Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyFebruary 14th, 2013
Today at 11:33am PST, during the Illinois State Senate debate on same-sex marriage, Sen. Kyle McCarter (R) said — no, you won’t believe me.
Hold on, let me try.
He said…
He said…
He said…most florists will close their shops rather than give service to same-sex couples.
The crowd expressed its skepticism.
UPDATE: See for yourself here, at the 1:10:15 mark.
February 14th, 2013
The National Organization for Marriage is touting it’s latest public relations ploy, a poll of Rhode Island voters about whether the legislature should treat all citizens equally. And, as usual, it’s all just a game.
They set the stage with a question about whether participants approve of Governor Chafee (he’s not very popular but he’s the face of the marriage movement) and then come the relevant questions:
5. Have you heard or read anything in the news recently about the issue of same-sex marriage in Rhode Island?
96% yes
4% no6. Recently the Rhode Island House of Representatives voted to redefine marriage to include two persons of the same sex. A resolution has been introduced in the Senate to allow the people to vote on the definition of marriage. Which of these two positions do you think is correct: do you think the definition of marriage should be decided by the voters of Rhode Island, or should it be decided by the Rhode Island General Assembly?
74% voters
20% general assembly
7% don’t know/no response7. Please tell me whether you agree or disagree with the following statement: “voters in 35 other states have been able to vote on the definition of marriage in their state, and Rhode Island voters deserve the same opportunity.” Do you …
60% – Strongly agree
18% – Somewhat agree
10% – Somewhat disagree
8% – Strongly disagree
4% – Don’t know / no response8. Regardless of how you feel about the issue of same-sex marriage, should the Governor and General Assembly consider making same-sex marriage legal while there is an economic crisis in our state, or should the economic crisis be dealt with first before the issue of same sex marriage is considered?
31% – First statement
55% – Second statement
15% – Don’t know / no response
By now many of you are laughing. It’s all a bit too obvious.
Never once does the National Organization for Marriage ask voters whether they support marriage equality or even if they support the specific bill before the legislature. I can only assume that the don’t dare because they know the answer: Rhode Islanders support equality.
Instead NOM pits legislators “redefining marriage” against voting rights. Them untrustworthy scoundrels vs The People.
But the truly amusing part isn’t even their push poll language. It’s NOM’s sample.
As it turns out, NOM doesn’t report their age demographics using the standard voter breakouts. But by using the 2004 voter demographics and making some estimations, we can get close enough.
For Rhode Island
18 – 39: voters 31%; NOM 13%
40 – 49: voters 19%; NOM 16%
50 – 59: voters 19%; NOM 37%
60 plus: voters 31%; NOM 34%
So even though half of Rhode Island voters are under 50, only 29% of NOM’s sample is in that range.
And now let’s look at faith. By coincidence, Gallup released today a listing of states by order of those who find religion to be important in their daily like and who attend church every week or almost every week. Rhode Island weighed in at forty-fifth with only 29% being very religious.
But NOM’s sample was, shall we say, a bit more devout.
26% of NOM’s sample goes to church 1 to 3 times a month, 22% makes it 4 times a month, and another 9% make it 5 or more times a month.
So yeah, NOM’s doing it again. I guess they’re polling religious retirement communities and thinking that represents the state’s voters.
But it just must be depressing as Hell at NOM headquarters. Even after trying to get their participants hyped up about their right to vote; even after fears about a bad economy, still a third of their doddering church ladies still want the legislature to vote for equality now.
It makes you wonder, do they go home at night and cry?
February 14th, 2013
Today is the traditional Feast Day of St. Valentine. Which Valentine is anybody’s guess. One tradition, as laid out in Legenda Aurea, has it that the day commemorates Valentine the Presbyter (also known as Valentine of Rome), although very little is known if him. Pope Gelasius I in 496 included him as among those “whose names are justly reverenced among me, but whose acts are known only to God.” It is said that he was martyred in about 269 during the reign of Claudius II, after having been arrested and imprisoned for marrying Christian couples who were then under persecution in Rome at a time when Christians were seen as a grave threat to civilization, to all the traditions that made the nation great, and to the natural order of things. But there is no written record of his being associated with romantic love until Geoffrey Chaucer wrote Parlement of Foules in 1382:
For this was on seynt Volantynys day
Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make.
(For this was Saint Valentine’s Day
when every bird comes there to choose his mate)
When the notoriously romantic Victorians got hold of St. Valentine’s Day in the nineteenth century, all hell broke loose on the love-dovey front, and it hasn’t let up since then.
