The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, February 24

Jim Burroway

February 24th, 2015

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From ONE magazine, May 1955, page 24.

From ONE magazine, May 1955, page 24.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
President George Bush Backs Federal Marriage Amendment: 2004. With Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling that nothing short of marriage would provide full equality for same-sex couples as required in the state’s constitution (see May 17), and with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s order that the county clerk begin issuing marriage licenses to gay couples (see Feb 12), pressure had been building on President Goerge W. Bush, then running for a second term as President, to do something! And so, in lockstep with his conservative Christian base — and in keeping with his campaign strategist Karl Rove’s encouraging several important states (including, critically, Ohio) to place marriage bans on their ballots as part of a get-out-the-vote effort — Bush declared his support for the Federal Marriage Amendment, which, if enacted, would have permanently and nationally banished all same-sex marriages “or the legal incidents thereof.”

And in the typical black-is-white rhetoric that had become a hallmark of his administration, he blamed his decision on gay people. “After more than two centuries of American jurisprudence, and millennia of human experience, a few judges and local authorities are presuming to change the most fundamental institution of civilization,” he said. “Their actions have created confusion on an issue that requires clarity.”

Declaring that “the voice of the people must be heard,” he urged Congress to “promptly pass… an amendment to our Constitution defining and protecting marriage as a union of a man and woman as husband and wife,” during televised remarks from the White House’s Roosevelt Room. After urging that the nation consign gay Americans to permanent second-class citizenship, he called on the nation to begin the debate “without bitterness or anger.”

Log Cabin Republicans, who enthusiastically supported Bush four years ago after a closed-door meeting with the then-Texas governor, felt betrayed by the statement. Patrick Guerriero, executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, said. “Log Cabin considers support for this amendment a declaration of war on gay and lesbian families and an attack on our sacred Constitution.” LCR political director Chris Barron (he would later go on to co-found GOProud), would later comment, “It is impossible to overstate the depth of anger and disappointment caused by the president’s support for an anti-family constitutional amendment. This amendment would not only ban gay marriage, it would also jeopardize civil unions and domestic partnerships.” LCR would go on to withhold its endorsement of Bush for the 2004 election cycle.

Later in September, the proposed amendment would fail in the House, 227 to 186, with 290 votes needed to cross the two-thirds requirement to send a Constitutional Amendment to the States for ratification. The Senate had, by then, already failed to break a filibuster against the proposal.

L-R: Don Schmierer, Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundidge

American Evangelicals Announce Anti-Gay Conference In Uganda: 2009. BTB became the first Western outlet to discover and report the shocking announcement that Exodus International board member Don Schmierer and a little-known staffer at Richard Cohen’s International Healing Foundation, Caleb Lee Brundidge, would join Holocaust revisionist and anti-gay extremist Scott Lively for a three day conference in Kampala. Lively was already known to regular BTB readers for his involvement with the international anti-gay extremist group Watchmen On the Walls (not to be confused with an unrelated Family Research Council initiative by the same name) and for his book, The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party, in which he wrote that “the Nazi Party was entirely controlled by militaristic male homosexuals throughout its short history.” Knowing that Lively was bringing his brand of extremism to Uganda was very worrying. As I wrote at the time:

Lively’s brand of rhetoric is unusually vitriolic, even by some of the more ardent anti-gay standards. He regularly describes gays as being sick and“followers of the Father of Lies.” When the Watchmen On the Walls held a rally in Novosibirsk, Russia, Lively excused Satander Singh’s murder in Sacramento. Lively contends that “civilization and homosexuals” are engaged in a full-blown war, which is part of the Devil’s design to destroy civilizations.

The Kampala conference was organized by Steven Langa, director of Kampala-based Family Life Network. Lively had struck up a friendship with Langa during a tour of the African continent in 2002. Throughout the decade, Ugandan pastors adopted increasingly violent rhetoric against gay people, with one pastor, Martin Ssempa, leading hundreds of his followers in 2007 through the streets of Kampala demanding harsh punishments against gay people, and publishing the names and addresses of Ugandan gay rights advocates. Many were forced to go into hiding.

“Can anyone say AIDS?” Scott Lively calling AIDS a just punishment from God at an anti-gay conference in Kampala, Uganda, March 7, 2009.

With Lively’s incendiary rhetoric being thrown into the mix, I didn’t know what would happen but I feared the worst. My worst fears, however, were nothing compared to what actually followed: a long series of anti-gay meetings and rallies, vigilante campaigns, rising violence and blackmail which ultimately culminated in the introduction of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, otherwise known as the “Kill the Gays Bill,” in Uganda’s parliament in October, 2009. Lively, who had bragged that his 2009 conference was a “nuclear bomb against the gay agenda,” is being sued by Sexual Minorities Uganda in U.S. Federal Court under the Alien Tort Act. The lawsuit alleges that alleging that Lively engaged in a conspiracy to deny the LGBT community of their rights under International Law which caused harm to the LGBT community in Uganda.

