Box Turtle Bulletin

If you liked Thrift Shop…

I, like just about everyone else, was mesmerized by Thrift Shop, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ whimsical paon to used clothes shopping. But I expected that, like so many novelty songs, the artists would be one-hit wonders.

But then radio stations revisited the Seattle-based hip-hop duo’s 2012 album and suddenly (like the ceiling) Can’t Hold Us was everywhere. The bouncy club sound featured Macklemore’s rapid fire rap matched with a smooth lyrical chorus and it blended well with the quasi-urban sound that dominates airwaves and dance floors.

But perhaps more surprising is their third hit from The Heist. Written to support Washington’s Referendum 74, it’s now catching the attention of the rest of the nation, with the LA Times saying that it “seems to have captured the nation’s mood”.

Here’s Same Love

Florida Man’s Bulgarian Husband Approved for Green Card

Traian Popov and Julian Marsh

Julian Marsh, a Florida resident, and his Bulgarian husband, Traian Popov, made history by becoming the first same-sex married couple to gain a permanent resident visa for a foreign spouse as a result of last week’s Supreme Court ruling striking down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act. Popov was notified via email late on Friday that his green card was approved, in a move so fast that it took the couple’s immigration lawyer by surprise:

Speaking by telephone on Sunday from the couple’s home, Mr. Marsh said that he turned 55 on Friday and that he and Mr. Popov were celebrating with dinner at a Red Lobster restaurant when they received news of the unprecedented green card.

“It was just kind of a shock, like winning the lottery,” said Mr. Marsh, a music producer. “The amazing overwhelming fact is that the government said yes, and my husband and I can live in the country we chose and we love and want to stay in.”

Popov had been in the U.S. legally for the past fifteen years on a series of student visas. The couple married in New York last year and applied for a green card in February.

Officials at the U.S. Immigration and Citizenship Services said that local immigration officers in Florida jumped the gun a bit in granting Popov permanent residency status, but I don’t see any indication that they will attempt to reverse the decision. Authorities said that the agency will announce new procedures for same-sex binational couples this week:

For the last two years, the agency has kept a list of same-sex couples whose green card petitions were denied, the officials said, anticipating that the Supreme Court would eventually weigh in on DOMA. Those denials will now be reversed without couples having to present new applications, if no other issues have arisen. Gay couples with no denials, like Mr. Marsh and Mr. Popov, will move through the system at the same pace as traditional spouses, officials said.

The Daily Agenda for Monday, July 1

Victoria Bandy (left) will tie the knot this morning with Delaware State Sen. Karen Peterson (right), making them the first married same-sex couple in the First State.

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Marriage Equality Arrives in Delaware. Delaware State Senator Karen Peterson, sponsor of the marriage equality bill which was signed into law last May, will exchange vows with her partner of 24 years, Victoria Bandy, in Wilmington this morning at 8:30 a.m. EDT, making them the first married same-sex couple in Delaware history. “It just validates our relationship, and that’s the most important part of it: In the eyes of society, it gets validated,” said Peterson.

That same legislation will also allow Delaware’s same-sex couples who have entered into civil unions to convert them into full marriages. When the U.S. Supreme Court’s striking down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act last week, it made converting to full marriage all the more attractive as it will bring with it the thousand-plus rights and responsibilities provided under Federal law to married couples. Technically speaking, that’s exactly what Bandy and Peterson will be doing this morning. New Castle County Clerk of the Peace Ken Boulden says his office spent the weekend preparing for the anticipated rush.  “It’s gonna be historic,” said Boulden. “There are going to be over 700 couples that have had civil unions in the last 18 months that are going to be starting the conversion process from civil unions to marriage and there will be a large number of couples coming in to get their marriage license.”

Delaware is the tenth state, in addition to the District of Columbia, to provide marriage equality for its same-sex couples. Rhode Island and Minnesota will join the ranks on August 1.

ONE, July 1958. (Click to enlarge.)

THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
55 YEARS AGO: A Day at the Beach: 1958. In 2013, record-breaking temperatures are being recorded all across the western United States. Here in Tucson, we have just closed out the month of June with all thirty days recording temperatures in triple digits, the first time that’s happened in recorded history. And there’s no break in sight, probably, until September. Naturally, thoughts turn to any patch of water — a Slip’N’Slide, a back yard pool, or, if you’re really lucky, a day at the beach.

