| Amy Hunt -- 04/16/2004 11:52 |
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WELL DONE, GOVERNOR. Mitt Romney interrupted the Ellen DeGeneres Show yesterday to announce a last-ditch effort to stop equal marriage. His "emergency" proposal doesn't look like it's going to win the necessary legislative support. But it did win good reviews where it counts. Handsome Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council in Washington cast an admiring glance at Romney as he "flexed his gubernatorial muscle" (oh, stop, you're embarrassing me). And Jan LaRue of Concerned Women for America praised Romney on behalf of her organization and John Adams, who she may or may not speak to as regularly as she speaks to God, she didn't say. In addition to their concerns about gay marriage, the Concerned Women would also like to ban those cool jelly bracelets the kids are wearing these days, because they "encourage sexual activity." The jelly emergency is at the top of her website's newsflashes today, which has got to disappoint the Governor's media team. http://www.cwfa.org/main.asp COMPELLING LEGAL REASONS. If he could, Romney said he'd appoint former SJC Justice Joseph Nolan to argue for a two-and-a-half year stay of the Goodridge ruling. Nolan says he sees "compelling legal reasons" for the stay. Given that he's called the ruling an "abomination," would he see it any other way? It's telling, I think, that Romney couldn't find anyone else to take this leap with him. Was there no one else besides a judge who's said it's okay to fire lesbians, and tell them they can't willingly take on responsibility for a partner's kid, and ought not to have the most basic protections from discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations? For an AP story on Nolan, visit http://www.heraldnews.com/site/news.c EMERGENCY. Forget that we typically reserve special prosecutors and independent councils for real problems like Watergate, Iran/Contra, for chasing down guys like Meese and Nofziger and the University of Colorado rape team (I mean "football team"). Is May 17th really an emergency? To be honest, I'm even a little offended by all this yap about training the town clerks to deal with me. (Here you go everyone, listen up: When you're talking about my intended, don't say "he," say "she." Everything else, we can just muddle through together.) According to a new Gallup poll, only 1% of Americans think anything to do with The Gays -- anything at all -- is urgent business for our elected officials. What keeps us all up at night is fear of war. Charred body parts hanging off bridges in Iraq. Fear right here at home in tall buildings, subways, malls, ballparks. The miserable economy and chronic unemployment, underemployment. Here's an emergency for the Governor to work on: The Boston Fire Department is on record with Homeland Security as ill-equipped to handle a liquified natural gas catastrophe in Boston Harbor. They're worried. Me too. Unfortunately, Romney is preoccupied with his own political worry about having to be chief executive of The Gay Marriage State. So just like the public officials who led the resistance movement after Brown v. Board of Education, he's claiming that he doesn't know how to execute the court decision, that following the law is very complicated, that the rest of us don't understand how complicated it is, that chaos is just around the corner. The fact is, Mitt Romney and Tony Perkins and Jan LaRue and Ron Crews and the little ministers Sheldon and Dobson are afraid that, when marriage discrimination ends and the plague of locusts is a no-show, people won't be susceptible to anti-gay hysteria anymore. That fine and useful inclination most Americans have -- "live and let live" -- will take over. And everybody will just move on. Gee. What a disaster. |
| Amy Hunt -- 04/15/2004 02:32 |
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THE PRO-GAY ELITE. The anti-gays like to assert that the cause of equal marriage rights is being advanced by an out of touch elite. They like that word, "elite," and use it all the time. It's the opposite of American; it's a sissypants French word. And since nobody ever really thinks they're in the elite (not even Yalie Skull and Bones, Harvard MBA, President's boy, oilman and baseball team owner George W. Bush, who likes to pretend he's a simple cowpoke), there's no one to object when blame is dumped there. Who's going to say "Hey, I'm an elitist, and I resent your mischaracterization of us." If we really had an "elite" and could round them up, I'd be all for them having excessive influence over big decisions. e-lite. 1. (a) The choice part. (b) A group or class of persons or a member of such a group or class, enjoying superior intellectual, social, or economic