Box Turtle Bulletin

Gays and Conservative Christians

It’s been a long day. A long and scary day. But before I get to that…

You may have noticed that I don’t much write about what is said and done by conservative Christians or the religious right anymore. For quite a long time I’ve referred to our most vocal opponents instead.

That’s because I’ve been schooled by Will’s family, especially his parents. They’re conservative Christians, beyond a doubt. And after a long period of not really wanting to meet his boyfriends, they suddenly changed their mind. There was no big announcement. Four and a half years ago, when our first Christmas rolled around, Will’s mom simply called and asked what time of the day we were coming over. And since then they’ve treated me like family.

Our house is in my name. A year after Will moved in we remodeled the kitchen. Will’s family, led by his dad, came down for the demolition. And it was a crowd, because Will (at that time) had 8 nieces and nephews — it’s up to 10 now. The cutest memory is his 3-year-old nephew grabbing a fist-size piece of floor tile and running to throw it in the enormous trash bin. Meanwhile, Will’s brothers and parents (including his mom) were taking sledgehammers and pickaxes to our flooring and walls. We took that mother down to its studs and saved about three grand doing it. Then Will’s brother Gordon, an electrical contractor, ran the kitchen wiring.

Back to the point: This was pulled together by Will’s conservative Christian father, for a house that wasn’t in his son’s name. And he did it not in spite of but because of his conservative Christian family values. And I think you can date the change in my vernacular to about that time, though I don’t think I was aware of it as it happened.

So, today. Today we got word that one of Will’s nephews had been in a serious accident. He’d been choppered from his home an hour away to a Children’s Hospital close to our house, and he’d been placed in a medically-induced coma.

He’s out of it now. Looks like everything’s going to be fine. But Will’s whole family descended on our house tonight and I told them the entire place was at their disposal. I mean, come on. They’ve treated me like family for years now. Obviously I’m going to do the same.

Mostly I was happy that Will and I happened to live so close to the facility. My thoughts were chiefly with young Jonathan, but I’d spent a whole week reading about how angry our opponents were (angry that their lawyers hadn’t put forth a moral case against homosexuality); as the clan enveloped this house that they helped build, I couldn’t help but remember those awful commentators. I couldn’t help but declare: GO TO HELL.

Go to hell, and go there forever. I’ve never said go to hell with such a sense of moral authority as when saying it to these fools who think that there is something wrong, something immoral, something unnatural, about the safe haven built by this whole family of people who suddenly find it available in their moment of need.

Yeah, go to hell. All I know is that the conservative Christians who were with me today won’t be there to greet you.

And now I have to go tend to the little ones who are too young for visiting hours.

The Daily Agenda for Friday, March 29

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Events This Weekend: BEARcelona, Barcelona, Spain; AIDS Walk, Ft. Worth, TX; White Party, Palm Springs, CA; European Snow Pride, Tignes, France.

THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
Inducing Hallucinations to “Cure” Homosexuality: 1962. Ever since Ivan Pavlov taught his dog to salivate whenever a bell was rung, Behavioral Therapists employed all sorts of adverse stilumi to produce a conditioned response in their patients which would represent a desired change in behavior: smoking cessation, giving up alcohol and other drugs, or stopping being gay — as though being gay was nothing more than behavior. And as far as Behavioral Therapists were concerned, being gay was just behavior and nothing more. (See Blind Man’s Bluff for a more complete explanation of Behavioral Therapy and its history.) And ever since Louis M. Max invented a device for delivering non-lethal doses of electric shock (see Mar 11), Behavioral Therapists have deployed any number of punitive methods designed to “cure” their patients of their homosexuality (see Jan 18, Jan 20, Jun 3, Jul 26, Oct 30, Dec 8), and our award-winning investigation, What are Little Boys Made Of?).

