Elton John

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Elton John didn’t mince words in slamming his fellow musicians for boycotting Arizona over the controversial SB 1070 immigration law. From the stage at his sold-out Tucson Arena concert Thursday night, John savored a few choice, not-so-family-friendly words:
“We are all very pleased to be playing in Arizona. I have read that some of the artists won’t come here. They are (expletive)wits! Let’s face it: I still play in California, and as a gay man I have no legal rights whatsoever. So what’s the (expletive) with these people?”
John has never been one to cave into political pressure from his musical colleagues. He ignored an artist boycott of Israel in June over the flotilla fiasco and played a show in Tel Aviv. He also played Rush Limbaugh’s latest wedding reception in early June, which drew the ire of gays and lesbians. Limbaugh is vehemently anti-gay marriage; John is married to his longtime partner David Furnish.
from The Arizona Daily Star

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GUERNEVILLE, CALIFORNIA — Sonoma County has agreed to pay $600,000 to settle a lawsuit by an elderly gay man who said social workers kept him from seeing his dying partner in the hospital.
Clay Greene, 78, of Guerneville filed a lawsuit earlier this year, claiming the county’s Public Guardian program discriminated against him because of his sexual orientation.
Greene accused social workers of denying him hospital visitation rights to see his partner, Harold Scull, despite signed wills, medical declarations and powers of attorney naming each other as spouses. The couple was not married nor registered as domestic partners.
The lawsuit also alleged that after Scull’s death, social workers forced Greene into a nursing home and sold the couple’s property, including art and heirlooms.
The county’s lawyer, Gregory Spaulding, denied the discrimination claims but admitted mistakes in selling the couple’s property.
Greene was kept away from Scull because of previous domestic violence allegations, according to the county. According to a sheriff’s report, Scull went to authorities with a black eye and said Greene threatened to kill him, though Scull was later unwilling to lodge a formal complaint.
“The county remains confident in its position that there was no discrimination in this case,” Spaulding said, noting that the plaintiff removed the discrimination allegations from the lawsuit three weeks ago.
Under the law, officials can sell property worth $5,000 or less to cover medical expenses, but the couple’s property sale brought in more than $25,000 at auction, Spaulding said. Errors in that case have led to revised policies at the Public Guardian’s office, he said.
Spaulding said the county settled the case Thursday to avoid further expense.
“It just made economic sense to stop the bleeding,” Spaulding said. “To end the case and avoid all expenses and costs.”
Calls to Greene’s attorney, Anne Dennis, were not immediately returned Friday.
from The Mercury News

Panorama Magazine Cover

The Catholic Church in Italy was embroiled in a fresh scandal on Friday when photographs apparently showing homosexual priests attending gay nightclubs and engaging in casual sex were published in a magazine.
A journalist from Panorama, a conservative weekly news magazine owned by Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, used a hidden camera to film interviews with three gay priests, who introduced the journalist to the gay clubs they apparently frequent, and allowed the journalist to film their sexual encounters with strangers, including one in a church building.
One of the priests, a Frenchman identified only as Paul, celebrated Mass in the morning before driving the two escorts he had hired to attend a party the night before to the airport, Panorama said.
The Catholic Church in Italy, still reeling from the paedophile priest scandal, responded on Friday by ordering homosexual priests who are leading a double life to come out of the closet and leave the priesthood.
In a statement on Friday, the Rome diocese insisted that the vast majority of Rome’s 1,300 priests were truthful to their vocations and were “models of morality for all.”
The Vatican did not comment on the Panorama investigation, but a senior source said: “This is the usual silly season rubbish to attract readers during the quiet summer months.
“There is no proof that the people involved are from the clergy.”
A preview of the article sent out by Panorama said: “By day they are regular priests, complete with dog collar, but at night, it’s off with the cassock as they take their place as perfectly integrated members of the Italian capital’s gay scene.”
Panorama described its investigation as “deeply disturbing” as it detailed how the priests – two Italians and a Frenchman – happily took part in gay events and had casual sex.
The Catholic Church insists on celibacy for priests and sees homosexuality as a sin. In 2008 the Vatican issued guidelines which said that any would-be trainees should not join if they had “deep-seated homosexual tendencies.”
Panorama editor Giorgio Mule said: “This was a two week investigation and was not aimed at creating a scandal but showing that a certain section of the clergy behaves very differently.”
from Telegraph UK
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Lt. Dan Choi

