July 2nd, 2011
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Cologne, Germany; Helsinki, Finland; London, UK; Los Angeles, CA (Black Pride); Marseilles, France; and Toronto, ON.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
State Department Fires 381 Homosexuals: 1953. In the early 1950s, the entire country was in the grips of the Red Scare as Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy was conducting his witch hunts. One of his main platforms would be the Senate’s Subcommittee on the Investigation of Loyalty of State Department Employees. While McCarthy’s main targets were imaginary Communists in the State Department, gay employees were also seen as “subversives” in need of rooting out. Among the more high-profile targets was Samuel Reber, a twenty-seven year career diplomat who announced his retirement in May of 1953 after McCarthy charged that he was a “security risk” — which was a barely-concealed code for homosexual. By then, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had already responded to McCarthy’s witch hunt by signing an executive order mandated the firing of all federal employees who were found guilty of “sexual perversion.” He also announced a re-organization of the State Department. Rep. Charles B Brownson, an Indiana Republican with his own lesser-known witch hunt underway in the House Government Operations Committee, asked the State Department for a progress report in rooting out homosexuals. On July 2, 1953, the State Department’s chief security officer R.W. Scott McLeod revealed that 351 homosexuals and 150 other “security risks” had been fired between 1950 and 1953.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Dee Palmer: 1937. Jethro Tull fans would know her as composer and keyboardist David Palmer. She had provided orchestral arrangements for several significant Jethro Tull albums, including Aqualung and Thick as a Brick before joining the band as a full time musician in 1976. At the time, she presented herself as an eccentric Englishman, complete with a Sherlock Holmes pipe and a beard. She remained with the band until it broke up in 1980 over Ian Andersion’s decision to release a solo album under the Jethro Tull name.
She was also married. He had told Maggie about her transgender feelings on their second date, and Maggie was accepting. “All of my time with Maggie was blissfully happy,” she later recalled. But after her wife died in 1998, Dee was left alone to confront her sense that something was wrong. “Once she died I sat in the kitchen looking down the garden for a year, then gradually from the outermost part of my body and soul where I had consigned what I was to learn was gender dysphoria started to reassert itself as something that I had to deal with again.”
She finally decided it was time to act on the feelings that she had been having since the age of three. She changed her name to Dee in 2000 and underwent gender reassignment in 2004. The whole process for her was very difficult. “It isn’t for wimps by the way … And it isn’t for people who want to wear a frock and prance around masquerading as a female. It’s nothing to do with that, it’s a light year away from that.” Now that she has transitioned, she feels liberated, and lives with a sense that there was nothing left to hold her back. “it is like jumping from a parachute. At first it’s very easy, but then suddenly the ground is coming up at you and you can’t stop until you’ve reached the end; it’s very much that kind of experience – your writing and performance will take on new dimensions.” Today, Dee is a solo artist and a classical composer who wants nothing more than to be judged on her musical abilities alone.
Johnny Weir: 1984. The famous American figure skater is a three-time U.S. National Champion (2004–2006) and a the 2008 Worlds Championship bronze medalist, although for a number of reasons, his Olympic appearances in 2006 and 2010 were disappointing. When he appeared at the 2010 U.S. Championships wearing fox fur as part of his costume, he began to receive death threats from animal rights activists. He defended his decision to wear fur as “a personal choice,” but decided to remove the fur from his costume. By the time the 2010 Winter Olympics came around in Vancouver, he had to change his housing arrangement due to security concerns.
Weir was always a bit different — including the fact that he spins clockwise instead of counter-clockwise like most other figure skaters. He was long suspected of being gay — as are probably most male figure skaters. The fact that he designed some of his own skating costumes in a very androgynous style didn’t do much to quell the rumors. But for most of his career, he preferred to leave the questions unanswered. “It’s not part of my sport and it’s private,” he’d say. But when he published his memoir Welcome to My World earlier this year, he finally came out as gay. He said his decision to come out was prompted by a string of suicides in 2010. “With people killing themselves and being scared into the closet, I hope that even just one person can gain strength from my story.”
If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. PLEASE, don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).