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Events this weekend: Arizona Gay Rodeo, Laveen, AZ; Sydney Mardis Gras, Sydney, NSW.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
San Francisco Establishes Domestic Partnership Registry: 1991. The idea had been tossed around since 1979, when gay rights activist Tom Brougham proposed a new category of relationship called “domestic partnership.” His cause was taken up in 1982 by San Francisco Supervisor Harry Britt, who had taken the seat of slain Supervisor Harvey Milk. Britt’s bill authorizing domestic partnerships was vetoed that year by Mayor Dianne Feinstein, It would be passed again in 1989, but that law was repealed by a voter initiative in 1990. Fortunately, that same year city voters approved Proposition K which established a modified version of domestic partnerships which allowed same-sex and opposite-sex couples to register. Fittingly, on February 14, 1991, the brand new registry was established in San Francisco allowing partners to register. San Francisco however wasn’t the first city to provide domestic partnerships. That honor went to West Hollywood in 1985.
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?
February 13th, 2013
The Atlantic has a cute story about the sayings that Necco’s Sweethearts have taken off the candy over their nearly 150 years. This is the illustration:
Which was all nice and fine until I saw this one.
Yeah, I know what it is supposed to say, but really? Really? C’mon, it’s tough enough being 49 and single this week.
February 13th, 2013
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Events this weekend: Arizona Gay Rodeo, Laveen, AZ; Sydney Mardis Gras, Sydney, NSW.
Grant Wood, self-portrait, 1932.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Grant Wood: 1891. Born a few miles outside of Anamosa, Iowa, the great expanse of the upper great plains and the solid simplicity of its people would always be near to his heart. He studied at the Art Institute in Chicago, and from 1920 to 1928, he made four trips to Europe where he studied Impressionism and Post-Impressionist styles of painting, but his heat never strayed far Iowa, nor did his style stray from simplicity and directness which are the bedrock of Iowa’s people. His style became known as Regionalism, which depicted rural American themes in a style which recalled the severe Calvinism of Northern Renaissance paintings.
American Gothic, 1930.
This is best exemplified in his iconic 1930 painting American Gothic, perhaps among the best known, best loved, and best parodied of American paintings. Art critics, at least those who assumed the painting was meant to be satire of small-town life, praised it. When a copy was printed in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, locals denounced their depiction as “pinched, grim-faced, puritanical Bible-thumpers.” Wood himself defended the painting as simply a a depiction of the American pioneer spirit. He also became a vocal critic of modernist trends and the dominance of the East coast art world. No other American artist before or since has earned such national fame without ever showing his work in New York.
In 1932, he founded the Stone City Art Colony to help other artists get through the Great Depression, and from 1934 to 1941 he taught at the University of Iowa’s School of Art, where his teaching career was very nearly derailed over accusations that Wood was gay. The only report that contains the complete details of those accusations was buried in a time capsule of the Art and Art History Building in 1934, and the details will remain hidden until the cornerstone is opened some twenty years from now. New allegations arose in 1941 when university colleagues, most of whom embraced the European trends that Wood so clearly disdained, tried to get Wood removed from the faculty. Their accusations centered around a very brief marriage that ended in divorce in 1938 and the handsome young roommates who lived in his home. When a reporter from Time came sniffing, the university president managed to get the story spiked, and reorganized the Art Department so that Wood would be placed in an entirely separate division and away from his detractors. But before Wood could resume teaching, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died in February 12, 1942.
Most biographies which have come out since Wood’s death have either avoided his homosexuality or dismissed it. Tripp Evans’s 2010 Grant Wood: A Life
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?
February 13th, 2013
Yesterday I wrote our opponents love to claim they’re persecuted simply for opposing same-sex marriage — claiming it so falsely and frequently, I’ve now learned to interpret simply as code for there’s so much we’re not telling you.
I didn’t expect to have another example so soon.
It seems author Orson Scott Card is slated to write a Superman series for DC Comics. People are petitioning DC to dump him for his past statements on gays, and Brian Brown is outraged.
NOM President Brian Brown told Fox News he was simply stunned that gay rights activists are trying to destroy a man’s career.
“This is completely un-American and it needs to be stopped,” Brown said. “Simply because we stand up for traditional marriage, some people feel like it’s okay to target us for intimidation and punishment.”
Brown called the attacks on Card frightening and said it’s another example of gay rights activists trying to punish those who believe marriage should be a union between a man and woman.
There’s that “simply” again (emphasis added). But how simple is it?
In 1990, Card wrote this:
Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society’s regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.
Why, what’s so awful about that? He doesn’t even want to through all gays in jail. Just the uppity ones. And that was 1990. Perhaps Card has moderated his views.
Hmm.
Compare this from his 1990 article:
No act of violence is ever appropriate to protect Christianity from those who would rob it of its meaning.
