Pinko notes

Here's a handful of things that would have been dangerous (at least professionally) for me to have expressed during large portions of the 20th Century.

1. This video has been bouncing around the liberal blogosphere (I watched it at Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog). In it, Rachel Maddow picks apart the arguments of Richard A. Cohen, an author and therapist who treats patients who don't want to be gay. His writings have been repeatedly cited by the Ugandan proponents of laws to criminalize and severely punish (including the death penalty) homosexuality in that country. Maddow clearly disagrees with him, and does not mince words, but is well-prepared, specific and respectful, letting him defend himself and his work to the extent that he can. Imagine the alternatives, an O'Reilly or Olberman type, hectoring their guest without letting them get a word in, or an overly-deferential Meet the Press kind of exchange that takes the guest's qualifications and assertions at face value.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Update: SIDEBAR! Pastor Rick Warren, who has also drawn flak for his associations with the Ugandans pushing the anti-gay legislation, to his credit, has strongly spoken out against it.

2. The American Civil Liberties Union has lost the financial support for the next year of a major donor who would have been giving on the order of $20 million. The ACLU's annual operating budget is apparently only about four times that, so this is a huge hit for them. The organization is a truly non-partisan one; if you have political opinions of any kind, chances are they've been fierce defenders of and litigants against people with whom you hold common cause. They've taken up causes to the agitation of conservatives and liberals alike. But I am of the opinion that their work, to "defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and laws of the United States guarantee everyone in this country," is vital.

If you want to help support the ACLU, you can donate at their web site. As a commenter at Balloon Juice points out, if you give, you get to call yourself a "card-carrying member of the ACLU." And then George H.W. Bush can repeatedly point that out as if it's a bad thing when you run for president against him in 1988. I was a member for a year or two early in the decade. Perhaps it's time to re-join.

3. Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA) fisks the NYTimes op-ed by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) defending his amendment to the House health care bill regarding coverage of abortion.

Marriage Equality in NY

I know you can't swing a dead cat on the internet today without hitting this clip of NY State Sen. Savino, but it is such a good speech that if one of you few who read this blog haven't seen it and watch it here, then the relink is worth it. As you may know, the NY legislature earlier this week voted to approve gay marriage in the state, as they have done twice before. Yesterday the state senate took up the measure. Sadly, it was defeated, 38-24.



Two of the more interesting reactions I've read to the vote are:

Here, a good overview of the vote and the background to it from Gay City News. I guess a number of Republicans had privately expressed their support for marriage equality. Not a single Republican voted for it. And several of the nay-voting Democrats have benefited greatly from gay support. As Andrew Sullivan notes, all but one (the Democratic Pentecostal minister from Brooklyn) of the Nay votes did not say a second word about their vote on the floor.

Here, where DougJ at Balloon Juice, a Democratic resident of a Republican-represented district of Upstate NY, expresses his confusion about why his otherwise gay-friendly Senator would vote against this. He correctly points out that fighting equality isn't just socially backward; it's economically backward.

Awful piece on marriage, gay and otherwise

With a hat tip to Isaac Chotiner at The New Republic, whose post alerted me to this editorial, I'd like in turn to draw your attention to a terrible piece of writing on marriage. It's by one Sam Schulman at the conservative website/magazine The Weekly Standard, and is full to brimming with head-slappingly ridiculous claims about marriage between people of different sexes and the same sex. If you don't read all of Schulman's work, read Chotiner's post to get the flavor.

To be honest, I have a tough time with my feelings about the piece. On the one hand, my reaction is so strongly and immediately negative, and almost everything Schulman writes seems wrong in such a glaring, obvious way that it could be dismissed as a self-made straw man of sorts, an extreme outlier. At the same time, however, he lays bare a major undercurrent I've always noted in the arguments against marriage equality: the desire of social conservatives to preserve "traditional" gender roles in heterosexual relationships. How can you keep the work/homemaking spheres separated, after all, if the married couple in question is two ladies or -- added ickyness! -- two dudes?

The answer to those like me who believe in making your home life in the way that you and your loved ones see fit* is that you don't, or need not, keep the spheres separate unless you choose to do so for yourselves. And so, I look at a paragraph like this one Schulman cobbled together from the bones of the past, and after every sentence, I find myself flatly negating the statement he just made:

Even in modern romantic marriages, a groom becomes the hunting or business partner of his father-in-law and a member of his clubs; a bride becomes an ally of her mother-in-law in controlling her husband. There can, of course, be warm relations between families and their children's same-sex partners, but these come about because of liking, sympathy, and the inherent kindness of many people. A wedding between same-sex lovers does not create the fact (or even the feeling) of kinship between a man and his husband's family; a woman and her wife's kin. It will be nothing like the new kinship structure that a marriage imposes willy-nilly on two families who would otherwise loathe each other.

The assumtion of universality, the "one-size-fits-all" of his model of marriage is staggering. It's not that a groom might partner with his father in law, it's that he does. No he doesn't, Mr. Schulman. It's like he got his idea of family and marriage from all the old comic strips that newspapers only keep to avoid receiving nasty letters from septugenarians.

I feel that mentioning, as Schulman does, that he's been married thrice, is scoring easy points. Honestly, if I didn't think someone would read his piece and bring this fact up in a comment, I'd leave it out.

Anyway, I feel like today is a good day to celebrate marriages of all kinds, as it is Melissa's and my second anniversary. The first two years have been wonderful, and I'm looking forward to many pairs of years more!

* (So long as nobody is being harmed! Gay and non-traditional straight marriages are not a slippery slope to legal incest, bestiality, and polygamy.)

More Public Policy: Marriage Equality

Big congratulations to Iowa (state of my beloved alma mater and its terrible web page) for taking a major step for equality on Friday with the State Supreme Court decision that restricting marriage to heterosexual couples violates equal protection under the law.

This has been covered in more depth by better-informed correspondents elsewhere, but I wanted to share a couple of things:
1. That this happened smack in the middle of the Midwest is wonderful, and makes me hope for a positive effect in neighboring states (*coughMinnesotacough*).
2. The way things work in Iowa, this cannot be easily dumped in the next election cycle by a public proposition for a constitutional amendment. Amending the Iowa constitution is much more difficult than California, where Prop. 8 needed only a simple majority to pass.
3. More specifically, the SOONEST an amendment could be voted on by the public would be 2012, and that presupposes that the current state legislature act on it now. Which isn't going to happen, because Democratic Majority Leader Mike Gronstal will not play ball. This is great:



So it looks like this will stand for a while. Hotbed of liberals, that Iowa.

Meanwhile, in Vermont, the state legislature is in the process of passing marriage rights for same-sex couples, and the Republican governor has vetoed it, because it would be a "distraction" from more important issues in this time of economic trouble. Zuh? That veto may be overridden tomorrow, but the vote looks pretty tight.

Update! They did it! Well met, Vermont! VT is now the first state to achieve marriage equality legislatively. So, no talk about activist judges overturning the will of the people here...

Election Reaction: Proposition 8

The most disappointing result of Tuesday night was the passage of Proposition 8 in California, which amended the state's constitution to ban same-sex marriage. The margin by which it passed (52.3% to 47.7) was surprising, given that in the last weeks before Election Day, polls showed the measure failing by about the same difference.

Some notes:

1. Why is it that in California, ballot items that involve tax or spending issues seem to take a supermajority to pass, but amending the constitution needs only a simple 50%+1 majority? This seems hopelessly backwards.

2. Thankfully, the CA Attorney General has stated that the approximately 18,000 same-sex couples who married this year will remain married. Here's hoping that continues to stand, and that the normalcy of those marriages continues to undermine claims that gay marriage somehow endangers the sanctity of heterosexual unions. Of course, the way that opponents of equality have lied and spun statistics (Sweden is dying, you know!) thus far, perhaps this is wishful thinking.

3. It is disappointing that two particularly high-profile opponents of the amendment didn't do more to stop it. Barack Obama and Gov. Arnold Schwartzanegger both voiced their opposition to the proposition, but did not campaign against it. I find it hard to believe either that their voices wouldn't have at least made up some of the difference OR that spending this bit of capital would have harmed them politically enough to make a difference for their respective electoral chances. Grow a backbone, people.

4. Early exit polls suggested that African-Americans might have made the difference in passing the bill, but subsequent analysis seems to prove otherwise, though it is true that, of ethnic groups, African American voters in California showed the largest proportion of support for Prop. 8 (about 70%).

5. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, officially, as an organization, poured money into the Yes-on-8 effort in California, and encouraged its supporters to do the same. Mitt Romney recently explained why:

[S]everal months ago, not long before he died, I had the occasion of having the Rev. Jerry Falwell at our home. He said that when he was getting ready to oppose same-sex marriage in California, he met with the president of my church in Salt Lake City, and they agreed to work together in a campaign in California.

Romney's difficulties in the Republican primaries came in part from being a Mormon in a party dominated by a religious base distrustful of that religion. Was this agreement by the Church of LDS a way to buy respect from the religious right? Gross.

Note that not all Mormons were willing to follow the Church's lead. Hall-of-Fame 49'er Steve Young, a Mormon, contributed and campaigned for the No-on-8 efforts. Here's hoping that he can continue to be a strong example. It's disturbing to see the official institution of an entire faith group play politics in such a hateful, discriminatory way, but heartening to see that some of their membership is bucking the leadership.

On this last note, Todd Zywicki at the Volokh Conspiracy wrote an either under-informed or under-honest post painting the marriage equality supporters in California who have taken out their frustration by picketing at a Mormon temple as mindless bigots. He trots out the misleading exit polls and suggests the protests would be more accurately (but "less-politically-correctly") pointed at black churches. Even with two updates, he does not address the very substantial role that the Mormon Church played in the passage of Proposition 8. His blogging colleage Dale Carpenter, who writes often about gay rights, had a much more on-point post discouraging people from tarring all Mormons with the same brush, while still encouraging drawing attention to the church's actions and making constructive suggestions as to useful projects for protest.

6. One lesson I'm personally taking from the Proposition 8 campaigns in California is that it isn't enough to argue against these marriage amendments, as the No On 8 campaigns did, from a perspective that says "no matter what you think of marriage, we shouldn't put discrimination in the constitution." That may be true, but it isn't the point, nor is it the whole point that supporters of 8 lied in suggesting that kids will be indoctrinated or recruited. The point is that America needs to get past thinking of gay people and their relationships as necessarily icky. There is nothing icky about a committed monogamous relationship that seeks to grow deeper with time. What those of us proudly allied with the gay rights movement seek is not somehow special or unique, but the same boring stuff to which the rest of us are already blessed to have access. Tuesday was a setback. But it's not the end of the story. Onward and upward.