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If you still haven’t heard, TODAY is the day to stand up and be counted. We’re told 1 million people are expected to hit the streets marching to oppose Prop 8 and fight for equal rights in over 300 cities in all 50 states of the US as well as 10 countries around the world — Australia, Belgium, Canada, China (Hong Kong to be exact), France, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, Puerto Rico, the UK and Germany. Protest locations are way too numerous to list here now, so check out http://jointheimpact.wetpaint.com/ to find out if there is a protest location near you. This is a historic moment so if there’s a protest in your city, please be there with your family, friends and colleagues! More information available here and here and for ongoing updates, follow @jointheimpact on Twitter.

We leave you with this latest press release from the Join The Impact founders, Amy Balliett & Willow Witte. If anything, it has left us breathless to see what a small group of very committed people can achieve through the Internet:

Exactly one week since Amy Balliett and Willow Witte announced a national call to action for the LGBTQ community to protest Proposition 8 and to fight for equal rights across the nation, the community has come together at global numbers exceeding 1 million (According to early estimates from National Social Pages, and the JoinTheImpact.wetpaint.com social network).  “We will come out tomorrow in numbers this world has not yet seen,” Says Amy Balliett, co-founder of JoinTheImpact.com.  “Rain or shine, our community will take to the streets to get the word out that equality is a human right and one that we will not stop working toward until it’s afforded to all citizens,” Says Willow Witte, JoinTheImpact’s other founder and organizer.

300 Cities around the country will participate in a simultaneous protest against Proposition 8 and for equality.  Founders of JoinTheImpact stress that this must be a peaceful protest and say that it’s main goal is to bring the conversation of equality to a national stage.  The movement launched on November 7th, 2008 and by Monday November 10th it went international.  Now all 50 US states and 10 Countries world-wide have joined the IMPACT.  Each protest will begin at the exact same time and will include prominent speakers such as local activists, government officials, celebrities, and religious leaders.  These speakers will carry the message of equality as well as one that encourages the entire community to unite for this cause.

JoinTheImpact founders hope that this world-wide event will drive the community into a very necessary Civil Rights Movement and have already joined forces with many other prominent organizations to keep the conversation of equality at the forefront of our nation’s mind.  The future of JoinTheImpact includes continued national demonstrations on the 10th of every month for their 10 months 10 lives changed initiative.  This includes working joining forces for December 10th’s Day Without a Gay, a January 10th international protest against DOMA, and a continued forum for open and respectful debate.  Please join the IMPACT locally and nationally, to find out how 10 conversations can make the impact that leads this nation into equality!

Those of you with your own blogs and websites will like this one. From now on, you can create your very own Gays.com badge and display it on your website! Creating a badge is as simple as A-B-C. Here’s how:

First go to Profile -> Badges. When you select “Create a badge”, you will see a table of options (which looks like this) that allows you to decide what goes into the badge and what doesn’t. At the moment, six options are available — profile picture, name, email, birthday, status and location. You can also decide if you’d prefer a vertical or horizontal badge. Once done, click “save” and you will get an HTML code which you can then embed anywhere on your blog or website.

One thing you should remember though when creating your own badge is this — all mini-profiles on Gays.com are by default not visible to non-members. If you’re creating your badge for the very first time, there is a chance you’ll first need to make your mini-profile viewable to non Gays.com members and this can be done on your privacy settings.

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann deserves a medal for this six and a half minute long impassioned statement directed at those who voted for Prop 8. He picks apart religious reasons often cited by conservatives, and asks them why opposing gay marriage means so much to them when “in a time of impermanence and fly-by-night relationships, these people over here want the same chance at permanence and happiness that is your option”. Not so long ago, Olbermann pointed out, it was illegal for white and black people to intermarry. The following verses by the old Persian poet, Omar-Khayyam, quoted by Olbermann at the end of his speech, totally nailed it home on the religious Pharisees of our times:

If you, like us, are an active user of such Web 2.0 services as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, Blogspot, Wordpress and LiveJournal, you can now link your Gays.com profile to all the above-named services by keying them in one by one at Profile / Edit / Contact / FollowMe and they will be appear as little icons right under your profile picture, like what you see on the left.

For those of you that are on Twitter and FriendFeed, here’s a little reminder that it’s now possible to post to Twitter and FriendFeed from your Gays.com status updates! We’ve had very little feedback on this feature so far, so get cracking people and tell us what you think about it!

It’s often been said how archaic the gay internet landscape is, and we at Gays.com aim to change just that. We want to make it easier for you to share your thoughts, your life, your ideas and your pictures with your friends, and since you are already doing all that and more through the above web services, we thought they should appear on your Gays.com profile. Because we know what a *pain* it is to update all your Web 2.0 services and then inform your friends one by one, expect to see some of this stuff getting integrated into your LiveFeed in the future.

They may have voted to ban gay marriage, but 36,000 of you still got your marriage licenses in the state of California over the last few months. While the jury is still out on the legality of existing same-sex marriages (damn those bastards), we want to invite you guys to come announce your marriage or civil partnership right here at Gays.com.

Doing so is simple. Just log on to Profile / Edit / Personal / Relationship Status and tell us who you’re married or in a civil union with (your partner will first need to be your friend on Gays.com). Once done, a relationship request will be sent to your partner and when he or she confirms the relationship, your profile will be modified as follows!