status. (c) The best or most skilled members of a group: the football team's elite. Give me the smart kids, smarter than me, to sort out our thorny problems. Heck, after 9/11, I gave the benefit of the doubt to Wolfowitz. I also typically like my surgery done by a board certified surgeon, with the assistance of an anesthesiology team rather than, say, a whack over the head by whoever's interested in helping. Don't you? AD POPULUM. Many of the anti-gays missed civics class on a very important Tuesday or Wednesday a long time ago, and many of them missed logic classes too. You can't build arguments around the idea that if the majority of people believe a thing is so, it must be so. This particular fallacious argument is called "Ad Populum." (It's also not a terribly reliable path to take, since most humans learn, evolve, and change their thinking all the time.) The anti-gays are also big on "Appeal to Tradition," a fallacy that assumes a change to something is always negative. Change is always scary, anxiety-provoking, even a pain in the neck. But negative? Once upon a time, marriage was a business deal between a father and a guy he picked out for his 10-year-old daughter. I think we've made steady improvements, we do it all the time, and we'll continue to. PAWLICK. MassNews just isn't enough. He's just fixed up http://macitizensformarriage.com/ with all kinds of pics and prattle. If you're over 18 years of age, check out "The Ultimate Question In Homosexual Marriage." He begins with a little disclaimer that says "we do not enjoy wriiting about this conduct." Yeah right. |
| Amy Hunt -- 04/14/2004 03:02 |
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NEW GAY MARRIAGE DANGER. An anti-gay group has sent a letter to the IRS Commissioner calling for an investigation into same-sex couples. (I missed that whole era of investigating homosexuals, born much too late, but maybe I'll get in on this one.) Apparently, all this marriage nonsense of ours isn't really about civil rights, or tangible legal protections for our families, or a refusal to be considered less committed to our loved ones than, say, Elizabeth Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Burton Warner Fortensky. Apparently, it's all a big tax evasion scheme. And because it's always important to speak of The Gays in the most frantic of terms, the letter says that improper, illegal uses of Married, Filing Jointly on tax returns "could mushroom into a dangerous tax scam throughout the United States," and that the "loss of revenues to the federal government from federal income taxes clearly would be substantial." (This dire prediction from the same people who say that homosexuals are, at best, 2% or 3% of the population and, of that, few really want to get married anyway because we're tomcats.) The letter asks the IRS commissioner to explain how he will "deter this conduct" and suggests that threatening public service announcements might be a good start. The anti-gay group is called "Public Advocate of the United States." Gee, isn't it great that the nation and everyone in it has one, centralized advocate? http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelea DON'T GET ME STARTED. Because domestic partner benefits are recognized as extra income and taxed, it's cheaper to have the laid-off girlfriend pay her own health insurance, full freight, on COBRA. If I die tomorrow, my 20 years of involuntary contributions to Social Security will go to someone else's grieving widow, not mine. MassHealth counts the joint savings of a same-sex couple as the spendable asset of the person needing help with long term care -- without the slightest thought that the person he or she leaves at home might end up eating Tender Vittles. A few weeks ago, The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force released a great report on the cost of marriage discrimination to real Massachusetts couples. Now, the Human Rights Campaign and the Urban Institute has their take, "The Cost of Marriage Inequality to Children and their Same-Sex Parents," based on an analysis on 2002 Census Data. http://www.hrc.org REQUIRED READING. Ed Pawlick, former colleague of the Massachusetts Family Institute (the relationship seems a bit strained these days), and the local nut who has been spending his kids' inheritance on anti-gay campaigns for years, gets long overdue exposure in the Globe today. He was a formidable opponent at one point (he's rich and shamelessly mean) but in the last year or so, he's really gone into the abyss. I guess that's where these folks go when it's all over. His two favorite things are conspiracy theories and writing dirty, even dirtier than Sheldon. And every attorney with a subscription to Lawyer's Weekly may be helping him do it. The story is at http://www.boston.com/business/globe/ar |
