But there is a difference with Oregon. There is a reason that none of the previous federal rulings have caused places such as Wikipedia or GLAAD or any other place that is covering his phenomenon to count those states as one that now allows marriage equality.
Oregon is the first state with one of these cases where not a single state or county official argued in favor of keeping the ban.
And that has important legal implications… Continue reading It may not seem like news…
A judge in Idaho declared that state’s ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional, and refused to issue a stay, so marriages could begin Friday (depending on how the Governor’s appeal to the Circuit Court goes).
The Arkansas Supreme Court declined to issue a stay, but also pointed out that the judge’s preliminary ruling forgot to mention a third statute that prohibits clerks from issuing licenses. More on that in a minute.
The federal judge in Oregon who heard arguments about the ban last month (if you can call it arguments when the state Attorney General and every other group filing a brief agreed with the gay couples that the ban is unconstitutional) ruled that the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) could not intervene on behalf of anonymous citizens who allegedly fear reprisal, so they couldn’t be named.
Seriously, NOM’s behavior on this has been really pathetic. They issued a lengthy angry press release two months before the deadline to file a brief about the case, then they missed the deadline to file. Then the night before the scheduled hearing, they file an emergency request to be allowed to file a brief and come into the court to argue on behalf of the ban, claiming that they were caught off-guard by the hearing? The judge refused to halt the scheduled hearing, but promised he wouldn’t release a ruling until he’d had another hearing on their intervention petition.
Rumor had it that NOM had missed the deadline because they were looking for a county clerk who would agree to be their co-filer. Since marriage equality came to California because the Supreme Court rejected the case on the grounds that NOM and other groups had no standing to step in if the state declined to appeal the lower court ruling, NOM has switched to trying to recruit lower-level state officials to be their puppet petitioner. Rumors were that, with polls shows 58% of Oregon voters already wanting to repeal the state constitution’s ban, no state or county official who might arguably have standing was willing to come forward. That’s why NOM filed late.
They confirmed this in their arguments about why they should be allowed to intervene. They allegedly had several people who wanted to argue for the ban, but only if they could remain anonymous. It should have been no surprise to them that the judge denied the request. Come on! The Supreme Court had already ruled NOM didn’t have standing. Claiming you have anonymous co-petitioners who are afraid even to meet with the judge? That’s just crazy.
And then there’s Kentucky, whose ban was ruled unconstitutional a while ago, but the ruling has been stayed while awaiting the outcome of an appeal. But that doesn’t mean nothing’s happening. No, the original court has now ordered the state to pay the attorneys fees of the gay and lesbian couples who originally filed the case.
But it’s the Arkansas case that’s crazy. When the news first broke last week, I was kind of surprised to read that the Judge had to find both a state constitutional ban and a separate statute banning same-sex marriage violated the federal constitution. Arkansas had both a law and a constitutional ban? Talk about wearing both a belt and suspenders at the same time! But it’s worse than that, there’s another statute that separately prohibits clerks from issuing the licenses. Really? How paranoid can you be?
But apparently, since the state Supreme Court mentioned that third law, everyone, including the counties that had been issuing licenses since Saturday, has stopped following the first judge’s order allowing marriage equality. As more than one observer has pointed out, it seems absurd that once the ban is declared unconstitutional, that anyone could argue that an extra law whose only effect is to enforce this thing that has already been declared unconstitutional can itself remain constitutional.
The original judge had only issued preliminary ruling, not his final orders, so he could mention the third law in those final orders. No one knows if the justices on the state’s highest court did this to make certain everything is covered, or it it’s a delaying tactic to avoid having to decide whether to issue a stay. I’m not sure what the delay would accomplish. Do a couple of them hope that if they wait a few weeks this will all blow over?
Between thr time I started writing this and now, the judge has issued a revised order, and specifically ordered clerks to issue marriqge licenses. So it’s back in the state Supreme Court’s lap. There comes a point where you wonder when the bigots will admit the fight on this is over…
Except that isn’t what she had done, at all.
