The time has come to change a policy that imposes a lifetime ban on donating blood for any man who has had gay sex since 1977, 18 senators said Thursday. "Not a single piece of scientific evidence supports the ban," said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who joined 16 other Democrats and independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in writing Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg.
The lawmakers stressed that the science has changed dramatically since the ban was established in 1983 at the advent of the HIV-AIDS crisis. Today donated blood must undergo two different, highly accurate tests that make the risk of tainted blood entering the blood supply virtually zero, they said. The senators said that while hospitals and emergency rooms are in urgent need of blood products, "healthy blood donors are turned away every day due to an antiquated policy and our blood supply is not necessarily any safer for it."
Brian Moulton, chief legislative counsel for the Human Rights Campaign,the nation's largest gay rights group, said they are hopeful that the policy, last reviewed in 2006, will change under President Barack Obama, "who is interested in looking at all the policies that have a discriminatory effect." The goal, he said, is "to have policies in place that are based on the science" rather than "any discriminatory idea about our community." [...]
DC Begins licensing same-sex marriages
By Keith L. Alexander and Ann E. Marimow
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, March 4, 2010; A01
Just sitting down at a desk at the marriage bureau at D.C. Superior Court on Wednesday was too much for Angelisa Young. She cried so hard that she eventually had to bury her face in her fiancee's chest. About a half-hour later, Young and her partner, Sinjoyla Townsend, who met 13 years ago in a Constitutional Law class at the University of the District of Columbia, became the first same-sex couple to apply to be married in the District as the city officially joined five states in allowing gay marriage. "I'm just so happy. We're whole now. We will actually be a true family like everyone else," Young, 47, said as Townsend, 41, used her thumb to wipe away her soon-to-be wife's tears. After the couple from Southeast Washington rose from the desk, couples in line behind them broke into spontaneous applause and cheers.
For Young, Townsend and the cheering masses, being there, in the tiny and usually sleepy marriage bureau, on the very first day meant everything. There was the history of it all, but mostly it was about having the nation's capital validate their relationships and their families.
For the couples in line Wednesday and those who follow, it was the culmination of a three-decade struggle for equality. Advocates had long known that the D.C. Council would approve same-sex marriage. But the timing had to be right. Congress and the White House could have killed the bill, which had to clear a congressional review period, so advocates waited for a president and legislature sympathetic to gay rights and home rule. In the meantime, the gay community picked up important rights in the District, including a domestic partnership law, before the council passed the same-sex marriage bill in December.
Still, there were no white wedding dresses or tuxedos among the gay couples Wednesday because they won't be able to marry until Tuesday, at the earliest. Gay or straight, the District requires a three-day waiting period from the day you get your license. Young and Townsend plan to marry that day at the Human Rights Campaign headquarters as part of a ceremony involving other same-sex couples.
The line to get into the marriage bureau was composed of racially diverse couples of all generations and appeared to include more women than men. By the end of the day, 151 couples had filed to be married, far surpassing the dozen or so applications the bureau typically collects on a single day. Some brought their children or spoke of the importance of their change in status to their sons and daughters. "It's a great source of pride for her and, deep down, a source of relief and stability," said Silver Spring resident Deborah Weiner, referring to her 15-year-old daughter. Weiner stood in line with her partner of 24 years, Janne Harrelson....
Democrats vow quick end to 'don't ask, don't tell' as Senate bill is introduced
By Ed O'Keefe
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Leading Senate Democrats pledged Wednesday to move quickly to repeal the ban on gays serving openly in the armed forces rather than wait, as the Pentagon has requested, for the military to complete a lengthy review.
Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) introduced the Military Readiness Enhancement Act, legislation that would lift the ban and prohibit discrimination against gay service members. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) said he expects his panel to take up the measure in May as part of the annual defense authorization bill.
"Gays are serving successfully in our military right now -- this legislation would allow them to serve with integrity," Levin said.
Lieberman said: "If Americans want to serve, they ought to have the right to be considered for that service regardless of characteristics such as race, religion, gender or sexual orientation."
The Pentagon and congressional Republicans have urged Democrats to allow the military to first complete its study of the policy and the impact of a potential repeal. The study is expected to be completed by Dec. 1.
"We need to know more than we know now about what the potential impact would be," Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told reporters Wednesday. "And we need to be armed with that information so that we could work with the Congress to help inform the process that they undertake, if they undertake it." [...]
Of course, the interesting part of all of this is that none of this is irrevocable, or even guaranteed that it will move forward. One can count on obstructionist conservative Democrats and pretty much each and every Republican to fight the blood-donation ban. Senator Levin, into whose committee DADT repeal must first go, is already on record as saying that he recommends merely that enforcement of the policy be suspended, rather than a full repeal. (And in a wonderfully entertaining aspect, the military officers assigned to do the research on the topic have stated that they plan to speak to currently-serving gay officers and enlisted about the ban and how they feel. Since identifying themselves as gay for the purpose of this study would be a direct violation of DADT and lead to their immediate dismissal from service, how the researchers plan to do this is entirely unclear. Moreover, there's more than a hint, in the comments floating around, that anyone surveyed on these issues will be, shall we say, Strongly Encouraged to say that they would be uncomfortable serving with openly gay personnel.
And as far as the DC marriages go, there's an attempt going forward to get the courts to overturn that section of the DC charter prohibiting votes on the Human Rights section as unconstitutional. Apparently, some people feel that the DC city council's position, that allowing majorities to vote on the rights of minorities is in and of itself unconstitutional, does not allow them to vote on their moral repugnance at the very idea of treating gays and lesbians as though they have the same human rights as anyone else, and they're trying to get that overturned. But all that said, for now, DC couples will be able to marry by Tuesday.
So, as I said, a very interesting day it's been.
]]>Political, religious and sexual behaviors may be reflections of intelligence, a new study finds.
Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. The findings will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.
The IQ differences, while statistically significant, are not stunning -- on the order of 6 to 11 points -- and the data should not be used to stereotype or make assumptions about people, experts say. But they show how certain patterns of identifying with particular ideologies develop, and how some people's behaviors come to be.
The reasoning is that sexual exclusivity in men, liberalism and atheism all go against what would be expected given humans' evolutionary past. In other words, none of these traits would have benefited our early human ancestors, but higher intelligence may be associated with them.
"The adoption of some evolutionarily novel ideas makes some sense in terms of moving the species forward," said George Washington University leadership professor James Bailey, who was not involved in the study. "It also makes perfect sense that more intelligent people -- people with, sort of, more intellectual firepower -- are likely to be the ones to do that." [...]
I don't know ... call me a skeptic, I suppose, but it seems profoundly counterintuitive that an "evolutionarily novel" idea such as monogamy should be an indicator of higher intelligence. After all, as the professor himself notes, it's actually a counter-evolutionary tendency for males.
...Religion, the current theory goes, did not help people survive or reproduce necessarily, but goes along the lines of helping people to be paranoid, Kanazawa said. Assuming that, for example, a noise in the distance is a signal of a threat helped early humans to prepare in case of danger. "It helps life to be paranoid, and because humans are paranoid, they become more religious, and they see the hands of God everywhere," Kanazawa said. [...]