| Amy Hunt -- 04/13/2004 06:32 |
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HOW SHORT DO YOU NEED IT? "Pete" Knight, California state senator, the king of all anti-gay marriage lawmakers, darling of the Concerned Women for America, and not exactly Father of the Year (his son is gay), has said he'd "support something short of marriage" for same-sex couples now. He simply asks that we stop making the case for real marriage licenses and real equality with the likes of, say, Dennis Rodman and Carmen Electra. http://www.advocate.com AN "US MAGAZINE" MOMENT. I was not at all surprised to read that this marriage is kaput, tell me I'm not alone: "Full House" actor and cheap phone company pitchman John Stamos and his Victoria's Secret model wife, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, most recently painted up as the blue-green hottie hero in "X-Men." Also, Tom and Penelope? Called it. Anything that begins with breaking Nicole Kidman's heart is doomed. THOSE PEOPLE. Allan Carlson, social historian and author of "The American Way" tells Pat Robertson's CBN news that kids of gay parents are inherently in a lot of trouble "from their own sexual identities, to troubles at school, to troubles with drugs. We're engaged in a huge and risky and dangerous experiment, and children are the ones who are going to be paying the price." In Pennsylvania, a traditional Mom is paying the price: She was sentenced to 15 months in the slammer for stripping at her son's birthday party when the go-cart riding idea didn't work out. Mom decided to buy beers, rent a hotel room, and give the boys (ranging in age from 13 to 16) a show. She blamed the incident on her own use of pills and booze. AP story is here. http://www.post-gazette.com/breaking/20 One of the things we're supposed to do here in America is judge people as individuals, not as members of groups. We have a hard time doing that, of course. History is rich with the stories of Those People, asking to be merely people. We always end up doing the right thing -- in our laws, if not our hearts -- and this will work out exactly the same way. |
| Amy Hunt -- 04/12/2004 13:07 |
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POLLS. I'd like to propose a day of polling about heterosexuality. Let's put our finger on that pulse, shall we? Let's turn on CNN's Crossfire and see a big dust up over the straight lifestyle: What they're doing and why, what they want, if we like them, what our public policy position toward them should be. Another week, another poll, this one by the LA Times. And as tired as I get sometimes of being the most interesting cage to visit at the zoo, more good news: While gay marriage is still outside the comfort zone of most Americans, their understanding of homosexuality and their comfort with gay people in general has grown dramatically. When 7 out if 10 people say they know a gay or lesbian person, and think the U.S. Military policy against openly gay soldiers is wrong, and wouldn't blink if their kids had an openly gay teacher, the fundamentalist Right is going to have a hard time ginning up a culture war. The fact is, an ever-increasing number of gay people are having the courage to live honestly, and trust that the straight folks who matter to them will be okay. And an increasing number of straight people are hanging in for the conversation instead of letting fear get the better of them. "Being gay is no longer an abstraction," says Gary Gates, a demographer at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. "It's my friend, my neighbor, my brother, my office mate." Come out come out wherever you are. http://www.sfgate.com/cgibin/article.cg THE LITTLE MINISTER. That's what columnist Jimmy Breslin calls Dr. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition. (Why are they all Doctors, anyway?) In his April 7th Newsday column, Breslin recounts a conversation he had with the little minister. Some Sheldon gems: "Homosexuals are dangerous...They proselytize. They come to the door, and if your son answers and nobody is there to stop it, they grab the son and run off with him. They steal him. They take him away and turn him into a homosexual...I speak the truth for the Lord...They steal your son." Sheldon vehemently denies the conversation took place. Safe bet that he's not quibbling over what Breslin quoted him as saying, because they're exactly the sort of things Sheldon says all the time at http://www.traditionalvalues.org. Who on earth is the fundamentalist Right going to get to run the national anti-gay campaign they are so itching for? How will the little minister ever get more than rolled eyes from the America above? The other little guy, Dr. Dobson from Focus on the