But among the cruelest methods for attempting to “cure” gay people must be the one described by the University of Edinburgh’s Dr. Ian Oswald, in which he used a combination of aversion therapy and induced hallucinations to try to cure one of his patients of the gay. (His other six patients were two rubber fetishists — one apparently gay and one straight — three alcoholics, and a married cross dresser.) The aversion therapy portion of the treatment was literally retching: Oswald administered two-hourly injections of apamorphine, a powerful emetic which induced violent vomiting and, in some cases, diarrhea. This was already a relatively common form of aversion therapy, but for Oswald’s experiments, the vomiting and depletion of electrolytes had the additional effect of making his patients dizzy and lightheaded. The patients were also injected with pilocarpine nitrate, which causes heavy salivation and sweating and, in some cases shortness of breath. Oswald never does state why he injected his patients with pilocarpine nitrate, but it might have been to create a simulated panic sensation in his subjects. He also gave his patients small doses of dexamphetamine, a stimulant, which he used to induce a condition of sleep deprivation in his patients.

All of that pharmacology was in the service of creating a condition in which his patients could be induced to experience auditory hallucinations when a tape loop was repeatedly played for hours on end. His goal was to create a state of mind similar to that of paranoid schizophrenia. Here is how it went for a patient identified as Case 5:

Case 5. A homosexual male aged 25 under the management of Dr. W. D. Boyd. The patient’s tyrannical father died when the patient was 15. The mother, to whom the patient was closely attached, was a drunkard, a spiritualist and a Lesbian. Elder brother had never engaged in honest work. No family history of mental illness.

Homosexual relationships began at the age of 14 and included frequent brief affairs in public lavatories and several long love-affairs. He had married at 19 and had two children. He came for treatment to try and salve his marriage, for he had been living away with a man for eight months. He was usually a passive partner, principally interested in fellatio. He was greatly excited by male urine and sometimes drank it.

Aversion therapy was embarked on with some reservations. A 30-minute interview in which he described his homosexual practices was tape-recorded. Every two hours he received apomorphine by injection and then the tape-recorded interview was played through a loud speaker. Glasses of urine were sometimes placed by him. In the intervals the following tape loop was played; “It makes him sick, it makes him sick, Sex with men? Oh, it makes him sick now. He gets sex with men. It must make him sick now. He’d meet men in the lavatories. Ugh. Sex with men makes him sick. He looks at men’s bodies. It must make him sick now.” (One male voice). Four seconds pause.

He received pilocarpine nitrate 1/20 grain once on the first day and once on the fourth, and dexamphetamine sulphate 10 mg. each night. Fluid and electrolyte depletion were prevented as with the other patients and serum potassium and sodium remained within normal limits, though the CO2 combining power rose to 33@5m.Eq./L. and chloride fell to 96 m.Eq./L. on the fourth day, having remained within normal limits previously.

He experienced the words of the tape-loop changing from the first day and throughout the four days’ treatment. The changes never had any great significance for him, seeming merely trivial or absurd. He could not voluntarily re-experience what was actually played through the loudspeaker. The changes were experienced by day and night throughout the four days and three nights of treatment.

At times he wrote down the various phrases he heard, which included:

“I like it thick my bacon thick. Sanford man, what makes it him sick now. He has Sangford man. They musta made a mistake now. They’ll need 8 men in the lavatories. Sangford man makes it sick. Be a good man Sportis? Do not make sick now. I’ll knock him sick. What makes him sick now. Enough with men’s bodies. Bolton quick it’d make you sick. Sex written in. He’s got six sick men, that must make him sick now. He’d eight men in the lavatories. Sax written back Matron’s sick. Hey’n they’ve got nice bodies. But you mustn’t make them sick now.”