For a little background, for many years she pulled in a six-figure salary from this group while she went around the country, explaining how letting gay people have either civil unions or get married would destroy families, would harm children, would cause irrepairable harm to non-gay people’s marriages, and so forth. She raised and spent (every year) tens of millions of dollars putting advertisements onto local radio and television filled with lies and distortions about how immoral, unhealthy, et cetera, et cetera gay people were. She sent people into churches to rally the faithful. She repeated the lies on local and national “news” shows, and so forth.
Then, when it became clear that the battle had been lost on civil unions, she and her organization started insisting that they only meant to protect traditional marriage, and they claimed to stop opposing civil unions (though they did keep more quietly funneling money into campaigns opposing those), and asserted they were only against marriage.
She kept repeating the same lies, demonizing gay and lesbian people, quoting all those debunked studies and so forth. They fought tooth an nail, mounting speaking tours, spending large amounts of money on ads to defeat judges and legislators who helped civil unions and marriage equality move forward.
Then, she resigned as president of the organization, letting her longtime friend and ally Brian Brown take over. She still pulls in a healthy, six-figure salary as chairperson of their board of directors. And they still spread the same lies. But now, they spend as much of their time and money trying to block gay adoptions, trying to block transgender rights laws, trying to repeal school policies against bullying gay and trans children, and so forth.
And recently, Maggie has started going on conservative radio shows and the like saying things that, when quoted out of context, sound like she’s surrendering. “Gay marriage is inevitable, now,” and “we’ve lost that fight.” And everyone who has been blogging about and covering the struggle for marriage equality, are repeating those quotes, slapping a “she’s surrendered!” headline on them, and sometimes wondering why she’s going around admitting that they’ve lost.
Here’s what they all misunderstand: admitting that they have lost the marriage argument is not the same thing as surrendering. And if you listen to the rest of what she says in these interviews or go read all of her blog, instead of stopping as everyone seems to assume as a consequence of the admission of loss, you find a different story:
“The rapid collapse of opposition to gay marriage we are witnessing did not just happen, and it was not inevitable. But it is.
“The question now on the table is: will orthodox Christianity (and other traditional faiths), be stigmatized and marginalized as the equivalent of racism in the American public square? Will Biblical morality be wiped out as an acceptable public position in America?
“Or will we regroup, rebuild as a subculture, and survive to become the possibility of a new foundation in the future?”
—Maggie Gallagher
She goes on to lament that “version of America we were born into is no more,” and she talks a lot about how faithful Christians and Jews and Muslims are being intimidated into silence. There are two flaws with this claim. She believes that anyone who doesn’t feel the same as she does about gay rights are not faithful or true Christians, et cetera. And she also believes that not everyone who claims to support our legal rights really do support us.
She then segues to something that may seem a little bizarre and disconnected:
“7 percent of the American people believe contraception—while legally acceptable—is not morally acceptable.”—Maggie Gallagher
This betrays another secret of the anti-gay movement that lots of people don’t understand: they aren’t just anti-gay, they think that birth control (all forms) is immoral. Rick Santorum originally got is name turned into a gross sexual slang term not because he opposed gay marriage, but because he was campaigning for re-election to the Senate on a platform of restricting access to birth control for everyone (including married people), and wanting to impose laws against kinky sex on everyone (including married people), in addition to outlawing all abortions, re-criminalizing gay sex, banning gay marriage, and repealing sex discrimination and sexual orientation discrimination laws.
(Psssst! All of those things were part of his platform for the 2012 presidential nomination, too!)
