It wasn't just me who raised an eyebrow over today's news about Seattle's gay pride parade. Elected officeholders, business leaders, and activists are growing increasingly peeved that political officials are being asked to pay $1,200 to march this year—while businesses only have to pay $700.

"It's like a tax on being a supportive candidate," says Representative Jamie Pedersen, who sponsored the House version of a marriage-equality bill passed by the Washington State Legislature this year. And it's a big tax on politicians. Since last year, the fee for Pedersen and other elected officials went up $530, while business saw only a modest $30 rate hike.

"They are basically saying, 'We don't want candidates or elected officials in the pride parade,'" Pedersen says.

Seattle Out and Proud (SOaP), which produces the parade, simply explains on its website that participants must pay higher fees this year due to "increasing cost associated with putting on such a large event." Reached by e-mail, SOaP director Adam Rosencrantz said that the group created a fourth category of parade entrants—elected officials and political organizations, which used to pay the same amount as businesses—because "we needed to be proactive in our fund raising and to increase parade fees was one of our options." What's the logic in targeting political leaders for the money? Rosencrantz refused to elaborate, saying, "I clearly answered that question." He added that "we are maintaining the current pricing structure."

But several LGBT leaders have terse words for pride organizers.

Gay-rights activist Thomas Pitchford has created a Change.org petition that accuses the parade of "bilking candidates and office holders" and questions SOaP's accounting. "Where does the money go?" the petition asks.

And as Pedersen points out, "One of the key purposes of pride has been for the community to show its political power and support. When you have someone like Senator Ed Murray or me making the calculation that it doesn't pencil out to march, there is something drastically wrong."

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Bust out the tiny violins.

Go read the Slog post filed yesterday evening by former Stranger intern Chris Collison, who covered an attempt at Ukraine's first gay-pride parade, the Orthodox hooligans, the beatings, the pepper spray, and the police's complicity in the abuse.

And as Collison explains, this is actually progress.

There's this in today's LA Times:

"[It's] pretty extraordinary what we've accomplished in less than 50 years," said Cleve Jones, who has spent decades as a gay rights activist, starting in the 1970s as a protege of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk. "Homosexual behavior itself was a felony almost everywhere," Jones recalled. "There were laws on the books preventing us from congregating in bars and restaurants. There were special police units in every single city whose job was to entrap and arrest and imprison us. … There's been enormous progress, astonishing progress." ...

But experts and advocates agree on one explanation above all others: Familiarity.

"People came to understand we existed," Jones said. "They worked with us. They knew us. They had [gay] family members. That demystified it and made it harder for them to hate us in an abstract way."

That was an avenue obviously unavailable to African Americans. "It isn't as if white people suddenly come to discover they have African American children or relatives," said Kenneth Sherrill, a professor at Hunter College in New York and a longtime gay activist. Gays and lesbians "are born into straight families and live in straight neighborhoods and go to straight schools and work in straight businesses," Sherrill said. "There's a kind of familiarity that's exceedingly difficult to achieve in the case of race."

And then there's this in a church in North Carolina:

In a sermon blasting President Obama for his same-sex marriage support, Pastor Charles L. Worley of Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, North Carolina, offered a novel—and horrific—solution to the so-called gay scourge: build an electric fence and let "lesbians, queers and homosexuals" starve to death. "I figured a way to get rid of all the lesbians and queers," he says in his sermon, delivered on May 13. "Build a great, big, large fence—150 or 100 mile long—put all the lesbians in there... Do the same thing for the queers and the homosexuals and have that fence electrified so they can't get out… And you know what, in a few years, they'll die." ... Throughout the sermon, many of his congregants can be heard calling out "Amen."

Towleroad has the video.

Keep it up, ordained hate mongers, keep it up. When you force people to choose between their imaginary friends and their real friends and family members—when you force them to choose between your church and their children—and they almost always choose their friends and family members.

But the Australian politician is saying that, of course; he's saying exactly that. If two loving parents of the same sex can never hope to represent "the best outcome for a child," then gay parents are by definition "lesser"—less than ideal, lesser than straight parents.

The background:

Prompted by an audience question about why the shadow treasurer thinks he and his wife make better parents than the Finance Minister and her female partner, the segment ends with Wong quietly but firmly declaring: "I know what my family is worth." It may only be brief but activists are calling the exchange a ''watershed moment'' in their campaign for same-sex marriage—both allowing people to understand the debate at a personal level and demonstrating its status as a mainstream political issue.

It was one thing to condemn gay people when you didn't know any gay people—or when didn't know you knew any gay people—and it was easy to play the demagogue and spew hate about us and our lives when you didn't have to work with us or look us in the eye and condemn us to our faces. Openly gay men and women have complicated things for the bigots. Which is why we're seeing more and more anti-gay bigots losing the courage of their own bigoted convictions—as evidenced by this exchange. When a bigot feels obligated to preface an unambiguously bigoted statement (gay parents are lesser than straight parents) with a qualifier that contradicts the unambiguously bigoted statement he's about to make ("I'm not saying that gay parents are lesser parents")... well, it's just another sign that we're winning. We're not just winning. We've reached the tipping point.

Because we know what our families are worth.

Don't even try parsing that headline.