My, I'll bet Professor Kanazawa gets some ... INteresting mail and messages after this. Effectively defining religion as organized paranoia and an evolutionary strategy is not really going to go over well in some quarters.
The comments thread on the above article is already vastly entertaining.
]]>GALESBURG, Ill. — An Illinois National Guard soldier in Afghanistan has been charged by the U.S. Army with possessing child pornography over pictures of a young relative his mother says she sent him. Terri Miller of Galesburg says she sent her son, Specialist Billy Miller, pictures of the little girl to help him get over his homesickness. The pictures show the child in a swimsuit playing a wading pool and sitting on a truck. In one, the girl is wearing a swim suit and part of her buttocks are exposed.
The Army says Miller will stay in Afghanistan until his court martial. His unit came home last August. Miller faces jail time, if convicted.
Terri Miller says the pictures are innocent. She says her son is close to the girl.
WQAD TV reports that the child is a relative whom the family says Billy treated as his own child when the girl was diagnosed with cancer as her father went through boot camp. Her father, the station reports, can't believe the charges, especially since they're on other family computers and on Facebook pages and no one else has been investigated.
Granted, we don't get all the facts in this story, I'm sure. And granted again, we need to protect children. I get all that, I really do. But at some point, we have to let a little sanity enter the child porn debate. Sometimes pictures of children are just pictures of children. But as it stands, this man could well lose his career over photographs that even the child's father thought were perfectly innocuous.
Frankly, assuming that the photographs are as described, this makes me wonder what exactly has been happening in our military that would lead them to jump to this conclusion based on that particular evidence. Or what else they've found that they're not talking about, because really, given what this article says, there's no there there.
]]>By Tim Craig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 15, 2010; B02
A D.C. Superior Court judge ruled Thursday that same-sex marriage opponents do not have a right to call for a referendum to determine whether such unions should be legal in the District. The decision, a major victory for gay rights activists, makes it more likely that the District will begin allowing same-sex couples to marry in March. In the 23-page ruling, Judge Judith N. Macaluso affirmed a D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics decision that city law disallows the ballot proposal because it would promote discrimination against gay men and lesbians. Macaluso also concluded that previous court decisions outlawing same-sex marriage in the District are no longer valid.
[...] The election board has twice ruled that a referendum on same-sex marriage would violate a city election law prohibiting such a vote on a matter covered by the Human Rights Act, which outlaws discrimination against gays and other minority groups. Bishop Harry Jackson, pastor of Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, appealed that ruling to Superior Court. Last week, 39 members of Congress filed a brief in support of Jackson's appeal, arguing that the election board overstepped its authority in denying a public vote on whether marriage should be defined as a being between a man and a woman.
Jackson and his attorneys said Thursday that they will appeal Macaluso's ruling. They contend that that the laws in question were written in the late 1970s, long before same-sex marriage was an issue, and should not prevent a referendum. "We are fighting for justice and defending the rights of the people of the District of Columbia," Jackson said. "We have always anticipated that our quest for voting rights on the issue of marriage would end up in our higher appeals court, and today's ruling confirms that is where the issue is headed."
It's going to be interesting to see what the DC Appeals Court does with this; I would expect another dismissal, myself. And this is as high as you can get in DC without either transferring over to the appropriate circuit court of appeals or the Supreme Court itself. (And I can't imagine that the Supreme Court would touch this case. Apart from anything else, unless the lawsuit alleges a federal constitutional violation and I don't think it does, longstanding doctrine holds that a state's supreme court is the final arbiter of its state constitution. And I think the Court is going to run far and fast from this issue for as long as they can -- which is to say, until the decision comes out of the curent 9th Circuit Court of Appeals trial. If precedent holds true, the 9th Circuit will hold that Prop. 8 was, in fact, a federal constitutional violation, and then the Supreme Court will have to search far and wide for some way to slap down the 9th again. (It's one of their recreational pastimes.) But they're not likely to do anything with the DC issue, since it doesn't have wider implications in and of itself.
.....Despite opponents' plans to appeal, they are running out of time to block same-sex marriages in the District. Congress has begun the required 30-legislative-day review of the same-sex marriage law. City leaders said that, barring intervention by Congress, marriage licenses will be available to same-sex couples around the first week of March.
Well. We shall see, won't we?
]]>By Ian Daly
January 13, 2010
Today, a 25 year old from Los Angeles (by way of Alabama) will become the first legal male prostitute in this country's history. "Markus" (his working name) was fresh off the Greyhound bus yesterday when he granted Details an exclusive first interview in a cottage at the Shady Lady Ranch brothel, two-and-a-half-hours northwest of Las Vegas. His story is about to become a national sensation. Read on to find out why.
Q: So you'd rather be called a gigolo than a prostitute.
A: I think for a male, if you want to be successful in this type of venture, you're not a prostitute. You're a surrogate lover. You encompass everything that's required of you—not only emotionally, physically—but psychologically. Because women are wired differently. They're much more sensitive creatures. You actually have to enjoy what you do. You can't necessarily say, "Oh, it's just a job." You actually have to say it's a passion....
...Really? A woman who goes to a brothel needs you to say that having sex with her -- and most of the other women that request you -- is a passion? Huh. Who knew?
I also thought of a gigolo as more of an ongoing gig, so to speak. And, actually, less well regarded than simple prostitution; gigolo implies a certain deception of the client. (Though, granted, if you're telling her that your job is "a passion", the deception requirement may well be fulfilled.
OK. I'll give him the performance and craft aspect. After all, being a successful sex worker really does require you to develop both certain physical and interpersonal skills.
It's the bit where apparently prostitution isn't prostitution because you've developed those skills and porn performers haven't where he kind of loses me. I mean, porn is performance sex, by definition. Maybe done to a specific formula, yes, but nonetheless, still performance that requires the development of certain skills if you do it over any length of time.
But ... he works in a brothel. Maybe being a gigolo requires all those skills, and maybe it doesn't, but surely working in a brothel wouldn't let you exercise most of those skills. After all, as the middleman, the brothel is in it to make money, and time is money. You're not going to cram all that stuff plus sex into the 40 minutes for $200 that the brothel is charging for his time.
Q: What city?
A: I don't really want to divulge that because then people back in my hometown are going to be like, "Oh my God..."[...]
He's doing an interview in Details to which his photo appears to be attached -- in fact, there's a whole set of images of him with the article. Unless everyone in that town is actually physically blind, never uses the internet, never buys Details from a store or newsstand, I'm guessing that people in Alabama are going to figure things out pretty damn quick. And it appears that he's also blindsiding his family with all this, so one suspects that things will not go well on that front.
What really gets me, though, is this quote from near the beginning of the article:
Um ... it was about changing one line in a law in one county in Nevada.
That said, it kind of was about changing social norms, just a bit.