Maggie quotes that 7 percent statistic for another reason, she goes on to describe how the battle for marriage equality that has been won in the hearts and minds of Americans was pushed by a mere 2 percent of the population. Because she things that only 2 percent of the population is gay and lesbian. From my study of the methodologies of all the studies that have tried to pin that number down, I think it’s closer to 6 percent. But the more important thing Maggie doesn’t understand is the studies conducted by the CDC in the 80s and 90s that concluded that merely 45% of adults have sex with some regularity with members of both genders (the other thing that study found was that Americans, at least, would rather admit to being heroin addicts than label themselves bisexual).
So, while she soothes herself thinking that only 2 percent of the population is non-heterosexual, and therefore if 2 percent of the population can bamboozle a big majority of Americans to decide that gay people are human and deserve the same rights as other humans, her 7 percent will be able to reverse all of that. She also soothes herself by believing (and until just the last week ago, continuing to insist) that the vast majority of Americans agree with her, they just aren’t speaking up.
She’s also using all these things to prepare to keep up the fight. To look for new ways to take away our rights:
the first struggle we now face is internal and spiritual: Will we accept the newly dominant culture’s view of our views—of ourselves—as hateful and bigoted and stand down?”—Maggie Gallagher
She is not surrendering, by any means. She’s saying that they have lost this battle, but the war goes on. Which is best caught by this line from the middle of her most recent blog post:
“There is no line we can draw that pushes gay people “outside” and leaves us free “inside” to be angry, foot-stomping, and morally “pure.”—Maggie Gallagher
Now, last time I checked, children were far more likely to be sexually abused (or at least meet their abusers) in certain churches, parochial schools, and orphanages. Other schools, yes, but not in nearly the numbers as the other places. In fact, the statistics show a rather strong correlation between how anti-gay the rhetoric of a church is, and how likely it is to harbor such child abusers.
Of course, this is all tangled up in notions that Manning has about sexual orientation that have been debunked by many, many studies now. And clearly he isn’t interested in facts.
It was evil and totally reprehensible act whose victims were primarily innocent children.
And what horrors have been visiting on Pastor Manning’s church since his homophobic church sign messages have become news? A lot of news sites and bloggers made fun of them. A woman embarrassed a church employee by showing up to say she was there for her stoning. Someone vandalized the sign with spray paint.
And that’s it. As I wrote before, the spray paint vandalism was wrong, and shouldn’t have happened. But none of these things compare, in any way at all, to the horror or magnitude of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.
Usually it’s clueless white people who make the mistake of trying to compare their minor inconvenience to actual hate crimes and acts of terror that resulted in bloodshed. Pastor Manning, as an African American, should therefore be doubly ashamed for this crass attempt at self-martyrdom.
I started to write that words can’t describe how Pastor Manning’s latest antics make me feel. Then I realized that someone has already described Manning and his ilk quite well:
Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.—Jesus, Gospel According the Matthew, chapter 7, verses 22-23
I mentioned earlier that Michael used to say that he considered NorWesCon our anniversary, because he was even worse about forgetting the date of our first date (which is one of the dates I tried to remember as an anniversary) than I am, and neither of us could ever remember the date of our commitment ceremony without digging out the paperwork for our domestic partnership registration.
To be fair, we made it a very small thing we tacked onto another get-together with friends. So it wasn’t like an event planned for months ahead or anything. We needed to file domestic partnership paperwork to get us both on the same health insurance, so we did it and that was that. Just a few months afterward I had already started forgetting what the date was. It just never stuck.
I have not had the issue at all with remembering our wedding day…
The folks who quote Leviticus are so deeply mired in superstition and fear of an angry god that logic is just lost on them.
I say superstition instead of faith because the ones that are choosing to fight for the six or so times that English translations of the Bible seem to be talking about same sex sexual activity, but not the dozens of times that Jesus said to love one another, to stand up for the downtrodden, to place compassion over a literal interpretation of the law—those people don’t have faith. They are not engaged in a spiritual journey of discovery in hopes of a deeper understanding of their fellow humans. They want something that justifies their dislike of anything different. They want assurance that they are right, and anyone who disagrees with them is wrong.
