eclecticism

September 19th, 2003 |

From the New York Times: Married Gay Canadian Couple Barred From U.S.

A married gay couple on their way from Canada to a human rights conference in Georgia were not allowed to enter the United States today because the two men insisted on filling out a single Customs clearance form declaring themselves a family.
Mr. Bourassa said he and his partner, Joe Varnell, first approached the United States immigration desk at Pearson Airport in Toronto and an officer stamped their forms. But when they went to a Customs agent for final clearance, the agent would not accept a joint declaration. “He said same-sex marriage is not recognized by the United States of America and we would have to enter the country as single individuals,” Mr. Bourassa said. A supervisor agreed when Mr. Bourassa objected.

p>(via Tina)

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5 Responses to “Gay couple kept out of US”

Tim Who? Says:
September 19th, 2003 at 6:31 pm

A GAY couple, A CANADIAN gay couple “Oh my GOD” Them there furreners are going to destroy our whole country. Thank God we stopped them at the border, before they infected us all. Whew!! That was close, they almost got in. Now aren’t you glad we passed the defense of marriage act? And on their way to a human rights conference too. No doubt trying to further that dammed Gay agenda again.

Aaron Says:
September 19th, 2003 at 9:33 pm

That’s nothing, last week the U.S. kept out “respected” Muslim businessmen when they were simply trying to attend a conference on how to stop terrorism. I know, it’s their fault for trying to travel on 9/11 but people should not be put in jail for sixteen hours just because they have a business card.

“You guys picked the wrong day to travel…” was the quote one of the guards used.

I don’t protest up here in Canada but I did just stop paying almost $200/month to the U.S. I know, it’s not going to stop Bush from buying some help for Iraq — Germany, but not France.

Aaron Says:
September 19th, 2003 at 9:36 pm

Commenting here from within FeedDemon is not easy.

Michael Hanscom Says:
September 19th, 2003 at 10:12 pm

Hrm…I know nothing about FeedDemon. Since you were kind enough to provide a link, though, I’ll poke around and see if there’s anything I can do. Have any suggestions?

Michael Hanscom Says:
September 20th, 2003 at 3:16 am

Well, I just downloaded and poked around with FeedDemon, and at least right now, I’m fairly confused. It’s apparently only reading the ‘description’ of the RSS feeds, and ignoring the ‘content’ — which results in all three of my RSS feeds being ‘excerpt only’ feeds. So that’s an issue, but it seems to be a FeedDemon issue (at least, things work correctly in NetNewsWire on my Mac).

I think I see what you mean by commenting not being easy from within FeedDemon, though. Having IE embedded within a window creates a really narrow window for the weblog to display in if it’s on the right, or really short if it’s on the bottom. Plus, this comment entry field initially displays correctly, but then as soon as you start typing, the width doubles (or so), and a good chunk of the box goes outside of the window, and you can’t even scroll over far enough to see the entire thing. How annoying.

Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure that that’s an IE bug — for some reason, while the text entry box initially displays correctly, activating it by typing causes it to break free of the layout. Really annoying, not the intended behavior — and not my fault. My best suggestion at this point is to use an external browser (preferably one that renders CSS correctly, such as Mozilla or FireBird, rather than the bug-ridden monstrosity that IE is) rather than the internal browser that FeedDemon offers (as it’s just an embedded IE window). Sorry about that — I’m sure it’s not necessarily the preferred solution, but there are so many browsers that do what their supposed to that I’m getting less and less interested in trying to work around all of IE’s myriad wierdnesses.