After the end of treatment on the fourth day he wrote of his most recent auditory experiences:

“This impression of the tape-recorded message was not written down in detail at the time I heard it because I was quite convinced that it really was a separate recording, and I accepted it as such without question. I remember that the dialogue seemed much briefer and with longer pauses than the original recording, also the intonation seemed different. While listening, my mind’s eye formed a picture of the characters involved in this little ‘sketch’. One person monopolized all speech on a telephone while his weak-stomached friend sat immobile in a bath-chair. The man on the ‘phowne would jokingly say he had ‘mixed bodies’ (sweets?) then say something quietly to the effect that he had better not say that as it might make ‘him’ (the bath-chair sitter) sick. There would then be a deep belching sound not before heard on the recorder and the person on the ‘phone would say, ‘He’s sick now,’ or words to that effect. Then after a pause, very loudly, ‘Oh, we’ve made him sick, we’ve made him sick,’ then carry on more normally asking after the health of two friends with strange names I cannot remember. The dialogue would then come round to the part about ‘mixed bodies’ and carry on repeating endlessly the same sickly tale. If I remember correctly these variations in the recordings always came after I’d snatched a little sleep. They never changed while listening and no effort would make them sound like the original recording.”

A month later the patient reported that he had had one attempt at sexual relations with a man but had stopped because he felt feelings of revulsion and physically sick. Within two months, however, he had left his wife and gone off to live with a man.

As for the other patients, Owens claimed success with the three alcoholics, but only one of the two fetishists — the other rubber fetishist had “formed a friendship with a male homosexual (but had not had sexual relations with him” — while the cross-dresser, “in the 8 month since, he has dressed-up in female clothes on many occasions.”

[Source: Ian Oswald. “Induction of illusory and hallucinatory voices with consideration of behaviour therapy.” Journal of Mental Science 108, no. 453 (March 1962): 196-212.]

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).

This your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?

Parents Needed

Anti-marriage folks are still promoting Gracie Evans, the 11-year-old who testified against same-sex marriage before the Minnesota legislature, asking:

Which parent do I not need: my Mom or my Dad?

I wrote a lengthy response to Gracie, but sometimes we just need a quick reply. If anyone pulls this bit on me, here’s my plan to shift the conversation:

Some kids aren’t asking which parent they don’t need. They’re asking, “Why can’t I have a parent at all?”

Support same-sex adoption.

Premature Celebration

Time magazine this week celebrates, “Gay Marriage Already Won!” Okay, I added the exclamation point, but the cover goes on to explain that “the Supreme Court hasn’t made up its mind — but America has.” David Von Drehle writes in his cover story:

According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, 1 in 7 American adults say their initial opposition to same-sex marriage has turned to support. The picture of a nation of immovable factions dug into ideological trenches is belied by this increasingly uncontroversial controversy. Yesterday’s impossible now looks like tomorrow’s inevitable. The marriage license is the last defensible distinction between the rights of gay and straight couples, Cooper told the Justices as he steeled himself to defend that line. But most generals will tell you that when you’re down to your last trench, you are likely to lose the battle.

What’s most striking about this seismic social shift — as rapid and unpredictable as any turn in public opinion on record — is that it happened with very little planning. In fact, there was a lot of resistance from the top. Neither political party gave a hint of support before last year, nor was marriage part of the so-called homosexual agenda so worrisome to social-conservative leaders. For decades, prominent gay-rights activists dismissed the right to marry as a quixotic, even dangerous, cause and gave no support to the men and women at the grassroots who launched the uphill movement.

Victory has a thousand fathers, which is why its so easy to forget how very reluctant many gay rights groups were to engage this battle early on. We’re all guilty of this forgetfulness. Even me. As I set down to write about this Time cover story, I decided to go back through the BTB archives to pull out the posts where the gay rights orgs were lined up in opposition to Americans for Equal Rights’ announcement that they had hired Olson and Boies to challenge Prop 8 in Federal Court, only to discover — because I’ve long since forgotten — that I had initially opposed the lawsuit. Worse, I actually wrote this, quoting from a Freedom to Marry press release: “But I do think that the LGBT advocacy groups’ advice is what we need to heed now: ‘Rather than filing premature lawsuits, we need to talk to our friends, family and neighbors, and help them understand why denial of the freedom to marry is wrong.'”

How embarrassing.

