Troy Brunet is here standing at 17th and Castro in San Francisco waiving this flag -- "it's like a sigh of relief" pic.twitter.com/4KsaspMWQc

— Hamed Aleaziz (@Haleaziz) June 26, 2015

Cars are already honking through San Francisco's Castro district this morning following the historic 5-4 ruling by the Supreme Court this morning. Thankfully, the justices dropped their most dramatic decision on this Friday of Pride weekend in San Francisco, New York, Minneapolis, and Seattle instead of waiting until Monday, which is their last scheduled day for releasing decisions. This means that Pride celebrations will kick off with an extra boost of jubilation, much like they did two years ago in the wake of the rulings on DOMA and Prop 8.

A 5 p.m. rally in the Castro will, like it did in 2013, come with a concurrent block party of epic proportions (likely to begin a couple hours ahead of that), as locals and tourists alike flock to one of the world's nexuses of the gay rights movement to celebrate this historic moment.

State Senator Mark Leno tells the Bay Area Reporter that the ruling "was a long time coming. [And] amid all the joy, all the elation, all the celebration, a quiet part of me says this just feels right.”

Chronicle reporter Hamed Aleaziz posted the photos above and below to Twitter showing one Troy Brunet and his big rainbow flag, standing at the corner of Market and Castro in the shadow of the much larger rainbow flag there, saying, "it's like a sigh of relief."

A 9 a.m. rally at City Hall featured local LGBT rights leaders and politicians, including Kate Kendell, the executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, who pointed at the crowd and said, "You you you you! Look what you did!"

Leno also spoke, saying that former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger "will go down in history as the George Wallace of California" with regard to same-sex marriage rights, as Chron reporter Vivian Ho tweets from the scene (see below).

Mayor Ed Lee spoke, and former mayor, now Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom was expected to speak. [Update: As seen in the tweet below, Newsom arrived late and didn't get to say much at the rally.] Newsom, of course, was instrumental in getting the ball rolling in the national debate over gay marriage when he controversially allowed the San Francisco city clerk to begin issuing same-sex marriage licenses back in 2004.

Newsom has clearly had a prepared statement ready to release for weeks now, and he begins by quoting George Washington.

’We have abundant reason to rejoice that, in this land, the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition.’ The wisdom of these words, penned by President Washington and now more than two centuries old, remind us that American Democracy is an evolving journey, perfected with the passage of time.

Indeed our present day comprehension of marriage — based upon love and lifelong loyalty — is itself an evolution in the institution of marriage.

...

This cause for celebration closes one chapter of civil right injustices enforced by state laws. To deny the value of any love, devalues all love. The nation has traveled full circle in the eleven years since San Francisco’s Winter of Love, but the underlying prejudices have not disappeared.

...

And as we celebrate, we must give thanks. Thanks to the brilliant lawyers who forged ahead with legal challenge after legal challenge. Thanks to the judges who understood this was about equality and justice. Thanks to the elected officials who supported marriage equality, caring more about doing the right thing than winning political points. Thanks to the activists who have been waging the battle for marriage for decades and never giving up. And most of all, thanks to the couples who taught us about courage and constancy.

SF District Attorney George Gascon also released a statement this morning, saying, "Love is truly the great equalizer, and today’s decision is a victory for the countless LGBT couples whose determination and love for one another led to this historic day... Today, more than most days, I am proud and grateful to live in this country."

All previous coverage of same-sex marriage on SFist.

As predicted yesterday following the Supreme Court's decision not to hear any of the same-sex marriage challenges before them, two more states have seen their same-sex marriage bans fall at the hands of federal appeals court judges: Idaho and Nevada. The decision came late Tuesday afternoon from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, from a unanimous three-judge panel, as the AP reports.

Idaho and Nevada were not among the five states whose same-sex marriage bans immediately fell on Monday, after the Supreme Court tacitly chose to deny review to cases in which federal appeals courts had struck down the bans as unconstitutional. Those states were Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Idaho and Nevada were also not among the other six states governed by the same three appeals courts affected by yesterday's decision, which are Colorado, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Wyoming. This means that the immediate impact of yesterday's decision is likely to bring gay marriage to 13 new states in the coming days or weeks, up from 11. This brings the total number of states where gay marriage is now/will soon be legal to 32 plus the District of Columbia. (The New York Times is putting the number at 35, which seems include Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee, all overseen by the Sixth Circuit, which is expected to rule soon on bans in those four states.*)

Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote in his decision, covering two separate cases pertaining to the two states, "We hold that the Idaho and Nevada laws at issue violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because they deny lesbians and gays who wish to marry persons of the same sex a right they afford to individuals who wish to marry persons of the opposite sex." He also wrote that a separate ruling regarding a marriage-law challenge in Hawaii, where same sex marriage is currently legal, is forthcoming.

