From the San Francisco Chronicle:
Three members of an amateur San Francisco team who said they were branded "not gay enough" and stripped of their second-place finish at the Gay Softball World Series have settled their lawsuit against a national gay sports organization.
Steven Apilado, LaRon Charles and Jon Russ, who were members of D2, a team that was part of the San Francisco Gay Softball League, will receive an undisclosed sum from the North American Gay Amateur Athletic Alliance and will get their second-place 2008 championship trophy back, said their attorney, Suzanne Thomas.
"This is an amazing result," Thomas said Monday. "It's also an opportunity to put a spotlight on significant discrimination in sports against the LBGT community, and going forward we will look at this as an opportunity to provide additional education about this discrimination."
Roger Leishman, an attorney for the alliance, said the settlement Friday came a week after U.S. District Judge John Coughenour in Seattle ruled that the group had the right under the First Amendment to limit the number of heterosexuals who could play on a team to two.
"It is reasonable that an organization seeking to limit participation to gay athletes would require members to express whether or not they are gay athletes," Coughenour wrote
D2 ultimately lost the championship to a team from Los Angeles.
Afterward, officials with the gay athletic alliance called Apilado, Charles and Russ separately into a conference room for a hearing to determine whether they were heterosexual or gay, the suit said.
They were asked "very intrusive questions," including what their sexual interests and preferences were, Thomas said.
Charles, who was D2's manager, asked whether he could say he was bisexual and was told, "This is the Gay World Series, not the Bisexual World Series," the suit said.
Charles' Facebook profile said last year that he was married to a woman.
The alliance ultimately determined that the three men were "non-gay" and that D2 had broken the rules.
Thomas said the men had been essentially branded as "not gay enough."
Read the rest here.
At first glance, this story seems silly but I actually see a larger point here: the gay softball league has rules about who can play and who am I to say they should allow 2 or 3 or 5 non-gays, or consider bisexuals as gays or not. Clubs set their own rules and, as long as these aren't set up to discriminate against a particular group, I think they should be allowed to set themselves however they want.
This is why I think the state has no business in the "marriage" business.
Let me be clear. Of course, the state should recognize unions but imagine how the debate changes if civil marriage is simply renamed as civil unions. Leave marriage to churches so if someone wants to get married, they can always do so but at that point, celebrating same-sex marriage or not becomes a decision made by each individual institution.
Churches are clubs, clubs have rules.
If a church says their definition of marriage is a man and woman, fine. That's their club and no one is obligated to join it in order to get married but the state cannot be in the business of allocating different status to different tax-payers so if there's no gay marriage at city hall, there should be no marriages at city hall.
What happens in every individual club is up to its members.
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