Five years ago this week, the United State Supreme Court delivered its most sweeping gay rights decision ever, striking down laws in Texas and other states that had criminalized sex between gays. The court erected a shield of privacy around sexual behavior for all consenting adults, and in doing so paved the way for other milestones in the gay rights legal movement, including judicial victories for gay marriage in Nov. 2003 in Massachusetts and this year in California. The decision in the Lawrence v. Texas case overturned convictions against two Houston men, who police had ...

Pink News is reporting that a gay bar in Budapest was fire-bombed last night after its address appeared on a hate group’s website. It’s unclear how heavily the bar, called Action, was damaged. Gay rights groups have voiced concerns about extreme right-wing violence. They accuse a hate group using a website called kuruc.info for last night’s bombing. The website, a Hungarian site hosted in the United States, is known for posting addresses, phone numbers and other personal information about gay activists. Yesterday, the site post an address list of all the gay bars in Budapest, with Action being the first on the list. Budapest’s ...

After supporting Seattle's Gay Pride Parade, sponsoring numerous events for gay-rights groups, and stirring up controversy in 2005 by printing a quote from gay novelist Armistead Maupin on its cups, Starbucks is being sued by two former employees who say they were discriminated against while working for the coffee giant's diversity program—because they're gay. Joseph Hooks and Dorothy Baker worked at Starbucks's corporate headquarters in Seattle. They claim their boss, Starbucks's director of equal opportunity employment, Craig Sawyer, discriminated against and harassed them and pressured them to move elsewhere in the company. Through their attorney, David Breskin, both plaintiffs ...

365Gay.com(Washington) For the first time a House subcommittee has heard firsthand of widespread discrimination against transgender men and women. The hearing grew out of anger by a large number of gay rights groups after protections for transpeople were stripped from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act - much of it aimed at Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), ENDA's chief sponsor in the House. The stripped down version, which makes it illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation in hiring, firing, promoting or paying an employee passed the House last November. (story) It has yet to be dealt ...

You know the Alliance Defense Fund, the conservative legal group that argues against gay equality at every turn? The group that argued against marriage equality in California? The outfit that tried to have a "stay" placed on the California ruling until the anti-gay side had a chance the get their constitutional amendment passed at the polls? The group that has issued the following video in which ADF Senior Counsel Jordan Lorence invokes "God and his sovereignty" as a justification for the group's battle against civil equality (which Mr. Lorence liken to the work of Satan): Yea, ...