Fifty-five years ago this month, ONE magazine took its readers along for a day at an unnamed gay beach in greater Los Angeles, which was one of the rare places where gay people could congregate and let their guard down:

I hadn’t gone near a gay beach for years when Marty and I drove out last summer to one of California’s most famous. It was a long pleasant drive out the Boulevard and it seemed that quite a few others were going our way — a red convertible with two sun-baked blonds; two sporty lesbians in an MG; a carload of screaming queens . . . .

…Marty, who idealized homosexuals en masse much as intellectuals used to get dewy-eyed about the toiling masses, was aw~struck at the sight, though it was familiar to him. “Look at that!” he said with a sweep of his bronzed arm. “Doesn’t the sight of that crowd thrill you? Right out in the open, hundreds of our people, peacefully enjoying themselves in public, no closed doors, no dim lights, no pretense.

“I often lie awake nights wondering how long it’ll take our group to become aware of itself — its strength and its rights. But I hardly ever appreciate just how many of us there really are except when I come here. Except for a few minutes on the Boulevard after the bars close, this is the only place where we ever ‘form a crowd,’ and there’s something exciting about seeing homosexuals as a crowd. I con’t explain how it stirs me. but I think beaches like this are a part of our liberation.”

Jim Kepner, writing as “Frank Golovitz,” introduced ONE’s readers to some of the people at the beach that day, including Joe and Jim, “a look-alike, dress-alike couple… Happily married (seven years)” and “devout Mormons.” They never went to gay bars, and saw the beach as the one of the few “respectable places to meet other nice homosexuals.” Paul and Terry, two young engineers, were “busily directing the construction of the most elaborate sand castle I’d ever seen.” Jo Anne and Virginia were there with Jo Anne’s two kids they were raising together. Kepner later ran into Barry, Jo Ann’s ex-husband “of convenience,” who was “also a mine of assorted gossip.” He also met Ronnie Chase, “an angel-faced willowy young bank clerk” who defended their place in the sun when a straight couple showed up complaining about “damned queers taking over the place.”

“Well, go somewhere else if you don’t want to be contaminated,” he howled. “You’ve got fifty miles of beach around here and this is all we’ve got. So disappear !”

His antagonist managed one parting shot, unprintably suggesting that all homosexuals should be locked up and castrated.

Ronnie boiled all afternoon. “Did we hurt them? We don’t say anything about the way they behave on the beach. But just let one queen raise the pitch of her voice and it’s a public scandal!”

I suggested that he’d offended them — hardly good public relations.

“I offended them? They offended us. Why always put the blame on this side? They started it. We weren’t doing anything to spoil their day, except existing. Let them go somewhere else. This is our beach. It’s small and crowded, but it’s ours.”

[Source: Frank Golovitz (Jim Kepner). “Gay Beach.” ONE 6, no. 7 (July 1958): 5-10. Kepner joined ONE magazine in 1952 and wrote under a half-dozen pseudonyms in addition to his own name in order to lend the appearance that ONE’s staff was larger than it actually was.]

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Farley Granger: 1925: Despite being one of the best-looking and well-regarded men in Hollywood, Granger didn’t have the kind of prolific a film career one might expect. He is best known for his role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope and Strangers on a Train and for Luchino Visconti’s Senso. In Rope, Granger played a murderer and (implied) lover of an accomplice in a story inspired by the Loeb and Leopold murder.

In real life, Granger enjoyed the attentions of men, and women. According to his 2007 autobiography Include Me Out, he had affairs with Patricia Neal, Arthur Laurents, Shelly Winters, Leonard Bernstein, Barbara Stanwick and Ava Gardner. As for dealing with “liberal” Hollywood’s deeply-entrenched homophobia:

I found it difficult to answer questions about “gay life in Hollywood when I was living and working there. …I was never ashamed, and I never felt the need to explain or apologize for my relationships with anyone. I had many gay friends, but more of my friends were straight and most were married with families. The ratio of my gay to straight friends was probably in direct proportion to that of gay and straight people in general. I have loved men. I have loved women.”

Granger insisted he was never closeted, and he also resisted labeling himself:

Men or women?

