war on Christmas, with Newt Gingrich warning of a nefarious secular plot “to abolish the word Christmas” altogether and Jerry Falwell attacking Mayor Michael Bloomberg for using the euphemism “holiday tree” at the annual tree-lighting ceremony at Rockefeller Center. In between these discrete culture wars came a presidential election in which the Bush-Rove machine tried to whip up evangelical turnout by sowing panic over gay marriage.


It was into that tinderbox of America 2004 that Gibson tossed his self-financed and self-directed movie about the crucifixion, “The Passion of the Christ.” The epic was timed to detonate in the nation’s multiplexes on Ash Wednesday, after one of the longest and most divisive promotional campaigns in Hollywood history.

Gibson is in such disgrace today that it’s hard to fathom all the fuss he and his biblical epic engendered back then. The commotion began with the revelation that his father, Hutton, was a prominent and vociferous Holocaust denier and that both father and son were proselytizers for a splinter sect of Roman Catholicism that rejected the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, including the lifting of the “Christ-killers” libel from the Jews. Jewish leaders and writers understandably worried that “The Passion” might be as anti-Semitic as the Passion plays of old. Gibson’s response was to hold publicity screenings for the right-wing media and political establishment, including a select Washington soiree attended by notables like Peggy Noonan, Kate O’Beirne and Linda Chavez. (The only nominal Jew admitted was Matt Drudge.) The attendees then used their various pulpits to assure the world that the movie was divine — and certainly nothing that should trouble Jews. “I can report it is free of anti-Semitism,” vouchsafed Robert Novak after his “private viewing.”

Uninvited Jewish writers (like me) who kept raising questions about the unreleased film and its exclusionary rollout were vilified for crucifying poor Mel. Bill O’Reilly of Fox News asked a reporter from Variety “respectfully” if Gibson was being victimized because “the major media in Hollywood and a lot of the secular press is controlled by Jewish people.” Such was the ugly atmosphere of the time that these attempts at intimidation were remarkably successful. Many mainstream media organizations did puff pieces on the star or his film, lest they be labeled “anti-Christian” when an ascendant religious right was increasingly flexing its muscles in the corridors of power in Washington.

Both George and Laura Bush expressed eagerness to see “The Passion.” There were reports (spread by the film’s producer and never confirmed) that the very frail Pope John Paul II had given a thumbs-up after his own screening at the Vatican. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which would publish several encomiums to “The Passion,” ran a sneak preview likening the film to “a documentary by Caravaggio.” Even The New Yorker ran a deferential profile of Gibson — in which the star said he wanted to kill me and my dog (though, alas, I had no dog) and have my “intestines on a stick.” Far more troubling was the article’s whitewashing of Gibson’s father’s record as a Holocaust denier. In the America of 2004, Mel Gibson, box office king and conservative culture hero, was invincible.

Once “The Passion” could be seen by ticket buyers — who would reward it with a $370 million domestic take (behind only “Shrek 2” and “Spider-Man 2” that year) — the truth could no longer be spun by Gibson’s claque. The movie was nakedly anti-Semitic, to the extreme that the Temple priests were all hook-nosed Shylocks and Fagins with rotten teeth. It was also ludicrously violent — a homoerotic “exercise in lurid sadomasochism,” as Christopher Hitchens described it then, for audiences who “like seeing handsome young men stripped and flayed alive over a long period of time.” Nonetheless, many of the same American pastors who routinely inveighed against show-business indecency granted special dispensation to their young congregants to attend this R-rated fleshfest.

It seems preposterous in retrospect that a film as bigoted and noxious as “The Passion” had so many reverent defenders in high places in 2004. Once Gibson, or at least the subconscious Gibson, baldly advertised his anti-Semitism with his obscene tirade during a 2006 D.U.I. incident in Malibu, his old defenders had no choice but to peel off. Today you never hear conservatives mention their embrace of “The Passion” back then — if they mention Gibson at all. (Fox News has barely covered the new tapes.) But it isn’t just Gibson who has been discredited. Even as he self-immolated, so did many of the moral paragons who had rallied around him as a culture-war martyr.

Take, for instance, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals. During the “Passion” wars, he had tried to blackmail Gibson’s critics by publicly noting that Christians are “a major source of support for Israel” and that Jewish leaders would be “shortsighted” to “risk alienating two billion Christians over a movie.” That evangelical leader was Ted Haggard, the Colorado megachurch pastor since brought down by a male prostitute. Gibson’s only outspoken rabbinical defender in 2004, the far-right Daniel Lapin, would be sullied in the scandals surrounding the subsequently jailed Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff. William Donohue of the Catholic League — who defended Gibson in 2004 by saying, “Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular” — has been reduced these days to the marginal role of attacking The Times for reporting on priestly child abuse.


The cultural wave that crested with “The Passion” was far bigger than Gibson. He was simply a symptom and beneficiary of a moment when the old religious right and its political and media shills were riding high. In 2010, the American ayatollahs’ ranks have been depleted by death (Falwell), retirement (James Dobson) and rent boys (too many to name). What remains of that old guard is stigmatized by its identification with poisonous crusades, from the potentially lethal antihomosexuality laws in Uganda to the rehabilitation campaign for the “born-again” serial killer David Berkowitz (“Son of Sam”) in America.

Conservative America’s new signature movement, the Tea Party, has its own extremes, but it shuns culture-war battles. It even remained mum when a federal judge in Massachusetts struck down the anti-same-sex marriage Defense of Marriage Act this month. As the conservative commentator Kyle Smith recently wrote in The New York Post, the “demise of Reagan-era groups like the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority is just as important” as the rise of the Tea Party. “The morality armies have failed to inspire their children to join the crusade,” he concluded, and not unhappily. The right, too, is subject to generational turnover.

As utter coincidence would have it, the revelation of the latest Gibson tapes was followed last week by the news that a federal appeals court, in a 3-0 ruling, had thrown out the indecency rules imposed by the F.C.C. after Janet Jackson’s 2004 “wardrobe malfunction.” The death throes of Mel Gibson’s career feel less like another Hollywood scandal than the last gasps of an American era.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

You Belong (in your legislator’s office!)

A Town Hall Forum and Training Session

Join Jason Crighton of the Western Pennsylvania Advocacy Initiative for an informative and exciting evening - July 8 @ 7:00 PM - Craze Night Club, 1607 Raspberry St, Erie, PA



LGBT issues remain a flash-point at every level of government, but especially at the state and federal level where legislation that would benefit lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals and families is stalled.

You can play a key role in changing that! Democracy is a participatory activity!

In this town hall forum learn about the status of pending legislation and the things you can do to assure the passage of these critical protections. You will leave with step-by-step ideas about how you can make a noticeable difference towards achieving equality.

This event is sponsored by the Western Pennsylvania Advocacy Initiative.

For more info, contact Jason Crighton at (412) 206-0874, or check out the Delta Foundation of Pittsburgh's Facebook page or their web site at www.pittsburghpride.org.

Learn more about the event HERE.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

More about the Delta Foundation