Army Lt. Dan Choi, the gay New York soldier who became the national face of the battle to overturn the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, was booted by the Pentagon on Thursday.
Choi, an Iraq war veteran and West Point grad, found no honor in the honorable discharge he got.
“After 11 years since beginning my journey at West Point, and after 17 months of serving openly as an infantry officer, this is both an infuriating and painful announcement,” said Choi, of Manhattan.
“It hurts, but then you remember what your service really meant,” he told the Daily News. “Wearing the uniform is not about symbols or rank. It’s about fighting for freedom and justice.
“It’s the absolute duty of my life to fight this,” he said.
Choi, 29, a Army reservist and member of the New York National Guard, has been challenging efforts to discharge him since coming out last year on the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC.
This year, he chained himself to the White House fence to protest the 17-year-old law that has forced more than 12,500 men and women from the military.
Choi, who is fluent in Arabic, was an infantry platoon leader in Iraq in 2006 and 2007.
President Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates support repealing the DADT policy, which lets gays serve as long as their sexuality stays secret.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, including Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), are resisting and say letting gays serve openly would negatively affect military morale.
from The New York Daily News

June 5, 1981. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued its first warning about a rare pneumonia called pneumocystis circulating among a small group of young gay men.
Unrealized at the time, it was the official beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Dr. Michael Gottlieb, then a 33-year-old immunologist at the University of California Los Angeles, treated one of the first patients, a 31-year-old gay male with pneumocystis.
“In those days patients were essentially given a terminal diagnosis,” Gottlieb says. “We had no medication whatsoever. At the very beginning we did not even know it was viral infection.”
In 1982, the CDC coined the term AIDS, for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, but the cause was still unknown. In 1983, the virus was finally isolated and given a name: Human Immunodeficiency Virus or HIV.
At that time there were no treatments. Patients died quickly. Today, with the development of antiretroviral drugs and a much greater understanding of the disease, people who contract HIV in the United States are living decades.
The drugs carry side effects, some extremely debilitating, but because of those drugs, a small number of long-term survivors are experiencing what they couldn’t have imagined when they got their diagnosis in the epidemic’s early days — middle age.
“The first antiretrovirals were introduced in 1987; that gave us a glimmer of hope,” Gottlieb says, describing drugs that disrupted the virus’ ability to multiply in the body.
Dr. Michael Gottlieb, then a 33-year old immunologist at the University of California Los Angeles, treated one of the first patients.
Dr. Michael Gottlieb, then a 33-year old immunologist at the University of California Los Angeles, treated one of the first patients.
“In 1996, the advent of the protease inhibitor and the so-called cocktail changed the prognosis for HIV, and that therapy has required considerable refinement, because even that therapy had complications from the drugs themselves that caused a lot of damage — lasting damage — and many of those long-term survivors suffered and continue to suffer the complications of the earlier medication.”
Jim Chud is one of those long-term survivors. The 53-year-old AIDS activist says he was a 20-year old bisexual athlete at Yale University when he contracted the virus. Chud thinks it was 1977 when he got sick. He was leading a double life: He had a steady girlfriend, but took weekend visits to the bathhouses in New York.
By 1985, Chud was living in Washington. Having watched many of his friends get sick and die, Chud was at the head of the line when the new HIV test arrived. By 1989 he had full-blown AIDS — the most advanced stages of HIV. “I thought I was going to die,” he says. “I didn’t think I would see 30.”
He started volunteering for drug trials. One, a National Institutes of Health study looking at the combination of drugs AZT and DDC, left him paralyzed for four months. He has had more than 30 surgeries on his spine and neck.
In 1999, Chud contracted a fungal infection in his sinuses that spread to his brain. There were more toxic drugs and six more surgeries. Over the years he’s been on 12 different HIV drugs. Today he’s disabled and along with HIV medications takes prescriptions to battle pain, infections and depression.
(more…)