By Ashley Powers
January 6, 2010
Reporting from Tonopah, Nev. - Brothel owner Bobbi Davis got the go-ahead Tuesday to hire what her website cheekily calls "a few good men." Her Shady Lady Ranch is searching for "service-oriented" guys willing to become Nevada's first legal male sex workers. "I personally feel, as do the many other women who have made contact with me since I started this, that this is a service whose time has come," Davis said in a letter to Nye County officials.
A county board's vote Tuesday affirming that Davis could offer "shady men" to her clientele followed months of rancorous debate among the state's legal brothel community. The industry, in its own peculiar way, is somewhat conservative: Considered an anachronism of bawdy mining camps by some Nevada newcomers, it often balks at change.
Of course, new ideas in a business unique to Nevada (in its legal form) are a touch different. Adding porn stars to brothel lineups rankled some owners. Overturning a ban on brothel advertising, a battle Davis and the American Civil Liberties Union helped lead, also stirred up debate. Though neither change shuttered the state's 25 or so bordellos -- some would argue the publicity helped -- many owners still operate in an off-the-grid manner, wary of being shut down.
George Flint, longtime lobbyist for the Nevada Brothel Assn., has said that allowing male prostitutes could be the industry's Pearl Harbor. He has hinted that brothels possibly offering gay sex -- a choice each prostitute, as an independent contractor, would be free to make -- might sour some legislators on the entire brothel system.
Nevada lawmakers are notoriously skittish when discussing the birds and bees. The Legislature, even when severely cash-strapped, has repeatedly declined to tax the brothels (which are banned in Reno and Las Vegas) for fear of, well, legitimizing the business.
"This is the first time in the history of the world . . . that men have been licensed to sell sex," Flint said Tuesday, his voice rising. "It's never been done!" [...]
Thailand's male brothels are both legal and notorious. Until 2009, both male and female prostitution were legal in Rhode Island, under certain circumstances. As I understand it, prostitution is legal for any consenting adult in Britain, although gay brothels themselves seem to be on somewhat iffier legal ground. Brothels with males and females are legal in Australia. So, "first time in the history of the world"? No. First time in the history of Nevada, however...
It's pretty obvious that the county commissioners in Nevada had a vision of a Big Gay Brothel dancing in their heads when they went through such angst and agony over changing the law. Clearly, that's not what happened -- not yet, anyway. However, I should imagine that the idea of the women they know going to a "gigolo" in a registered brothel would not actually ease their minds substantially. In fact, I'm pretty damn sure that asserting that a woman has exactly the same right to sexual relief as a man in exactly the same way would make them really uncomfortable. So, changing social norms? Well ... yes, if perhaps not quite in the way he meant.
Though I truly wish he hadn't invoked Rosa Parks. People will get distracted by that and discount the rest of his statement, which, if inartfully put, is mostly true.
But, seriously, I really feel sorry for his family. Not because of what he's doing -- he's a grown man, he should be able to do what he wants with his own body -- but because it sounds like he didn't have a horrible relationship with them before this, and you shouldn't blindside people you care about like that.
]]>Over the past decade or so, divorce has gradually become more uncommon in the United States. Since 2003, however, the decline in divorce rates has been largely confined to states which have not passed a state constitutional ban on gay marriage. These states saw their divorce rates decrease by an average of 8 percent between 2003 and 2008. States which had passed a same-sex marriage ban as of January 1, 2008, however, saw their divorce rates rise by about 1 percent over the same period....
Part of me wonders about the statistical validity of it all, but then, 538.com is known for making sure that its stats are tight.
Another part of me just wonders how on earth this can make any difference.
And another part of me says: Wait. Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Mexico have the lowest divorce rates. Mass. allows gay marriage, but the other two merely haven't passed bans against it; they ceritainly don't allow it. (And both states have experienced a certain amount of kerflaffle over the issue.) It's also true that these are three of the most Catholic states in the union; in the latest American Religious Identification Survey, using religious identification data from the US Census Bureau, 46% of Rhode Island respondents identified as Catholic, as did 39% of Mass. respondents and 33% of New Mexicans . Those figures all seem to be higher than the median, which would be in the 20s somewhere. Is it possible that these factors are not coincidental? Granted that Massachusetts is ... peculiar; after all, very Catholic and very Liberal really shouldn't go together like that, and yet they do -- there and nowhere else in the country.
(Something of a side note: the takeaway from the American Religious Identification Survey is that the US as a nation is becoming less religious -- or less willing to identify as such, which isn't quite the same thing. And it's happening with surprising speed. That would explain why religious conservatives have gotten so very LOUD of late, wouldn't it? A way of life may be passing.)
]]>By Tim Craig
Wednesday, December 16, 2009; A01 (washingtonpost.com)
The District was on the verge Tuesday of becoming the sixth place in the country to legalize same-sex marriage after the council gave final approval to its bill allowing the unions. The legislation would allow gay couples from anywhere in the country to marry in the city. Those couples who live in the District would be entitled to all rights afforded to heterosexual married couples under District laws. Although a final signature on the bill by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) could come by the end of the week, same-sex marriage opponents vowed to step up their effort to get Congress or a court to block the initiative during the 30-day congressional review period.
The 11 to 2 council decision, which caps a nearly year-long debate, set off a wave of excitement across the gay community, both locally and nationally. "In many ways, this is the final prize," said council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1), one of two people on the council who are openly gay.
According to an analysis by the Office of the Chief Financial Officer, more than 10,000 same-sex couples from across the country could get married in the District over the next three years if the measure becomes law. The analysis, created in the weeks leading up to Tuesday's historic council vote, estimates that 2,000 gay couples who live in the District will marry shortly after the law takes effect. But the bulk of the weddings, which could pump millions of dollars into the regional economy, would probably be out-of-state couples unable to marry in their own states, according to the analysis, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post. It concludes that at least $5 million, and perhaps as much as $22 million, would be generated by same-sex weddings in the District over the next three years.
Local and national gay rights leaders note that opponents face a difficult fight: Both the Democratic-controlled House and Senate and President Obama would all have to block the legislation, which is unlikely. But council member David A. Catania (I-At Large), the bill's sponsor and the other openly gay member on the council, cautioned that Congress also could unravel the measure through budget maneuvers in future years. "There is no question: We are going to have to be defending it and defending it and defending it until the other side realizes they are losing more votes by being tethered to the past," Catania said.
Several opponents of same-sex marriage warned that the celebrations were premature. They are seeking a public vote on the issue, and some are meeting with members of Congress on Wednesday. "God's war has just started," Bob King, a community activist who lives in Northeast, said a few minutes after the vote. "Shame on them. We're going to get to the ballot box through either the courts or the Congress. So tell everyone: Don't let the marriage licenses start flowing." [...]
"God's war". Hmm. One would think that we lived in a theocratic state, wouldn't one? Apparently, we turned into Iran when we weren't looking.