July 1st, 2011
Mission America’s Linda Harvey thinks we just simply shouldn’t be allowed:
Our President has launched a broad scale attack on traditional values. If homosexuals and transgenders are allowed to live and love as they see fit, we would have a whole societal mess on our hands, which is already starting to happen in some areas. We’re already seeing the denial of liberty, intimidation tactics, and flat out dirty tricks in the effort to silence concerned citizens, especially Christians. And I’m sure many of you are as dismayed as I am over our hyper-sexualized culture, well homosexual activism only puts that trend on steroids.
July 1st, 2011
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, former White House Chief of Staff for Barack Obama, was asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about marriage equality. Emanuel discussed Illinois’ civil unions, which just went into effect, say that his state may go further towards marriage equality soon. “I would hope that the state would move in that direction…Tremendous progress has been made across the country on a value statement and I think that’s very important.” Emanuel refused to comment on whether Obama’s “evolving” position is important or not, but instead emphasized the progress that has been made for LGBT equality under his administration.
July 1st, 2011
Tom McClusky, Vice President for Government Affairs for Family “Research” Council, is furious — furious! that the Republican National Committee has tapped Log Cabin Republicans Executive Director R. Clarke Cooper to serve on its Finance Committee, where, according to an RNC news release “he will be playing a critical role in raising funds for the party’s efforts to elect Republicans to the White House and across the country.” McClusky is spitting bullets, telling his readers that they “should NEVER donate to the Republican Party” (all CAPS his). American Family Association trots out its concern troll as well.
These developments come on the same day in which Mike Huckabee (!) complained that the GOP has become too focused on ideological purity:
I’m not sure a guy like me can win in the atmosphere of the current Republican party. We’ve become a party of such fractured purity. It’s all or nothing, now or never. It’s not whether the government functions, it’s whether the government is ideologically pure.
July 1st, 2011
As promised, the Red Sox video was released this morning:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOkWfueTNjkJuly 1st, 2011
The respected analyst Nate Silver has a major piece at The New York Times’ blog about the prospects for marriage bans if they were brought up today on the ballot. It’s worth a read. He uses two models based on public opinion polls, and based on those models, he says that in Maine, where LGBT advocates have announced a drive to place marriage equality back on the ballot for 2012, voters are predicted to approve same-sex marriage just three years after rejecting it by about six percentage points. But it’s worth recalling that in 2009, Silver also thought the ban on same-sex marriage would fail:
When we last discussed this model, it gave Maine’s Question 1 — which reversed the State Legislature’s decision to provide for same-sex marriage — a 3-in-4 chance of being defeated. In fact, the measure won and same-sex marriage was repealed in Maine, although the results were close and within the model’s margin of error. (There’s more discussion of the Maine result here.)
He’s done a lot of tweaks to his model since then, and he now believes that Maine — and California — would have a shot at overturning their marriage bans. According to Nate’s analysis, Maine has a better prospect of overturning its ban than California does. But the one thing that his model cannot predict is the effectiveness of the two particular campaigns — the pro-equality and anti-gay sides — to shape the messages and motivate voters who are much more interested in other things. And the other thing to keep in mind, is that this is only a model. Models can only try to predict the future, about the same way your local meteorologist tries to predict the future, using very sophisticated computer models based on weather patterns. There still remains that nasty margin of error, and Silver doesn’t disclose the possible impacts of that error.
But even if the models were perfect, it’s still up to the campaigns themselves to turn those predictions into reality. And as I mentioned yesterday, it’s worth raising the questions of what kind of a campaign they intend to run this time around. I’m sure Maine’s LGBT advocates have learned quite a few lessons since 2009, but if they are relying on the perception that they’ve changed a lot of minds in their d0or-to-door grassroots campaigns since then, then I worry that we are setting ourselves up for a very expensive fall again.
Don’t get me wrong. I wholeheartedly support every LGBT American who is willing to stand up and fight for our rights. Maine has my complete support. But I think that a key part of supporting a campaign is the ask the hard questions, particularly where we’ve seen mistakes before. And the biggest mistakes we have made in the past, we’ve made repeatedly, not just in Maine.
