Arkansas News Blogs

Virginia’s new attorney general, a "family values" Republican like the governor, is following in the governor’s footsteps in making it clear that Virgnia is unfriendly to gay people. He’s told the state’s colleges and universities that they have no authority for policies against discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. (The University of Arkansas, to name [...]

Blogger Blue Arkansas reports 1st District congressional candidate Tim Woolridge’s leadership role in a group, the Families First Foundation, one of whose controlling purpose is to be anti-homosexual. (Tim Wooldridge’s values credentials also include his famous legislation calling for public hangings.) From Families First: Are Christians guilty of discrimination because of a refusal to tolerate homosexuality? No. There is a [...]

Frank Rich thinks the noise has been noticeably muted to military leadership’s endorsement of the end of discrimination against gay people in the service. He takes heart. He says polls show the majority of American people are comfortable with the switch, critical independents moreso than Republicans. I need not be reminded that the homophobia of the [...]

Linda Greenhouse examines the simmering dispute over televising court proceedings that arose because opponents of gay marriage want as little widespread public exposure as possible of the constitutional case being presented against them. The TV issue combines with anti-gay activists’ efforts to close to the public the names of people who sign petitions to put anti-gay referendums [...]

Former Arkansas First Lady Gay White will chair Scott Wallace’s campaign for the Republican nomination for Congress from the Second District, he announced today. Former Gov. Frank White’s widow has a lot of friends.

The New York Times reports on how so-called evangelical Christians from the U.S. have been influential in the drive to make homosexual acts punishable by death in Uganda and otherwise helped create a lynch-mob climate in the country, a darling of the Bush administration and other so-called Christians like Rick Warren. The players are trying to distance [...]

Republicans have a solid candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in Illinois. Naturally, he is being savaged by a wackjob. The GOP has been slow to distance itself from the nut. Sexual politics — candidate’s sexual orientation and pro-choice politics — are objects of obsession.

The Washington, D.C. City Council has legalized same-sex marriages in the city. Traditional marriages in the city are officially doomed. Any day now, U.S. senators will start consorting with prostitutes and staff members and picking up men in airports. ON A MORE SOBER NOTE: The Human Rights campaign is urging letters to the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington not [...]

Will Phillips, the West Fork fifth grader whose symbolic refusal to recite the Pledge of Allegiance became known worldwide after David Koon’s story in the Arkansas Times, was honored over the weekend in Fayetteville by Mitchell Gold, a gay rights advocate, during a program at the library. This coverage (the local paper’s coverage is behind [...]

The Family, a secretive fundamentalist group with tentacles deep in Congress, has gotten plenty of attention recently —  when its members stray (Ensign, Sanford); when its friends try to restrict abortion rights (Stupak), or when they try to make homosexuality a crime punishable by death in Uganda. We’ve written before, too, about Jeff Sharlet, who’s written a book about [...]