As far as bringing things up for a vote is concerned, the DC Council's position is that marriage is a part of the Human Rights section of DC law, and as such, can't be brought up for a vote. It will be interesting to see what happens when this goes to federal court. Home rule is one thing, but as a federal district, I would think that DC wouldn't be allowed to do things that sharply at variance with federal law. I don't understand how DOMA doesn't trump DC home rule, but I suppose that will all be fought out in the courts.
The really fascinating thing is going to be seeing what the Supreme Court does with this. As I understand it, decisions out of DC's court, since DC is more or less a federal city-state, can be appealed directly to the Supreme Court, though they may also go through the Court of Appeals that includes Virginia and Maryland -- the Third Circuit, I think. In any event, I would expect that, if it makes it to the Supreme Court, they'll probably rule very narrowly on the issue of whether or not this can be brought up for a vote, at first. And then in a few years, they'll get the question of the actual law itself. They're going to be spending several years doing a delicate tapdance around this issue, is what I'm saying. It seems fairly clear that this is the type of thing they want no part of, at least right now.
In any event, as the opponents say, nothing is likely to really change for a while. The law will almost certainly be enjoined during all of the various challenges, one way and another. In 3-5 years, if all goes well and people are lucky, you may actually get universal marriage in DC.
Probably not, though.
]]>By Maria Sacchetti, Globe Staff | November 4, 2009
PORTLAND, Maine - Maine voters overturned the state’s same-sex marriage law yesterday, delivering a potentially crushing blow to gay-rights advocates after a year when their cause seemed to be gaining momentum with legislative and legal victories in four states. As the ballot counting continued well past midnight, the margin continued to grow - with 52.7 percent of voters in favor of the repeal - and the Associated Press called the contest in favor of gay-marriage foes shortly before 1 a.m. The “people’s veto’’ came six months after Maine’s law was approved, and one year after California voters rejected gay marriage by a similar margin.
"This is an amazing moment. It’s beyond words," said Mary Conroy, spokeswoman for Yes on 1/Stand for Marriage Maine, the organization leading the fight against same-sex marriage in Maine. "I feel energized, overcome, overjoyed for the family and the people of Maine. Clearly, this tonight is the people of Maine speaking."
Yes. Yes, it is.
...Gay marriage advocates, who gathered in a ballroom at a Portland hotel, spent much of the evening dancing and cheering, but grew more subdued as the hours passed and the votes favoring a repeal of the gay-marriage law pulled steadily ahead.
No on 1 campaign manager Jesse Connolly vowed to continue counting votes into this morning, but even he seemed to concede that they had lost this battle. We’re not short timers. We’re in for the long haul," he said early this morning. "We will regroup. This is about love and commitment and family, and so we’ll stay the course. And I ask you to stay the course with us."
With the news, supporters of gay marriage dissolved into tears. One couple, Susan McCray and Yvette Pratt, had married in Massachusetts, but every time they crossed the border back into Maine, where they live, their marriage was no longer recognized. "We thought we had it," McCray said, holding Pratt’s hand. As they walked out, a woman called to them, "It’s not over."
Gay marriage supporters, who had cast the question as a classic civil rights struggle, had hoped that Maine voters would become the first in the country to sanction gay marriage. It is currently legal in five states, but only by virtue of politicians or judges...
[...]Massachusetts became the first state to legalize gay marriage, in 2003, under a landmark decision issued by the state’s high court. Connecticut courts legalized gay marriage there in 2008, and then Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine followed earlier this year, either through legislation or court rulings. Same-sex marriage was briefly legal in California, until 52 percent of voters approved a constitutional ban last year. Maine has struggled with gay rights in the past. In 1998 and in 2000, lawmakers voted to ban discrimination against gays and lesbians but voters narrowly struck down those laws. The law was ultimately approved in 2005....
Given Maine's history, the result should have surprised no-one. The plain fact is, majorities will not choose to recognize civil rights of any minoritiy of their own free will. It simply will not happen. Whenever this sort of thing comes up for a vote, it allows the majority to say "We don't like you, we don't want you, and we think you are not human enough to share our rights." And they do, and they will. DC has one thing right; it refuses to allow people to vote on rights enumerated in its Human Rights Act, because they will use that opportunity to express prejudices and reject minorities, as Maine has done here.
Am I saying that we should give up, give out, give in? No, of course not. I am saying that we're going to have to go back and do this again and again and again, in all the same places and in different ways, before this is finally going to stick. And if history is any guide, we've only seen the leading edge of resistance at this point.
Some people like to refer to the Civil Rights era, likening this struggle to that one. But historically, looking at that struggle, the way this eventually works is for the laws either to come out of the courts -- or, more rarely, from legislatures that are ahead of the people they represent -- and then for the states to essentially get battered into resentful submission by lawsuits from affected minorities, with support from the court system which says to the state, "This will happen." That level of support from the courts and the legislatures does not yet exist for gay rights. It is, surprisingly enough, coming; it's just not there yet.
The one interesting note is that the percentages are similar to those in California, a far more religious state. This indicates that there may be a level of support that exists nationally, and which should grow over time. It may be that in another decade -- judging from Maine's progress in passing and maintaining nondiscrimination laws, it may be possible to pass and sustain these laws against this sort of discriminatory pushback.
...Conroy said most of the Stand for Marriage supporters are ordinary families who are worried that children will read stories about same-sex couples in schools, that teenagers will be encouraged to experiment with their sexuality, and that same-sex marriage will become widespread. She said that gays and lesbians have won antidiscrimination protections and should “leave marriage alone.’’
“No one’s antigay,’’ she said. “It’s just whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. . . . Not so fast."
My, it's lovely when people just stand there and lie to your face, isn't it? Are the people saying, "Not so fast"? Well, yes, clearly. But they're also saying, "We don't think you should have the same rights as the rest of humanity." And if that isn't "antigay", nothing is.
]]>
Official Says ‘Down Low’ Men Not Responsible for High HIV Rates Among Black Women
The Seattle Medium - Seattle, WA:
Fri Oct 16 2009 15:29:12 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time)
by George E. Curry
NNPA Special Contributor
Originally posted 10/7/2009
Despite all the talk about “Down Low” Black men – who have sex with women while secretly having intercourse with other men – the major cause of the extremely high HIV/AIDS rates among African-American women is being fueled by heterosexual Black men with multiple sex partners, a top federal official says.
In an interview with the NNPA News Service, Dr. Kevin Fenton, director of the Centers for Disease Control’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention, said the CDC has studied why Black women make up 61 percent of all new HIV cases among women, with 80 percent contracting the disease through heterosexual contact. “We know that a lot of the infections are actually coming from male partners who have high-risk behavior,” Fenton said in an interview in his Atlanta office. “In fact, we have looked to see what proportion of infections is coming from male partners who are bisexual and found there are actually relatively few. More are male partners who are having female partners and are injecting drugs or using drugs or have some other risks that may put those female partners at risk of acquiring HIV.”
At 61 percent, Black women have an infection rate nearly 15 times higher than White women. Latina represent 17 percent of all new HIV cases among women. White women are only 15 percent. AIDS is the leading cause of death among Black women between the ages of 25 and 34....
Huh.