It only too me six weeks to change my mind, which was about the same time other pro-gay groups were trying to jump on board, mostly because they feared being left behind and thought they knew better how to handle the Prop 8 challenge than Olson and Boies. And many more minds have changed since then. The lawsuit went far better than expected — the Federal District Court trial revealed the abject legal poverty of Prop 8 supporters’ arguments, the appeals process solidified and propelled the lower court victory to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it looks like Prop 8’s eventual demise appears likely. It’s almost certain that we’re not going to get a sweeping pronouncement that gays and lesbians have a right to marry, and it’s possible that the issue of standing may wind up vacating the Ninth Circuit’s ruling, knocking it all the way back down to the Federal District level and the resulting uncertainty as to how the ruling applies statewide.

Which is to say that there’s so, so much more work to do. As Nate Silver’s projections show, we’re looking at more than a decade’s worth of a lot of hard work before marriage equality becomes a viable reality nationwide if we rely solely on the ballot box and state legislatures. As we say here in Arizona, things probably look pretty swell — in New York City, where Time is published and gays are marrying — while our ever-entertaining legislature is kickstarting an “papers please before you pee” bill in the Arizona House and our governor is fighting to strip state employees of their domestic partner’s health benefits.

In a rare moment of overly-inflated confidence, I mentioned to a friend two weeks ago one morning at breakfast that I thought that in a couples of years I might shut this blog down because we will have run out of things to advocate for. What was I thinking? For christsakes, I live in Arizona! Look around! Of course, I knew better and that moment passed very quickly, before my second cup of coffee that morning. So I understand the temptation to count our victories before they’re hatched. I do think we have turned a corner, but it’s a given in warfare that when the battle turns, the losing side fights harder and nastier. We have much to celebrate, but we also have a whole lot of work to do.

During yesterday’s oral arguments in Windsor v. US, Chief Justice John Roberts grilled Edith Windsor’s attorney on the growing support for gay rights and implied that perhaps the court didn’t need to intervene because the LGBT movement is now “politically powerful.”  And it’s true that polls show that we have the luxury of time on our side. But that luxury is only available to some of us. I only wish that someone had pointed out to those nine justices that 83-year-old Edith Windsor was sitting in that court room, fighting a  $363,000 tax bill today. She doesn’t have a decade to wait for the law to catch up with public opinion.

The Daily Agenda for Thursday, March 28

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Events This Weekend: BEARcelona, Barcelona, Spain; AIDS Walk, Ft. Worth, TX; White Party, Palm Springs, CA; European Snow Pride, Tignes, France.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Dirk Bogarde: 1921. He was born Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde, but his friends and fans called him Dirk. After serving in the Queen’s Royal Regiment in World War II as an intelligence officer, he became one of Britain’s top matinee idols in the 1950s. In the 1960s he decided to do away with his heart-throb image with more challenging roles, including that of the closeted Melville Farr in 1961’s Victim, who resolves to break up an extortion racket that targets gay men.  Time magazine was scathing in its review of Victim, denouncing it as “a plea for perversion.” “Everybody in the picture who disapproves of homosexuals proves to be an ass, a dolt or a sadist,” Time fumed. “Nowhere does the film suggest that homosexuality is a serious (but often curable) neurosis that attacks the biological basis of life itself.”

Bogarde won critical acclaim playing the sinister Hugo Barrett in 1963’s The Servant, and he took on the gay lead in the 1971 art house film Death in Venice. Warner Brothers tried to drop the distribution of Death in Venice because they feared it would be banned for obscenity. They relented after Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Anne attended the premiere in London.

If it was brave for a popular actor to take on gay roles like that, it was doubly brave of Bogarde because he never officially came out. And yet he remained dedicated to his lifelong partner Anthony Forwood, whose death in 1988 after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease and liver cancer led Bogarde to become an advocate for assisted suicide. Bogarde died in 1999. It wasn’t until 2004 when his brother Gareth van den Bogaerde finally acknowledged publicly that Dirk was gay.

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).

This your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?

NOM’s idiotic trumpeting of a mangled third hand report

You have to love this declaration from NOM:

UKDailyMail: “Christian Opponents Easily Outnumbering Advocates for Gay Marriage”

It all started with Yahoo’s Chris Moody reporting an incident in the events of yesterday. He followed the NOM marchers’ progress:

When members of the crowd rose, they pressed on further down the street, where they were met by another small group of people that had stretched out a rainbow flag in front of them. When they refused to budge from the street, NOM organizers urged everyone to just go around them.