Mistakes is a loaded word, so let me clarify further: in raising these issues, it’s not my intention to question the commitment or competence of those who ran past campaigns. They worked their hearts out, and did the best jobs they could possibly do with the information they had at that time. The mistakes that were made were not, I believe, a reflection of their competence — when those mistakes are made the first time. But if they are repeated again, then it will truly be the case that we only have ourselves to blame.
Having said that, I think the mistakes we made in the past centered on three critical questions we failed to ask.
Question 1: What do voters really care about?
Here’s the first hint: It’s not same-sex marriage. Frank Schubert, who ran the Maine’s 2009 anti-gay campaign as well as the California’s pro-Prop 8 campaign recognized that fact early on. As former U.S. House Speaker Tip O’Niel famously said, all politics are local. Schubert recognized that politics aren’t just local, but personal. It hinges on the question, “How will this affect me?” Karen Ocamb’s brilliant analysis of the California campaign, which should be mandatory reading for everyone, describes very carefully how Schubert came to this conclusion:
During the Prop 8 Case Study workshop, Schubert said he, Flint and their team spent hours “looking at where people were and what we needed to do to reach them.”
What they found was that most Californians were very tolerant of same sex relationships. Schubert said:
“They didn’t see how gay marriage effected them, per se. It wasn’t their issue. It wasn’t something they cared to think about. It wasn’t something they wanted to talk about. It was an uncomfortable subject generally for them event to get their arms around.”
Karen wrote that analysis in 2009 as a warning to Maine, a warning that was not heeded. I still think her analysis is just as germane today as it was two years ago. If we really want to win these battles, we need to begin with an understanding of this important but uncomfortable truth: Nobody cares about same-sex marriage.
Yes, I exaggerate. Everyone has an opinion about same-sex marriage. But nobody cares about it in the personally imperative sense simply because it is something that just doesn’t affect them. A lot of people care about global warming, but we’re not exactly seeing hybrid and electric cars flying off the dealers’ lots or solar panels sprouting on rooftops.
When people go to the pols, we cannot expect them to base their vote on altruism. People vote on how an issue affects them personally. And until we make the issue about something they have a personal stake in rather than a relatively abstract notion of fairness and equality (both are politically meaningless concepts: even bigots think they’re fair and open-minded), we’re not going to really get their attention.
Question 2: What do voters really care about?
That question is the same as question 1. Notice a pattern here? I’m repeating it because successful elections are all about how to get a voter to be motivated by something he or she really cares about — something personal. Schubert understood that if voters didn’t care about marriage — which most of them personally don’t have a stake in — they could be made to care about something else. That something else in both California and Maine turned out to be education. And so California and in Maine, Schubert took an election about something nobody cares about (gays being allowed to marry) and made it about something that everyone cares about. Again, Karen quotes Schubert with the a-ha moment:
What the research showed was that we could not win by simply affirming traditional marriage. People said, ‘Yeah, OK – but what’s the problem here. How does this impact me?’…. This forced acceptance [by the court] that gay marriage was now mandatory was a big deal – the consequences – specifically regarding religious freedom, religious expression and teaching of gay marriage in schools – and the education consequences become the most powerful in the course of the campaign.
We bet the campaign on consequences – especially on education. Education from the beginning – while it was one of three consequences – it was the one that was the most emotionally charged and the most powerful. And I remember testing an ad in focus groups in Southern California….[One ad was} with the Wirthlin couple from Massachusetts. She’s telling the story of her son Joey – about he’s being taught how a prince can marry another prince – and he’s in second grade.
There’s an African American gentleman in this group watching the ad [who] just shakes his head. So I [told the researcher to] ask him what he meant. And the guy says, ‘I’ll tell you what, if that happened to me – I would be pissed.’
And that was the moment that we decided that the campaign would rely on education.
Nate Silver’s models are based on whether people want to ban same-sex marriage. But it asks the wrong question. If he had asked whether schools want to “teach homosexuality in the schools,” he would get a very different answer. That’s why Schubert changed the question in voters’ minds.
