John Gregg undergoes a pre-election LGBT conversion.

In a recent article about John Gregg's evolution since 2012, online.com/news/opinion/commentary-john-gregg-mike-pence-and-a-locked-steering-wheel/article_723b88c4-c99f-11e5-b0ed-dbbe112fc955.html">John Krull offered this quote: "You shouldn’t lock the steering wheel in life, because the road does bend."

There's a reserved seat for Mike Pence in dustbin of history, and yet I still need convincing about Gregg. In 2012, he came off as exactly the sort of  non-Democratic Faux Democrat we've learned from experience to loathe here in Floyd County.

We'll see.

A one-on-one with the Indiana Democrat looking to take down Mike Pence, by By Rick Sutton (The Word, via NUVO)

[EDITOR'S NOTE: The Word, central Indiana's LGBT monthly publication, is paying close attention to the 2016 election cycle. The Word's Political Editor, Rick Sutton, sat down with Indiana Democratic gubernatorial candidate John Gregg for a recent interview, which is featured in the April issue. A similar interview or guest column has been requested of incumbent Republican Gov. Mike Pence. That request remains open. NUVO will reprint that interview or column, if it ever happens.]

Former Indiana House Speaker John Gregg is the Democratic nominee for governor. It's his second try — in 2012, his campaign ran afoul of the LGBT community for divisive statements regarding Indiana's then-pending Constitutional amendment on marriage.


After that hard-fought but losing campaign, Gregg considered his options and decided to seek the state's top job in 2016. As part of that process, one of his major considerations was LGBT civil rights —and he arrived at different conclusions than his 2012 campaign proclaimed.

The South does it again -- wait, Indiana did it first. No matter: "The NBA Needs to Move the 2017 All-Star Game From Charlotte."

C'mon -- you know Grooms would have voted in favor if he lived in North Carolina.

The real world, from the only sportswriter who matters.

The NBA Needs to Move the 2017 All-Star Game From Charlotte. Now. (By Dave Zirin, The Nation)

... The 2017 NBA All-Star Game is due to be held in Charlotte, North Carolina. Silver should announce as soon as possible that this game needs to be moved unless the state legislature overturns its new law set to go in effect April 1 “blocking local governments from passing anti-discrimination rules to grant protections to gay and transgender people.”

The law was passed as a direct response to the City of Charlotte for passing an ordinance to protect gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people from being discriminated against by businesses. Outrageously, the North Carolina legislature scheduled an extraordinary special session—the first time they have done so in 35 years—to annul the Charlotte ordinance before it went into effect. It’s remarkable how quickly lawmakers leap to actually do their jobs when the work involves stripping people of their rights. It is also stunning how all of the Dixie paeans to local control and states’ rights go out the window when it comes to issues such as these.

The law also bans students from using restrooms that correlate with their gender identity if it is not what is listed on their birth certificate. “Legislators have gone out of their way to stigmatize and marginalize transgender North Carolinians by pushing ugly and fundamentally untrue stereotypes that are based on fear and ignorance and not supported by the experiences of more than 200 cities with these protections,” Sarah Preston, acting executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina, said in a statement.

This law empowers businesses across the state to put signs in their windows saying that they reserve the right to deny service to anyone whom they perceive to be part of the LGBT community. Think about that for a second: The law empowers right-wing small-business owners to legally discriminate based on their own “gaydar.”

Under the shadow of this legislation, the NBA really only has one recourse: It needs to move the 2017 All-Star Game and show the world that it is not going to “fall behind” on what is a very elemental issue of human rights and dignity. The NBA Players Association, led by the estimable Michele Roberts, should also call for Adam Silver to take this step.

Let's keep the spotlight on the civil rights FAIL perpetuated by Mike Pence and Indiana's Republicans.

But that's life in a one-party state.

EDITORIAL: Legislature, governor fail test of courage, at the Evansville Courier & Press

... With five weeks remaining in the short, non-budgetary session, the 2016 Legislature, without great leadership from the governor's office, has accomplished little. We acknowledge that, usually, there is a great rush of bills through Indianapolis in the final week, but beginning with civil rights legislation, it's disheartening what Gov. Mike Pence and the Legislature chose to not push through.

Once again, the simple act of assuring equal rights for all escaped our elected leaders and became a debate that reached the national stage — though, thanks goodness, not as much as last year's Religious Freedom Restoration Act. In an effort to appease both those who support civil rights and those who fear their religious beliefs would be infringed upon, nothing moved forward — which you sense, in this election year, is exactly what Gov. Pence had hoped.

