Craig Stowell is a straight Republican gay rights activist from New Hampshire. Brian Brown is the loud, complaining one from the National Organization for Marriage hate group. This MSNBC debate did not go well for him. Watch him regurgigate the same three talking points over and over again, accomplishing nothing:
It’s nothing short of amazing to witness Brian’s hypocrisy as he complains about “special interest groups from out of state putting a lot of money in” to making marriage equality legal in New Hampshire. NOM’s entire agenda consists of barging into states where they have no business and trying to hurt gay people!
Here’s Jimmy Carter’s religious argument in support of marriage equality, and it’s funny — it’s exactly what gay activists have been fighting for:
Homosexuality was well known in the ancient world, well before Christ was born and Jesus never said a word about homosexuality. In all of his teachings about multiple things -– he never said that gay people should be condemned. I personally think it is very fine for gay people to be married in civil ceremonies.
I draw the line, maybe arbitrarily, in requiring by law that churches must marry people. I’m a Baptist, and I believe that each congregation is autonomous and can govern its own affairs. So if a local Baptist church wants to accept gay members on an equal basis, which my church does by the way, then that is fine. If a church decides not to, then government laws shouldn’t require them to.
The idea that gay people want to “force” churches to marry us has always been a straw man erected by the biggest liars of the Religious Right to scare people. Individual churches have always and should continue to be able to bless or not bless whatever unions they want to.
Why would we want to get married in a congregation that doesn’t support us in the first place?
Great news on the marriage equality front in Europe:
Denmark’s Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt said in a press conference today that the government is finalizing a bill that will legalize same-sex marriage on June 15, but individual priests will still be able to refuse to perform ceremonies. Thorning-Schmidt expressed pride in the development, saying, “It’s an important message for a country such as Denmark to send — we respect every citizen’s choice but we also respect priests’ choice too.”
It looks like Maine voters will reverse their 2009 decision and legalize gay marriage in the state this fall. 54% think that gay marriage should be legal to only 41% who think it should be illegal. And when we asked about the issue using the exact language voters will see on the ballot this fall, they say they’re inclined to support the referendum by a 47-32 margin.
One of the Religious Right’s favorite talking points against marriage equality is that “in 31 out of 31 states, voters have rejected same sex marriage when it’s put to a vote blah blah blah.” It looks like that talking point will soon die for them, in Maine and also in Washington state if their marriage law is put to a referendum. It’s always nice when Religious Right talking points die.
I’m sure you all are by now annoyed and familiar with the story of Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown student who has been attacked over the last week by Rush Limbaugh and the rest of Wingnuttia for daring to speak out in support of contraception, which up to approximately twelve seconds ago, was one of the least controversial subjects in the United States. If not, she has a Wikipedia entry now! I hadn’t written about it much, because meh, but Thers picked up on the latest annoying, predictable development in this story, and it’s subject matter dear to my heart, namely the fact that the fights for reproductive rights and LGBT rights [and hell, most other things which make life better for people who aren't rich white Christian dudes] are the same fight. So this will be one of my “I told you so” posts.
You see, apparently Sandra Fluke wrote a paper [a woman! with a vagina! writing a paper! that wingnuts don't like!] a while back which stated her support for private insurance not only covering contraception, but also treatment for transgender people, all the way up to gender reassignment surgery. In a sane world, this would not be controversial, as transgender people are real and recognized by the medical community, and they’re pretty much in agreement on the proper ways to go about treating them.
Not for wingnuts. First off, just click on this Memeorandum link to all the wingnuts now gnashing their chompers saying “How dare she?!”
Sandra Fluke is being sold by the left as something she’s not. Namely a random co-ed from Georgetown law who found herself mixed up in the latest front of the culture war who was simply looking to make sure needy women had access to birth control. That, of course, is not the case.
As many have already uncovered Sandra Fluke she is, in reality, a 30 year old long time liberal activist who enrolled at Georgetown with the express purpose of fighting for the school to pay for students’ birth control. She has been pushing for mandated coverage of contraceptives at Georgetown for at least three years according to the Washington Post.