Now you know that the issue of education was a red herring, and I know that the issue of education was a red herring, but voters don’t know that. And the beauty of that strategy is this: false charges and fears can be implanted in a little as thirty seconds, but they have an exceptionally long shelf life. Remember Willie Horton? Those adds ran twenty three years ago! Maine voters remembered the education issue very well, but I’m sure they’ve forgotten the pro-equality’s answer to that.
Question 3: What do voters really care about?
Voters care about a lot of things. They care about jobs, taxes, the economy, education (still), foreign wars, immigration — all kinds of things. They don’t care about equality because too many of them think that we have it already through other means. And they don’t get motivated by being preached to about fairness because they think they are already fair. Campaigns aren’t opportunities to teach voters what they don’t know, but rather the time to confirm to voters what they already believe with the issues they care about. That’s why our opponents changed the topic of the election.
The case of Arizona’s Prop 107 campaign in 2006 is instructive, simply because it is the ONLY campaign in which anti-marriage forces lost. People tend to dismiss it as a fluke, but it embodies a very valuable lesson. The proposed amendment to the Arizona constitution that year would have not only barred same-sex marriage, but all other domestic partnership registries as well. LGBT advocates ran a brilliant campaign pointing out how this proposed law would affect straight people — including large numbers of senior citizens who live together but haven’t married because they don’t want to give up their social security benefits. Because they weren’t married, they relied on local domestic partnership registrations for access to local services and to be able to make medical decisions for each other. It also affected a large number of unmarried straight firefighters and police officers, whose significant others would lose access to health benefits. Because it became an issue that straight people cared about — the majority in Arizona as elsewhere — it went down in defeat. A different amendment passed in 2008; that one focused exclusively on same-sex marriage, and LGBT advocates failed to find a hook that everyone could care about. And when we fail to find a hook that everyone cares about, we will lose every time.
And by the way, this isn’t true just about LGBT politics. It’s politics in general. When people voted in 2008 for president, most of them voted based on a desire for “hope” and “change” and “Yes We Can!” on the one hand, or — okay, I can’t remember what McCain wanted us to vote about. Maybe that’s why he lost as badly as he did.
Our failure to answer these three very important questions in the past have become a costly and painful lesson. Our failure in the future to heed those lessons will leave us with no one else to blame but ourselves.
July 1st, 2011
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Cologne, Germany; Helsinki, Finland; London, UK; Los Angeles, CA (Black Pride); Marseilles, France; and Toronto, ON.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Fred Schneider: 1951. The B-52s front man is probably America’s best known practitioner of sprechgesang. (The Free Dictionary: “a type of vocalization between singing and recitation … originated by Arnold Schoenberg, who used it in Pierrot Lunaire (1912)”) The group’s guy-and-gals call-and-response between Schneider and Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson have become a trademark ever since “Rock Lobster” hit the charts in 1978. That sound defined the B-52s as the quintessential party band, inviting everyone to pile into the Chrysler as big as a whale. Schneider was coy about his sexuality throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s, but his reluctance appeared to be more a matter of annoyance than fear. “I’m on the same side the fence as k.d., Elton and Frederick the Great. I just don’t like to share my personal life with the public.” Of course, there wasn’t much sharing needed. His own mother’s reaction when he came out to her probably sums it up for everyone else. “Oh I know, Freddie,” she said, and continued vacuuming without missing a beat.
Roddy Bottum: 1963. The keyboardist for Faith No More since 1982, Bottum came out as gay in 1993 the year after his father died. It’s easy to imagine that his revelation would have come as quite a shock to the hyper-hetero world of heavy metal, but Bottum described it as “a positive and uplifting experience. I guess I expected some of the fans to burn crosses or throw panties at me, but nothing like that ever happened.” One of his hits with Faith No More was “Be Aggressive,” from their 1992 album Angel Dust. The homoerotic song was about oral sex. “It was a pretty fun thing to write, knowing that (lead singer Mike Patton) was going to have to put himself on the line and go up onstage and sing these vocals.” Bottum’s openness about his sexuality didn’t exactly open the floodgates for other heavy metal rockers to come out. “You’d think there’d be a lot more homosexuality in metal with all the dressing up,” he told The Advocate in 1999. By then he had left Faith No More — and metal — to form the indie boy/girl group Imperial Teen. Since 2005, Bottum has written scores for more than a dozen movies and television shows.