The Middleton Grange School

NEW ZEALAND – A Christian school in New Zealand was ordered to compensate a former coach who was fired because he is gay.
The Middleton Grange School in Christchurch booted the coach based on Christian beliefs that homosexuality is a sin.
The school offered to rehire the 28-year-old man, who declined to be named, but he rejected the offer. The amount of money the school is forced to pay the ex-coach was also undisclosed.
“At first I was shocked. I’ve never felt so small in my life,” the man told the New Zealand media. “I started to kind of blame myself,” he said.
School board members will also have to undergo human rights awareness training as part of the settlement.
“We care for him and respect him,” the school’s principal, Richard Vanderpyl, said of the former girls’ netball coach.
Vanderpyl said he offered the man his old job, but was told he “secured another position” elsewhere.
The man was hired in February, but the school board fired him after finding out he is gay.
“It’s hard enough to go through finding yourself, and accepting yourself and being ‘out’ in the first place,” the man said. “Having to go through discrimination doesn’t help.”
He said he is pleased with the school’s settlement and is happy the boardmembers will undergo sensitivity training.
“I am glad it won’t happen to anyone again at that school,” he said. “It was definitely a hard thing to go through.”
from The New York Daily News
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Chief Justice Margaret Marshall

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS — Massachusetts Chief Justice Margaret Marshall, who wrote the landmark ruling making the state the first to legalize gay marriage, said Wednesday she’s retiring to spend time with her husband, who has Parkinson’s disease.
Marshall said she would step down in October to be with her husband, former New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who retired in 2001.
Marshall was first appointed to the bench by then-Gov. William Weld in 1996, after four years as general counsel and vice president of Harvard University. She became chief justice three years later.
Perhaps her most enduring — and maligned — legacy on the court was the decision in 2003 that allowed Massachusetts to become the first state to legalize gay marriage.
In the 4-3 ruling, Marshall said the denying gays and lesbians the right to marriage “works a deep and scarring hardship on a very real segment of the community for no rational reason.”
“It cannot be rational under our laws, and indeed it is not permitted, to penalize children by depriving them of State benefits because the State disapproves of their parents’ sexual orientation.”
The ruling — and justices — were widely criticized by opponents of gay marriage as being judicial activists.
Weld said Wednesday that the criticism was unwarranted.
“I knew from early on she was committed to justice for everybody,” he said, adding that he dropped her a note a day after the gay marriage ruling to say “she had done the right thing.”
Kris Mineau, president of the Massachusetts Family Institute, welcomed the news that Marshall was leaving the court, saying the state had been under “Marshall law” since the 2003 ruling.
“In our opinion, her legacy will have a far-reaching negative effect on the health of our commonwealth,” he said.
He said he hoped Massachusetts residents would eventually be allowed to vote on the definition of marriage.
Marshall said in 2005 — a year after the first gay marriages were performed — that she was concerned about political attacks on the judiciary.
“I worry when people of influence use vague, loaded terms like ‘judicial activist’ to skew public debate or to intimidate judges,” Marshall said. “I worry when judicial independence is seen as a problem to be solved and not a value to be cherished.”
Marshall, a native of South Africa, was the first immigrant and first woman to lead the state’s 320-year-old Supreme Judicial Court. She was a white student leader of the anti-apartheid movement in the 1960s.
from The Associated Press

Gay and bisexual men who were victims of sexual abuse and social shaming as children are more likely to have psychosocial health problems that could put them at greater risk for HIV infection, a new study suggests.
A second study found that most older gay and bisexual men report a low use of illegal drugs.
he first study included more than 1,000 HIV-positive and HIV-negative gay and bisexual men enrolled in the U.S. National Institutes of Health-funded Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study, which began in 1983.
Almost 10 percent of the participants had been victims of childhood abuse and nearly 30 percent had been the targets of gay-related victimization between the ages of 12 and 14, including verbal insults, bullying, threats of physical violence, and actual physical assaults.
The University of Pittsburgh researchers found that men who experienced childhood sexual abuse and a sense of masculinity failure were more likely to use illegal drugs and to engage in risky sexual behaviors in adulthood, both of which heighten the risk of HIV infection.
They added that those health issues have led to a “syndemic,” or shared epidemic.
“Our study shows that the early socialization experiences of gay men can be deeply stigmatizing and increase their risks for syndemic [linked epidemic] conditions in adulthood,” study author Sin How Lim, of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, said in a university news release. “Given the long-lasting impacts, effective interventions should address multiple interrelated social issues early on rather than focusing on each problem in isolation.”
The second study examined illicit drug use (poppers, crack, cocaine, methamphetamine and ecstasy) over a 10-year period among 1,378 HIV-positive and HIV-negative gay and bisexual men, aged 44 to 63, enrolled in one section of the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study.
About 79 percent of the participants were infrequent drug users, nearly 6 percent reported consistently high levels of drug use, more than 7 percent said they’d increased their use of drugs, and 7 percent said they’d decreased their use of drugs.
“Although a majority of participants reported infrequent drug use, three subgroups of men displayed distinct patterns of use over 10 years of midlife,” study author Jessica G. Burke, an assistant professor in the department of behavioral and community health sciences at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, said in a university news release.
Understanding those subgroups and the factors that lead to drug use “will give us a better understanding of how we can address this behavior among similar individuals,” she said.
The studies were presented this week at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna.
from US News & World Report

