Gay Marriage
- Marriage between same-sex couples was first made legal in the Netherlands in 2001
- Spain is the only country in the world that recognizes same-sex marriage and heterosexual marriage under the same law.
- Marriage statistics show that female couples made up nearly two-thirds of the same-sex marriages in Iowa in the year after the state Supreme Court ruled it legal in April 2009.
- Gay couples who reported as married on the 2000 census were changed to unmarried by the Census Bureau
- Public support for gay marriage has increased about 1% annually over the last two decades.
- Statisticians predict a majority of Americans will support gay marriage by 2012.
Gays in the Military
- To date, the U.S. has discharged over 11,000 service members for being gay or lesbian.
- Twenty-four countries [not including the U.S.] currently allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military
Employee Sexual Orientation Discrimination (Gay Rights)
- There are currently thirteen states, as well as the District of Columbia, that have enacted policies to protect against gender identity and sexual orientation discrimination in employment.
- Seven states, meanwhile, have laws that prohibit employment discrimination solely based on sexual orientation
- As late as 2005, 39 percent of all LGBT workers reported experiencing some sort of workplace discrimination or harassment
- Nearly 90 percent of people in the U.S. believe that gay and lesbian workers should have the same rights as their heterosexual counterparts.
- In thirty states, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender citizens can be fired on the basis of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity without any legal recourse.
Stop Sexual Orientation Hate Crimes
- 2008: 1,617 ate crime offenses based on sexual-orientation bias were reported by law enforcement agencies throughout Unites States.
- 2007: 1,460 hate crime offenses based on sexual-orientation bias were reported by law enforcement agencies throughout Unites States
- 2006: 1,415 hate crime offenses based on sexual-orientation bias were reported by law enforcement agencies throughout Unites States
- 2005: 1,171 hate crime offenses based on sexual-orientation bias were reported by law enforcement agencies throughout Unites States .
AIDs (It isn’t just in the Gay community be safe)
- The first HIV/AIDS cases in the United States were detected in 1981, in California and New York. Just two years later
- Three years after being discovered in the US in 1983, more than 3,000 AIDS cases had been identified in the States, and more than 1,000 people had died from the disease.
- By 1986, more than 38,000 worldwide had been diagnosed with the disease, though the Reagan Administration had only officially recognized the disease in September 1985.
- By the end of the decade, more than eight million people worldwide would have HIV/AIDS. Reagan himself, in 1990, would eventually apologize for his administration’s failure to respond to the disease.
- As of June 2007, according to the Center for Disease Control, 71 percent of those in the U.S. infected with HIV/AIDS were “Men who have sex with men” (MSM).
- Moreover, CDC studies indicated that as of 2005, the incidence rate of HIV/AIDS in black MSM (46 percent) was more than twice of that among white MSM (21 percent). Today, in the U.S., more than 230,000 gay men have HIV/AIDS
- The World Health Organization and UNAIDS estimate that, worldwide, 33.2 million people are living with HIV/AIDS.