However, as I discovered today, birth control is not all that Ms. Fluke believes private health insurance must cover. She also, apparently, believes that it is discrimination deserving of legal action if “gender reassignment” surgeries are not covered by employer provided health insurance. She makes these views clear in an article she co-edited with Karen Hu in the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law.
As Thers said, OMIGOD. Woman have opinion on two things and write them down!
[I]magine Fluke trying to defend this language about “heterosexist” policies in a public hearing, with Republican members of the committee questioning her about whether religious institutions (or private businesses, or taxpayers) should also be required to foot the bill for “gender reassignment.”
Congratulations, America: You’ve been scammed!
UPDATE: Dan Collins at The Conservatory points out that the Obama administration is already providing illegal immigrants with “hormone treatments for transgendered people.”
Of course, this only makes sense. We wouldn’t want these foreign transpeople to go back to wherever they (illegally) came from and say that they’d been the victims of American “heterosexism,” would we? Then President Obama would have to issue another apology to the foreigners we had victimized.
Haw haw haw, wingnut attempt to make joke!
If you are truly bored with your existence, click around all the other Memeorandum articles featuring wingnuts screeching basically the same thing over and over, but if you have things to do, the takeaway is, again, simple: it’s all the same fight.
Here’s what Thers says at the end of his post, along the same lines, but funnier than I have the energy to do right now:
Are they deliberately trying to prove feminists and queer theorists right about everything? If so, well played. I guess.
Wait’ll they find out she dislikes racism. Then she’ll be totes exposed as an Anti-American Faith-Hating Fraud.
Truth Wins Out is definitely becoming a lot more well known these days, but Wayne Besen is featured as one of five “modest heroes” in the fight for equality:
These five modest heroes — hailing from the disparate worlds of health, research, law, journalism, and religion — deserve some recognition. Each makes unique contributions to LGBT equality that matter more than most people realize.
And about Wayne, specifically:
Activist author Wayne Besen launched a petition this month that within hours forced a homophobic high school principal in Brownsville, Tennessee to resign after she told LGBT students they were doomed to spend all eternity in Hell. His petition also got the county school board to formally commit – on the same day – to free speech, tolerance, and diversity.
When not writing, Besen operates TWO (Truth Wins Out), the non-profit organization most dedicated to exposing the fraudulent “ex-gay therapy” that is sold by anti-LGBT hate groups, and promoted and endorsed by the Catholic and Mormon churches. This so-called “reparative” therapy purports to cure whatever sexual orientation the patient was born with, yet consists only of hope and prayer wrapped in a new, non-gay wardrobe. This faux treatment was long ago discredited by every major professional mental/medical health organization because it’s expensive, never succeeds, harms its patients, and leads to suicide.
Besen’s educational efforts help potential patients, relatives, and friends realize before it’s too late that ex-gay therapy is junk science, that selling it constitutes consumer fraud, and that treatment with it constitutes medical malpractice. For more info, check out: WayneBesen.com, TruthWinsOut.org, and follow him on Twitter @WayneBesen.
[Here are two open tabs in my browser that I can combine into one blog post, said the blogger.]
Frank Rich has had quite a lot to say about the march toward full LGBT equality in the past few days. In his column on Sunday, he looks at the state of the movement right now, with all the victories that are being won, and cautions us not to whitewash the actual history of some of our allies while we’re popping out the champagne:
In the outpouring of provincial self-congratulation that greeted the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York, some of the discomforting history that preceded that joyous day has been rewritten, whitewashed, or tossed into a memory hole. We—and by we, I mean liberal New Yorkers like me, whether straight or gay, and their fellow travelers throughout America—would like to believe that the sole obstacles to gay civil rights have been the usual suspects: hidebound religious leaders both white and black, conservative politicians (mostly Republican), fundamentalist Christian and Muslim zealots, and unreconstructed bigots. What’s been lost in this morality play is the role that many liberal politicians and institutions have also played in slowing and at some junctures halting gay civil rights in recent decades.