To this, which he wrote in 2008:
Because when government is the enemy of marriage, then the people who are actually creating successful marriages have no choice but to change governments, by whatever means is made possible or necessary. [emphasis added]
…
Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.
If anything Card has grown more extreme, moving from mere intolerant bigotry to threats of outright treason.*
NOM is trying desperately to claim people are persecuted “simply” for opposing same-sex marriage, and as an example, NOM offers up a man who calls from the imprisonment of gay people and who thinks the violent overthrow of the government is a justifiable response to marriage equality.
It’s time for NOM to answer this question: If your claims are so good…why is your evidence so bad?
*The First Amendment guarantees that talk of treason is not inherently treasonous. Card would have to act on his threat or incite imminent lawless action to be guilty. So far, with same-sex marriage legal in the east, the west, and the middle of the country, Card hasn’t followed through with his threat, revealing himself to be an empty, belligerent blowhard, which is not itself treasonous.
February 12th, 2013
When President Hollande of France signs the marriage bill, a couple of islands off Newfoundland and several off Africa, along with a country in South America will also be impacted. Britain’s bill may or may not change law in the Falkland Islands off Argentina, but it will likely influence thought in the many nations that comprise the British Commonwealth. The Netherland’s marriage bill was finally reflected when itty bitty Saba, in the Caribbean, conducted it’s first same-sex marriage in December. And when the US Supreme Court rules in a few months, it’s decisions will determine the fate of same sex couples in St. Thomas and Puerto Rico.
While it is exciting when large and powerful countries move towards equality, let’s keep in mind that this movement is not and cannot be limited to just those countries. Each success is larger than just its borders.
February 12th, 2013
Self-described Catholic blogger Brandon Vogt recently published Rebuttals to arguments for same-sex marriage. He tries to disprove 10 common same-sex-marriage arguments, but merely highlights the most common mistakes of his own camp. I’m addressing each of his 10 points in separate posts as a kind of back-to-basics review of our opposition.
On Saturday Brandon Vogt responded to one of my posts. I doubt he did his cause much good, but one thing he said stuck in my head: his belief that my post…
…is couched in a smug, condescending tone that makes fruitful dialogue more difficult.
If that’s true (and I can’t claim total innocence) then I’ve made a rhetorical error. I was actually reaching for a somewhat different tone.
Exasperation.
Vogt’s errors of logic and fact are so grievous that eventually a fair reader has to ask, What could make him write that? I wanted to do more than point out his logical flaws. I set to myself to conveying this sense of exasperated wonderment.
That’s why I changed the order of his points and left his examination of #8 for last:
8. Opposition to same-sex marriage is based on bigotry, homophobia and religious hatred.
Vogt worded this ambiguously. He could be trying to dispute either of these interpretations:
I don’t know which version Vogt is taking issue with. I don’t agree with the first one myself, and I’ll address that in another post.
As for the second version, I hope Vogt’s not trying to deny it. Much of our opposition declares gay people to immoral, depraved, Hitler-enabling, America-hating purveyors of evil comparable to murderers and rapists, who reduce their children to trophies, cannot love them like straight parents can, cannot love their partners, are worthy of death, and are in the thrall of Satan, Satan, Satan, Satan, Satan.
And Satan.
Let’s see what Vogt has to say about this. Read the rest of this entry »
February 12th, 2013
France’ National Assembly has now voted to allow same sex couples to marry and adopt children: (AP)
President François Hollande’s Socialists pushed the measure through the national assembly, carrying a vote by 329 to 229.
The assembly has been debating the bill and voting on individual articles in recent weeks. The bill now goes to the senate, which is also controlled by the Socialists and their allies.
February 12th, 2013
Having sat through some 5,000 proposed amendments, France’s National Assembly is ready to vote. Again.
After today’s expected victory, the bill will move to the nation’s Senate.
February 12th, 2013
Today the leadership of Hawaii’s legislature will decide whether to kill marriage equality for this legislative session. If a hearing isn’t scheduled before the Judiciary Committee of the Senate or House, the marriage bill will die.
Supporters are hoping that they can find procedural ways around the deadline, but if leadership opposes the bill (or fears that it doesn’t have sufficient support) then procedure isn’t the problem.
How ironic that it may well turn out marriage came closer to a reality this year in Wyoming than Hawaii.