"Gov. Mike Pence and the General Assembly have failed Indiana and its residents, not just those from the LGBT community, but all of us."

When I was a wee lad, being Republican was all about obeying the every desire of high-powered economic interests.

Now it's groveling to the prejudices of our Christian Taliban. It's hard to decide which aspect of the One Party State is worse.

Editorial: A legislative letdown over LGBT rights (Indy Star)

The General Assembly and Gov. Mike Pence’s refusal to extend the state’s civil rights law to include sexual orientation and gender identity continues to tarnish Indiana’s image and jeopardize long-term economic prosperity.

Last spring, after a firestorm from passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act blew up in their faces, lawmakers pledged to address legal protections for LGBT citizens in the next legislative session.

But after meeting privately Tuesday, Senate Republican leaders decided to kill legislation that would have protected gay Hoosiers from discrimination. In doing so, they not only failed lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Hoosiers but also their families, friends, coworkers and anyone else in our state who values equality ...

Further notice: Southern Indiana Equality's next meeting is January 28 at the Roadhouse.

Here's a reminder that Southern Indiana Equality's next meeting is January 28 at the Roadhouse. That's Thursday.

Southern Indiana Equality will be holding their 1st quarter meeting at 7:00 pm on January 28th. It will be held in the upstairs room at The New Albany Roadhouse.

New Albany Roadhouse
1706 Graybrook Lane
New Albany, Indiana 47150

We are proud to welcome representatives from Freedom Indiana as well as Indiana Competes to discuss the new legislative session. This will be a full community meeting where questions can be answered and the future of Indiana equality will be discussed.

Food and drinks will be available for purchase.

Southern Indiana Equality is a good place to monitor Indiana's legislative foibles -- and there are many. Relevant links:

Southern Indiana Equality
Freedom Indiana
Indiana Competes

Southern Indiana Equality's next meeting is January 28 at the Roadhouse.

While thinking about posting the mailing received today from Freedom Indiana, Brad Bell served notice of the next meeting of Southern Indiana Equality:

Southern Indiana Equality will be holding their 1st quarter meeting at 7:00 pm on January 28th. It will be held in the upstairs room at The New Albany Roadhouse.

New Albany Roadhouse
1706 Graybrook Lane
New Albany, Indiana 47150

We are proud to welcome representatives from Freedom Indiana as well as Indiana Competes to discuss the new legislative session. This will be a full community meeting where questions can be answered and the future of Indiana equality will be discussed.

Food and drinks will be available for purchase.

Southern Indiana Equality is a good place to monitor Indiana's legislative foibles -- and there are many. Relevant links:

Southern Indiana Equality
Freedom Indiana
Indiana Competes

Selected "Southern Indiana leaders talk LGBT protections bill."

Indiana is a lamentably lop-sided one-party state, but earlier this year when Governor Mike Pence's GOP triumphantly embraced the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, numerous sycophants from the usual corporate-weighted economic development cadre finally got the willies.

Now, for our entertainment, the same legislators who brought you the idiocy of RFRA will provide anti-discrimination laws to countermand it -- well, mostly. There'll have to be bigotry maintenance exceptions, you know.

Our local state representative broke ranks over RFRA, and accordingly, Ed Clere is quoted here.

State Senator Ron Grooms as yet touts the wonderfulness of RFRA, evidently as viewed from his residence on Fantasy Island, but fortunately, he is not interviewed here.

However, there is one paragraph in need of explanation.

(New Albany council person Greg) Phipps said he's happy to see New Albany's anti-discrimination ordinance working. Though the human right commission hasn't heard any cases, he said a couple of instances of alleged LGBT discrimination have been mentioned, but not acted upon.

It works, though it hasn't been used, and discrimination not brought before the HRC did't occur because there was no action.

In short, Gahanism in a nutshell: Fundamental change is imperative, so long as nothing fundamentally changes. 

Southern Indiana leaders talk LGBT protections bill, by Jerod Clapp (Clark County Today)

SOUTHERN INDIANA — A bill to include LGBT people in existing anti-discrimination laws is on the slate for the State Senate's upcoming legislative session.

The draft, written by Sen. Travis Holdman, R-Markle, comes after the state's heavily criticized passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act from last spring. The new bill grants protections to lesbian, gay, bisexual and trangender people.

Though some local government and business leaders see the proposal as a step in the right direction, they expressed concern over religious exemptions.