[...]
The history of liberal culpability in such government-mandated discrimination should not be locked in a closet now. To forget any history is to risk repeating it. To forget this particular history is to minimize or erase the struggles of gay men and lesbians whose lives and fundamental rights were trampled routinely for decades in America, with cruel and sometimes deadly results.
He discusses the evolution of the Cuomo and Clinton political families on these issues, citing Mario Cuomo’s governor’s race against “confirmed bachelor” Ed Koch, all the way up to DOMA and DADT. He does this, though, not to be unappreciative of the support we now have, but to encourage liberal and Democratic leaders to TRULY step up and advocate as fiercely as possible for LGBT equality, as a way to truly exorcise the demons of past discrimination which liberals and Democrats, unfortunately, aided and abetted.
Read that whole column if you have a minute.
Last night, Frank sat down with Rachel Maddow and turned his attention to the hypocrisy of gay and gay-friendly Republicans in continuing to put up with a party which panders to the basest instincts of its most rank bigots to score votes. Andy pulled this quote from the interview:
“There’s a complete disconnect. I guess it’s just a kind of desperate, craven relationship to the base of that party. We now have a base of the Republican party that is so radical that they can be pandered to by calls for elimination of public education…the hypocrisy…someone like Ken Mehlman is in a long tradition, I hate to say it, of Republicans who were closeted homosexuals in power, actually enabling homophobic policies and in some cases the real demonization of gay people. And then as soon as they’re away from it…then he comes out and does the right thing. Comes out as gay, but also comes out of those policies. But where was he when it really mattered within his own party?…There’s a real pathological disconnect and they’ve really got to be called on it.”
He also discusses Dick Cheney, who lobbied behind the scenes for marriage equality in Maryland, yet refuses, like so many pro-gay Republicans, to loudly condemn the party itself for supporting hatred and bigotry.
Consider this thought experiment. Twin brothers announced on a TV talk show that they were gay. Under the laws proposed, can they marry? If not, why not? They’ve certainly had a “committed relationship” since before they were born. What constitutional principle could you invoke to say these twins cannot marry each other? And if these twin brothers may marry, why not a twin brother and sister? Dick Cheney probably never met Mae West. For younger readers unfamiliar with one of Hollywood’s original blond bombshells, I’ll simply say: sailors in World War II called their large life jackets Mae Wests. (This is a family blog, after all.) Mae West famously said: “Marriage is a great institution, but I’m not ready for an institution.” How strange that Mae West had a better understanding of civil marriage than a former Vice President of the United States, a man who was twice elected to national office by pro-family voters.
For those trying to keep up at home, blah blah blah, twins, Mae West was hot and said something funny, therefore Dick Cheney sucks.
Today, we are excited to follow-up that announcement with the news that ten members of congress participated in the NOH8 ON THE HILL photo shoot; all of them being Democrats from the House of Representatives, including a Delegate to Congress from the District of Columbia. Representatives from Ohio, Massachusetts, California, Oregon, and Colorado took a few minutes away from the floor to pose for their NOH8 photo – making it known where they stand on equality.
“Our nation was founded upon the principle of equality. It is imperative that we work for equal rights for all in order to make that principle a reality. Love isn’t gay or straight, tall or short, black or white, it is for everyone,” said Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio’s 10th District.
This afternoon, Bush appointee Judge Jeffrey White (Northern District of California) struck down DOMA as unconstitutional under the equal protection clause.
[...]
Noting that neither the Ninth Circuit nor the Supreme Court has determined what level of scrutiny should apply, the court determined that heightened scrutiny should apply to classifications based on sexual orientation…
Angry Black Lady [who you all should be reading] goes on to point out that this ruling, and the rulings on other DOMA-related cases we’re seeing, are a direct result of the Obama administration’s decision not to defend DOMA. Obama may not have done everything we all want him to do yet, but he’s definitely done significant things to contribute to full LGBT equality.