Family, has the same problem. He sells books about homosexuality on his website, books called "Dark Obsession: The Tragedy and Threat of the Homosexual Lifestyle." His Director of the Center for Marriage and Family Studies (sounds so objective), Peter Sprigg, has laid out the organization's public policy position on gay citizens "We want people to abstain altogether from engaging in homosexual acts," he wrote. Sprigg didn't offer any specifics about how they intended to accomplish this. For Breslin's column visit http://www.newsday.com/news/printeditio PLUMBING. I started to work on the marriage issue a few years ago. One of the first people I met told me that in any sustained debate on the topic, the other side will eventually have nowhere to go but the body part argument: the boy parts, the girl parts, how babies are made by Tab A and Slot B, or, as she put it, "The Plumbing." And when they get to the plumbing, you win. |
| Amy Hunt -- 04/09/2004 10:10 |
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THE EVANGELICAL VOTE. According to the Associated Baptist Press, Christian voters may not be motivated around the marriage issue as much as their leaders would like them to be. A recent bipartisan poll commissioned by two Christian organizations showed that only 15% of respondents thought a candidate's position on equal marriage rights was more important than what they'd do to breathe life back into the economy, provide jobs, help the poor. Another recent poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life suggests that the more contact evangelical voters have with gay people, the less threatened they feel, and the less interested they are in anti-gay campaigns. (This is true of every demographic and it appears highly conservative evangelicals are no exception). Gay marriage is not a liberal idea, it is a conservative one. As of May 17th, there will be a new, higher standard of commitment for gay and lesbian couples. The standard used to be dialing for a U-Haul and maybe writing up a new will. But in a few weeks, the state of Massachusetts is going to up the ante. We'll be able to enter into legally binding relationships. We'll be free to go on record and do it in public. There will be a very public, well-understood expectation of permanence, monogamy, muddling through for better and for worse. We will accept a long list of legally enforceable obligations. Society will frown on us if we try to bail out, and doing that won't just be a matter of getting the U-Haul back. Corwin Smidt, a political science professor at the evangelical Calvin College, suggests his students struggle with being asked to oppose both gay promiscuity and gay commitment. "I think there's kind of a tension that goes on," he said. "We don't want promiscuous gay relationships. So when you're talking about civil unions of gay people, somehow that is more decent than the [promiscuous] gay lifestyle you sometimes see." No one expects you to talk to the "God Hates Fags" people, but let's not give up on these folks. Associated Baptist Press story available at http://www.abpnews.com/abpnews/story.cf PAT ROBERTSON IS BUMMED. The Christian Broadcasting Network has announced none too happily that Governor Mitt Romney "has given up on a challenge to the state supreme court ruling legalizing gay marriage." Let's hope so. The older I get, the more I see the fragility of our lives, and the world we inhabit, and the more I genuinely root for our leaders, even if I didn't vote for them, even if I wish someone else were in charge. Today, there are chronically unemployed and underemployed people living on one-tenth of the income they had a few years ago, always a few hundreds bucks away from not being able to take the kids to the doctor or the dentist. There are still elderly people who choose between food and medicine. When we leave our homes in the morning and say goodbye to our family members, let's face it, the building they work in or the subway they ride could be blown up that day and not one of us will get to act surprised, this is now part of our existence. On that September 11th morning, I was at Logan Airport with my friend Jim in the boarding line for the shuttle to New York. My cell phone rang. It was my Mom, in a panic: "Are you on the plane yet? Don't get on that plane." She and my sister were watching the first World Trade Center building go up in flames on TV. No one knew what happened yet, only that it was a plane from Logan. Three minutes later, all flights were suspended. Jim was driving me home when we heard on the radio that a plane had flown into the Pentagon, and he just looked at me and said "We're at war." That day and for some time thereafter, I rooted for George Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Condolezza