Got Milk?

Today, May 22, 2010 is the first Harvey Milk Day in California.  Please don't stop reading. Please.  (If you want to know how I as a straight Christian came to become a gay rights supporter.  Click Here.)

This is a day of recognition that will occur every May 22nd, "in the state of California for gay-rights activist Harvey Milk, who was assassinated in 1978. Milk is only the second person in state history, after conservationist John Muir, to gain such a designation.  He is also the only openly gay person in the country to be honored with this designation.

Milk was an American politician who became the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, when he won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated less than a year later. Despite his short career in politics, Milk became an icon in San Francisco and "a martyr for gay rights", according to University of San Francisco professor Peter Novak.   In 2002, Milk was called 'the most famous and most significantly open LGBT official ever elected in the United States'.   Milk was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009." [Wikapedia]

The Senate Bill, SB 572,  for this day of commemoration was written and pushed through by Senator, Mark Leno who was in 2008 and is the first openly gay man to serve in the Senate.  Leno was previously one of the first two openly gay men (along with John Laird) to serve in the Assembly. He also served as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors between 1998 and 2002 after being appointed by Willie Brown.

Please watch the YouTube Video below to find out more about Harvey Milk, for he should be honored for being a gay man's achievements, but also what an example he was as champion for the rights of of the unheard, those who experience prejudice on all level and the disenfranchised.  He modeled what an advocate does to protect and make all voices heard.