Read the full summary opinion here.

* This post has been updated to reflect an updated total in the New York Times post of the number of states where same-sex marriage will soon likely be legal.

Today in D.C., San Francisco's Catholic Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone took part in a march organized by the National Organization for Marriage, an anti-gay group that does everything in its rhetorical power to pretend that it is not a hate group, and that it is simply a pro-straight-marriage group. S.F. civic leaders tried to sway our conservative archbishop from attending this rally, but he went anyway, and below we've excerpted the text of what he said, for those who care and who want to parse the rhetorical tricks he used to keep from sounding backwards and anachronistic in his views.

The crux of Cordileone's speech is that the gay-marriage fight can be compared to abortion, and opponents shouldn't be discouraged by various recent polls and court rulings, because just look at abortion: Some ardent, faithful souls are still fighting that good fight 40 years later. (Ugh.)

In related news, facing a 47-percent decline in Catholic marriages in the Archdiocese of San Francisco, Cordileone's camp is encouraging one church to start offering weddings, with receptions, free of charge. St. Thomas More Church, near S.F. State, is launching “Project Operation I Do,” allowing people to get married there for free, along with a "modest reception." Perhaps if the Catholics weren't so far behind the times, they wouldn't have to resort to this kind of groveling for parishioners. Maybe they should throw in two-for-one christening deal?

Anyway, here's Cordileone's speech, in part:

Every child comes from a man and a woman, and has a right, a natural human right, to know and be known by, to love and be loved by, their own mother and father. This is the great public good that marriage is oriented towards and protects. The question is then: does society need an institution that unites children to the mothers and fathers who bring them into the world, or doesn't it? If it does, that institution is marriage — nothing else provides this basic good to children.

Yes, this is a foundational truth, and one to which we must witness by lives lived in conformity to it, and which we must proclaim with love. Love for those millions of loving single mothers and fathers who struggle to pick up the pieces of their lives and succeed in creating loving homes for their children — they need and deserve our love, affirmation and support...

And let us not forget: we must also proclaim this truth especially with love for those who disagree with us on this issue, and most of all, for those who are hostile toward us. We must be careful, though, not to paint our opponents on this issue with broad strokes. There is a tendency in our culture to do this to groups of people the powerful don’t know and think they don’t like. We must not do that. We must recognize that there are people on the other side of this debate who are of good will and are sincerely trying to promote what they think is right and fair. It is misdirected good will. But even those from whom we suffer retribution — and I know some of you have suffered in very serious ways because of your stand for marriage — still, we must love them... We must not allow the angry rhetoric to co-opt us into a culture of hate.

...Those with temporal power over us might choose to change the definition of marriage in the law even against all that we have accomplished through very generous participation in the democratic process, but our nature does not change. If the law does not correspond to our nature, such that there is a conflict between the law and nature, guess which will prevail? And people will figure it out.

We can take heart from what we see happening now in the pro-life movement. Back in the early 1970’s, just before the Court issued its infamous Roe vs. Wade ruling, public support for abortion was growing rapidly. And as with marriage redefinition today, a generation gap opened up in the polls, leading many to predict that opposition to abortion would literally die off. That was the future; before long, it would not even be an issue. Instead, something unexpected happened. A relatively small band of faithful believers held the line on the sanctity of human life in the womb, and today, two generations later, the pro-life movement is flourishing like never before. We now have the most pro-life generation of young adults since the infamous Roe decision. People have figured out that it is a human life that is within the mother’s womb, and that abortion, yes, really does harm women; they’ve figured out that it’s good to cherish that human life and surround the mother with love and support so a truly happy choice can be made, the choice for life.

People, too, will figure out that a child comes from a father and a mother, and it’s good for the child to be connected to his or her father and mother. These truths may seem obvious to us, but they aren’t to everyone while in the heat of controversy. ... This noble cause is a call to love we cannot abandon, that we will not give up on, and that in the end we know will triumph.

