LGBT feud with Arkansas newspaper heats up

I posted about this last week – the Arkansas newspaper that omitted a surviving same-sex spouse in an obituary, then defended the decision by saying they don’t list pets, either.

From Reuters: (Reuters) – A battle between gay rights groups and an Arkansas newspaper over an obituary is picking up steam after a near-truce fell apart. After saying they would review their policy banning the inclusion of life partners in free obits, the Batesville Daily Guard’s newspaper executives published an editorial defending the policy. Now the protests are going forward, and the central figure in the controversy, the gay life partner of a man who died from spinal meningitis, is threatening legal action from a hospital bed. “I want a hundred times more now than I did at the beginning of all of this, which was just to have my name listed,” Terence James told Reuters on Monday. James has been diagnosed with the same illness that killed his partner, John Millican, on June 11. Oscar Jones, the newspaper’s attorney, told Reuters on Monday that the policy was still being reviewed and that it was “a process,” not something they could do overnight.
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