February 12th, 2013
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Premiere of “Making Love”: 1982. Starring Michael Ontkean, Charlie’s Angels star Kate Jackson, and Harry Hamlin, Making Love opened in theaters as the first mainstream film to tackle homosexuality in a nonjudgemental way. That’s not to say that the story wasn’t without drama when Zach (Ontkean) and Claire (Jackson) dealt with a crumbling marriage as Zach struggled to deal with his attractions to other men. When he meets gay novelist Bart McGuire (Hamlin), their professional relationship (Zach was a doctor, Bart a patient who was in for a check-up) turned into a lunch date, then a dinner date, and then a full-fledged relationship, which over time, ends in a divorce for Zach and Claire. Claire handles the news badly, but over time comes to understand that gay people can live happy lives. The film’s happily-ever-after ending had the feel of a made-for-TV movie which critics hated. Gay critics, however, were overjoyed that the film was a positive portrayal where the gay characters didn’t all die in the end.
In real life however, the film demonstrated one significant difficulty in making mainstream movies about gay men: it seemed to confirm the fear that taking such a role would be career killers. Tom Berenger, Michael Douglas, Harrison Ford, William Hurt and Peter Strauss were all approached to play Zach; they all turned the role down. After the film’s release Ontkean and Hamlin had trouble living the film down. Hamlin’s promising career stalled for the next four years until he landed a role in NBC’s L.A. Law. Ontkean tried to prevent clips of his role from appearing in Vito Russo’s 1996 documentary The Celluloid Closet.
SF Mayor Grants Same-Sex Marriages: 2004. It was a stunning announcement, when San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom declared that the California Constitution’s equal protection clause gave him the authority to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Between February 12 and March 11, 2004, an estimated 4,000 joyous couples lined up at City Hall to take part in what was quickly dubbed “The Winter of Love.” But the weddings came to an abrupt halt when the California Supreme Court declared that the mayor lacked the authority to bypass state law. All of those marriage licenses were voided, and same-sex marriage would remain unavailable until 2008 when the state Supreme Court found that “equal respect and dignity” of marriage is a “basic civil right” for all couples in California, gay or straight. That finding was overturned by Prop 8 in 2008, which itself was ruled unconstitutional in 2010. That ruling was upheld by a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last week. But a stay against the resumption of marriages remains while the case continues is long journey to an expected U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June.
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?
February 11th, 2013
Alexander Hornaday, Vice-President of the Colorado Log Cabin Republicans, spoke some truth to Colorado’s Republican legislators. They mostly chose to ignore his warning, but it is, nevertheless, something they needed to hear.
The tide has moved on this issue, and it’s not just Coloradans generally who are reconsidering their past opposition, it’s many Republicans too. I am not the only Republican here offering support. Mr. Nicolais already testified to the support in the Colorado Republican Convention for civil unions. A month earlier at the Denver Republican Assembly, for which I also serve as treasurer, 56% of delegates voted to support civil unions.
…
Look at our young Republicans. Yesterday the Colorado Federation of College Republicans reaffirmed its support for civil unions, and gosh, until it became cost prohibitive the Denver Metro Young Republicans met at Hamburger Mary’s, a gay bar! Most striking, though, is that with the possible exception of a few primary races, opposition to civil unions did not prove to be electorally useful for Republicans. In the General Election it was quite the opposite, in fact.
Only one Republican Senator voted for civil unions. But those who opposed did so mostly quietly and any outcry has mostly been a whimper. They know he’s right.
February 11th, 2013
Today the Colorado Senate voted for a civil unions bill (Denver Post)
A bill allowing gay couples to form civil unions passed the Senate on Monday morning on a 21-14 with Sen. Ellen Roberts of Durango providing the lone Republican “yes” vote.
All Democrats voted for the bill. On Monday the bill goes to the House where it is expected to pass easily. The bill is expected to become effective in May.
February 11th, 2013
Some argue that it is inherently inappropriate to vote on matters of civil rights. And I understand and appreciate the logic behind that claim. But from a pragmatic point of view, absent any declaration of the unconstitutionality of state bans on marriage equality, that’s the only way that some states will become equal.
So I am delighted that activists in the state of Oregon have decided to take marriage back to the ballot box in 2014. (Oregonian)
The state’s major gay-rights group, Basic Rights Oregon, made the decision over the weekend to launch a petition drive on Monday to put a measure on the ballot that would allow legal recognition of same-sex marriages. Given the group’s resources and the issue’s high visibility, there is little doubt the group can qualify the measure for the November general election.
And the time may be right, with Oregon voters now supporting marriage. A PPP poll in December found the following:
Q20 Do you think Oregon voters should be allowed
to vote on whether they think same-sex
marriage should be legal, or not?
Voters should be allowed to…………………. 77%
They should not ……………………………………. 14%
Not sure …………………………………………………. 9%Q21 Do you think same-sex marriage should be
allowed in Oregon, or not?
Should be allowed …………………………………. 54%
Should not………………………………………………. 40%
Not sure …………………………………………………. 5%
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