“That really depends on the person,” he said impishly. But his follow-up comment left little doubt: “I’ve lived the greater part of my life with a man” — he has been with (Robert) Calhoun in New York since the 1960s — “so obviously that’s the most satisfying to me.”

In the late 1950s, Granger left Hollywood and moved to New York City, where he launched a second career on Broadway. Granger died in 2011 of natural causes in New York at the age of 85.

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. 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?

Putin Signs Anti-Gay Law Amid Clashes in St. Petersburg

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law a measure which effectively bans all advocacy for LGBT people:

The law introduces fines of up to 5,000 rubles ($166) for citizens who disseminate information “directed at forming non-traditional sexual setup” in minors or which may cause a “distorted understanding” that gay and heterosexual relations are “socially equivalent”, the publication showed.

SCOTUS to ADF: Go Away

The Alliance Defending Freedom, the Phoenix-based anti-gay legal group that had been supporting ProtectMarriage’s fight to support California’s Proposition 8, had filed an emergency motion yesterday in a last desperate attempt to put a stop to same-sex weddings taking place in California. ADF had complained that the Ninth Circuit had lifted its stay on marriages before the end of the 22-day waiting period during which Prop 8 supporters can still file a separate motion for the Supreme Court to reconsider its position. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who oversees the Ninth Circuit, denied ADF’s emergency motion:

Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy turned down at midday Sunday a request to stop same-sex marriages from occurring in California. Without comment, and without seeking views from the other side, Kennedy rejected a challenge to action by the Ninth Circuit Court on Friday implementing a federal judge’s ruling allowing such marriages.

…Although attorneys for the ballot measure’s sponsors have been creative in finding new ways to try to press the challenge, the brief action by Kennedy on Sunday may have removed the final barrier to the full achievement of marriage rights for gays and lesbians in the nation’s most populous state. …If there was some irony in Justice Kennedy’s action, it was that he was among the four dissenting Justices who would have allowed the measure’s backers to press their defense of the same-sex marriage ban. However, they had been out-voted, five to four.

The Daily Agenda for Sunday, June 30

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations Today: Bangor, ME; Barcelona, Spain; Chicago, IL; Dublin, Ireland; Harlem, NY; Helsinki, Finland; Houston, TX; Istanbul, Turkey; London, UK; Malmö, Sweden; Oslo, Norway; Paris, France; Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN; New York, NY; Oslo, Norway; St. Louis, Mo; St. Petersburg, FL; San Francisco, CA; San José, Costa Rica; Seattle, WA; Toronto, ON; Valencia, Spain.

Other Events Today: Durban Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Durban, South Africa; Frameline 37 Film Festival, San Francisco, CA; Canadian Rockies International Rodeo, Strathmore, AB.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Census Bureau Releases Incarceration Statistics on Sodomy: 1904. Dr. William J. Robinson, editor of the American Journal of Urology, in 1914 combed through the Census Bureau’s statistics released ten years earlier and published the following information:

STATISTICS OF SODOMY
Statistics regarding all crimes in the United States are miserably defective and the results attending an effort to determine the frequency of the offence of sodomy, generally designated as an “offence against nature” is unsatisfactory. We find, however, that on June 30, 1904, there were in American penal institutions 876 prisoners committed for this crime. These prisoners comprised 15.5% of those committed for offences against chastity. Of the total 375 were male and 1 female.

The distribution by states was as follows: New Hampshire, 1; Massachusetts, 20; Connecticut, 7; New York, 62; New Jersey, 12; Pennsylvania, 52; Maryland, 8; Virginia, 3; West Virginia, 1; North Carolina, 4; South Carolina, 1; Georgia, 1; Florida, 3; Ohio, 22; Indiana, 6; Illinois, 2O; Michigan, 11; Wisconsin, 6; Minnesota, 8; Iowa, 2; Missouri, 11; North Dakota, 2; Nebraska, 2; Kansas, 4; Kentucky, 6; Tennessee, 5; Alabama, 3; Mississippi, 6; Louisiana, 3; Texas, 29; Montana, 4; Wyoming, 2; Colorado, 5; Arizona, 1; Utah, 2; Idaho, 2 ; Washington, 8; Oregon, 1; California, 30. It will be seen that the frequency of conviction varies greatly in different localities.