If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. PLEASE, don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).
June 30th, 2011
When I wrote about the United Methodists who are up in arms in Minnesota over marriage equality, some readers thought I was mocking them. This is the farthest from the truth: I respect and admire them.
But truly, Methodists tend to be a steady bunch. Very nice people, but just not all that excitable.
But every once in a while an issue comes along that fires them up and gets them agitating for change. And when they do, change happens. Which is why I am delighted that the United Methodist marriage movement is spreading. (Although, yes, I’m amused as well.)
Inspired by the Minneapolis letter, Methodists in New England are signing on to their own letter of defiance, declaring that they too will “offer the grace of the church’s blessing to any prepared couple desiring Christian marriage.” And they got a lot more support than expected. (Portland Press Herald)
“We used the exact same statement they used in Minnesota, and we invited like-minded colleagues to sign with us” during the conference, he said.
He hoped for 12 people to stand with them. Fifty signed the statement on the first day.
That number grew to 90 by the end of the conference, and it now stands at 123, about one in nine clergy members in the New England Conference.
Now it may not seem that one in nine is significant enough to represent drastic change. But this is one in nine willing to sign a letter of defiance, expressing intent to violate the rules of the church, declaring that this issue is one of such importance that unity and formality fall secondary. In other words, this is ten percent of the church that is pissed off, fired up, and ready to love their opposition into submission.
And never ever underestimate the power of a pissed off Methodist.
June 30th, 2011
Last Summer, Marcus Bachmann, husband and political strategist to GOP Presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) appeared on a conservative radio talk show to explain his views of gay people:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvwP4vHEc-I(at 3:36) We have to understand: barbarians need to be educated. They need to be disciplined. Just because someone feels it or thinks it doesn’t mean that we are supposed to go down that road. That’s what is called the sinful nature. We have a responsibility as parents and as authority figures not to encourage such thoughts and feelings from moving into the action steps.
And let’s face it: what is our culture, what is our public education system doing today? They are giving full, wide-open doors to children, not only giving encouragement to think it, but to actually encourage action steps. That’s why when we understand what truly is the percentage of homosexuals in this country, it is small. But by these open doors, I can see and we are experiencing, that it is starting to increase.
It won’t come as a surprise to anyone that Bachmann reportedly operates an ex-gay therapy program in Minnesota (via archive.org).
June 30th, 2011
Right Wing Watch has the details of a message sent to Tea Party Nation activists from Rich Swier, an activist with TPN and the anti-Muslim group ACT! For America. Swier reacts to an anti-bullying initiative in Florida by declaring that bullying is actually “peer pressure and is healthy.” The money quote:
As MassResistance.org reports, “The homosexual movement in the public schools has always been based on lies and deception. But until the mid-1990s, they were still having difficulty getting into the schools. Then they found the key to their huge success — what they call ‘re-framing the issue'”.
…This is not bullying. It is peer pressure and is healthy. There are many bad behaviors such as smoking, under age drinking and drug abuse that are behaviors that cannot be condoned. Homosexuality falls into this category.
MassResistance is one of a small handfull of groups that are so unhinged that they made the SLPC’s official list of anti-gay hate groups.
June 30th, 2011
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Marriage Ballot Initiative Kick-Off: Portland Maine. Equality Maine and Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) are set to announce an initiative to collect 57,000 signatures by next January. The ballot initiative will ask Maine voters whether same-sex marriage should be legal in the state. In 2009, Maine voters rejected marriage equality 53%-47%. LGBT advocates say things will be different this time, citing recent polls saying that Mainers now support marriage equality 53% to 39%, with 7% having no opinion. That last group will undoubtedly pick up an opinion between now and election day, and when you throw in whatever the margin of error happens to be (for most polls, it’s between plus or minus 4-6%) , and that looks uncomfortably close to me.