Seattle Out and Proud, producers of Seattle's gay pride parade, have selected a theme for this year's event, and that theme is “The Many Faces of Pride.” Who knows that that means, right? Well a-fucking-hem. Seattle Out and Proud's website has provided this—how shall I put this?—descriptive body of text to explain exactly what this year's pride parade is all about. Have at it:

This year, as you revel and participate in the 2012 Seattle Pride Parade, look to your left, then to your right. Look behind you, ahead of you, across the street. All around, you'll see it — community, and the beautiful people who make it theirs. Some will be immediately recognizable; others may catch you by surprise. But there you stand, shoulder to shoulder, comfortable and cohesive among them, your collective individualism on parade even as you stand in place — unblemished youth at the elbow of battle-scarred senior; the utterly fabulous against the gently indistinguishable; the confident alongside the questioning; the jubilant beside the impassive.

All around you, the intricate jigsaw of Pride will unfold to you — Latino and Asian and Native American and black and white; families in all their wondrous incarnations; 20-year locals and first-time visitors; the transitioning and the transgendered; the impaired and their companion animals; the athlete; the aesthete; the strange; and the stranger. These are The Many Faces of Pride.

Sounds like pride this year is not one to miss.

Created by the Alliance Youth Committee of the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance:

Beautiful.

Required viewing:

Not a lot has changed.

In the Guardian:

This is why it is genuinely historic that Obama, in the midst of a difficult re-election campaign, chose to become the first US president ever to support same-sex marriage (former Vice-President Dick Cheney, citing his lesbian daughter, did so when running for re-election in 2004). One can question Obama's sincerity; some believe his reliance on gay donors and need for greater enthusiasm among his core voters was his motive. One can quibble with his rationale; some have criticized him for suggesting that states have the right to ban same-sex marriage if they wish. But one cannot reasonably question the importance of his act.

Obama's public defense immediately enshrines same-sex marriage as the official orthodoxy of the Democratic party. It is inconceivable that marriage equality will ever again retreat to the fringe. His willingness to embrace it in the midst of an election year signals a belief that the American public is ready to accept this position as perfectly mainstream, even if they disagree with it. It will undoubtedly enable—or pressure—other world leaders to support the same view.

Perhaps the least quantifiable impact of Obama's statement is the most important one: it is a powerful message to gay youth that their sexual orientation is neither a flaw nor an abnormality. As White wrote yesterday: "The stigma of being gay drove my age-mates and me toward drink, suicide and years on the psychoanalytic couch in an effort to go straight. We were wracked with self-hatred, which blighted so many lives of our friends." This stigma, devastating in so many ways, is surely lessened when the nation's highest elected official advocates for full legality for same-sex couples.

The news:

President Obama today announced that he now supports same-sex marriage, reversing his longstanding opposition amid growing pressure from the Democratic base and even his own vice president. In an interview with ABC News’ Robin Roberts, the president described his thought process as an “evolution” that led him to this place, based on conversations with his own staff members, openly gay and lesbian service members, and conversations with his wife and own daughters.

The video. The straddle:

The president stressed that this is a personal position, and that he still supports the concept of states deciding the issue on their own. But he said he’s confident that more Americans will grow comfortable with gays and lesbians getting married, citing his own daughters’ comfort with the concept.

Today Barack Obama announced that he supports the freedom to marry. Personally. Because he knows monogamous same-sex couples who are raising children. (Non-monogamous couples aren't allowed to get legally married, of course, unless they're straight.) But the president also supports the "concept" of states "deciding the issue on their own." (States like, say, North Carolina, which yesterday banned any recognition of same-sex relationships in reality, not in concept.) So the president supports same-sex marriage while also supporting the right of states to ban the same-sex marriages that he supports. Which means, of course, that once the dust settles... everyone is going to be upset, supporters of marriage equality and opponents alike.

I wouldn't say that this "completes a turnabout" for the president on the issue of marriage equality. I'd say he's almost there. His support for marriage equality in concept is huge, of course, and it's welcome, and I'm pulling out my gay checkbook. (I'm pulling it out again.) But as delighted as I am by this news—and I'm freakin' delighted—I'm nevertheless disappointed that the president's support for marriage equality doesn't extend to same-sex couples in North Carolina and other states that have already banned same-sex marriage.

UPDATE: Everyone else on Gay Earth is absolutely delighted—so, yeah, looks like I'm an outlier here. Forgive me for being Debbie Downer. But if a politician came out for legal interracial marriage and then said in the very next breath that he also supported the right of states to ban interracial marriage, well, I can't imagine that supporters of legal interracial marriage would let that pass without comment.

Good for MSNBC's Thomas Roberts. When one of the Christian ministers behind North Carolina's hateful anti-gay marriage amendment (which also ban civil unions and domestic partnerships) cites the Bible to justify the ban, Roberts presses him all the other stuff in the Bible that Christians ignore:

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And, hey, Genesis 2:24—that's in the Old Testament, right? I keep hearing from Christians about how it's hugely unfair of me to mention what the Old Testament says about shellfish or beards or or farming or murdering your non-virgins daughters on their wedding nights because that stuff is in the Old Testament and the Old Testament isn't, you know, germane to Christians. So all the Christians who've jumped down my throat for quoting Deuteronomy—a passage that requires us to amend North Carolina's constitution to make it legal to stone Callista Gingrich to death—will now dash to their computers and blast off angry emails to this Christian preacher for citing Genesis, right?

Right?