I wonder how many of the people at this rally are intolerant of Catholics, too.

Update: Looks like the crowd was pretty sparse! [Queerty]

[SF Archdiocese]

Catholic archbishop and occasional drunk driver Salvatore Cordileone has written an open letter in response to the open letter sent to him last week by Mayor Lee, Gavin Newsom and dozens of others encouraging him not to attend a June 19 rally in Washington organized by hate group National Organization For Marriage. Despite being deemed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and despite their work to turn back the clock on transgender rights and their documented strategy to use gay marriage as a wedge issue to divide LGBT people and African Americans, Cordileone smarmily insists that the group is just a bunch of good people like him who believe that marriage should only exist for heterosexual couples possessing exactly one penis and one vagina, no more, no less.

He would also like us all to understand that this fight over gay marriage really isn't a losing one, and it's one the Pope still supports, and really it's more often people like him, and supporters of traditional marriage, who are the victims of "offensive rhetoric," "physical violence," and retribution from the left these days when they decide to express their views. They're the victims now, you see.

Also, he employs NOM's clever rhetorical tactic of insisting they don't hate anyone, and they're not anti-anything. They're just pro-straight people. And straight people marriage. And heterosexuality. In fact, NOM likely coached him on these talking points — you can read all their talking points right here.

Here's an excerpt from Cordileone:

1. The March for Marriage is not “anti-LGBT” (as some have described it); it is not anti-anyone or anti-anything. Rather, it is a pro-marriage March. The latter does not imply the former. Rather, it affirms the great good of bringing the two halves of humanity together so that a man and a woman may bond with each other and with any children who come from their union. ... Rest assured that if the point of this event were to single out a group of individuals and target them for hatred, I most certainly would not be there.

2. While I cannot go into all of the details here of your allegations against the sponsors of this event and scheduled speakers, I do know that at least some of what you say is based on misinterpretation or is simply factually incorrect...

3. It gives me assurance that we share a common disdain for harsh and hateful rhetoric. It must be pointed out, though, that there is plenty of offensive rhetoric which flows in the opposite direction. In fact, for those who support the conjugal understanding of marriage, the attacks have not stopped at rhetoric. Simply for taking a stand for marriage as it has been understood in every human society for millennia, people have lost their jobs, lost their livelihoods, and have suffered other types of retribution, including physical violence. It is true that historically in our society violence has been perpetrated against persons who experience attraction to members of the same sex, and this is to be deplored and eradicated. Sadly, though, we are now beginning to see examples, although thankfully not widespread, of even physical violence against those who hold to the conjugal view of marriage (such as, most notably, the attempted gunning down of those who work in the offices of the Family Research Council).

Read it all here.

Have fun in D.C. being pro-marriage with all those totally non-hateful people, Sal!

Enjoy listening to all that love-filled rhetoric about how gay marriage and gay sex are an abomination, too.

[SF Archdiocese]

Previously: Mayor Lee and Lt. Gov. Newsom blast Archbishop for event promoting ‘hatred’ to gays [SFGate]

It might be time to finally download Chrome, folks. Mozilla's new CEO, Brendan Eich, has come under fire after it was revealed he donated to Proposition 8, California's (overturned) gay-marriage ban. And with that, OKCupid has asked their lovelorn users to boycott Mozilla's open source browser, Firefox.

Ahem:

Hello there, Mozilla Firefox user. Pardon this interruption of your OkCupid experience.

Mozilla's new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples. We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid.

Politics is normally not the business of a website, and we all know there's a lot more wrong with the world than misguided CEOs. So you might wonder why we're asserting ourselves today. This is why: we've devoted the last ten years to bringing people—all people—together. If individuals like Mr. Eich had their way, then roughly 8% of the relationships we've worked so hard to bring about would be illegal. Equality for gay relationships is personally important to many of us here at OkCupid. But it's professionally important to the entire company. OkCupid is for creating love. Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure.

If you want to keep using Firefox, the link at the bottom will take you through to the site.

However, we urge you to consider different software for accessing OkCupid.

As noted on The Verge, Mozilla responded to OKCupid's request, saying:

Mozilla supports equality for all, including marriage equality for LGBT couples. No matter who you are or who you love, everyone deserves the same rights and to be treated equally. OKCupid never reached out to us to let us know of their intentions, nor to confirm facts.