There are added difficulties. In 2009, Maine’s Question 1 was the only one like it in the country, making LGBT advocates in that state the beneficiaries of donations from across the country. In 2012, Minnesota will also have an anti-gay ballot measure, and North Carolina may be on its way. Meanwhile, it’s not clear whether any LGBT groups campaigning for marriage equality have learned the lessons of past elections. Hard questions about tactics need to be asked — and answered. I asked those questions before, and was blasted for doing so. But I’ll ask them again because one thing is certain: doing the same thing we’ve always done will only get us the same results. All that said, it’s hard to tell anyone not to fight for equality, and so this fight deserves our support along with all the others.
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Cologne, Germany; Helsinki, Finland; London, UK; Los Angeles, CA (Black Pride); Marseilles, France; and Toronto, ON.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Bowers v. Hardwick: 1986. It all started in August, 1982, when Michael Hardwick threw a beer bottle into a trash can outside of an Atlanta gay bar. A police officer cited him for public drinking. When Hardwick failed to arrive for his court date, a warrant was issued for his arrest. Several weeks later — after Hardwick realized his error and paid the ticket — a police officer went to Hardwick’s apparent to serve the arrest warrant. The police officer entered the apartment (accounts differ on how he got in), and discovered Hardwick and a male companion engaged in oral sex, which Georgia defined as “sodomy” under the law. Both men were arrested, but the local district attorney decided not to press charges. Hardwick then sued Georgia attorney general Michael Bowers in federal court seeking to overturn the state’s sodomy law. The ACLU agreed to take the case on Hardwick’s behalf.
A federal judge in Atlanta dismissed the case, siding with the Attorney General. Hardwick appealed to the Eleventh Court of Appeals, which reversed the lower court’s ruling. Bowers then appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled on this date — during pride week — in 1986 that Hardwick’s right to privacy did not extend to private, consensual sexual conduct — at least as far as gay sex was concerned. Justice Byron White, writing for the majority, barely concealed his contempt for gay people. He wrote, “to claim that a right to engage in such conduct is ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’ or ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty’ is, at best, facetious.” Chief Justice Warren Berger, in a concurring opinion, piled on: “To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching.”
Justice Lewis Powell was considered the deciding vote. It has been reported that he originally voted to strike down the law but changed his mind after a few days. In 1990, after Powell had retired three ears earlier, he told a group law students that he considered his opinion in Bowers was mistake. “I do think it was inconsistent in a general way with Roe. When I had the opportunity to reread the opinions a few months later I thought the dissent had the better of the arguments.” His mistake would remain the law of the land for another seventeen years, until Bowers itself was held to be “not correct” in Lawrence v. Texas.
If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. PLEASE, don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).
June 29th, 2011
The first half of this year has seen some victories and some defeats; and even some which are hard to categorize. But, there certainly has been change.
The status of the various recognition mechanisms is as follows (2011 additions are in italics):
Marriage on the same terms as heterosexual marriage – 11.5% of US Population:
Massachusetts
Connecticut
Iowa
Vermont
New Hampshire
District of Columbia
New York
Civil Unions – all rights except the name – 8.2% of US Population:
New Jersey
Illinois
Hawaii
Delaware
Rhode Island
Domestic Partnerships with nearly all the rights except the name – 16.3% of US Population
California
Oregon
Washington
Nevada
Limited recognition of same-sex couples – 5.8% of US Population
Colorado – Reciprocal Benefits
Wisconsin – Domestic Partnerships
Maine – Domestic Partnerships
Maryland – Domestic Partnerships
In addition, the state of Maryland (and perhaps New Mexico) will give full recognition to same-sex marriages conducted where legal.
So about 41.8% of all US residents live in a state in which some measure of recognition is given to same sex-couples. In addition, another 7.3% of the population lives in one of the dozens of cities which offer some form of recognition and protection for same-sex couples.
June 29th, 2011
A broad coalition of LGBT advocacy groups are urging Rhode Island governor to veto the fatally flawed Civil Unions Bill which passed the state Senate earlier today. According to a press release sent out by two of those groups:
On the heels of a marriage victory in New York, marriage advocates including Freedom to Marry and the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) sent a letter late yesterday evening to Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee calling on him to veto the civil union bill currently under consideration if it comes to his desk in its present form. The bill contains a provision that would allow religious organizations and their employees to disregard couples’ civil union status, creating unprecedented, onerous and discriminatory hurdles for same-sex couples seeking to take care of one another.