Rice and Colin Powell and Paul Wolfowitz and his crazy idea about making an example of Saddam Hussein and installing an Arab democracy in the Middle East. I wanted them to be right. I want Governor Romney to do right things for us all too. And one of those right things is to not let guys like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell -- who, after 9/11, said the gays and other perverted, unholy things in America were responsible for it -- suck us all into a culture war. For the CBN story, visit http://www.cbn.com/CBNNews/News/040 DEAR DWIGHT. "Hi" right back to you. I have to admit, just for this one day, I miss your predecessor Chris Funnell, I was hoping she wouldn't give up before Easter. She had written about how the gays should keep away from St. Patrick's Day. How the gays didn't and couldn't have anything to do with family values. How the gays ought not to sing God Bless America and the National Anthem. To be honest, I was really looking forward to an Easter blog called "Hey, You, Put That Chocolate Bunny Down." |
| Amy Hunt -- 04/08/2004 07:51 |
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YOU'RE WELCOME. All these years, gays and lesbians been buying married America a whole lot more than attractive place settings. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute just released a report quantifying how real same-sex couples pay more in taxes, then get unceremoniously shut out of the nation's economic safety-net programs -- including things it's hard to believe we just let go, like our pension and Social Security survivor benefits. When there's economic disparity within a gay couple, the denial of marriage can be catastrophic. I know couples who've spent a decade taking all the right, responsible steps with a financial planner, and still they've bought only a couple years of security for the poorer of the two if and when the more financially successful one dies. If I were discourteous enough to die, the girlfriend would have about 30 seconds to sell our house and move to pay the taxes. If I were a real jerk, I'd wither in long term care for a few years so the government could take everything but the cats. For a free copy of the report, "Economic Benefits of Marriage under Federal and Massachusetts Law," go to http://www.TheTaskForce.org/library BULLISH ON MARRIAGE. According to Forbes magazine, legal gay marriage across America would mean a $16.8 billion boon to the wedding industry. "From caterers to jewelers to travel agents, the $70 billion-per-year U.S. wedding industry embraces a wide array of sectors," said Forbes. "If gay couples could say 'I do,' and assuming they spend as much on the occasion as their heterosexual counterparts, then such companies as Tiffany, Williams-Sonoma, Marriot International, Federated Department Stores and May Department Stores would see a serious boost in their matrimony-related business." Hey, if we can exercise our full rights as adult citizens, protect our loved ones, and bring back a little irrational exuberance at the mall, what's not to like? http://www.forbes.com/home/index.html?p WHO SAID IT? From the State House News Service yesterday: "It's likely to be somewhat disruptive, but that's the nature of government. We have to live with the fact that the courts have to do what they feel is right and it's our job to implement the decisions." No, that's not Attorney General Tom Reilly explaining to Gov. Mitt Romney why he can't block the door to City Hall on May 17th. It's Mitt Romney commenting on Tuesday's Supreme Judicial Court's decision that a tax law change enacted by the Legislature -- a capital gains tax increase that moved the state from a graduated tax to a flat tax, and is retroactive -- is unconstitutional. The ruling was split 4-3 just like Goodridge. If you wanted to look at this one angrily and weirdly, the way some people do Goodridge, you could say "one justice decided it." (One run often decides the World Series too, but we don't play the game over, or say it shouldn't have been played in that ballpark, or ask the people in the bleachers to decide who they think won.) You could also call the SJC an "activist usurper" of the Legislature, with no business deciding matters of tax policy. But Romney simply said we've got to respect the court, which, of course, is right. When asked about the ruling, he declined to get into his personal views. He said the matter was not political. And interestingly, his response was mostly statement of principle about the nature of government, about what the court's job is, about what his job is. If he does have a principle at work here (and it's hard to tell what's up with him, with all the running for Dick Cheney's job he's doing) it's got to apply equally to rulings he likes, rulings he doesn't, and rulings he doesn't worry his pretty head about. Everybody hang on to that sentence up there. We may need it in the weeks ahead. THAT'S "MRS. MISTRESS M" TO YOU. Another fun person who can, whenever she wants, get a marriage license from the government and no one will freak out and try to pass a Constitutional amendment: Mistress M., the dominatrix who allegedly hacksawed and buried the 280-lb. body of a guy who had a heart attack during a paid bondage session. http://www.boston.com/news/local/new_ha |
