The South Bend Tribune Thinks Gay Couples Are Unfit for Print

It's a tradition for many, waking up early, putting on some slippers, pouring some coffee, and then opening up the pages of your local paper. There's the news, the comics, the horoscopes, and the listings of everyone who's applied for bankruptcy or gotten engaged. Standard newspaper fare, right?

Not in South Bend, Indiana, particularly when it comes to engagements. That's because The South Bend Tribune has a bunch of editors who think that the sight of same-sex couples getting engaged is enough to bring out the sick bag. Perhaps nobody knows that more than Mary Ponterio and Linda Bentz.

As the Human Rights Campaign covered this week (and a h/t to Bilerico's Donna Pandori as well), Ponterio and Bentz are a pretty amazing couple. They met while volunteering for LGBT organizations during the 2008 AIDS walk in Fort Wayne, Indiana. They've been in a relationship ever since, and have been extremely dedicated to the South Bend community. Ponterio and Bentz have even gotten engaged, and though Indiana doesn't recognize same-sex marriage, relatively nearby Iowa does (two states away), as do five other places in the U.S. (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Washington, D.C.).

Ponterio and Bentz wanted to announce their engagement to their friends, family and community. One of the ways they hoped to do that was by taking out a paid listing in The South Bend Tribune, which at a circulation of about 70,000 issues a day, not to mention over 90,000 on Sunday, is a pretty grand medium for announcing an engagement. Straight couples do it all the time, and The South Bend Tribune also publishes obituaries that include references to same-sex partners and significant others.

Yet when Ponterio and Bentz submitted their engagement advertisement for publication, they got the cold shoulder from The South Bend Tribune. Pressed for a reason why the engagement listing was rejected, The South Bend Tribune couldn't even turn to a written policy on engagement listings (they don't have one). Instead, it boiled down to the personal philosophy of the paper's editors. As Zack Pesavento with the Human Rights Campaign concluded, "This was just blatant, hideous discrimination on the part of The South Bend Tribune."

The South Bend Tribune certainly shouldn't be allowed to get away with this without hearing from the masses. Upset that a paper would turn down a same-sex couple for an engagement listing? Send The South Bend Tribune a message urging them to reconsider their discriminatory policy on engagement listings, and press them to allow Ponterio and Bentz the right to list their engagement. Yes, The South Bend Tribune is a private paper. But if they're going to openly discriminate against same-sex couples, they shouldn't expect to do so without some pointed criticism of their policies.

In many ways, this story is similar to a decision by Ohio-based newspaper chain Dix Communications in February of this year, where the company wouldn't allow a same-sex wedding announcement to be printed from a gay couple who had a legal gay marriage in Connecticut. Back then, the head of Dix Communications said that his newspapers reserve the right to refuse content they deem "inappropriate."

Looks like The South Bend Tribune is in agreement, that there's something "inappropriate" about two people who love each other. And that's a shame, because when the community could be celebrating the fact that two great women found each other, fell in love, and want to make a lifetime commitment to one another, instead everyone is left with a sour taste in their mouth. Here is a leading paper in Indiana, sending the message that some relationships are more valuable than others.

Send The South Bend Tribune an email, urging them to print same-sex engagement announcements. They have nothing to lose by doing so; in fact, because folks have to pay to list their engagement, one could argue that financially speaking, The South Bend Tribune has everything to gain. But beyond just financial reasons, it's also the right thing to do. Indiana couples shouldn't have to be invisible inside state newspapers.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons