Focus on Family, Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, and other supposedly pr0-family Christian groups have launched a full-fledged attack on the Matthew Shephard Act currently before the Senate (the House version passed in March).
What will this law do? It will strengthen already existing federal hate crime law by adding perceived gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, and disability to the current categories of race, color, religion, and national origin, and by no longer restricting it to crimes that take place while the victim was in the act of performing a federally protected act, like voting or going to school.
Now, I can see how someone might argue that hate crimes legislation doesn’t work or isn’t necessary. I don’t happen to agree with them, but I could see that. But in that case they would have to argue for getting rid of all hate crime laws, not just ones that add sexual orientation and gender identity. That’s not what Dobson and Friends are doing.
No, instead, they’re scaring their base by shouting far and wide that the Matthew Shephard Act will restrict Christians’ freedom of speech and make it a crime for clergy to preach that homosexuality is a sin.
Bullshit.
They know that’s not true. If their sheep would read the actual act instead of opening wide and swallowing, they would know it’s not true as well. Read the rest of this entry »
I believe Obama is a smart man. I hope when he watches this back, which I know he will, he’ll see the sad irony that, in the middle of a discussion about reducing the stigma of HIV testing, he felt the need to rush in to assert his heterosexuality and make a joke out of the idea he could be gay or bi.
Of course then Biden had to add that he got tested for a “good” reason, too.
So now there are “good” reasons to get tested and “bad” reasons? You can still be a real man if you get tested because of blood transfusions or to make a political point, but if it’s because of sex it’s bad?
This reminds me of when people talk about people with AIDS who got it through blood transfusions in a way that suggests that somehow they deserved it less. Do others deserve it more? Isn’t that buying into the notion that disease is a punishment for sin? How far do you have to go from that to Jerry Falwell’s assertion that AIDS was God’s vengeance on gays? By the way, how did Falwell account for lesbians? Could it be that he believed that God loves us, or did he just forget we exist, like so many do.
I’ve been trying all week to write a post about Dick Cheney, but it just isn’t working. There’s too much. Any outrage, disbelief, or fear seems over the top because he’s over the top.
It started with the Washington Post’s 4-part feature on The Cheney Vice Presidency, looking at the incredible power Cheney exercises and the disturbing level of secrecy he enforces.
As if this weren’t enough, the Oversight and Government Reform committee (chaired by Henry Waxman) released a report on the “shadow government” of federal contractors and the spiraling increases in the money they’re sucking from our government. The biggest winner? Cheney’s own Halliburton, of course. The biggest loser? Us.
By the time you get to reading about the man-sized safes Cheney keeps in his office, all you can do is laugh until you cry.
By the way, supposedly Cheney’s stock options in Halliburton rose 3281% just this past year. Supposedly, he’s going to give all his profits to charity. So I wonder which charity is going to get that $8 million. I suppose it’s not Freedom To Marry.
Speaking of which, it’s funny that the Christian right is so disturbed that Baby Samuel has two mommies and no daddy. If they had any sense, they’d be afraid for the poor kid having a grandfather who probably has baby-sized safes somewhere in his office.
“The concern became that any kind of ballot initiative was going to be very unpleasant and that there would be vituperative and vicious kinds of allegations and nobody’s children — the children of the Commonwealth don’t need to hear that about their parents or their neighbors or their teacher or anybody else,” she said. “Many of these same-gender couples have adopted children and have for years [adopted] children no other couples wanted. Children who have severe challenges and they’ve done amazing things with those children. They’ve built families with those children. And I don’t want those children to ever feel less than or second best.”
Candaras noted that her staff tracked every communication that came into her office regarding the amendment. She said she received about 6800 calls, emails and letters urging her to vote against the amendment and just 500 communications from those who wanted her to support it. “People are becoming more educated about these issues,” Candaras said.
Candaras related the story of a constituent who had previously urged her to support the amendment but had recently called to say she had changed her mind: “Another woman in my district said to me, ‘I asked you to put this on the ballot so I can vote … but since then, Gale, this lovely couple, these two men moved in next door to me and they have a couple of children and they’re married and they help me with my lawn.’”
Stories like those, she added, moved her the most. “Older individuals who had asked me to let them vote the last time and who had changed their minds,” were the most influential to her decision-making process, she said. “When you get more than one or two of those” it’s noticeable.
The Massachusetts Constiutional Convention starts at 1:00. They’ll be voting on a possible amendment that would take away the marriage rights they have in Mass. They need 50 of 200 votes for the amendment to go forward. The governor, Deval Patrick, has been working hard to defeat it.
My friend Jenn wanted to try her hand at blogging too, so I’ve added her to this account and she’ll be posting along with me. Once I figure out how to make it tell which one of us is posting.
Today is the 40th anniversary of the charmingly named Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court verdict that struck down state laws against interracial marriage. The case involved Richard and Mildred Loving, who married in 1958 in Washington, DC, where their marriage was legal, but then moved to Virginia, where interracial unions were a crime punishable by up to a year in jail. They were convicted, but spared jail and instead banished from Virginia for 25 years by trial judge Leon Bazile. Yes, banished. How medieval. The ACLU and the NAACP took up the case and pushed it to the Supreme Court, where a unanimous decision struck down the Virginia law and the laws of 16 other states still clinging to state-sanctioned discrimination (although South Carolina and Alabama held on to their unenforceable laws until just a few years ago).
In some ways it’s hard to believe that within my lifetime, such marriages were illegal in many states. In other ways, it’s not hard to believe at all.
It’s not hard to believe that a judge could use the Bible to justify discrimination, as in Judge Bazile’s infamous quote:
Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix. Read the rest of this entry »
There are a lot of arguments for and against marriage equality, but a few in particular that are being used repeatedly by the presidential candidates. They’ve become such standard answers that no one seems to even question them anymore.
After my blog yesterday criticizing the press for not questioning candidates when they utter misleading statements or give pat answers that couldn’t bear much scrutiny (but luckily for them don’t ever have to), I figured it was only right that I would try to challenge some of the nice-sounding but false justifications they give for denying full equality to LGBT citizens.
This post will be the first in a series, each looking at one of the major arguments.
Paul Krugman has an excellent column in today’s New York Times about press coverage of the presidential debates. Here’s the opening:
In Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday.
Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the “gaffe of the night”?
Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit.
After watching Bill Moyer’s special, “Buying the War,” on the Washington press corps’ complicity in perpetuating mistruths about the Iraq War, I had hoped that maybe they would be shamed into doing their job. I’m losing that hope. Read the rest of this entry »
