Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-PA) has taken over the helm of MREA2009 – the Military Readiness Enhancement Act (H.R.1283).  This bill will repeal the ban on open and honest service by patriotic LGBT Americans.  MREA has already surpassed 160 co-sponsors, leaving less than 60 to go to hit the simply majority milestone. In full support of Rep. Murphy’s renewed push to bring more co-sponsors on board, AVER agrees with SLDN‘s 60/60 Initiative — 60 new co-sponsors in the next 60 days.

More information about this bill, how to find out if your Representative has signed on as a co-sponsor yet, and how to contact your Representative, plus a regularly-updated map to track the bill at a glance, is always available at the AVER Action Alerts page.

US Navy Seaman August Provost [family photo]

Almost exactly ten years to the day after Army PFC Barry Winchell was brutally murdered at Ft Campbell because some fellow soldiers “thought” he was gay, yet another savage killing for seemingly the same reason has happened at Camp Pendleton.

Barry wasn’t even gay, despite his having become a martyr for the movement to repeal the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell law.  He was in love with a transgender woman.  Out of pure profoundly ignorant hate, he was beaten to death in his sleep with a baseball bat by a soldier whose hate had been inflamed by official cadence calls that urged soldiers to “kill fags.”

Now we must sadly examine the fate of Navy Seaman August Provost, an African American sailor, who apparently had been rudely accused earlier the same night of being gay by a person now being questioned by the authorities.

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World War II gay combat veteran Dr. Frank Kameny got a belated apology from the US Government during the heart of Pride Month in America on June 24th, 2009.  It took more than half a century (52 years) for America, now led by President Obama, to have an openly gay Director of the Office of Personnel Management to apologize for firing Frank Kameny in 1957 because he was gay.  In the interim, Dr. Kameny became the Gay Pioneer who, along with Barbara Gittings, founded the modern gay rights movement in America.

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The Cleveland International Film Festival is just a week away. It’s the largest film festival between New York and Chicago, running 11 days, and screening 140 feature- and 170 short films from more than 60 countries. Thousands of people flock to Cleveland from all around the world for this event.

This year, AVER – American Veterans for Equal Rights – is a proud “Community Partner” for the film “Ask Not” :
www.asknotfilm.com
www.clevelandfilm.org

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Representative Ellen Tauscher (D-CA) reintroduced the Military Readiness Enhancement Act in the US House of Representatives today.  The bill [HR 1283] in the current session is identical to the two previous introductions in 2005 and 2007.  If a similar bill were introduced in the Senate, passed in both houses, and signed by the President, it would repeal the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, and allow Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual patriotic volunteers to enlist and serve openly.  It would also allow otherwise-eligible former service members who had been discharged under DADT to be reinstated.

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