Speaking of facts, Eich, who co-founded Mozilla and created JavaScript, supported California's anti-civil rights brouhaha with a donation to the tune of $1000 back in 2008. At least one board member publicly stepped down over the controversy.

For his part, Eich responded to the outcry with a detailed, bullet point-riddled blog post about being humbled by the experience.

I am deeply honored and humbled by the CEO role. I’m also grateful for the messages of support. At the same time, I know there are concerns about my commitment to fostering equality and welcome for LGBT individuals at Mozilla. I hope to lay those concerns to rest, first by making a set of commitments to you. More important, I want to lay them to rest by actions and results.

A number of Mozillians, including LGBT individuals and allies, have stepped forward to offer guidance and assistance in this. I cannot thank you enough, and I ask for your ongoing help to make Mozilla a place of equality and welcome for all. [...]

While some members of his own staff have asked for him to resign, not everyone in the tech and queer community believes that to be the best answer. Take, for example, openly gay tech scribe Owen Thomas, who penned a thoughtful piece at on ReadWrite. In lieu of resignation, Thomas asks Eich for something more, something better. In part, he writes:

So here’s what you need to do—not for your own sake, but for Mozilla, its employees, its developers, its partners, and Internet users everywhere

Stop saying that this was merely a private matter that won't affect your work as Mozilla's CEO. That’s disingenuine and beneath a leader of your stature.

Say that whatever chain of logic led you to conclude that your personal views required you to support Proposition 8 was flawed, erroneous, incorrect. You may well maintain those same views—that's your prerogative—but you don't have to draw the same conclusions from them today as you did six years ago.

Go further. Say that you support the rights of people to enter into same-sex marriages everywhere. Say that you will not only support employees in the United States who are in same-sex marriages, but that you will also fight for the civil rights of Mozilla employees who work in societies with less progressive views.

Hear, hear. Sound advice to follow. Mozilla might want to get on this before they get saturated with Palinian-like supporters championing the noted free software community in the name of God and crying bald eagles.

[Verge]
[Valleywag]

California's secretary of state announced late Monday that a measure designed to roll back California's laws protecting the rights of transgender students lacked a sufficient number of signatures to qualify for the November ballot. But the case might not be over yet, as the trans rights opponents say they're not willing to take this one lying down.

AB 1266, which was sponsored by San Francisco's own Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, requires school district to allow students to participate in programs and use facilities based on their gender identity. It took effect on January 1.

Even before the law kicked in, folks like Prop 8 campaign manager Frank Schubert took up torches and pitchforks, creating the Privacy For All Students coalition to fight these new rights for trans kids.

According to their website, PFAS seeks to "give voters the right to decide whether to accept legislation that gives students the ability to utilize intimate school facilities such as showers, rest rooms and locker rooms based on their so-called gender identity and not their actual sex."

In a post on Red State, Schubert is more overt, saying that laws like AB 1266 are "an example of what happens when politicians and activists push agenda politics, and where political correctness trumps objective reality. No matter what any politician or activist says, there are only two genders: male and female. Nature and chromosomes determine gender, not education bureaucrats, activists or politicians."

If PFAS had come up with 504,760 valid anti-trans-kid signatures, AB 1266 would have been put on hold until the November election, at which time voters could have voted to repeal it. (As they did with Prop 8, as you might recall.) In the meantime, voters would surely have been hit with a campaign that "promised to be as bitterly fought as the one over Proposition 8," reports the Associated Press.

We might have been saved that campaign, though. Though PFAS turned in over 619,000 signatures, only 487,484 were found to be valid by election officials, leaving them around 17,000 short of the ballot.

The folks opposing the trans student protections have not yet begun to fight, however. “We are ready to review and challenge every signature that was not counted toward the referendum of this impudent and in-your-face bill," Brad Dacus, president of Pacific Justice Institute, told the LA Times.

His PJI colleague, Kevin Snider, told the AP that "The secretary of state has had the inclination to disenfranchise voters, and we won't sit still and take their word for it."

In a statement, Ammiano took Snider, Dacus, and the rest of the PFAS lot to task as "people that make money off promoting hate and professional fear mongers, who took advantage of what other people didn’t understand."