Constance McMillen

A school district in Mississippi has agreed to pay a recent high school graduate $35,000 in damages and adopt a policy prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, according to a statement released Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The settlement comes after the ACLU sued the school district in Fulton, Mississippi, on behalf of Constance McMillen, a lesbian teen who was told by Itawamba Agricultural High School officials she and her girlfriend would be ejected if they attended the school-sponsored prom.
The agreement, which was filed Tuesday, ends the lawsuit.
“I’m so glad this is all over. I won’t ever get my prom back, but it’s worth it if it changes things at my school,” McMillen said in a statement released Tuesday.
McMillen, who according to the ACLU statement, “suffered humiliation and harassment after parents, students and school officials executed a cruel plan to put on a decoy prom for her while the rest of her classmates were at a private prom 30 miles away.”
“We hope this judgment sends a message to schools that they cannot get away with discriminating against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students,” said Bear Atwood, interim legal director at the ACLU of Mississippi.
Officials at McMillen’s former high school are not commenting at this time and a call to the north Mississippi school district seeking comment wasn’t immediately returned.
from CNN
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Brandon McInerney & Larry King

Lawyers representing teen murder suspect Brandon McInerney want a judge to step down from presiding over the boy’s trial because they feel the judge can’t be fair to him or his defense lawyers.
The motion to recuse Ventura County Superior Court Judge Charles Campbell comes after the judge refused to allow McInerney’s lawyers more time to prepare for the trial. The judge had told lawyers he would hear pretrial motions Monday, and begin the jury selection process today.
McInerney is accused of killing a 15-year-old classmate in February of 2008.
The motion to get Campbell disqualified immediately stops the case from going to trial until the recusal issue is resolved.
Campbell has five days to respond to the defense’s allegations. Another judge will be appointed to hear the legal arguments.
In court, prosecutor Maeve Fox criticized the filing of the recusal motion, describing it as a legal “ploy.” Fox said this was the defense attorneys’ obvious “end run” to Campbell’s ruling to delay the trial.
“It’s really a travesty upon the court system and the rule of law. … This is ridiculous and disgraceful,” she told the judge.
Last week, prosecutors told Campbell that they were ready to present testimony and evidence. Defense attorneys told the judge Wednesday they needed more time to investigate the case and interview witnesses. Without a delay in the start of the trial, they said they would not put on a defense for McInerney or respond to any of Fox’s pretrial motions.
In an interview, McInerney’s lawyer, Scott Wippert, said the motion to disqualify Campbell was made as a result of some of his rulings and comments he made last week. He declined to elaborate.
“It is clear in our minds that Brandon will not be able to get a fair trial in this courtroom,” Wippert said. “It is perfectly within our legal obligation, and ethical obligation to do so on Brandon’s behalf.”
McInerney’s case was recently sent to Campbell’s court. He was appointed the presiding judge for McInerney’s trial and last week was the first time Campbell heard legal and other matters pertaining to the case. Up until that time, McInerney’s case has gone from one judge for a preliminary hearing, then to others as other legal matters arose.
McInerney is accused of first-degree murder in connection with the shooting of 15-year-old Larry King at E.O. Green School in Oxnard in February 2008.
He is facing a murder charge, along with the special allegation of lying in wait and other charges in connection with the fatal shooting of King. The shooting is being charged as a hate crime; King had told people he was gay.
The shooting occurred in front of 25 to 30 students, prosecutors said. McInerney had just turned 14 when he allegedly pulled the trigger.
McInerney appeared in court, for the first time, wearing a white shirt, tie and black pants. He normally appears at court proceedings in blue juvenile detention garb.
from The Ventura County Star