In the figures of crime given for the state of Indiana, which are probably the most complete available, the offence in question is not mentioned. In the Indianapolis police court, however there were two cases of sodomy in 1910 and ten in 1911.

[Source: Robinson, William J. “Statistics of Sodomy.” American Journal of Urology 10, no. 3 (March 1914): 146. Available online via Google Books here.]

Urban Renaissance Blighted by “Parading Homosexuals”: 1969. We like to think that gentrification of older urban neighborhoods is something new. For most cities, it is, and for many cities it has been gay people leading the way, rehabbing run-down homes and bringing entire blocks back to life. But New York’s neighborhoods have been in a constant state of reinvention ever since the Indians moved out and the Dutch moved in. In 1969, it was the Manhattan Upper West Side’s turn when New York magazine noticed its “renaissance,” brought on by a new band of urban settlers moving into the very rough neighborhood, attracted there by cheap rents and readily available housing:

“I was ready for war,” one recent brownstone buyer said. “You know, German shepherd, barbed wire, burglar alarms, punji sticks, the works. But we were delighted to find that with a little caution it could be a relaxed place to live.” … Business, of course, has joined and helped to stimulate the movement to the West Side. Flower vendors who set up their cardboard cartons at the top of the neighborhood’s subway stairs claim business is booming. “Only a year ago,” Monroe, a West 86th Street vendor, said between sales, “flowers couldn’t live on the West Side.”

High end stores, restaurants, theaters were returning to the Upper West Side amidst a $700 million building boom. But the transition from a down-in-the-heels neighborhood to a sought-after address was far from complete:

The same kind of young, successful and relatively affluent middle-class families that moved to the suburbs 20 years ago and to the East Side 10 years ago are moving to the West Side today, and while the neighborhood still has an ample supply of teenage muggers, parading homosexuals and old men who wear overcoats in July, the over-all mood of the area seems to have changed.

This article was published just two days after the Stonewall Rebellion, which took place just four short miles to the south in Greenwich Village. Those riots were barely mention in New York’s respectable press, and “parading homosexuals” were still seen as a sign of decay. But just a decade later a new generation of “parading homosexuals” would become highly sought-after pioneers in reviving dying neighborhoods, whose efforts today are often praised by city leaders as evidence of renewed economic and creative vigor.

[Thanks to BTB reader Rob for providing a copy of the New York magazine article.]

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. 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?

Prop 8 Supporters Try Desperation Shot

Lawyers for Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly Alliance Defense Fund), which have been found by the U.S. Supreme Court to lack standing to defend California’s Proposition 8 on appeal, is trying one last time to derail marriages in California by filing an emergency motion asking the U.S. Supreme Court to put a stop to those weddings.

“The Ninth Circuit’s June 28, 2013 Order purporting to dissolve the stay…is the latest in a long line of judicial irregularities that have unfairly thwarted Petitioners’ defense of California’s marriage amendment,” the paperwork states. “Failing to correct the appellate court’s actions threatens to undermine the public’s confidence in its legal system.”

Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Austin Nimocks said the Supreme Court’s consideration of the case is not done yet because his clients still have 22 days to ask the justices to reconsider the 5-4 decision announced Wednesday.

Legal experts say that the Supreme Court’s 22 day waiting period is not binding on the Ninth Circuit Court. The ADF filed its motion with Justice Anthony Kennedy, who oversees appeals from the Ninth Circuit. Kennedy dissented from the majority opinion which ruled that ADF lacked standing to appeal the Federal District Court ruling striking down Prop 8.

Update: SCOTUSBlog’s Tom Goldstein says ADF isn’t likely to succeed. He also noticed something rather telling:

But it seems unlikely that the Supreme Court will see the situation as sufficiently urgent to require its intervention now. In perhaps a sign of that understanding, the firm of the proponents’ principal Supreme Court counsel — Cooper & Kirk — did not place its name on the emergency application.

If you want to see what desperation looks like in writing, you can see the ADF’s motion here (PDF: 1.7 MB/76 pages!).

