Huntington Beach Mayor Connie Boardman and her Orange County-adjacent colleague Bob Foster in Long Beach are among 25 California mayors who have signed a Courage Campaign letter supporting gay marriage.
All the other OC mayors–it seems as if there are 50 or so–apparently could not find pens with ink in them.
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Boardman is a Democrat, a professor of biology at Cerritos College and president of
the Bolsa Chica Land Trust, which has fought development around the ecologically sensitive Bolsa Chica wetlands for years and years.
The city council she leads includes openly gay Councilman Joe Shaw, who campaigned for office on the same winning team as Boardman in 2010. She'd previously been Surf City's mayor and entered that race late.
Foster, who is married (to a woman) and has two grown sons and three grandchildren, joined about 100 folks in Long Beach at a candlelight vigil in support of gay marriage Tuesday that had the mayor not only speaking but helping raise a rainbow-colored LGBT flag.
Among others in attendance was City Councilwoman Gerrie Schipskie, who is lesbian. Long Beach, of course, has a large, active and vocal LGBT community.
Boardman and Foster were joined by the mayors of Los Angeles, San Diego, Oakland and Sacramento, among others, in signing the letter.
It reads, in part:
As Mayors, we have a special view of the
separate class system created by Proposition 8. Individuals who are
public servants and work to improve our cities do not receive important
benefits for their loved ones as other couples do, because they are
denied the recognition of marriage Residents of our cities who work in
the private sector must hope that their private employer confers such
benefits upon same--sex couples, while their heterosexual co--workers
do not face such obstacles. Proposition 8 has only served to divide our
city into groups, one with more rights and dignity than the other.
You can read the entire letter here: https://s3.amazonaws.com/
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.