From which the Daily Mail, apparently not present and completely unaware of any other media coverage on the planet, extrapolated to mean:

Both sides of the debate were out in force, with Christian opponents easily outnumbering advocates for gay marriage.

And which led the integrity-deprived National Organization to pretend as though it were true. Personally, I’d be embarrassed to engage in such shameless behavior.

And I can’t help but wonder: if your pants are forever aflame, does that mean that you’re already in hell?

DOMA Oral Arguments Released

Audio and transcript of today’s oral arguments forWindsor v U.S. are available here.

DOMA’s Doom Appears Likely

In contrast to yesterday’s Prop 8 hearing, where the Supreme Court looked like it was desperately seeking a way to avoid making a decision, today’s hearing for the Defense of Marriage Act was more focused, directly, or indirectly, on the statutes constitutionality itself. Like yesterday, Justices first tacked the issue of standing — should the House Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group (BLAG) be defending the statute instead of the Justice Department — but those arguments, it seemed to me, also centered on DOMA’s constitutionality:

Conservative justices sharply questioned why the Justice Department is refusing to defend DOMA as unconstitutional but yet enforcing the law and placing the gay-marriage question before the Supreme Court. Justices also questioned whether the case belonged before the court at all.

Chief Justice John Roberts told attorney Sri Srinivasan, the principal deputy solicitor general, that the government’s actions were “unprecedented.” To agree with a lower court ruling finding DOMA unconstitutional but yet seeking the Supreme Court to weigh in while it enforces the law is “has never been done before,” he said.

Justice Antonin Scalia cited the longstanding Office of Legal Counsel memorandum that requires the Justice Department to defend laws passed by Congress, except in rare circumstances. He called it a “new world” where Attorney General Eric Holder can decide a law is unconstitutional, but yet not so unconstitutional that the executive branch won’t enforce the law.

…Justice Anthony Kennedy cited the controversial and “questionable” practice of presidential signing statements as an example. He said if the president doesn’t think a law is constitutional then he shouldn’t sign it. And said the same principle perhaps applied in this case — meaning if the president believes the law is unconstitutional, he shouldn’t enforce it.

…Chief Justice Roberts repeatedly expressed irritation at the Obama administration, telling Ms. Jackson, the court-appointed lawyer, and without specifically mentioning the administration, that perhaps the government should have the “courage” to execute the law based on the constitutionality rather instead of shifting the responsibility to the Supreme Court to make a decision.

Justices set aside questions of standing for the second hour, which was set aside to examine the constitutionality of DOMA itself:

Justice Kennedy, however, jumped in with federalism concerns, questioning whether the federal government was intruding on the states’ territory. With there being so many different federal laws, the federal government is intertwined with citizens’ day-to-day lives, he said. Because of this, DOMA runs the risk of running into conflict with the states’ role in defining marriage, he said.

…Justice Ginsburg again says the denial of federal benefits to same-sex couples pervades every area of life. DOMA, she said, diminished same-sex marriages to “skim-milk” marriages. Justice Elena Kagan follows a short time later saying DOMA did things the federal government hadn’t done before, and she said the law raised red flags.

…Justice Kagan said the House report that accompanied the legislation suggested at least some lawmakers had improper motives to enacting the law, such as for the purposes of voicing disapproval of homosexuality.  Mr. Clement said the high court has never invalidated a statute on that basis.

The issue of federalism and the Tenth Amendment limiting the powers of the Federal Government, arguments which have been mostly lacking in the case against DOMA, appear nevertheless to be the handle that the Justices will likely grasp rather than the Equal Protection clause:

 Josh Marhsall at Talking Points Memo notes the significance of the states rights arguments against DOMA:

If that’s the case, it would probably be the first time that “states rights” was ever used to vindicate any actual person or group’s rights. It’s almost always been bulwark behind which states hide to deprive citizens of rights. There are likely some marginal examples of the contrary. But the big verdict of history is unmistakable. It would be an ironic first.

