Many same-sex couples are living proof of the injustice of United States immigration laws. "Bi-national couples" – one person foreign-born and the other a U.S. citizen, face big challenges whether gay or straight, but same-sex couples face the additional burden of not being able to naturalize our spouses under current U.S. immigration law. Thanks to Democratic senators like Dick Durbin caving in to the religious right, the "Gang of 8" senators' so-called immigration "reform" bill currently con...
Last year the United States deported more immigrants than in any other year of its entire history. If the current trend continues, President Obama come next January will become the biggest deporter of immigrants of any president in U.S. history. In six years, he'll have surpassed what the previous Deporter-in-Chief, George W. Bush, did in 8 years. Now Obama and the so-called "Gang of 8" senators are proposing something they call immigration reform, but if you look closely at it, there's very l...
In March 2013, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on two anti-gay measures, California's Proposition 8 and the so-called "Defense of Marriage Act," which was signed by President Clinton in 1996. Both measures ultimately make same-sex couples second class citizens by denying them equal rights under the law, yet the Court is not expected to rule in favor of full legal equality when it announces its decision in late June. Here Richard Streetman and GLN's Andy Thayer discuss the political cont...
While leading Republicans are finally acknowledging that their party's belligerent anti-immigrant language and actions cost them at the polls, Democrats are pretending that they support immigrants even though President Obama has deported more people than any President in U.S. history. He says he supports an LGBT-inclusive immigration reform package, yet his de facto floor leader in the Senate, Dick Durbin, is pushing a package which throws LGBT immigrants and their families under the bus. Immi...
Respecting each other's self-identification on gender is about respecting other people's dignity and humanity. Transgender people face much higher levels of violence and unemployment than the general population, and so the last thing they need is disrespect. Kate Sosin, Senior Reporter for the Windy City Times, and Brent Holman-Gomez of the Gay Liberation Network discuss some basic do's and don'ts about the use of gender pronouns and other language so we do not reinforce the discrimination tha...
The first promise of the newly-minted Obama administration back in 2008 was to shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison. Today, dozens have spent many years there without charges, let alone trial, and have been "cleared" for release, but haven't been. And Guantanamo is just the tip of the iceberg, with a far larger such prison at Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan and secret CIA prisons dotting the globe. Watch as World Can't Wait's Jill McLaughlin and the Gay Liberation Network's Andy Thayer dis...
The Fake Budget Crisis Both President Obama and the Republican Congress are united on at least one thing – federal programs that help most Americans must be cut, and no amount of increased taxation for the rich will change that. But in the wealthiest country in the world, one that spends almost as much on war as the rest of the planet combined, there is plenty of money for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Indeed, many much poorer countries have social services that Americans only dream ...
The cases of "The NATO 5," five young anti-war activists arrested on terrorism charges in the days before the NATO summit in Chicago this past May, illustrate some of the worst law enforcement abuses in a town which is rife with them. Using Chicago police informers, Cook County States' Attorney Anita Alvarez used the arrests of these young activists as a political football to justify the obscene "security" funding for the NATO summit. The arrests just days before the summit also provided a con...
2012 saw the first victories for gays in statewide referenda in a generation. Not since the movement of Harvey Milk's time have we won such votes, and this year we won four – winning the equal right to marry in Maine, Maryland and Washington State, and stopping a constitutional amendment against equal marriage rights in Minnesota. But what of Obama's victory? The last time he won the White House, we also saw the passage of California's notoriously anti-gay Proposition 8. The Gay Liberation Net...
Jason Tompkins of GenderJust and the Gay Liberation Network's Bob Schwartz discuss "Pinkwashing," a propaganda campaign funded by the Israeli government to divert attention from its continuing violation of Palestinian rights behind an image of modernity, signified by Israeli gay life. As international outrage has grown in recent years over the continued ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories, the Israeli government has poured millions into marketing the country as a 'ga...