The Daily Agenda for Saturday, June 29

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Albuquerque, NM; Bangor, ME; Barcelona, Spain; Cheyenne, WY; Chicago, IL; Cincinnati, OH; Cleveland, OH; Doncaster, UK; Dublin, Ireland; Durban, South Africa; Finnmark, Norway; Harlem, NY; Helsinki, Finland; Houston, TX; Istanbul, Turkey; Lexington, KY; London, UK; London, UK (Black Pride); Malmö, Sweden; México, DF, México; Oslo, Norway; Paris, France; Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN; New York, NY; Oslo, Norway; St. Louis, Mo; St. Petersburg, FL; Salem, MA; San Antonio, TX; San Francisco, CA; San José, Costa Rica; Sardinia, Italy; Seattle, WA; Swansea, UK; Toronto, ON; Utrecht, Netherlands; Valencia, Spain; VästerÃ¥s, Sweden.

Other Events This Weekend: Durban Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Durban, South Africa; Frameline 37 Film Festival, San Francisco, CA; Pink Dot Festival, Singapore; Canadian Rockies International Rodeo, Strathmore, AB.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Henry Gerber: 1892. Pro-gay activism in the U.S goes back a very long way, far longer than most realize. Henry Gerber, a Bavarian immigrant to Chicago, served in the U.S. Army’s occupation of Germany following World War I, where he came in contact with the growing German gay rights movement. He read up on German homophile magazines and came in contact with Magnus Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the first organization in the world working to advance gay rights. When Gerber returned to the U.S. he founded the Society for Human Rights (SHR) in 1924. With an African-American clergyman named John T. Graves as president, SHR is believed to be America’s first gay rights organization. Gerber also founded Friendship and Freedom, the first known American gay publication.

SHR didn’t last very long. The wife of the group’s vice president denounced Gerber and his associates to police, calling them “degenerates.” In July, 1925, police arrested Gerber, Graves and two others as newspaper headlines screamed “Strange Sex Cult Exposed.” Gerber was tried three times, but the charges were eventually dismissed. He was nevertheless ruined, jobless and drained of his life savings. He continued writing about gay rights, sometimes under his own name and sometimes under a pseudonym. He died on New Year’s Eve in 1972 at the age of 80, having lived long enough to see gay rights advocacy take on a new vibrancy in the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in an explosion of advocacy and pride after the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969.

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?

Scary Movie

World War G, from Funny or Die.

Californians Are Marrying and Prop 8’s Legal Supporters Are Thoroughly Pissed

Your schadenfreude for the day comes from ProtectMarriage, the official non-standing defenders of Prop 8:

We just received word that the Ninth Circuit, without waiting for the Supreme Court’s decision to become final and depriving us of our right to ask for reconsideration, has rushed forward to order same-sex marriage licenses.

This outrageous act tops off a chronic pattern of lawlessness, throughout this case, by judges and politicians hell-bent on thwarting the vote of the people to redefine marriage by any means, even outright corruption.

Homosexual marriage is not happening because the people changed their mind.  It isn’t happening because the appellate courts declared a new constitutional right.  It’s happening because enemies of the people have abused their power to manipulate the system and render the people voiceless.

The resumption of same-sex marriage this day has been obtained by illegitimate means.  If our opponents rejoice in achieving their goal in a dishonorable fashion, they should be ashamed.

It remains to be seen whether the fight can go on, but either way, it is a disgraceful day for California.

I find every word of that press release fantastically delicious.

Put a Ring on It: California Is Marrying Again!

Sandy Stier and Kris Perry, Paul Katami and Jeff Zarrillo (Photos courtesy of American Foundation for Equal Rights)

In the wake of Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling kicking Hollingsworth v. Perry back to the Ninth Circuit Court of appeals due to the lack of standing for Prop 8 supporters to appeal, the Ninth Circuit has issued a brief one-sentence order reading, “The stay in the above matter is dissolved effective immediately.”

Which means that marriage equality is golden in Golden State. Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, two of the plaintiffs in the original Prop 8 lawsuit have already gotten their marriage license moments ago in San Francisco. They were later joined by the other two plaintiffs, Jeff Zarrillo and Paul Katami, who got theirs in Norwalk. Congratulations!

Update: California Attorney General Kamala Harris has just officiated is about to officiate Sandy and Kris’s wedding. Jeff and Paul are on the way to Los Angeles to be married by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Update at 4:55 PDT: It’s official. Sandy and Kris are legally married.

Their son watches as Sandy and Kris are married by California AG Kamala Harris in the Rotunda of San Francisco City Hall.