This feature is also possible for those of you ‘in a steady relationship’ or are just ‘dating someone’ so start taking advantage of it!

From Jamison: “The morning after Prop 8 was passed, taking away the rights of same-sex couples to marry, the pride flag at Harvey Milk Plaza in San Francisco’s Castro District stood at half mast.”

What a difference a day makes! On 4 Nov 2008, a date that will no doubt go down in the annals of history as a watershed moment in U.S. politics, America elected its first black president (welcome back America and congratulations for making the right choice!). But that same day also turned out to be a dark day for the gay community as California — yes, the most gay-friendly state in the Union — voted to pass Prop 8 which overturns the state supreme court’s earlier ruling that same-sex couples had the right to marry under the constitution. While the fight over gay marriage has been the most intense (and the most expensive) in California, few people actually know that Arizona and Florida also followed suit in banning gay marriage, while Arkansas has voted to ban gay couples from adopting children! Here are the results of the local ballot measures (which we got from CNN):

As Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, pointed out in his speech to Googlers last week (watch it if you haven’t!), throughout the seventeen amendments in the 219 year history of the U.S. constitution, every single amendment has been to expand on people’s rights, not to deny them of their rights, and certainly not to take back rights that have already been granted. And now, the most progressive state in the U.S. has voted to do just that? Good God! How screwed up is that?! We’re trying to be rational here so let’s put things in a little perspective here, shall we? Cages for egg-laying hens and restrictive pens for veal calves and pregnant sows have been banned in California (we’re not making this up!), you can now get marijuana in Michigan and Massachusetts (no it’s not a pipe dream!), you can now get your doctor in Washington to help you end your life in dignity, but you cannot marry someone else of the same gender as you are because the day that happens, families will crumble, society will disintegrate, heterosexual marriages will suffer, and all children will become gay? Gimme a break!

As we write this, thousands are said to be marching in Los Angeles and San Francisco for marriage equality, and many are questioning the tax-exempt status of religious organizations that have poured in millions of dollars to pass Prop 8. Of the $35.9 million raised by supporters of the same-sex marriage ban, $20 million came from the Mormon Church, with the bulk of the remainder coming from other religious organizations like the Catholic Church, Knights of Columbus, Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, American Family Association, Focus on the Family, National Organization for Marriage, as well as the Saddleback Church (such strange bedfellows, and can anyone find a non-religious excuse to ban same-sex marriage, really?). [And yes, we do know there were also many progressive-minded religious leaders out there who were as vehemently opposed to Prop 8 and they should really be commended for taking the narrow unpopular road!]

As the dust settles, we need to realise the fight is not over yet. Our next stab at overturning this disgustingly discriminatory amendment will come four years from now, but for now, we must ask ourselves what we can learn this time. The answer, we think, lies somewhere in these findings by the Pew Research Center:

• Only 4 in 10 Americans report that they have close friends or family members that are gay.
• Familiarity is closely linked to tolerance: “People who have a close gay friend or family member are more likely to support gay marriage and they are also significantly less likely to favor allowing schools to fire gay teachers than are those with little or no personal contact with gays.”
• Those who say they have a family member or close friend who is gay are more than twice as likely to support gay marriage as those who don’t — 55% to 25%.

Pew’s research has a lesson that is loud and clear for the gay community. If you truly want equality, then it is really time to stand up and be counted. Don’t leave it to the gay rights groups to do all the work. You — yes, you! — need to come out to your family, to your friends, in your workplace, on campus, in your religious group, as well as any other social, community or interest groups you may belong to. The power is in YOUR own hands to break barriers, remove stereotypes, stop prejudice, dismantle homophobia, and to build bridges, encourage tolerance, and improve understanding!

As we mentioned earlier on Coming Out Day, part of the reason why the founders of this site decided to build Gays.com as the first gay social network for real people, real names and real-world connections is that we looked around us and found absolutely none on the horizon! Since then, we’ve made it our raison d’etre and our sacred mission to challenge, encourage, and prod members of the community to come out online if not in real life. Brothers and sisters, it is time to stand up and be counted, and the time is now. If you want to help fight ignorance, then don’t remain invisible anymore. If you want to help fight discrimination, then it is about time you stepped out of the closet. If you are protesting and marching in the streets, but still haven’t come out to your friends and colleagues, then realize this — you can protest and march all you want, but you’ll accomplish much more by stepping out of the closet to be who you really are in your school and in your office. Change starts with you and the people around you. This message is important, and if you see it, help us share Gays.com’s vision and message with the friends around you.

Just for laughs: Here’s one of Politico’s top ten viral videos of the U.S. presidential campaign.

Tomorrow, Americans will go to the ballot box to determine who the next president will be. And Californians will also be voting on Proposition 8 – the US$60 million battle over same-sex marriages. Despite the rather unsettling debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin in which both appeared to have the same stand on the gay issue, the Obama campaign’s official position is that it will not support a constitutional ban on gay marriages while the McCain ticket is divided. John McCain has said that states should be left to decide on the matter while Palin wants a federal marriage amendment defining marriage as between a man and woman.

Here’s a speech made by Michelle Obama at the LGBT conference of the Democratic National Conference back in August. This woman has such a regal presence and is an amazing orator.

And here’s the emotional speech made by the mayor of San Diego, Jerry Sanders, just before he signed a City Council resolution overturning a ban on gay marriages in September last year. Believe it or not, this guy is Republican.