Harvey Milk Day: Happening!
 

The governator signed the bill to honor Harvey Milk.

D'oh! Thanks for the link!

I'm fine with the day, but saying he was assassinated because he was gay seems a bit of a stretch. Why was Moscone assassinated?

This sentence saddens me (for reasons that have nothing to do with Milk, the governor or gay rights.

In large part, because Harvey Milk was gay.

Methinks Alex needs to put "Milk" on his Netflix list. I know he has been dying to see James Franco make out with another guy. ;)

The movie suggests Harvey Milk was assassinated because Dan White was gay.

Yes, I've seen Milk. It very much portrays a gay man who was killed. Not so much a man who was killed because he was gay.

I don't think we can ever know. In one sense, since it was a political assassination - it might be fair to assume Milk being gay had something to do with it in the same way it would be fair to assume an assassination of Obama had something to do with him being black.

Of course, this killing was done by someone who knew Milk - so it could be argued it was a murder, and not "even" an assassination.
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If we're going to generally consider it an assassination, I think it's fair to also credit his main issue as among the motives

Dan White was a resentful homophobe, who grew up in the old Irish cop neighborhoods of SF and hated seeing his vision of the world being co-opted by the "other." It's been a few years since I've read the books on the subject, but I definitely took away from them the idea that, had Harvey not been gay, White wouldn't have assassinated him. Moscone was part of the problem because, after all, if Moscone hadn't tolerated Harvey, Harvey wouldn't have had the job in the first place.

Or is this some "Jesus rode around on dinosaurs, and you can't prove he didn't" type of argument?