PALM SPRINGS, CALIFORNIA – Palm Springs has been a welcoming oasis for gays and lesbians ever since the days of Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter.
But new frictions have arisen between the city’s Police Department and its sizable gay population – estimated to be as high as 30 to 40 percent – over a police sting of gay public sex.
Last summer, Palm Springs police used undercover officers to arrest 24 men in a gay neighborhood for allegedly trying to engage the officers in sex. While few in the gay community defend anyone having public sex – whether gay or straight – the anger is over the unusual charges in the case: The men are charged under Section 290(c) of the California Penal Code, making those who are convicted register as sex offenders for life, their names added to a police database.
That charge is essentially a life sentence, defense lawyers say, and has never been used against straight couples arrested for similar activity in Palm Springs.
Adding fuel to the community anger is surveillance tape shot inside a patrol car during the sting. One officer can be heard using an anti-gay slur, while another officer laughs. All of this flies in the face of city’s reputation as a welcoming place for gays, says longtime gay rights pioneer Cleve Jones, who relocated to Palm Springs from San Francisco 10 years ago.
“They’re really shooting themselves in the foot,” Jones says. “Gay dollars are keeping this city afloat. Let’s get real. The gay events are the largest events in the valley. The gay tourist dollar is crucial to the economic survival of Palm Springs. And this story has spread far and wide across the world, and it will have an impact because people are angry. It’s ridiculous.”
The new scrutiny of the Palm Springs Police Department also reveals that there isn’t a single openly gay male police officer among the 99 officers on the force (there is only one open lesbian), despite the city’s reputation as a gay mecca. Reacting to anger in the gay community, the Palm Springs police chief now finds himself in the position of damage control. Last week, he met with gay leaders, and he brought in an openly gay Los Angeles sheriff’s sergeant to help conduct sensitivity training on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues in the Palm Springs force.
The training comes as welcome news to Andy Linsky, a prominent gay rights activist and a member of the LGBT Police Outreach Committee. “It’s definitely necessary because if they’ve done it before, then it hasn’t necessarily taken root. So it’s good they’re doing it again,” Linsky says, noting that he speaks for himself, not the board.
But another member of the police advisory board, Thomas Van Etten, is calling for the chief’s ouster.
“I’ve called for his resignation because the police chief is using tactics that we have not seen since Stonewall. For the Palm Springs police to pull something like this is incomprehensible,” he said.
The chief is also reaching out to several LGBT publications to stress that the police do not discriminate against gays.
Discrimination, however, is the basis of the defense’s case, because straight couples arrested in similar cases have never been charged as lifelong sex offenders, says attorney Roger Tansey, who is representing several of the men arrested.
He maintains that it was the police who instigated any encounters in the sting.
“A typical scenario,” Tansey says, “would be a couple of cops, who were dressed in tank tops, would walk around grabbing their crotches and staring at the defendants’ crotches saying, ‘Show me what you got. Show me what you got.’ In no case did they come upon any man already having sex.” Tansey adds that “in many cases the defendants were reluctant to participate and wanted to go back to a room or someplace more private and were coaxed to stay and allegedly expose themselves by the officers.”
The economic fallout on the city is not lost on City Manager David Ready, who says, “Palm Springs is very concerned and spends a significant amount of resources on tourism as our driving economic factor. So anything that affects tourism is of great concern to the city. That being said, the chief is doing his internal review of this sting operation, and he will be making recommendations on our policy going forward.”
The chief will make those recommendations this month to the City Council, three members of which are openly gay, as repercussions from the sting make this desert summer even hotter.
from The San Francisco Chronicle