| Amy Hunt -- 04/07/2004 08:09 |
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POLLS. So Massachusetts residents are evenly divided over the Legislature's so-called "compromise" proposal that would downgrade same-sex marriages to civil unions if, by late 2006, the heterosexual majority hasn't gotten over itself. The numbers on this living, breathing issue will continue to tremble this way and that, with the trend moving inexorably toward support of equal access to marriage. But in the end, the opinions polls are merely interesting. They can't be allowed to matter -- unless, of course, everyone else agrees to have questions about their personal freedoms crammed onto bumper stickers and TV commercials and put to a popular vote, in which case, who am I to demand special rights? http://www.boston.com/news/local/articl In 1948, when California became the first state to strike down a ban on interracial marriage, nine out of 10 Americans were beside themselves and, if given the chance, would have voted to keep the ban. Just four years ago, when Alabama finally voted to lift its old, embarrassing ban on interracial marriage, 41% voted to keep it. A couple years earlier in 1998, South Carolina went through a similar vote. Just about the same number of people wanted their sentimental feelings about race segregation, however unenforceable, on the books. http://www.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/sto According to an ABC News PrimeTime poll this past winter, 61% of Americans have a literal belief in the Bible's Genesis story, in which the universe and all of planet earth and the complete and peaceable kingdom of animals were created in six days. A National Science Foundation survey shows that less than half of adults in the nation understand that earth orbits the sun annually. Also, a Gallup poll shows John Wayne wins as the best actor ever. Please. RAMPANT LAWLESSNESS. There's a lot of mewling about the marriage phenomenon: scalawag mayors, impertinent ministers, and uppity gay and lesbian couples have been taking matters into their own hands from coast to coast. Let's remember that, in 1872, Susan B. Anthony broke the law when she decided to register and then vote in Rochester, New York. She was arrested, denied the right to testify on her own behalf, and found guilty, guilty, guilty. In 1955, Rosa Parks violated a segregation ordinance when she refused to give her bus seat to a white man. In 1959, Richard and Mildred Loving were prosecuted and convicted for their rogue marriage license; interracial marriage was still illegal in their home state of Virginia. In 1960, college students conducted sit-ins at segregated lunch counters across the South. Their slogan was "jail not bail." In the summer of 1969, the gays at the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan finally decided to defy a routine, perfectly lawful police raid. When the vice squad came in for the till money and started shoving people into paddy wagons again - simply because that's how we treated the homos back then - a riot erupted. We never turned back. The same-sex marriages that will happen in Massachusetts on May 17th are the product of a long, orderly legal process and, hey, good for us. But it's hard to blame other people and places in America for wanting to catch up, for wanting to assert their fundamental freedoms -- tangibly, symbolically, however they can. Like Rosa Parks, their feet are tired. And like Susan B. Anthony, they're right. EMAIL. A reader directed me to Vote-Smart.org where Rep. Phil Travis, key coordinator of the anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment in Massachusetts, has just one organizational affiliation highlighted: The Solid Waste Task Force, and it seems he coordinates that work too. On that one, I'll root for him. http://www.vote-smart.org/bio.php?can_i |
| Amy Hunt -- 04/06/2004 12:33 |
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Taking a breather today. (Apologies to the daily readers, and thank you for the emails to the Caucus site that say you're out there, a girl does wonder). It's beautiful outside. And I plan to not think about the M-word for a day, a whole day. You should too. Go get an ice cream cone. See you tomorrow. |