My Heart Broke a Little Today

83-year-old widow Edie Windsor is suing the government to strike down DOMA, and today was her day in front of the Supreme Court. She spoke on the sidewalk afterward about the heart attack she had not long after her wife Thea’s death and how the government had treated their relationship like it never existed.

What moved me most was her description of how she’d been closeted for so many years, and how she was so grateful today for the kindness in how the Justices treated her.

She was grateful for their kindness.

Take a moment to realize that for most of her life, this kindness — this civility and dignity and respect — was something she and Thea had no reason to expect. It breaks my heart with regret at what these women had to live through, and it breaks my heart with joy that this heroine has never let it overcome her. Edie Windsor has overcome, no matter what the Court decides.

This is a precious moment in the struggle for dignity. The dignity our elders were denied, the dignity they fought for and won, the dignity we feel today, and the dignity we’ll pass down to those who are now only kids, starting to wonder if they’re gay, and taking hope from the courage of this tiny 83-year-old lady.

Sen. Kay Hagen Supports Marriage Equality

Sen. Kay Hagen (D-NC) comes in just under the wire:

Marriage equality is a complex issue with strong feelings on both sides, and I have a great deal of respect for varying opinions on the issue. After much thought and prayer, I have come to my own personal conclusion that we shouldn’t tell people who they can love or who they can marry.

This wasn’t a decision I came to overnight, like my Republican colleague Rob Portman expressed recently on his own viewpoint. Last year, I opposed Amendment One because I was concerned about the negative consequences it could have on North Carolina families and our economy. The fabric of North Carolina and what makes our state so special is our families and our common desire for a brighter future for our children. No matter what your family looks like, we all want the same thing for our families – happiness, health, prosperity, a bright future for our children and grandchildren.

Religious institutions should have religious freedom on this issue. No church or minister should ever have to conduct a marriage that is inconsistent with their religious beliefs. But I think as a civil institution, this issue’s time has come and we need to move forward. Jobs and the economy are the number one issue for me and for North Carolinians right now, and I’m not going to take my eye off that ball at a time when so many are still struggling.

Sen. Hagen joins Claire McCaskill (D-MO),  Mark Warner (D-VA), Mark Begich (D-AK), Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), and Jon Tester (D-MT) in sparing their grandchildren the eternal embarrassment of being on the wrong side of history. Remaining holdouts among Democratic Senators include Tom Carper (DE), Bob Casey (PA), Joe Donnelly (IN), Heidi Heitkamp (ND), Tim Johnson (SD), Mary Landrieu (LA), Joe Manchin (WV), Bill Nelson (FL) and Mark Pryor (AR). The silence of Sen. Carper, who represents a state with strong pro-marriage equality sentiment, is particularly baffling. 

On the GOP side, Sen. Rob Portman (OH) is the only sitting Senator to announce his support for marriage equality.

Welcome Out and Congratulations, Jenna Wolf and Stephanie Gosk

Stephanie Gosk and Jenna Wolfe.

People magazine brings us the news that Jenna Wolf, weekend anchor for NBC’s Today, and her partner, NBC News correspondent Stephanie Gosk, are out and having a baby:

“This is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to us,” the Today weekend anchor tells PEOPLE exclusively in its new issue. “But I don’t want to bring my daughter into a world where I’m not comfortable telling everyone who I am and who her mother is.”

Together for three years, Wolfe, 39, and Gosk, 40, began discussing starting a family last year — and had little trouble getting pregnant.

“We were constantly on the road, juggling a thousand balls at once,” Wolfe says. “It’s a miracle we got it all together.”

The couple is also planning to wed, but admit they’re more excited for the baby.