So in other words, HIV/AIDS in blacks in the US looks almost exactly like HIV/AIDS in Africa.
I can't figure out if that's more encouraging or disturbing.
On the one hand, hopefully it will help, at least a little, to reduce some of the ostracising of bisexuals and gays in black communities and neighborhoods. And maybe, if the information gets out where it's needed, it will help empower both women and men to protect themselves with condoms. (Though, sadly, considering the ferocious infection rate among teens -- who really aren't great at thinking ahead and thinking of consequences ... well, one can hope.)
On the other hand ... well. I don't want to contribute to the profoundly stupid noise on the whole "down low" issue ... but I'm not entirely sure that I quite believe these findings. Bisexuaity and gayness is still subject to a powerful social desirability bias, and when the issue comes to disease tracking -- i.e., "whose fault is this, anyway?" -- then I'd think that getting honest answers would be extremely difficult.
I guess I hope that this is a true finding. It will be helpful in getting people to think of solutions, rather than the blame game.
]]>OK, yes, I do get that it's the Onion and it's parody.
Sad thing is, allowing for some exaggeration, there's almost no part of it that isn't at least somewhat true. Despite being, at least on the male side, as a group so image-and-body-conscious that we're the only group of men for whom anorexia is actually an issue, a rather staggering number of gay men smoke. Because it looks cool, or did when we were teens. Because it helps with the whole weight control thing. Because so much of our socializing was done in bars, where smoking used to be almost de rigeur. (Though these days it's usually expressly forbidden by state and local law. Walking past a gay bar at night these days is practically an invitation to lung cancer all on its own. And I will tell you right now that watching all those people hovering outside a bar in a Chicago winter because they have got to get their smoke in NOW! is both incredibly sad, and incredibly funny. Seriously, risking frostbite just because you have GOT to have that cigarette ... But I digress.)
CHAPEL HILL — Men and women who are gay or lesbian are more likely than their heterosexual counterparts to smoke, according to findings from a review study carried out by the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. The findings, published in the August issue of the journal, Tobacco Control, show that as many as 37 percent of lesbians and 33 percent of gays smoke. That compares to national smoking rates of 18 percent for women and 24 percent for men in the 2006 National Health Interview Survey. The authors reviewed findings from 42 studies of the prevalence of tobacco use among sexual minorities in the U.S. published between 1987 and May 2007. The findings suggest smoking is a significant health inequality for sexual minorities.
Recognizing and understanding the increased risk in a particular population can help policymakers, healthcare officials and others provide support for people more likely to start smoking or who may want to stop smoking, said Joseph Lee, lead author of the review and a social research specialist with the Tobacco Prevention and Evaluation Program in the UNC School of Medicine. A number of small or geographically limited studies have suggested that sexual minorities have higher rates of tobacco use than the general population, said Lee, who conducted the review as a master’s student in collaboration with Cathy Melvin, Ph.D., at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and UNC’s Sheps Center for Health Services Research and Gabriel Griffin, a medical student at the Duke University School of Medicine. “The underlying causes of these disparities are not fully explained by this review,” Lee said. “Likely explanations include the success of tobacco industry’s targeted marketing to gays and lesbians, as well as time spent in smoky social venues and stress from discrimination." [...]
Smoking prevention groups go after tobacco ads targeting gays
By Dennis Peck, The Oregonian (oregonlive.com)
March 03, 2009, 10:53PM
The cigarette pitch demands a second look.
Two ripped, rakish men and one lean, pristine hound pause, inexplicably, in the cool shallows of a calm green sea.
"How gay is this ad?" R.E. Szego, a Portland tobacco-prevention specialist, asks when she sees such an image.
It's a sincere question, not a slam.
Wooed for years by tobacco companies -- who lavish free merchandise on their bars and clubs, sponsor their events and advertise heavily in their publications -- gays, lesbians and bisexuals remain hooked on cigarettes, even as the general population smokes less. [...] "If you were coming up gay, it used to be the only place you got to meet was in a bar," says Michael Kaplan, executive director of Cascade AIDS Project and a former pack-a-day smoker. "If you wanted to fit in, you'd smoke."
About one in three gay, lesbian and bisexual Oregonians smoke, compared to about one in five smokers in the state's overall population, according to the public health division of the Oregon Department of Human Services. The disparity is worse among gay, lesbian and bisexual teens, who are 2 1/2 times more likely to smoke than their straight peers. What's more, half of all gay Oregon smokers say they don't want to quit....
So that nearly obsessive gym thing so many of us go through? Pretty much all about the shiny shiny muscles and not so much about the actual health benefits. Not everyone, of course. Certainly not YOU, oh no no no no! But I'm sure that every single one of us has seen someone go to the gym, work themselves into a veritable lake of sweat, then they shower, clean up, go outside ... and light up.
The part with the kids, while, yes, exaggerated, is really the saddest part. Because, honestly, most kids really would rather risk cancer and lung disease than be thought gay.
NEW YORK, Sept. 24, 2009 - Middle school LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) students are significantly more likely to face hostile school climates than high school LGBT students, yet have less access to school resources and support, according to a new research brief from GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, released as the New York Times Magazine publishes a cover story on students coming out in middle school.
The research brief, the first national research report to look specifically at the experiences of LGBT students in middle school, is based on data from 626 LGBT middle school students who participated in GLSEN's 2007 National School Climate Survey of 6,209 secondary school students.
"The findings should be a wake-up call to school officials and policymakers across the country that we can no longer ignore one of the biggest school climate issues facing middle school students, regardless of sexual orientation," GLSEN Executive Director Eliza Byard said. "GLSEN has worked for many years to provide educators/schools with evidence-based solutions that they can implement to address anti-LGBT bullying and harassment. For the sake of all of our students, schools must take action to address these issues in the critical middle grades."
More than 9 out of 10 LGBT middle school students (91%) said they experienced harassment at school in the past year because of their sexual orientation, 59% experienced physical harassment and a startling 39% said they had been physically assaulted, nearly twice as many as in high school (20%).
More than 8 out of 10 LGBT middle school students (82%) reported hearing homophobic epithets (e.g., "faggot" or "dyke") frequently or often from other students in school – a higher percentage than high school students (73%). Perhaps most shocking, 63% of LGBT middle school students had heard school staff make homophobic remarks.
The negative and hostile climate had a profound effect on student academic success. Half of LGBT middle school students (50%) had skipped at least one day of school in the past month because they felt unsafe. Further, their grade point average was half a grade point lower than students who had not missed school due to safety concerns....
And sadly, being thought "gay" is actually something to worry about still. But it is getting better, slowly but surely.
Austin didn’t know what to wear to his first gay dance last spring. It was bad enough that the gangly 13-year-old from Sand Springs, Okla., had to go without his boyfriend at the time, a 14-year-old star athlete at another middle school, but there were also laundry issues. "I don’t have any clean clothes!" he complained to me by text message, his favored method of communication.
