Newspaper opens up to same-sex marriage notices after denied couple fights back on Facebook
”If a pig would have flown by me then, I couldn’t have been more surprised. I felt I was punched in the stomach. I hung up the phone in disbelief – cried about it. For the first time, I felt discrimination.”
Jeff Wilke, an Omaha, NE area father, explaining his reaction when told that the Omaha World Herald newspaper would not print an engagement notice for his daughter, Kristy Wilke, because she is a lesbian, and the paper’s policy was not to publish same-sex marriage announcements. His family decided to go public with their rejection, and they started a Facebook group that received over 2,500 members, ”Omaha World Herald Denies GBLT Equal Rights”. It is reported that Kristy Wilke’s great, great, great, great grandfather founded that newspaper in 1885. (KPTM Fox 42)
”Today we are changing that practice and setting the record straight on our approach generally toward gay and lesbian issues.
”The ”Celebrations” page of the Omaha World-Herald has provided a place to buy space to celebrate weddings, engagements, anniversaries and birthdays. It will continue to be just that. Celebrations announcements regarding legal weddings… regardless of the genders of the couple. We will not run… non-marriage unions, again regardless of gender.
”Our sense is that this change will provide for a public “celebration” of important milestones in the lives of people who take the significant steps toward legally sanctioned marriage. Iowa and four other states as well as the District of Columbia have legalized same-sex marriages. We will publish Celebrations announcements of marriages from those jurisdictions.
”Last week, Omaha businessman Jeff Wilke called me about placing an announcement for the planned union of his daughter, Kristy, and Jessica Kitzman…. Instead, the matter went public on Facebook and generated a firestorm among folks who care passionately about the issue. So, given that Kristy and Jessica’s plans were the genesis of this controversy, let me pause here to congratulate them on their plans.”
Part of an announcement by Terry Kroeger, Publisher of the Omaha World-Herald, announcing a change in the paper’s stated policy of not printing marriage announcements for gay and lesbian couples. Kroeger also uses the opportunity to defend his publication from crticism, saying that the paper has published both political news and lifestyle articles about gay issues, and that the his paper may have been slow to react, but has never been hateful. (Omaha.com)
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