But the implications of the bill don't stop at the rights of LGBT people, but also what it could ultimately mean for the state's business environment and economy are also concerns among leaders.

Civil rights and LGBT? Indiana Republicans vow to keep us barefoot, stupid and mean-spirited.

Fundamental change, just so long as nothing fundamentally changes. It sounds almost like a Gahan campaign promise.

Indiana legislators foreshadow LGBT rights battle, by Maureen Hayden (CNHI via N & T)

INDIANAPOLIS — Any speculation that state lawmakers would wait until after the November election to debate civil rights for lesbian, gay and transgender Hoosiers is gone.

On Monday, state Senate President David Long, Fort Wayne, said legislators will soon see what he called a “comprehensive” bill that may extend anti-discrimination protections while allowing people to also claim religious freedom to deny those protections ... Long, a Republican, refused to give details of the proposed measure that will be filed when lawmakers return to the Statehouse for their short, 10-week session in January.

Even the Chamber of Commerce is urging the GOP to be rational. The House Speaker apparently sees bigotry as the state's biggest growth industry, with final word reserved for the Minority Leader.

House Speaker Brian Bosma, meanwhile, said the Legislature won’t be “bullied, badgered or blackmailed” into passing a measure that isn’t supported by most Hoosiers.

At the chamber’s legislative preview Monday, Bosma promised a civil debate would ensue, but he admitted it could be difficult.

“This is clearly the toughest issue of the session,” he said, "maybe the toughest issue of our [legislative] careers.”

That’s not how his Democratic counterpart sees it. House Minority Leader Scott Pelath said legislators could simply pass a bill that adds four words: “sexual orientation, gender identity” to the state’s civil rights law. And then move on to other pressing issues like road funding.

“My advice,” he said, “is to get it over with.”

"It’s time for Pence to lead ... full civil rights protections based on sexual orientation."

Inelegantly written, but hey -- it's a business publication.

And no, I have NOT forgotten the role of Ron Grooms in this debacle.

EDITORIAL: Governor must back full LGBT rights (Indianapolis Business Journal)

Gov. Mike Pence owes the state leadership on LGBT issues that have damaged our reputation nationally while creating an ugly chasm among Hoosiers.

Pence helped to create the problem earlier this year when he pushed the General Assembly to pass the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a law that was a poor solution in search of a largely non-existent problem ...

 ... It’s time for Pence to lead—and there’s only one place to go: Full civil rights protections based on sexual orientation.

The move may not put him in good stead with social conservatives, but Indiana needs to make the public statement—a national statement—that it’s the warm and welcoming place that we all enjoy.

A simple fact: "Gays, not Christians, are still America’s truly embattled minority."

Whomever chose Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" to serenade Kim Davis upon her release from prison merely offered the most recent example of American conservatives somehow not being able to grasp the applicability of popular music to photo ops.

Here are two hints: Read the lyrics and ask permission.

Conversely, had Davis chosen to expend her 14th minute of fame to bask in the glow of Ted Nugent's "Wang Dang Sweet Poontang," the planets would have remained in perfect ideological alignment.

But enough flippancy. As The Economist makes clear ...

Some martyr; Gays, not Christians, are still America’s truly embattled minority (The Economist)

 ... Ms Davis is fully entitled to her horror, but it is irrelevant to her duties ... to compare her recalcitrance, as some admirers have, to the refusal of Rosa Parks to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, or to the 19th-century figures who declined to return runaway slaves, is absurd.

Absurd because, unlike slavery or segregation, gay marriage is almost completely victimless. Therein lies another fallacy of Ms Davis’s martyrdom: she makes it seem that Christians have been persecuted by the Supreme Court’s ruling, directly and en masse, when, in reality, only a few have been inconvenienced (and many more gay Christians stand to benefit) ...

 ... The furore in Kentucky shows the extent to which some Christian Americans feel besieged by what they perceive as a strangulating godlessness. Given the freshness of the gay-marriage ruling, perhaps that paranoia is understandable. The truth, though, is that Americans’ freedom to practise their faiths is robustly defended by both the constitution and federal law (see article). The rights of the godly are actually much more secure than those of gay Americans—who still lack federal protection from prejudice like that granted to other groups by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In most states of America homophobes can still legally discriminate against homosexuals, married or otherwise. That is a much graver scandal than Ms Davis’s theatrical refusal to do her job.

A feather knocks us over as Democrats belatedly shuffle, mumble and pander about oppression.

Given that the Floyd County Democratic Party has been censoring me on social media since December, 2014, it's true that I only rarely visit the party's propaganda hive at Facebook.

