It’s been almost 31 years since Dan White took Harvey Milk from us, and who knows where we would be now if he were still with us. Harvey’s courage and wisdom would have guided us though the AIDS crisis here in San Francisco and the growing gay rights movement that followed. He would have been 79-years-young today.

Even though Governor Schwarzenegger has yet to sign a bill instituting Harvey Milk Day, there’s no reason why we can’t celebrate it. California Ripple Effect put together a great list of things we could do to honor Harvey’s memory…

• For starters, let’s make it official. Make sure you’ve added your name to the petition urging Gov. Schwarzenegger to sign Harvey Milk Day into law at www.eqca.org/HarveyMilkDay.
• If you’re in Sacramento, you can join your LGBT Caucus on the North Lawn of the Capitol for a Harvey Milk birthday celebration tomorrow from 11:30 to 1 p.m.
• A grassroots group has also organized candlelight vigils tomorrow night across the state to mark the occasion.
• If you want to tuck in with a good movie, or organize a screening for your friends, there are two excellent Oscar-winning flicks about Harvey Milk’s life, the documentary Times of Harvey Milk and Gus Van Sant’s Milk starring Sean Penn.
• Finally, wish those you see tomorrow a “Happy Harvey Milk Day”. This is a great opportunity to share his story with someone new if they don’t know it.

I’ll close with Harvey’s famous “Hope” speech, used so eloquently in the video below. And where ever your are Harvey, Happy Birthday!

SaveCalifornia.com is a pro-family, anti-gay group leading an effort to derail SB 572 which would institute an official Harvey Milk Day here in California. Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man to serve in political office, and was later gunned down by former city council member Dan White at San Francisco City Hall in 1978.

SaveCalifornia.com is urging concerned parents to send an email to Governor Schwarzenegger which describes all the horrible things that will happen to their children if SB 572 is passed, including:

SB 572 pressures public schools — from kindergarten on up — to perform “suitable commemorative exercises” promoting what homosexual activist Harvey Milk believed in: the entire homosexual, bisexual, and transsexual agenda and anti-religious values.

If SB 572 becomes law, schoolchildren would have positively portrayed to them homosexual experimentation, homosexual “marriages,” sex-change operations, and anything else that’s “in the closet.”

All doors of sexual experimentation MUST be opened: “If a bullet should go through my head let that bullet go through every closet door.”

SaveCalifornia.com is led by anti-gay bigot Randy Thomasson. There’s plenty of dirt on him over at goodasyou.com so I won’t repeat it here.

Milk screenwriter Lance Black testified in Sacramento today supporting SB 572. To counter SaveCalifornia.com, please sign this petition at Equality California urging the governor to support Harvey Milk Day.

To get an unpleasant taste of what SaveCalifornia.com is all about, watch the video below:

[pro-player width=’480′ height=’200′ type=’FLV’ image=’https://inlookout.com/video/savecalifornia.jpg’]https://inlookout.com/video/savecalifornia.flv[/pro-player]

As horrible as it sounds, I’ve always taken a small measure of comfort in thinking Anita Bryant, who worked so tirelessly in the 70s to strip gays and lesbians of their human rights and reduce them to second class citizens, was no longer with us. Which is not the same as wishing them dead, not exactly anyway.

I guess I’ve been living under a rock. I was wrong. Terribly wrong.

And it looks like she may be up to her old tricks and more… (via Gossip Boy)

And in case we need to be reminded…

Inspiring words from Cleve Jones, friend of Harvey Milk and advisor to the film Milk, speaks prior to the Eve of Equality march in San Francisco on March 4, 2009.

Hearings start at 9am PST this morning and can be seen online at the websites below:

SFGTV
The California Channel
SFist
Yes on Equality

Video clips will be posted here later today.