WordPerfect founder Bruce Bastian pledges $100,000 to National Equality March

Photo by wickeden via flickr

Gay philanthropist Bruce Bastian has pledged $100,000 for next months National Equality March in Washington DC.

Bastian is the co-creator of the word processing program WordPerfect and the co-founder of the WordPerfect Corporation. He is also an ex-member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Prior to this, Bastian, a resident of Utah and a former native of Twin Falls, Idaho, donated $1 million to the Human Rights Campaign to help counter the effort pushing Proposition 8 last year.

In an interview with the Washington Blade yesterday, Bastian said he strongly believes his donations will jump-start the LGBT rights movement.

The money will be used to help provide port-a-potties and other infrastructure for the march.

While the march has not received the universal endorsement of the LGBT community it has received support from such main stream LGBT rights groups such as the HRC, and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force amongst others.

During the conference call on Monday, March organizer Cleve Jones said the march and a related conference for LGBT activists on Oct. 10, to be facilitated by the Human Rights Campaign, is attracting “incredible support” from the grass roots and noted that many of the people expected to join the march are promoting the two-day event through Internet social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

While organizers of the march have declined to predict how many people would be joining the event, a check by LGR of hotel and motel booking in the DC metro area last week shows that they are significantly up for the weekend of the scheduled Oct. 11 event and a contact with the U.S. Park Service Police here in DC says that agency is gearing up for an excess of 100,000 marchers

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