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Nike’s openly gay Chief Information Officer, Anthony Watson, left the company this week after less than a year—and sources say it’s because he was miserable in Portland, where the sportswear is located.
“As a single gay guy from London,” a source told Fortune. “Watson underestimated what it would be like. It was a culture shock [in Portland]. And there’s no point in having a great job if you feel unhappy with your surroundings.”
It might not be swinging London, but we always thought Portland was pretty awesome.
A monk was arrested on Monday for distributing anti-gay leaflets in Cambridge, England.
Brother Damon Kelly, director of the Black Hermits, a Scottish charity that receives between $40,000 and $55,000 in donations each year, was arrested under a statute banning “threatening or abusive behavior”
In October, Kelly distributed flyers that declared “Homosexuals, like vampires in their insatiable lust, prey upon youth, as they conspire to create more of their own kind, meanwhile busy abusing each other’s anuses and worshiping (sic) their own and each others’ penises in a festival of authentic Satanism.”
A new study indicates that a conversation with a gay person can have a more profound effect on someone’s attitudes about gay marriage than one with a heterosexual.
A group of 41 canvassers were sent door-to-door in L.A. last year to talk to some 9,507 registered voters about marriage equality. Surveys given immediately after the interview indicated an 8% increase in favorable opinions about same-sex marriage across the board.
But a year later, the results were even better: Support for same-sex marriage had increased 14% if the canvasser was gay. If the canvasser was straight, the increase was just 3%.
“A lot of time we find in social science that most things don’t work, they don’t change people’s minds,” lead author Michael LaCour told the L.A. Times. “But we found that a single conversation was able to change voters’ minds up to a year later.”
Anti-gay Republican Rick Santorum has tipped his hat thathe’ll be running for president again in 2016. But, he says, his focus will be more on issues like the economy and immigration.
“Part of what I had to do last time was lay out my bona fides” on moral and social issues, Santorum said. “That’s done.”
Sorry, Rick, you’re still one frothy mixture we don’t want in the White House.
A leader of France’s far-right National Front Party istaking a gossip magazine to court for outing him as gay.
Last week, Florian Philippot, the NFP’s vice-presidential candidate, was pictured in Closer with his boyfriend in Vienna.
Unlike the States, the personal lives of French politicians are usually off limits for the press. The Telegraph calls the incident “an embarrassment for the [National Front], whose attitude towards homosexuals has historically ranged from ambivalent to downright homophobic.”
In the past, leaders of the Front have denied the Holocaust and said ebola was the cure for France’s immigration woes. The party opposes marriage equality, which came to France last year.
After several Christian bakeries faced legal woes for denying cakes to gay couples, anti-gay activist Theodore Shoebat called 13 pro-LGBT bakers and requested a cake with the words “Gay marriage is wrong” on it.
Shoebat maintains he was denied all 13 times. “One baker even said that she would make me a cookie with a large phallus on it,” says Shoebat, who maintains his “experiment” proves that LGBT allies are more “militant and intolerant” than Christians.
Can you say false equivalency?