Tag Archives: Gay Marriage

March 29, 2013 · 1:46 PM

Alan Simpson: ‘Men Legislators Shouldn’t Even Vote On’ Abortion

I don’t often agree with former GOP Senator Alan Simpson but in this instance, he is spot on…

The Huffington Post

Former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) has never shied away from turning his trademark brand of colorful rhetoric on his own party, and on Thursday he did so again, in a scathing examination of the Republican approach on social issues.

In an interview published in the Los Angeles Times, Simpson, who has weighed in prominently on fiscal issues in recent years, blasted the trend of old, white Republican males feeling compelled to legislate on abortion.

“[It's] a hideous thing. It’s terrible,” Simpson said of the medical procedure. “But it’s a deeply intimate and personal thing. … Men legislators shouldn’t even vote on it.”

Simpson also called out what he saw as a “homophobic strain in our party,” and accused members of the GOP of following a social agenda that was inconsistent with their broader political ideology.

“You’re a Republican, you believe in get-out-of-your-life and the precious right to privacy, the right to be left alone,” Simpson said. “Well then, pal, I don’t care what you do. You can go worship the Great Eel at night, I don’t give a rat’s … . But don’t mess with me and don’t then go take a position I have and wrap religion around it.”

(Read the rest of Simpson’s interview with the Times here.)

Simpson has expressed similar disagreements with Republicans on social issues in the past. In 2011, he targeted intolerance in the party, suggesting that it often ended up being a hypocritical display of hate.

“But I’m not sticking with people who are homophobic, anti-women, you know, moral values while you’re diddling your secretary while you’re giving a speech on moral values,” he said. “Come on. Get off of it.”

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January 6, 2013 · 4:14 AM

Welcome to the new Civil War

Welcome to the new Civil War

In a recent discussion with a friend, I mentioned how news pundits constantly use the phrase: “Our country has not been so ideologically divided since the Civil War.”

My friend’s question was “why the Civil War analogy…?  The following piece tends to address this question.

Salon

Lincoln’s unfinished war rages on, as the neo-Confederacy tries to turn back the clock on women, gays, God and guns

On a repeat viewing of Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” over the New Year’s holiday, a scene I had barely noticed the first time jumped out at me. Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens (played with reptilian gentility by Jackie Earle Haley), in a secret meeting aboard a steamboat with Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward, faces up to the reality that the era of slavery has come to an end. Ratification of the 13th Amendment, Stephens muses, will destroy the basis of the Southern economy and the South’s traditional way of life. “We won’t know ourselves anymore,” he says.

If only it had been so. What an affluent slave owner like Stephens feared most, no doubt, was the utopian vision of “radical Reconstruction” imagined by legendary abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones in the movie), in an earlier conversation with Lincoln in the White House kitchen. Stevens envisioned a future in which all the land and property of the Southern aristocracy would be dispossessed and divided among the emancipated slaves, building a new society of free soil and free labor amid the ruins of tyranny. To put it in contemporary social-studies terms, Stevens hoped that by uprooting and destroying the South’s slave economy, one could also replace its culture.

It didn’t quite work out that way. You can’t boil one of the most tumultuous periods of American history down to one paragraph, but here goes: Lincoln was assassinated by a domestic terrorist and replaced by Andrew Johnson, who was an incompetent hothead and an unapologetic racist. Within a few years the ambitious project of Reconstruction  fell victim to a sustained insurgency led by the Ku Klux Klan and similar white militia groups. By the late 1870s white supremacist “Redeemers” controlled most local and state governments in the South, and by the 1890s Southern blacks had been disenfranchised and thrust into subservience positions by Jim Crow laws that were only slightly preferable to slavery.

So even though it’s a truism of American public discourse that the Civil War never ended, it’s also literally true. We’re still reaping the whirlwind from that long-ago conflict, and now we face a new Civil War, one focused on divisive political issues of the 21st century – most notably the rights and liberties of women and LGBT people – but rooted in toxic rhetoric and ideas inherited from the 19th century.

Edit Note:  Emphasis are mine

Continue reading here…

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June 26, 2011 · 4:55 PM

Andrew Cuomo 2016 speculation heating up

Looks like Long Time Lurker and I speculated correctly…

Politico

The 2016 Democratic presidential race just began.