“This flawed civil union bill undermines a crucial principle that Rhode Island has always stood for — respecting the separation of church and state,” said Marc Solomon, National Campaign Director for Freedom to Marry. “Not only does the bill propose a separate-and-unequal status instead of ending the denial of marriage itself, it grants an unprecedented license to discriminate against same-sex couples and their families. Governor Chafee should veto this defective bill and work with the legislature to enact a marriage bill that ends discrimination while preserving religious and personal freedom on equal terms for all.”
The letter, which was signed by groups including Freedom to Marry and GLAD, reads:
This amendment could allow individuals, who are legally required to recognize everyone else’s legal commitments, to opt out of doing so only for gay and lesbian people. In practical terms, this law could allow religiously affiliated hospitals to deny a civil union spouse’s right to be by his spouse’s side and make medical decisions for him, and could allow religiously affiliated agencies to deny an employee’s right to leave in order to care for his civil union spouse under Rhode Island Family and Medical Leave.To read the full letter and see the full list of signers, click here.
“The Corvese amendment actually diminishes protections already available under Rhode Island law, and is seriously damaging to Rhode Island’s gay and lesbian families. If it becomes law, there is trouble ahead for Rhode Island’s same-sex couples,” said Karen Loewy, Senior Staff Attorney for Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders.
Signatories to the letter include: American Civil Liberties Union, Family Equality Council, Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD), Freedom to Marry, Human Rights Campaign, Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, Marriage Equality Rhode Island, National Center for Lesbian Rights, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
When New York lawmakers negotiated that state’s marriage equality bill, particular focus was on a set of provisions which would provide an exemption for religious groups and organizations from being required to recognize same-sex marriage. New York’s exemptions were narrow and carefully crafted, giving very little away from what was already constitutionally guaranteed under the First Amendment. Those limits were carefully placed around churches, religious schools, and housing provided for members of a particular faith.
But the exemptions in Rhode Island’s civil unions bill, as it currently stands, pretty much allows virtually anyone to ignore a couple’s civil union:
15-3.1-5. Conscience and religious organizations protected. –
(a) Notwithstanding any other provision of law to the contrary, no religious or denominational organization, no organization operated for charitable or educational purpose which is supervised or controlled by or in connection with a religious organization, and no individual employed by any of the foregoing organizations, while acting in the scope of that employment, shall be required:
(1) To provide services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods, or privileges for a purpose related to the solemnization, certification, or celebration of any civil union; or
(2) To solemnize or certify any civil union; or
(3) To treat as valid any civil union; if such providing, solemnizing, certifying, or treating as valid would cause such organizations or individuals to violate their sincerely held religious beliefs.
(b) No organization or individual as described in subsection (a) above who fails or refuses to provide, solemnize, certify, or treat as valid, as described in subdivision (a)(1), (a)(2) or (a)(3) above, persons in a civil union, shall be subject to a fine, penalty, or other cause of action for such failure or refusal.
June 29th, 2011
Maggie Gallagher loves to pretend that all gay people are screaming “hater” and “bigot” at every person who disagrees with us over full marriage equality. We aren’t. In fact, most gay organizations and a good many bloggers avoid using the words “hate” and “bigot” partly for just that reason and partly because using such terms loosely leaves us nothing for when true evil is encountered.
But sometimes we do see hate and it’s useful to know what it looks like.
Hate has an intentional desire to see harm or hurt come to others. Hate delights in the misery of others. Hate refuses to empathize, seeing the other as an enemy, someone so vile that you can’t put yourself in their shoes. Hate prioritizes the ill treatment of others, even above what is in its own best interest. Hate assumes the worst about others, ignoring any chance of decency.
Which brings me to the Batesville Arkansas Daily Guard. Now I’m not suggesting that Batesville (population about 10,000) is any less fascinating or newsworthy than any other similarly sized community, but a quick glance illustrates that obituaries make up a sizable chunk of the Daily Guard.