Even if you’re past your prime and have a hard time getting an erection, you might still need to worry about unprotected sex, according to U.S. doctors.
In fact, they report in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the rate of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) in older men taking erectile dysfunction drugs like Viagra is twice as high as in their non-medicated peers.
In both groups, however, the numbers are swelling. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were more than six new cases of STDs per 10,000 men over 40 in 2008, up almost 50 percent since 1996.
“Younger adults have far more STDs than older adults, but the rates are growing at far higher rates in older adults,” said Dr. Anupam B. Jena of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who led the study.
While the reasons for this development aren’t well understood, he said more divorces and better health might have conspired to boost sexual prowess and activity among graying heads.
The problem, however, is that older adults appear to flaunt safe sex practices. For instance, the researchers note, 50-year-olds are six times less likely to use a condom than men in their 20s.
“We are typically unaccustomed to practice safe sex over the age of 50, because the risk of pregnancy is eliminated,” Jena told Reuters Health.
To test whether the introduction of Viagra in 1998 might explain some of the STD surge, Jena and colleagues examined insurance records for more than 1.4 million U.S. men over 40. The average age in the study was about 60 years.
The most commonly found STD was HIV, followed by chlamydia, syphilis and gonorrhea.
Among the few percent of men who had filled prescriptions for erectile dysfunction drugs, more than two in a thousand had been treated for an STD in the year before they got the drug.
A year later, the number dropped to half that, suggesting that Viagra and its chemical cousins didn’t fuel STDs.
However, the risk of contracting an STD turned out to be more than twice as high in men taking erectile dysfunction drugs compared with those who didn’t.
“These users have a different sexual risk profile than non-users,” said Jena, adding that the data didn’t reveal any good explanation.
In an editorial, Dr. Thomas Fekete, of Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia, noted that it would have been valuable to know more about the frequency of sexual encounters, sexual partners and orientation.
He added that prevention strategies should still be directed at younger age groups, whose STD risk is at least 10 times higher than in middle-aged and older adults.
Still, he said, the authors remind us “that men older than 40 years remain sexually active, even if they need chemical assistance to do so. This study also serves as a reminder that sex after age 40 years is not necessarily safe.”
Jena recommended that doctors take a few minutes to discuss safe sex with older men when they prescribe Viagra.
His advice? “Look, just realize that you are at higher risk for STDs, and try to be careful like you used to be 30 years ago.”
from Reuters
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MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA – Joining a fledgling group of companies trying to address the disparity in how workplace health benefits for same-sex and heterosexual married couples are taxed, Google said Thursday it would compensate its gay and lesbian employees for the extra money they currently must pay the federal government each year.
While a few organizations, such as Cisco Systems and the Kimpton Hotel chain, have already begun to “gross up” their employees’ pay, as the practice is known, Google’s powerhouse status could fuel the trend, putting pressure on other employers to follow suit and on policymakers to restructure how domestic-partner health benefits are taxed.
In a blog posting on its website, Google said “we have another reason to celebrate” as it announced the policy, which will be retroactive to Jan. 1. A Google spokesman said the change came in response to a 700-member group of gay and lesbian employees and their supporters called Gayglers who had approached management asking that the discrepancy be addressed. The management team replied, “We agree,” said the spokesman. “It wasn’t a long process or debate at all.”
Google would not discuss how much money the change would cost the company or how many employees might be impacted.
But gay rights activists applauded the search engine giant for taking what they said was an innovative and bold stand.
“Google is really taking a leadership role here,” said Daryl Herrschaft, director of the Workplace Project for the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, D.C. “This is a really important step for gay and lesbian employees because it eliminates a tax burden they’re subject to because their families aren’t recognized under federal law.”
That law mandates that employer-provided benefits for domestic partners be counted as taxable income, assuming the partner is not considered a dependent. A study by the Williams Institute, which does research on sexual orientation policy issues, showed that on average employees with domestic partners will pay about $1,069 more a year in taxes than a married employee with the same coverage.
“With a company as large as Google taking this step, this could possibly spread,” said Lee Badgett, the research director who wrote the 2007 report. “If other employers are competing with Google for workers, they can’t ignore it. What’ll likely happen is that as more and more companies realize what a bite this tax is for their gay and lesbian employees, they may advocate for changes in the law.”
However, Badgett said that while legislation has been introduced to change the tax structure, “it hasn’t gone anywhere.”
from Mercury News