Update at 5:50 PDT: Jeff and Paul’s wedding will be broadcast live on Rachel Maddow, which begins in ten minutes. You can also watch it live here. They are all dressed, boutonniered and ready to go:

Jeff Zarrillo and Paul Katami (Photo via Americans for Equal Rights)

Update at 6:20: It’s official! All of the Prop 8 plaintiffs are married.

OPM Moves Quickly On Spousal Benefits For Federal Employees and Retires

The Office of Personnel Management — think of them as the HR department for the entire U.S. government — has moved quickly in the wake of Wednesday Supreme Court decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act. In a memorandum to executive department and agency heads, OPM acting director Elaine Kaplan has announced that the government “will now be able to extend benefits to Federal employees and annuitants who have legally married a spouse of the same sex.”

The memo indicates that additional information will be forthcoming, but effective immediately, employees and retirees can obtain health insurance, life insurance, Dental and Vision Insurance, Long-Term Care Insurance, and Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA) to cover their married spouses, and step-children. Most of those benefits are also available to spouses of Federal retirees as well. Retirees can also claim a survivorship for their married spouses, although, as is already the case with opposite-sex married spouses, a survivorship option can result in a reduction in their monthly pension. The OPM memo says that additional guidance will be forthcoming on that option, as well as on other benefits.

OPM has confirmed to BuzzFeed’s Chris Geidner that the marriage benefits doesn’t depend on the state in which the employee or retiree resides:

Additionally, the memorandum states at several points that the changes apply to “all legally married same-sex spouses,” which an OPM spokesman confirmed includes couples who are legally married in one state but live in a state that does not recognize the marriage.

“Yes, these benefits will be available to any Federal employee or annuitant who has a valid marriage license, regardless of their State of residency,” Thomas Richards, OPM director of communications, told BuzzFeed Friday afternoon.

New FMA proposal has four flat tires and a busted radiator

Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.) saw the DOMA decision as an opportunity, his ride out of obscurity. So he was the first to trot out with an announcement the he, Rep Huelskamp, would be introducing a federal constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Surely this is a proposal that will fire up the base, get him in the spotlight, and soon he’d be cruising the political fast lane in a pink Cadillac with white-wall tires.

But so far it’s been a bit of a bumpy ride. Turns out that not even red state Republicans are ready to climb on board. Not even his fellow Kansans. Not even his own district.

One local state representative didn’t have an opinion because its “a federal matter and he is a state legislator” (oddly, most Republicans in Washington had the opposite opinion). His local GOP Chairman “was in county commission meetings all day yesterday” so he wasn’t following the news.

But the best response had to be this one: (HuffPo)

State Rep. J.R. Claeys (R-Salina) stressed that a gay marriage ban is not a “legislative priority of mine” and said he doesn’t see a chance for Huelskamp’s amendment ever passing. Asked if he believes Huelskamp should have made the proposal, Claeys answered: “I am not sure how to diplomatically sidestep this question.”

So to Huelskamp, I offer this advice: yeah, about that political clunker you have on cinder-blocks in your front yard… you may want to lose that, you’re bringing down property values in the neighborhood.

Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver: Recognizing People’s Marriages Is Just Like Slavery, Eugenics and the Japanese Internment

They’re still chattering. Via Right Wing Watch:

I’m very dissapointed in this decision. I think this decision represents a line that the court has crossed into illegitimacy. We’ve seen this before in its history, where it decided the Dred Scott decision, which was an illigitimate decision; the Korematsu decision which was the Japanese interment decision; the Buck v. Bell decision that says its okay to force people to be sterilized, an illegitimate decision. All of which we say were dark spots in the Court’s history. I think today’s decision falls into that same category. This decision is by five justices that cut the tether between themselves and the Constitution. They are in their own fantasy world that there is somehow an equal protection right to mame-sex marriage.

Speaking of illegitimate: Mat Staver founder of Liberty Counsel. He’s also a vice president at Liberty university and the dean of its law school, which teaches his law students should ignore the law counsel their clients to break the law in favor of “God’s Law.” And according to a RICO lawsuit filed last year connecting his law school to the Miller-Jenkins kidnapping case, his law school practices what he teaches.

Magazine Cover of the Day

Click to enlarge.

Can you tell me how to get…
how to get to Christopher Street.