Unless they are willing to pull their heads out of the dark place they’ve shoved it, there is no reasoning with them. There is no persuading them. And it’s really not worth our time and energy to try to convince them. Nothing any of us can do or say is going to be able to trump the very simplistic (and limited) notion of god they have enshrined in their head.
This is why I get so tired of people admonishing us with arguments that begin, “You can’t persuade people if you…”
Because folks like Mike Huckabee or Brendan Eich are not persuadable. They have demonstrated that they are not making their decisions based on any semblance of rationality. When Huckabee says that marriage equality opponents are on the right side of the Bible, he’s saying that he rejects logic, science, and even the possibility that any other perspectives are worth consideration. When Eich said that he had nothing to apologize for his participation in an effort to not just ban marriage equality in California, but to literally undo the marriages that had already taken place, that demonstrates that he’s not open to other opinions. When he doesn’t see how giving money to the campaign that went to court after Proposition 8 passed and demanded that judges declare the marriages that had already happened null and void, goes beyond “holding a private opinion,” he proves that he is not using anything a rational person would call logic.
There is nothing private about forcing other people to divorce. And demanding that the courts and state officials undo all those marriages was precisely that: forcible divorce. Forcing other people to end their marriage is not “expressing an opinion.” Forcing children of some of those same sex couples off of one parents’ health insurance (which was another thing that Eich’s money was used to ask the courts to do) is not “expressing a private belief.”
And not being able to see that people would feel hurt by that, and that perhaps some acknowledgement that he contributed to the pain and suffering of a lot of people shows that he isn’t able to see things from another perspective. That means he’s not persuadable.
Not seeing that people would be loathe to trust someone who would do that sort of thing six years ago to make fair and equitable decisions about promoting and compensating his current employees? Not willing to even admit to the possibility that he might owe an apology some of the people who were hurt by the campaign to pass the law and the law itself? He refused to even issue the classic non-apology, “I’m sorry if someone was offended.” He even refused to say something along the lines of, “When I donated, I had no idea that the campaign would go to go and demand this other things.” Instead, he insisted that it was just an opinion, and not anyone else’s business.
Forcing other people to divorce isn’t the business of those other people? Or their friends and family? It isn’t the business of any of your customers or employees who might be members of that community? Really?
Where, in any of that, do you see a person who is willing to be persuaded?
A friend shared the graphic I’ve included above from @HistOpinion on twitter recently, and I was most amused by the people who were shocked to learn two things: as recently as 1970 there were still several states with laws against interracial marriage, and as recently as 1970 a lot of people approved of those laws.
I was alive in 1970, but even more important to this discussion, I was alive in 1967, the year that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that those laws against interracial marriage were unconstitutional. It is true that I was only in grade school when that ruling came down, but I remember the time clearly. Suddenly, it seemed as if every adult in my life was talking about interracial marriage. None of them—not my parents, not my parents’ friends, not my Sunday School teacher, not my friends’ parents, not the pastor at church, not any of the adults at the monthly church potluck, not my grandparents—bothered to tell me why they were talking about it, but they were all talking about it.
And these are things I heard with my own ears at the time regarding interracial marriage: Continue reading The more things change…
The upshot was that we had to file extra forms, but none of the forms that existed had places for folks in our situation to list the name or social security number of our partner. The first year that was the case, the IRS didn’t properly inform their own people, so same sex couples in the relevant states who filed early had their returns rejected and received letters threatening fines and penalties.
That got straightened out quickly, but the IRS never put out comprehensive instructions for taxpayers in our situation. Even after three years. Everyone was having to refer to one article from a gay rights lawyer posted on the web that walked you through all the different IRS publications—a few rules from this publication, the form from that, and these instructions from this other one. Yes, even the tax professionals were referring to that site.
It was a mess. And we weren’t even allowed to mail our separate filings in the same envelope.
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