ON THE AVENUES: The Adamite Chronicles: Have muzzle, will drivel.

Consequently, I definitely missed this post late last night.

Let's review.

Weeks of silence pass, and at the very last opportunity to indicate the presence of a pulse, however faint, Adam Dickey waits until a brand new autonomous organization steps up to what might have been the Democratic Party's bully pulpit, and then -- only then -- oozes a tepid late-night statement of solidarity with the oppressed ... who have been waiting in vain for weeks on end for Adam's tea leaves to magically align.

And does not so much as mention Dan Coffey's name.

That's passionate, raw courage, isn't it?

In the narrowest of possible interpretations, then yes -- the local Democratic Party has not been silent about Coffey's anti-LGBT slurs, which were captured and documented on film.

But with leaders like these, who needs enemies?

Previously: 

June 11: ON THE AVENUES: This is Dan Coffey, New Albany’s quintessential Democrat.

June 4: ON THE AVENUES: Dan Coffey speaks for Jeff Gahan and the Democratic Party … unless they say otherwise.

Pence, Grooms, other old bigoted white guys sadly united in both spite and cluelessness.

As so many have noted, this isn't Mike Pence's first dance as it exalts plainly purposeful discrimination, and as As the Indy Star's Matthew Tully succinctly observes, Pence is "out of his league as governor."

When you have to "clarify" a horribly damaging piece of legislation that you raced to sign, when you dodge a question on national TV about whether discrimination is legal in your state, when you deal your state a crushing economic blow, when you seem incapable of understanding the role you have played in creating this mess — well, that makes clear that you are not in the right job.

I'd place our state senator, the bizarrely oblivious Ron Grooms, in the same category. He isn't governor, so he gets a pass? He shouldn't. First tolls, now RFRA; is Grooms intent on sealing the border with the bulk of the metro Louisville market?

Back to Tully on Pence:

As a politician he is above all an ideologue, one whose actions and distractions have made clear that he doesn't truly understand what it takes to take on the state's massive challenges. He thrived while representing a gerrymandered congressional district, one where he could safely walk an ideological line and live largely in a partisan bubble. He has failed to understand that a governor's job is to represent a much more diverse state.

Old white guys living in bubbles. Spare me. Here is Frank Rich with more national ramifications of the Hoosier Stain.

Indiana, Arkansas, and the GOP’s Disastrous Anti-Gay Bigotry, by Frank Rich (New York)

... Other defenders of these laws, like The Wall Street Journal editorial page, are predictably pleading victimization: The real victims of bigotry, according to this argument, are Christians, who are being punished for unfashionable beliefs. The Bible has a long history of being cited in America to justify second-class citizenship for women and blacks, among others, in their struggles for equal rights over the past century. It didn’t fly then, and it won’t fly now. A GOP presidential field that supports transparent discrimination is not only on the wrong side of history but the wrong side of the present-day American electorate. There will be consequences far beyond the economic punishment that is already being inflicted on Indiana.

"New Albany gay bar has sense of Pride," even as one-way streets remain shameful.

Love him or hate him, Matt McMahan doesn't undertake projects unless they make dollars and cents, and this is the single best reason to congratulate him for his decision to keep The Warehouse open as an LGBT-friendly bar, albeit with a new identity.

It's capitalism and unexploited market segments, and it's an salutary exercise in ideology -- and some sweet day, none of these considerations will matter, and it simply will be what it is, with no further need for qualifications.

Just think about it: New Albany will support an LGBT bar, but the city can't seem to achieve two-way street conversions, and in terms of the street grid itself, we're actually regressing.

I think it's obvious who is displaying courage in New Albany, and who is not.

Only New Albany gay bar has sense of ‘Pride’, by Baylee Pulliam (Courier-Journal)

Matt McMahan has owned a few restaurants and bars, but his latest New Albany venture is a real source of ‘pride.’

The newly-rennovated Pride Bar + Lounge, 504 State Street, is the only lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender-friendly bar he knows of in Southern Indiana. When it opens Friday, McMahan says, it will fill a gap left when the bar’s previous owner closed early last month.

The Warehouse to reopen as Pride Bar + Lounge.

Get the scoop at the official Fb page.

Previously:

ON THE AVENUES: Learning from the Warehouse.

The Warehouse Bar is closed. Will it be back?

The Warehouse generates a tsunami.

"New Albany's first LGBT bar is now open."

Barack Obama: "The First Gay President."