When I met up with him an hour later, he had weathered his wardrobe crisis (he was in jeans and a beige T-shirt with musical instruments on it) but was still a nervous wreck. "I’m kind of scared," he confessed. "Who am I going to talk to? I wish my boyfriend could come." But his boyfriend couldn’t find anyone to give him a ride nor, Austin explained, could his boyfriend ask his father for one. "His dad would give him up for adoption if he knew he was gay," Austin told me. "I'm serious. He has the strictest, scariest dad ever. He has to date girls and act all tough so that people won’t suspect."
Austin doesn’t have to play "the pretend game," as he calls it, anymore. At his middle school, he has come out to his close friends, who have been supportive. A few of his female friends responded that they were bisexual. "Half the girls I know are bisexual," he said. He hadn’t planned on coming out to his mom yet, but she found out a week before the dance. "I told my cousin, my cousin told this other girl, she told her mother, her mother told my mom and then my mom told me," Austin explained. "The only person who really has a problem with it is my older sister, who keeps saying: 'It's just a phase! It’s just a phase!' "
Austin’s mom was on vacation in another state during my visit to Oklahoma, so a family friend drove him to the weekly youth dance at the Openarms Youth Project in Tulsa, which is housed in a white cement-block building next to a redbrick Baptist church on the east side of town. We arrived unfashionably on time, and Austin tried to park himself on a couch in a corner but was whisked away by Ben, a 16-year-old Openarms regular, who gave him an impromptu tour and introduced him to his mom, who works the concession area most weeks.
Openarms is practically overrun with supportive moms. While Austin and Ben were on the patio, a 14-year-old named Nick arrived with his mom. Nick came out to her when he was 12 but had yet to go on a date or even kiss a boy, which prompted his younger sister to opine that maybe he wasn’t actually gay. "She said, 'Maybe you’re bisexual,' " Nick told me. “But I don’t have to have sex with a girl to know I’m not interested."
Ninety minutes after we arrived, Openarms was packed with about 130 teenagers who had come from all corners of the state. Some danced to the Lady Gaga song “Poker Face,” others battled one another in pool or foosball and a handful of young couples held hands on the outdoor patio. In one corner, a short, perky eighth-grade girl kissed her ninth-grade girlfriend of one year. I asked them where they met. "In church," they told me. Not far from them, a 14-year-old named Misti — who came out to classmates at her middle school when she was 12 and weathered anti-gay harassment and bullying, including having food thrown at her in the cafeteria — sat on a wooden bench and cuddled with a new girlfriend....
Seriously, I cannot even imagine such a thing back when I was in junior high. So, yes, things have come a long way. Doesn't mean that there isn't still a long way to go, though.
]]>Brazil will become the first South American country to host the Olympics, after the city of Rio de Janeiro was chosen to stage the 2016 Games.Rio won a majority of the 95 votes at the meeting in Copenhagen, eliminating Madrid in the final round. Tokyo and Chicago had been knocked out earlier.
Earlier, Brazil's president told IOC members "it was time time to light the Olympic flame in a tropical country".
Chicago's early exit was a surprise, with bookmakers making them favourites....
I would like to thank the Chicago City Council for being so extraordinarily reluctant to guarantee the costs of the games that even the IOC had to notice, despite later delivering and reaffirming said guarantee. (Also, no cookie for the city council for that craven cowardice and caving to Hizonner da mayor.) I would like to thank the USOC for being such outstanding dickwads that they announced an Olympic cable network, while having disputes with the IOC not only about that very selfsame network, but a major ongoing dispute about the amount of revenues allocated to the IOC by the USOC. I would like to thank President Obama for dinging his public celebrity and credibility by going to pitch Chicago at the selection committee meeting, as maybe now, he'll get on with the business of governing -- though, given how badly he's been doing in some aspects of that, maybe we'd be better off with a celebrity president, at that. But, honestly and genuinely, I would like to thank the IOC for deciding to go where no Games has gone before.
The actual vote totals were a bit ... surprising. From the Venerable Beeb:
First round: Madrid 28 votes; Rio de Janeiro 26; Tokyo 22; Chicago 18 (Chicago eliminated). Second round: Rio 46; Madrid 29; Tokyo 20 (Tokyo eliminated) Final round: Rio 66; Madrid 32 (Rio to host 2016 Games)
Rio came within two votes of winning the games in the second round; they picked up the entirety of Chicago's votes, minus one that drifted to Madrid, as well as two of Tokyo's first round votes. One theory being floated is that people who genuinely preferred Rio, but thought it would have a hard time against Chicago in the final round, instead voted for Tokyo in the first round, seeing that as the weakest bid. Once Chicago was eliminated, they could then vote for the site they preferred. That would explain Tokyo's slightly unusual loss of support in the second round, and Rio gaining so many votes. No way to tell for certain, of course; it's only a theory.
One might guess that I was not in favor of an Olympic Games in Chicago. Given lunacy like proposing demolishing a brand new gymnasium and swimming pool needed by a high school in favor of a velodrome they can't possibly use, or putting a "temporary" 80,000 seat stadium and possibly an additional aquatics center in Washington Park, currently on the National Register of Historic Places -- what sensible person could be in favor? (Besides, we know how well things work here when they alter structures on the National Register. Soldier Field looks like an alien flying saucer is having ongoing unlawful and indecent congress with a Roman coliseum -- and the coliseum is not at all happy about things, no it is not.) And frankly, this city does not need the opportunities for corruption that awarding Games contracts would create; we do quite nicely with that without additional impetus, thank you kindly! And watching hizzoner reward his friends and punish enemies with his TIF monies on a really epic scale -- as opposed to the smaller scale he actually uses -- would just be appalling.
Apart from that, one suspects that a summer games in Rio is going to be one of the most unspeakably fun things ever to see. Hopefully, they can avoid the pitfalls of Athens, which wound up with several essentially unfinished venues for its games; they've got nearly as much to build from scratch as Athens did. And as it stands, the US television networks bidding for the rights -- one assumes that NBC will scratch the eyes out of any other net that even thinks of trying to take its prize away -- while they would certainly have preferred a US games, for logistical reasons if nothing else, they're probably not that unhappy about Brazil landing the games. Rio sits in the Atlantic time zone, only an hour ahead of New York. They'll be able to get most events into a prime-time window without a lot of monkeying with the schedule; trying to tinker with the schedule to get prestige events in the primetime window had Seoul, Athens and Beijing all livid with NBC at one point or another.
One does wonder what Hizzoner Daley is going to do with himself, now that his big civic projects keep falling through. He genuinely does seem to want to leave the city with some Big Civic Thing as part of his legacy; he's in his late 60s, his time as mayor is going to wind down someday -- possibly soon -- and he wants to leave some Big Mark on the city. (Rather like a male dog taking the Biggest Leak EVER on the biggest tree it can find.) One would think that Millennium Park would do -- egregiously late and over budget it may have been, but it's generally considered a really spectacular park. But apparently he wants to do something more. His plans for redoing part of the subway have fallen through -- there's no way to complete his plans without building several major chunks of parallel tracks in places, and nobody has the money for that. For good or otherwise, the Games would have remade the south and west sides of the city, as well as a small part of Wisconsin. And now that's not going to happen. So what will he turn to next? Which part of the city will he lift his leg on to whiz out some boondoggle to say, "I wuz here!"?