And it was to the obituaries that Terence James turned when John Millican, his partner of the past decade, passed away. And the Daily Guard ran Millican’s obituary complete with reference to parents and distant siblings, but no reference whatsoever to Mr. James. In the view of the Daily Guard, he simple didn’t exist.
When criticized, the Daily Guard responded with the usual “It’s not a gay thing. We don’t list unmarried couples, in-laws, or pets in the free obituaries.” Just real family, you know. But, even so, I’m not willing to call this hate. Ignorance, yes. Prejudice, certainly. But not necessarily hate.
However what they did next is simply unforgivable.
The Daily Guard promised to apologize and to reconsider their policy. Instead, they decided to humiliate Mr. Jones and to defame him. Seeing him in grief, they decided to compound the pain and to delight in his misery.
On June 27, the Daily Guard ran this editorial:
It was brought to our attention Terence James had a problem with our policy because he was not listed in the free obituary as a life partner. Once again, free obituaries do not list life partners or significant others, nor does it list in-laws or ex-spouses. Our local funeral homes know that if the obituary is not marked “paid” it will run to our free format.
Because we wanted to have all the information on the allegations, we did what any good newspaper would do: Our homework. After speaking with the funeral directors who assisted Mr. James, we learned he was REPEATEDLY told he would not be listed in the free obituary. (Contrary to what Mr. James said in a television interview, his mother was told the same thing, according to the directors.) The funeral director went on to say MR. JAMES MADE IT CLEAR TO THE FUNERAL DIRECTOR HE DID NOT WANT TO BE OUT THE EXPENSE OF A PAID OBITUARY.
After obtaining a copy of the paperwork filled out by Mr. James at the funeral home, we learned he listed two cats as daughters and a dog as a son. Once again, Mr. James was told by the director the Guard does not list pets as survivors in a free obituary.
We deal with the death of loved ones on a daily basis and our established policy allows us to do that with consistency. Listing pets as children is a direct slap in the face to every grieving parent who has buried a child, young or old.
This begs the question of exactly what MOTIVE Mr. James had when he began giving out FALSE information to news channels and various organizations in order to promote his own AGENDA.
Because of Mr. James, the Guard has come under fire for the policies that are in place for EVERYONE.
The Guard does not owe Mr. James a free obituary or an apology.
We can ignore all the nonsense about James listing pets. After Leona Helmsley’s obsession, those people who think of their pets as children may seem sad or silly, but they are hardly slapping anyone in the face. That was just gratuitously included so as to disparage James.
The motivation of the Daily Guard can be seen in two clauses “in place for EVERYONE” and “promote his own AGENDA”. To the Daily Guard, Terrence James – and indeed any surviving partner – is not part of everyone. Everyone has no need to include a life partner, Everyone doesn’t have one. Everyone is heterosexual.
And as for those who might have such a need, well clearly they have an AGENDA.
So take that, Terrence James. You can’t criticize the Daily Guard! They’ll put you and your agenda in its place. You think you’re grieving now, you just wait til they get done with you.
I can understand an ignorant and thoughtless policy. I can sympathize with the Daily Guard feeling unfairly challenged. But there’s no space for berating the grieving. There’s no good reason for trying to make Mr. James feel pain over the Guard’s own inconsideration.
That is just hate.
June 29th, 2011
Less than a week after same-sex marriage was legalized in New York, the Rhode Island State Senate on Wednesday evening approved a bill allowing not marriage, but civil unions for gay couples, despite fierce opposition from gay rights advocates who called the legislation discriminatory.
Governor Chaffee is expected to sign the bill.
Mr. Chafee told reporters on Wednesday that he would probably sign the bill even though he thought the religious protections were overly broad.
“We’re taking incremental steps forward, as other states have,” he said. “We want to get on the path to full equality, and this is a step on the path.”
We will continue our fight for equality. And it appears that the first step will be to get State Senate President, M. Teresa Paiva Weed (D – Jamestown), somehow replaced. She now stands as the single biggest obstacle to civil equality in the state.
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