Uganda’s parliament finally approved the Anti-Homosexualty Bill in December of 2013. The death penalty for so-called “aggravated homosexuality” has been removed and replaced with a life sentence (as though spending a lifetime in the notorious Luzira prison were any better). Other penalties included: lifetime imprisonment for entering into a same-sex marriage, seven years for conducting one, five to seven years for advocacy by or on behalf of LGBT people, five years for providing housing to LGBT people, and seven years for providing services to LGBT people. On February 23, 2014, five years to the day after the conference that started it all, President Yoweri Museveni signed the bill into law. There was one problem however: when parliament approved the bill in 2013, it did so without a proper quorum. That led Uganda’s Constitutional Court to nullify the Anti-Homosexuality Act in August. Since then, there has been promises to re-introduce the legislation back into parliament, but so far no such steps have been taken.

Since February 24, 2009, BTB has followed every twist and turn of the events in Uganda. Our compilation, Slouching Toward Kampala: Uganda’s Deadly Embrace of Hate, is a timeline and index of the nearly 600 posts that we have written documenting the events in Uganda since then. You can also follow our Uganda tag for more recent events.

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?

Eric Payne

February 24th, 2015

So, Jim, how an you write of one of the tactics that got the GOP base “out to vote” in 2004 without mentining its architect.

Yes, Bush/Cheney and Co. endorsed a federal “Protect Marriage” Constitutional Amendment to the federal constitution, the wording of which was based on several state constitutional amendments also on various ballots.

These initiatives were the brainchild of Ken Mehlman, an openly gay man who worked for W’s campaign.

Of course, when Mehlman eventually left/was forced out of government, he retired to a marriage equality state.

After all, he might meet somebody.

It’s difficult to believe there’s a healthy, out gay man who’d have such low self esteem as to date – much less bed – Mehlman… but, unfortunately, I know there are.

Hue-Man

February 24th, 2015

“The Ontario government has unveiled the first update to the province’s sex education curriculum since 1998.

Premier Kathleen Wynne has vowed that the updated curriculum will be in place in public and Catholic schools this September.”

The article describes the topics for each school grade, including:

“Grade 3 students will learn about same-sex relationships, while the physical, emotional and social impacts of puberty will move from Grade 5 to Grade 4.

In Grade 5, students will continue learning about puberty, including menstruation and spermatogenesis, and how these processes relate to reproduction.

Students in Grade 6 will learn about masturbation and “gender expression.” They will also be educated on how to build healthy relationships and consent.” http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2015/02/23/what-ontarios-students-will-learn-with-the-updated-sex-education-curriculum.html

Demonstrations against the proposals are planned for today but don’t have support from the opposition parties.

CPT_Doom

February 24th, 2015

Eric – Let’s not also forget Ms. Mary Cheney, who was running the VP operations for the 2004 campaign and was involved in, if not responsible for, the anti-gay marriage strategy. She also helped orchestrate the faux outrage when John Kerry mentioned the well-known fact that she is a lesbian.

She chose not to retire to an equality state, living in VA and choosing to have both her children in DC (to ensure her partner could adopt them) and then marrying here in DC when we legally recognized same-sex relationships (after having to wait for a Democratic majority in Congress). So she came into a jurisdiction where she pays not a dime of taxes and used her privilege to ensure she could access benefits and rights she deliberately denied others.

Raymond

February 24th, 2015

CPT_Doom,

What with all the GOP demagoguery, we sometimes forget that “gaming the system” is an upper-class invention.

Eric Payne

February 24th, 2015

CPT_Doom,

You want to hear/read something weird? I watched the GOP Convention the night Cheney was officially nominated to be the veep candidate… and I actually felt sorry for Mary Cheney, sitting out in the audience while her sister and father were onstage spouting their “traditional values” and “marriage protection” shit. Especially after Cheney officially accepted the nomination and he was (as the media put it) “joined onstage by his entire family.”

Except for Mary.

But I learned later of Mary’s own duplicity. Gay men and women who act like the Mehlmans, or the Cheneys or the Lopezes or the Pauliks — self-hating homos, as enough already puts it — make me want to vomit. Repeatedly.

Ben in oakland

February 25th, 2015

Eric, I prefer to use the term “homo-hating homos” to comvey just the right amount of well deserved contempt and alliterativeness.

Timothy Kincaid

February 25th, 2015

Eric,

I don’t believe you heard Dick Cheney “onstage spouting marriage protection shit”.

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/10/us/2000-campaign-republican-running-mate-cheney-s-marriage-remarks-irk.html

While he had not yet expressed his support for marriage equality (almost no one had), “protecting marriage” was not his schtick.

Eric Payne

February 25th, 2015

Timothy,

What I said was:

… and I actually felt sorry for Mary Cheney, sitting out in the audience while her sister and father were onstage spouting their “traditional values” and “marriage protection” shit.

During her very lengthy introduction of her father to the Convention, Liz Cheney extolled her father’s “traditional values” and also referenced “marriage being under attack.” All the while, the camera would pan from Liz onstage to Mary, in the audience. When Dickie came out, he did not say anything to indicate he had changed any of his views — which included support for a federal Constitutional marriage amendment.

Nor did he say/do anything at the end of his speech to invite Mary up on stage to join every other member of her family.

You don’t think that purposeful exclusion didn’t send a message, Tim? Seemed pretty clear to me: she’s a dyke, so she doesn’t count.

Timothy Kincaid

February 25th, 2015

Eric,

Thanks for the clarification. However, Cheney’s views did not include support for a federal Constitutional marriage amendment.

You can translate messages however you wish. But let’s shoot for accuracy in reporting facts.

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