]]>The Obama administration has decided not to seek new legislation from Congress authorizing the indefinite detention of about 50 terrorism suspects being held without charges at at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, officials said Wednesday. Instead, the administration will continue to hold the detainees without bringing them to trial based on the power it says it has under the Congressional resolution passed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, authorizing the president to use force against forces of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
In concluding that it does not need specific permission from Congress to hold detainees without charges, the Obama administration is adopting one of the arguments advanced by the Bush administration in years of debates about detention policies. But President Obama’s advisers are not embracing the more disputed Bush contention that the president has inherent power under the Constitution to detain terrorism suspects indefinitely regardless of Congress....
Well, bully for them! That way they can only violate the Constitution a little instead of a lot. Congratulations on working that out, people!
[...] Still, the position surprised some critics who had expected after a speech by Mr. Obama in May that he would seek legislation to put the system of indefinite detention on firmer political and legal ground. In that speech at the National Archives, Mr. Obama said that he was considering continuing indefinite detention in some limited cases but that he would not act unilaterally. “We must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded,” he said at the time. “They can’t be based simply on what I or the executive branch decide alone.” He said he would “work with Congress to develop an appropriate legal regime so that our efforts are consistent with our values and our Constitution.” [...]
Yeah, well, it's a bit late for that. To say nothing of the fact that the very concept of indefinitely detaining someone without charges is absolutely antithetical to the Constitution, and, allegedly, our values.
Frankly, I expect that the administration decided not to go for legislation at this time because whenever they floated the trial balloons, they got significant push back from people at large, resulting in a twitchy Congress. For entirely understandable reasons, people are perfectly happy with the concept of indefinite detention without legal basis, as long as it's done in a way that doesn't make them have to think about it. As soon as you come out and say, "The president is going to ask Congress to pass a law making it legal for individuals to be detained indefinitely without any sort of trial or real opportunity to fight their imprisonment," people discover that they really dislike that concept. There is, after all, no reasonable way to ensure that it would only be used against terrorists and noncitizens. What happens if a citizen and resident of the US is accused of being a terrorist, with information of a sort that the government doesn't want heard in any court anywhere? It's not an unreasonable fear; that's essentially what happened to Jose Padilla. Eventually the government was bludgeoned by the courts into actually bringing a case, which they did win -- though the case is being appealed. Mind, it's a particularly fruitless appeal. It's possible, though not probable, that the Court of Appeals will agree with Padilla and overturn the conviction. However, it's unlikely in the extreme that the Supreme Court would sustain that result. Even if they did, the government has too much invested to simply let it go-- even though it's an entirely different adminstration.
But I digress.
And then there's this bit of information:
By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
The Obama administration will announce a new policy Wednesday making it much more difficult for the government to claim that it is protecting state secrets when it hides details of sensitive national security strategies such as rendition and warrantless eavesdropping, according to two senior Justice Department officials. The new policy requires agencies, including the intelligence community and the military, to convince the attorney general and a team of Justice Department lawyers that the release of sensitive information would present significant harm to "national defense or foreign relations." In the past, the claim that state secrets were at risk could be invoked with the approval of one official and by meeting a lower standard of proof that disclosure would be harmful. That claim was asserted dozens of times during the Bush administration, legal scholars said.
The shift could have a broad effect on many lawsuits, including those filed by alleged victims of torture and electronic surveillance. Authorities have frequently argued that judges should dismiss those cases at the outset to avoid the release of information that could compromise national security.
The heightened standard is designed in part to restore the confidence of Congress, civil liberties advocates and judges, who have criticized both the Bush White House and the Obama administration for excessive secrecy. The new policy will take effect Oct. 1 and has been endorsed by federal intelligence agencies, Justice Department sources said. "What we're trying to do is . . . improve public confidence that this privilege is invoked very rarely and only when it's well supported," said a senior department official involved in the review, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the policy had not yet been unveiled. "By holding ourselves to this higher standard, we're in some way sending a message to the courts. We're not following a 'just trust us' approach."
[...] Under the new approach, a team of career prosecutors must review and the attorney general must approve any assertions of the state secrets privilege before government lawyers can make that argument in court. Officials said the new policy will ensure that the secrecy arguments are more narrowly tailored and that they are not employed to hide violations of law, bureaucratic foul-ups or details that would embarrass government officials...
[...] Since February, a Justice Department task force of eight lawyers has been sifting through about a dozen pending cases in which state secrets arguments have been made. So far, they have reversed course in only one lawsuit -- a bizarre case in federal court in the District in which a former agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration accuses the State Department and the CIA of installing listening devices in a coffee table in his home.
It's going to be interesting to see how much, if at all, this changes the government's approach. You're not likely to bring this sort of thing up with a team of government prosecutors in the first place unless you're fairly certain they'll agree with you, so it may limit the number of issues presented for state secrets arguments in the first instance. But if you do bring it to that committee, I'd wager that it has a good chance of being approved.
And, of course, as noted in the article, this has no effect on the cases that the Obama Administration inherited from Bush that are already making their way through the courts, and in which, much to the courts' own surprise, the Obama administration has asserted a state secrets privilege every bit as sweeping as the Bush administration.
Add to that the fact that Obama has been given to using signing statements with the bills he signs, much as Bush had done, and really, one begins to wonder why we bothered electing a Democrat in the first place if he's going to act like a vaguely moderate-to-conservative Republican.
]]>The New Mexico Symphony Orchestra has notified its musicians that it has discontinued several types of insurance — including medical and dental — as of Sept. 1, the NMSO reported Friday.
Eric Meyer, the NMSO's president and CEO, cited the symphony's inability to afford the insurance coverage it has been providing under its labor contract. When that contract expired Aug. 31, those benefits ended.
The symphony and its musicians are still negotiating a new contract.
Meyer said benefits affected are medical, dental, group life and long-term disability. He said notification was sent to musicians Wednesday.
Under federal law, another NMSO official said, the orchestra was obligated to let the 23 affected musicians know within a required period that they have 60 days after the date of notification to decide if they want to elect federal COBRA (Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act) continuation coverage of medical and dental. That coverage would be retroactive to Sept. 1. The opportunity for continued coverage [under COBRA] applies only to medical and dental insurance, which the musicians would pay for at their own expense. However, a significant portion of the insurance premiums are subsidized by the federal government, the NMSO official said....
Public Option Tough Sell in N.M.
By Sean Olson
Copyright © 2009 Albuquerque Journal
Journal Staff Writer
While most members of New Mexico's congressional delegation support a government-run public option for health care coverage, nearly half of the state's registered voters don't want one, a Journal Poll found.
Forty-nine percent of the voters surveyed statewide said they opposed a government-run insurance program that would compete with private industry. Forty-two percent said they favored a government-run program, or public option. Nine percent said it would depend or they didn't know.