“The good thing that comes out of this misguided referendum effort is that we were able to continue to educate people. It’s important that we begin to understand what transgender students are going through," Ammiano said.

[LAT]
[AP/ABC7]

Previously on SFist:
Prop. 8 Creep Now Targeting Trans Teens

The man behind Prop. 8 may have suffered a setback when his anti-gay marriage campaign was thwarted earlier this year, but Frank Shubert isn't letting that get him down. He's now ramping up the bullshit machine for another go, this time taking aim at the rights of transgender teens.

The Daily Beast reports that Schubert has signed on to lead a campaign backed by the National Organization for Marriage. The goal? To repeal California's new law reinforcing existing anti-discrimination laws. The law allows transgender public school students to elect which bathroom to use and which sports teams to play for.

Here's his intro to a piece called "There is Only Gender" for the conservative website Red State:

"You might look at my Caucasian features and wonder why I am claiming to be an African American. I may not be a natural descendent of African American lineage, but I feel black and have thus decided to identify as African American."

You can guess where that one is headed. The analogy is "no more ridiculous than the latest craze from the left concerning something they call 'gender identity.'" Trend alert! In the piece, he urges that we "accept the truth of reality in the natural order. We accept the natural meanings of gender and gender differences, and reject attempts to redefine them with amorphous perceptions and feelings about 'identity.'"

NOM and Schubert are looking to gather 507,760 signatures opposing the law, the necessary number to qualify for a referendum by the November 8 deadline. Although Schubert is one of the few who believe it's actually possible, the action is at the very least a sinister attention-seeking ploy. And with trans kids in the crosshairs, this one could get ugly.

[The Daily Beast]
[The Bold Italic]

Well, it's done. After twice denying petitions by the backers of Prop 8 to put an immediate halt to gay marriages in California, the state Supreme Court today also denied their petition for an appeal of Judge Vaughn Walker's original 2010 decision that declared the measure unconstitutional.

As you may know, the U.S. Supreme Court's carefully worded decision in June rejected the Prop 8 folks' appeal not on its merits, but on the basis of standing. This led to their inevitable regrouping and assertion that the decision only applied to the two counties in which the original plaintiffs in the 2010 case lived, Alameda and Los Angeles. That was what they were trying to get the state's high court to affirm, and today the court issued an order denying a hearing of their appeal, with no further comment.

Last week also brought the withdrawal of a second appeal by San Diego Clerk Ernest Dronenburg, whose job was threatened with the San Diego County Board of Supervisors found out what he was doing.

Maybe, just maybe, this means Prop 8 is finally dead and buried. But we're looking forward to what the marriage-intolerant come up with for 2016.

[CBS]
[LA Times]

All exhaustive Prop 8 coverage on SFist.

One of two lawsuits pending for review by the California Supreme Court that are attempting to reinstate Prop 8 is being withdrawn. The suit, filed last month by San Diego County Clerk Ernest Dronenburg with the help of anti-same-sex-marriage zealot Charles LiMandri, along with one filed by the proposition's original backers are both last-ditch efforts to halt gay marriages in California after the Supreme Court's decision to reject an earlier appeal based on standing.

The court has already rejected, in both cases, requests for stays of the 2010 decision striking down Prop 8 in order to halt gay marriages pending their appeals.

Dronenburg, as a county clerk, was being used by the anti-marriage camp in the hope that his standing as an official who performs marriages might open the window for another appeal to the high court, but it sounds like Dronenburg got in some hot water with his own county council over the move. He met with the San Diego County Board of Supervisors last week in a closed-door session after they apparently reprimanded him for seeking his own outside counsel and pursuing this lawsuit without their consent. (According to county rules, as a county official, he should only have been allowed to use the county counsel for filing lawsuits.)

The other lawsuit, filed by Protect Marriage, has still not been granted a full review by the CA Supreme Court, but Dronenburg says that he is withdrawing his suit because he feels his concerns will be addressed in the other suit. His attorney filed a one-sentence request for dismissal this week.

And did we mention this all just sour grapes and lame old people on the wrong side of history because they can't stand change? Yeah. But it's not likely to quiet down completely for some time.

[Appeal]
[U-T San Diego]

All previous Prop 8 coverage on SFist.