Nate Silver Examines Growing Support for Same-Sex Marriage

On Tuesday, Nate Silver examined national and state-level polling data on the growing support for marriage equality, and while he’s not yet ready to announce that a majority of Americans support marriage equality — there is still a lot of variation in the polls — he does say that supporters now outnumber opponents nationally:

What’s clearer is the long-term trend. The chart below documents national polls on same-sex marriage since 1996, as according to PollingReport.com. (It excludes polls that offer a three-way choice between same-sex marriage, civil unions, and no legal recognition for gay and lesbian couples, focusing on those that require a binary choice.) The polls are accompanied by a trendline determined through Loess regression to reflect the change in public opinion over time.

Click to enlarge.

In the past, we have sometimes considered the possibility that support for same-sex marriage is increasing at a faster rate than before. The data seems to suggest, however, that the increase in support has been reasonably steady since about 2004.

Silver notes however that the linear increase in support since 2004 nationally does not necessarily mean that support has been increasing steadily in all fifty states:

In 2011, I published a model projecting ballot initiative results for same-sex marriage based on two scenarios: one which assumed a linear increase in support, and the other which assumed an accelerating trend.

In general, the more conservative linear model was closer to the mark in forecasting the 2012 results. It predicted that 48.8 percent of voters would vote in support of same-sex marriage on average among the five states, fairly close to the actual figure of 50.1 percent. By contrast, the accelerated model predicted that 53.6 percent would vote to support same-sex marriage in these states.

…However, the predictions were not especially accurate when looking at individual states. Both versions of the model underestimated same-sex marriage support in Maryland and Minnesota, while both versions overestimated it in Maine, North Carolina and Washington.

But what about future predictions in the states? After all, that’s why we read Nate Silver, isn’t it? Well, here it is. Silver predicts that by 2016, voters in 32 states would approve same-sex marriage legislation, and by 2020, voters in 44 states would do so — including even Texas and Oklahoma. Readers in Rhode Island, Hawaii, New Jersey, Delaware, take heart: there’s no good reason for you guys not having marriage equality soon. Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi: it’s gonna be a while.

The Daily Agenda for Wednesday, March 27

Edith Windsor

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Supreme Court to Hear Oral Arguments in DOMA Case: Washington, D.C. As I said yesterday, this is the month when history will be made. In part two of that history, U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments today in the case of Windsor v U.S., which challenges the constitutionality of Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act. Section 3 is the portion of the federal law which bars the U.S. government from recognizing same-sex marriage performed by the states. This case was brought by Edith Windsor, the widow of Thea Spyer, who is being forced to pay $363,000 in federal estate taxes because the government is barred from recognizing their marriage. The couple had been together since 1965, and they were finally able to wed in Toronto in 2007, two years before Thea’s death.

A Federal District Judge ruled in Windsor’s favor and struck down DOMA’s Section 3 as unconstitutional, and the case was on its way to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals when Windsor’s attorneys, citing her age and poor health (she’s 83), asked the Supreme Court to take the case directly. (The Second Circuit ended up upholding the lower court’s ruling.) Oral arguments for Windsor v. U.S. will begin this morning at 10:00 a.m. and they are scheduled to last about two hours. Part of the reason for the extended time for oral arguments rests with the Justice Department’s determination that they could not defend the law’s constitutionality based on the facts and the heightened scrutiny that the believe the case requires. The House Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group (BLAG), under the direction of House Majority Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), then annouced that they would take up the statute’s defense, and so part of the oral arguments this morning will focus on whether BLAG has standing. Audio recordings will bceome available by 2:00 p.m. EDT. You can find the full docket of documents and amici briefs here.

Events This Weekend: BEARcelona, Barcelona, Spain; AIDS Walk, Ft. Worth, TX; White Party, Palm Springs, CA; European Snow Pride, Tignes, France.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Bob Mizer: 1922. Before there was the internet and its most lucrative offering, online porn, and before the proliferation of dead-tree porn in the late 1960s through the 1980s, there was the “physique” magazines that sprang up after World War II. Bob Mizer was the mild-mannered publisher and photographer for Physique Pictorial, one of many such magazines that published “beefcake” photographs under the guise of bodybuilding and health. His photography studio, the Athletic Model Guild (AMG), specialized in men (gay and straight) doing bodybuilding poses or wrestling in pairs. But that thin guise — almost as thin as the posing pouch that his models wore — wasn’t enough to keep him from being convicted in 1947 of unlawful distribution of obscene materials and serving a nine month sentence at a work camp in Saugus, California.