Intensity also was apparent. Respondents who "strongly opposed" a public option outnumbered those who "strongly favored" such a plan by more than 3-to-2....
Reform Opposition Is High but Easing
By Jon Cohen and Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, September 14, 2009
President Obama continues to face significant public resistance to his drive to initiate far-reaching changes to the country's health-care system, with widespread skepticism about central tenets of his plan, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
But after a summer of angry debate and protests, opposition to the effort has eased somewhat, and there appears to be potential for further softening among critics if Congress abandons the idea of a government-sponsored health insurance option, a proposal that has become a flash point in the debate. The gap in passion, which had shown greater intensity among opponents of the plan, has also begun to close, with supporters increasingly energized and more now seeing reform as possible without people being forced to give up their current coverage. ...
Take Public Option ‘Off the Table,’ Snowe Says
By JOSEPH BERGER
Published: September 13, 2009
A key Republican senator who President Obama hopes will support his effort to overhaul the nation’s health-care system urged him Sunday to take any plan for a new government-run program “off the table.”
Senator Olympia Snowe, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, where the most-watched version of the health care bill is being written, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the so-called public option is “universally opposed by all Republicans in the Senate” and “therefore, there’s no way to pass a plan that includes the public option.”
Ms. Snowe, who has previously criticized the public option, said she thought it unwise at this juncture to be clinging to the public option because doing so “leaves open a legislative possibility that creates uncertainty in this process.” On the other, she said, scuttling the public option for good “could give real momentum to building a consensus on other issues.” [...]
I do not understand people. No, I most certainly do not.
Oh, don't mistake me: I understand the Republicans, who are as much if not much more so in the pockets of the for-profit health care industry as any Democrat. Apart from the threat to their campaign funds and semi-legal perks, they have normal partisan interest in thwarting a Democrat president. (The Democrats, blue-dog or otherwise, cannot be excused their wishy-washy behavior for any reason whatsoever.) The craven cowards of Congress will do nothing to threaten their particular status-quo.
But I do not, will not, and never shall understand how fear of change makes people at large operate so clearly and apparently contrary to their own self interest. True, Congress and the president are trying to sell us a bill of goods when they say this can all be done in a deficit-neutral way or without new taxes, but that's all part and parcel of the same tax-resistance that's led to such disasters as California now faces. People have gotten so used to being lied to that they will no longer accept that services cost money.
To be sure, the NMSO situation is in part a purely transparent labor negotiation pressure tactic. That said, in an organization with 23 performing members and some number of behind the scenes and administrative people, given fairly limited income -- seriously, how many people do you think attend the symphony in Albuquerque? the metropolitan area is only a bit over half a million people, and not the wealthiest area in the country -- the health insurance costs are probably fairly substantial. But health care should not be subject to negotiation tactics. People's actual health should not be vulnerable to an employer saying, "Well, we ain't payin' for that no more, so suck it up and deal." People's actual health should not be subject to employment or desperate poverty.
]]>We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to apologize for the prosecution of Alan Turing that led to his untimely death
Alan Turing was the greatest computer scientist ever born in Britain. He laid the foundations of computing, helped break the Nazi Enigma code and told us how to tell whether a machine could think.
He was also gay. He was prosecuted for being gay, chemically castrated as a 'cure', and took his own life, aged 41.
The British Government should apologize to Alan Turing for his treatment and recognize that his work created much of the world we live in and saved us from Nazi Germany. And an apology would recognize the tragic consequences of prejudice that ended this man's life and career.
Thank you for signing this petition. The Prime Minister has written a response. Please read below.
Prime Minister: 2009 has been a year of deep reflection – a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing. [...] Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him...
[...]So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.
Gordon Brown
Well ... it's all very nice, I'm sure, but I'm not sure I get the point. Yes, what happened to Turing was horrible, and he deserved better ... but this doesn't expunge the conviction, he's not around to benefit from the apology, he doesn't have any descendants to whom it would matter. His contributions to the war and cryptography are exactly as important as they ever were, no more, no less. So, really ... not getting this. I am one with the not getting of it.
(And purely as a matter of style: surely a formal governmental apology should start with the apology, followed by the explanation of what the apology is for. And shouldn't it be ... well, more formal than "we're sorry, you deserved so much better"? Then again, I suppose something is better than nothing, if you want an apology, and complaining over matters of style is perhaps rather curmudgeonly.)
]]>By Tim Craig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 11, 2009
The District is poised once again to become the battleground for a divisive social issue as the D.C. Council moves a step closer to legalizing same-sex marriage, an action that could force Congress and White House to take sides in the debate.
After months of buildup and behind-the-scenes lobbying, a bill by David A. Catania, one of two openly gay members of the council, has been drafted and is ready to be introduced in the coming weeks. Catania (I-At Large) expects a final vote before the end of the year. On Thursday, Catania said he had 10 co-sponsors, all but assuring that the measure will be approved by the council. The bill would have to survive congressional review before it could become law.
The bill, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, would change the law to say that "marriage is the legally recognized union of two people" and that "any person who otherwise meets the eligibility requirements . . . may marry any other eligible person regardless of gender."
If Congress fails to intervene, the District will become the only jurisdiction south of the Mason-Dixon line where same-sex couples can marry. Gays and lesbians from across the country would probably flock to the city to take their vows, as they did in California before voters passed a referendum banning same-sex marriages. Gay rights activists in Maryland said the sight of gay couples getting married in the District would boost the chance that the General Assembly would approve a gay marriage bill within a few years.
There are signs that the bill will probably generate heated opposition from members of the city's religious community, and some are concerned that the issue could split the city along racial lines. It is also sparking a debate about whether voters, as opposed to council members, should have the final say over the issue.
Catania's bill, titled the "Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Equality Amendment Act of 2009," stresses that no religious organizations or their officials would have to perform a same-sex marriage or provide wedding-related services to same-sex couples.
"I think it is very important for people to realize we are talking about a civil marriage, not a religious marriage," Catania said.
Starting in 2011, the bill would eliminate domestic partnerships, although any couple already registered would have the option of keeping their partnership or converting it for free to a city-sanctioned marriage.
There is little doubt that the measure will be approved by the council, but that won't stop national activists opposed to same-sex marriage from trying to stop the legislation in Congress. ...
I do not doubt that many people -- some of them even living in DC -- will be lobbying Congress to intervene. And, quite honestly, I'd be rather startled if Congress didn't intervene -- quite possibly at the discreet and understated and off-the-record, but nonetheless express, request of the White House. They've made it quite clear that they want this issue to vanish from their view for the next four years, ideally. Having the seat of Congress, and a federal district, vote to recognize marriages that are not recognized by the national government would be deeply embarrassing. Moreover, it would seem to demand a court fight; surely if DOMA does nothing else, it should prohibit the federal District of Columbia from passing any such law.
In other words, the law will almost certainly pass the city council -- though Catania's hopes of a unanimous vote are almost certainly pipe dreams. Whether the law survives the inevitable federal court challenges, however, will be another thing entirely.
]]>