We told you last week how the stubborn backers of Prop 8 have brought a new suit to the California Supreme Court on behalf of San Diego County Clerk Ernest Dronenburg, arguing that he has standing to challenge the federal court decision regarding Prop 8 and that he's not beholden to the governor, the attorney general, or anyone in deciding whom he allows to get married in his county. In Friday's filing, Dronenburg and his attorney, anti-gay zealot Charles LiMandri, requested a stay of Judge Vaughn Walker's 2010 decision killing Prop 8, and Tuesday the court rejected that request.

Last week the court rejected a similar request for a stay by ProtectMarriage, the original sponsors of Prop 8. The organization was arguing that gay marriages should be halted while the court considers its filing, which argues that Walker's injunction only applies to the two counties where the couples in that case resided, Alameda and Los Angeles Counties.

The court has asked LiMandri for additional written arguments by August 1 before they decide to take up Dronenburg's appeal. LiMandri will also be arguing that Prop 8 remains the law in all but those two counties, and hoping that he can take the appeal, with Dronenburg's standing as a clerk who issues marriage licenses, to a higher court.

Dronenburg appeared at a press conference in San Diego yesterday to claim that he was participating in the case merely in order to "clarify the law."

As the AP notes, 24 of the 58 county clerks in California have already filed amicus briefs stating that marriage law should be governed by state officials, and should be consistent statewide. Which: obviously.

[AP/HuffPo]
[San Diego Free Press]
[LA Times]

All previous Prop 8 coverage on SFist.

Refusing to accept that courts or the attorney general have any say in the matter or that the momentum of support for gay marriage is going to win out in the end over their stubborn Christian egos, the anti-gay-marriage camp has made a last-ditch effort to fight the current law of the land. They've filed suit in state Supreme Court in the name of San Diego County Clerk Ernest Dronenburg, who may via a certain logic have standing to appeal Judge Vaughn Walker's 2010 decision striking down Prop 8 as unconstitutional.

Of course, their argument seems to have less to do with the constitutionality question as it does Dronenburg's ability to follow the law, essentially because they believe that Prop 8 is still the law, and he's "caught in the crossfire of a legal struggle over the definition of marriage."

It interesting that they waited a week after a highly celebratory San Diego Pride to file their suit, but the filing also follows another from last week in which same-sex marriages foes tried unsuccessfully to get the same court to issue an emergency stay to halt marriages once again while the court considers taking up the issue of Prop 8's enforceability. Last week's filing came from Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom, and SF City Attorney Dennis Herrera called it a "desperate obstruction tactic."

We suppose all of this was inevitable — we in fact expected it, back on the day of the Supreme Court ruling in June, however we thought it would come from that conservative Imperial County clerk and not a big urban county like San Diego. But it is nonetheless tiresome, and it once again reminds us that San Diego is one of the more conservative corners of our state, and that the people who hate the idea of two men or two women getting married are going to go down fighting.

[SFGate]
[Mercury News]

All previous, exhaustive coverage of the gay marriage fight on SFist.

In the wake of DOMA and Prop 8 decisions in the U.S. Supreme Court last month, Porterville, California Mayor Virginia Gurrola declared June to be LGBT Pride month, thus bringing the sprawling central valley metropolis of 55,000 people up to speed in terms of political correctness. Unfortunately for the proud folks of P-ville, the city council voted this week to rescind the declaration, sparking much debate and protest in the process.

At Tuesday's city council meeting, councilman Brian Ward (who has been "happily married to his wife Yvette for nine years and they have five wonderful children" and has some training in "Modern Social Issues") spoke for the town's disenfranchised straight population: “Why does the LBGT community get special consideration?" Ward asked a packed house at Porterville City Hall. "Why can’t it apply to everyone?"

An angry crowd member responded, "Because you hate us!"

According to the Porterville Recorder, "Outrage ensued."

During said "outrage" several LGBT activists and protestors were arrested for disturbing the peace, including Robin McGehee of Get Equal who told the Huffington Post yesterday that Porterville was a very proudly "Yes on 8" town during the 2008 election. Mayor Gurrola also pointed out that the town had issued similar proclamations to support veterans and victims of domestic violence.

As an alternative in this case, the council voted 3-2 to rescind the Pride month proclamation and make June "a month of community charity and goodwill to all in Porterville." The town, we should note, also has a pretty sweet rainbow featured prominently across the top of their website.

[Advocate]
[Porterville Recorder]
[HuffPo]