That setback barely put a dent into Mizer’s career. In addition the Physique Pictorial, Mizer added Young Adonis in 1963 and Grecian Guild Studio Quarterly in 1966. When obscenity laws were relaxed in 1968 allowing full male frontal nudity, Mizer quickly adapted with the times. Through it all, AMG was very much a family affair, with Mizer’s mother (her skills as a seamstress was put to use in creating a line of skimpy briefs and posing pouches) and brother (an accountant) playing important roles in the business. Mizer would photograph thousands of men and take nearly a million different images. He also produced over 3000 film titles from the 1950s to the 1980’s, which mostly consisted of film (and later, videotape) of his photo sessions. He died in 1992, and AMG went dormant for a while. But under new ownership, Mizer’s archives are being catalogued and digitally remastered. Mizer never thought of himself as an artists, but his work has garnered a significant re-appraisal in the past two decades, which influenced artists like Robert Mappelthorpe and David Hockney. The Los Angeles Times wrote in 2004 that “Mizer’s pictures are historically important because they capture a time, place and attitude so vividly that it still seems to be with us. His photographs are inspiring because they were not made to fill a market niche that already existed. Instead, they created the niche and then filled it with aplomb.” In 2009, Taschen Books released the monograph Bob’s World: The Life and Boys of A.M.G.’s Bob Mizer.

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This your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?

Part 2 of Rob’s Snarky Play-by-Play of the Prop 8 Hearing

Now I’m going to go through Olson’s attack on Prop 8. As before I simply started typing as I listened so please forgive the many typos.

33:00 Olson starts off by saying this of Prop 8:

It walls-off gays and lesbians from marriage, the most important relation in life, according to this Court, thus stigmatizing a class of Californians based upon their status and labeling their most cherished relationships as second-rate, different, unequal, and not okay.

Then the Court directs him talk about standing (i.e., the question of who has the right to defend Prop 8 in court) before he gets to the merits. I’ll skip that because it’s technical legal stuff not specific to marriage equality.

41:30 We get back to the merits. Olson says what I’ve been dying to shout at Cooper and everyone else who demands we justify our rights by showing they’ll benefit the State:

This is a measure that walls off the institution of marriage, which is not society’s right. It’s an individual right that this Court again and again and again has said the right to get married, the right to have the relationship of marriage is a personal right. It’s a part of the right of privacy, association, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

And let me say that Olson is one articulate MoFo. I’ve sped up the audio by 40% as a I listen, and it makes everyone’s slow, deliberate, halting legal-speak sound like a normal conversation pace, but not Olson – Olson is so sharp, confident, and prepared that at 140% speed his clear and well-constructed sentences just fly by! Read the rest of this entry »

Sen. Jon Tester Supports Marriage Equality

Number five:

…Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) announced his support for same-sex marriage on Tuesday, the day the Supreme Court considered the constitutionaly of Proposition 8, California’s gay marriage ban.

“Montanans believe in the right to make a good life for their families,” he wrote on his Facebook page. “How they define a family should be their business and their business alone. I’m proud to support marriage equality because no one should be able to tell a Montanan or any American who they can love and who they can marry.”

Sen. Tester joins Sens.  Claire McCaskill (D-MO),  Mark Warner (D-VA), Mark Begich (D-AK) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) in the last-minute upper-house rush to be on the right side of history before the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments tomorrow in the Defense of Marriage Act case. The last Senate holdouts on the Democratic side of the aisle are: Tom Carper (DE), Bob Casey (PA), Joe Donnelly (IN), Kay Hagan (NC), Heidi Heitkamp (ND), Tim Johnson (SD), Mary Landrieu (LA), Joe Manchin (WV), Bill Nelson (FL) and Mark Pryor (AR). On the GOP side, Sen. Rob Portman (OH) is the only one to make future generations of Portmans proud, beginning with his own son.