With his successful push to pass a gay marriage law, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo overnight became a national contender, putting down a major marker among the liberal party base that dominates the primaries.

“Most politicians, including most Democrats, have been afraid of this issue. Andrew is the first national figure ever to embrace it so enthusiastically,” said Richard Socarides, the president of Equality Matters and a former Clinton White House adviser. “Clearly, this establishes him as the most important progressive leader of our party, setting him up very well for 2016.”

Come 2016, “Cuomo is the only one who will be able to say ‘I delivered for you’ before everyone else realized it was politically popular, and that will be an invaluable asset,” Socarides said, adding, “it also has the benefit of being true.”

Same-sex marriage opponents also framed New York’s arrival as the sixth state to legalize gay marriage in terms of perceived national ambitions for the governor who pushed the GOP-controlled state Senate to make it happen.

“The Republican Party has torn up its contract with the voters who trusted them in order to facilitate Andrew Cuomo’s bid to be president,” said National Organization for Marriage president Brian Brown, in a statement Friday night attacking the vote.

 
 
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August 12, 2010 · 12:19 AM

Judge Who Struck Down Prop. 8 To Rule On Whether Gay Marriages Can Resume Immediately

The Huffington Post

The federal judge who overturned California’s same-sex marriage ban says he is ready to rule on whether gay marriages should resume immediately in the state or await an appeals court’s input.

Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker said he would issue his decision Thursday by noon on requests to impose a stay that would keep Proposition 8 in effect while its sponsors appeal his decision.

California voters passed the ban in November 2008, five months after the state Supreme Court legalized gay marriage.

Walker last week struck it down as an unconstitutional violation of gay Californians’ civil rights.

Supporters argued the ban was necessary to safeguard the traditional understanding of marriage and to encourage responsible childbearing.

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· 12:06 AM

Gingrich: ‘It Doesn’t Matter What I Live’

“It doesn’t matter what I do.
  People need to hear what I say.
  No one else can say what I say.
  It doesn’t matter what I live.” ~ Newt Gingrich

After reading Newt Gingrich’s ex-wife’s interview in Esquire Magazine, I have come to the conclusion that Gingrich is a disgusting human being who exhibits signs of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. 

Little Green Footballs has more… 

John H. Richardson’s profile of Newt Gingrich in Esquire Magazine includes this anecdote about Gingrich’s former wife Marianne, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis shortly before Gingrich revealed to her that he was having an affair. 

She called a minister they both trusted. He came over to the house the next day and worked with them the whole weekend, but Gingrich just kept saying she was a Jaguar and all he wanted was a Chevrolet. ‘I can’t handle a Jaguar right now.’ He said that many times. ‘All I want is a Chevrolet.’ 

He asked her to just tolerate the affair, an offer she refused. 

He’d just returned from Erie, Pennsylvania , where he’d given a speech full of high sentiments about compassion and family values. The next night, they sat talking out on their back patio in Georgia. She said, “How do you give that speech and do what you’re doing?” 

“It doesn’t matter what I do,” he answered. “People need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live.” 

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August 4, 2010 · 11:12 PM

Proposition 8 Overturned

 

Huffington Post

A federal judge overturned California’s gay-marriage ban Wednesday in a landmark case that could eventually force the U.S. Supreme Court to confront the question of whether same-sex couples have a constitutional right to wed.

The ruling by Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker touched off a celebration outside the courthouse. Gay couples waved rainbow and American flags and erupted with cheers in the city that has long been a haven for gays.

LA Times

 Both Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa praised the judge’s decision. “Because a judge had the courage to stand up for the constitution of the United States, prop 8 has been overturned!” the mayor wrote on Twitter.

“This ruling marks a victory for loving, committed couples who want nothing more than the same rights and security as other families,” added Rea Carey, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, minutes after Walker’s ruling was released. “From the start, this has been about basic fairness.”

New York Magazine

U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled on Wednesday that the California’s Proposition 8 ballot initiative denying marriage rights to same-sex couples was unconstitutional, in a case that will almost certainly go all the way to the Supreme Court.

Walker ruled that Proposition 8 is “unconstitutional under both the due process and equal protection clauses.” The court, therefore, “orders entry of judgment permanently enjoining its enforcement.” Two key sentences from the ruling:

Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California constitution the notion that opposite sex couples are superior to same sex couples.

Update: Good As You has a PDF of the decision.

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