More new developments on the gay marriage front:
(1) Former secretary of state Colin Powell has announced his support for gay marriage.
(2) ABC News/Washington Post polling reports that for the first time those strongly supporting gay marriage outnumber those strongly opposing.
(3) Langer Research Associates reports that since Barack Obama's announcement of support for gay marriage, African Americans now support gay marriage by 59%, up from 40% as recently as a year ago.
(4) ABC/Post poll reports that now an absolute majority of 51-53% support gay marriage.
(5) Public Policy Polling reports that now 57% of Maryland voters will vote to uphold the state's new gay marriage law. There has been an enormous shift in black support from 57% opposed to 56% in favor.
I'd say that the bottom of the anti-gay marriage hate ship has just fallen out and that the ship is now sinking. The haters had previously counted on an apparently immovable opposition to gay marriage among black voters. Then Barack Obama changed everything. Now prominent black leaders like Powell and the NAACP have announced support for gay marriage equality. The black vote no longer belongs to the haters. If trends continue (and there's no reason to think they won't) support for the anti-gay haters will hardly amount to a quarter of the population. Talk about reversal of fortune. That's about where gay marriage support started back in the late 1990s, the difference being that support for justice, fairness, and equality has grown whereas support for bigotry has declined. It's fair to say that the anti-gay marriage campaign is dying on the vine in front of our eyes.
November is now not only a watershed moment in the gay marriage struggle. It may be a knockout victory. If the votes in Washington state, Maine, Maryland, and Minnesota turn out to be landslides in favor of equality for gays, it's over. The Supreme Court will have a political basis to invalidate all anti-gay marriage obstructions when the Proposition 8 case arrives on its docket sometime after the election. There is already constitutional basis in Roemer vs Evans, but the uncourageous court never outpaces public opinion on anything.
Put a bit differently, if a political candidate was polling the way gay marriage is now polling, all observers and pundits would say that he was own his way to victory. Mitt Romney is going to pay a big price for his stupid support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. He'd better drop that crap right now if he knows what's good for him although I hope he doesn't because there will be nothing sweeter in November than the sight of the Mormon church and its favorite son/champion being crushed by a pro-gay avalanche.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Sunday, May 20, 2012
NAACP supports gay marriage
The good gay news just keeps rolling along.
The oldest civil rights organization in the country, the NAACP, has just endorsed gay marriage. Civil marriage, says the group, is a civil right and civil rights are for every American.
Hooray! This endorsement is a consequence of Barack Obama's recently announced support for gay marriage. But the NAACP sees him and raises the ante. None of this "leave it up to the states" crap for them. Nobody left black civil rights "up to the states" because "states rights" meant no rights for black people. We are citizens of the United States of America, not merely citizens of Idaho or Maine. All citizens enjoy the same rights: that's what the 14th amendment to the Constitution says. It was ratified in 1868 precisely to correct the Founding Fathers' error of minimizing the federal government's responsibility to articulate, define, guarantee, and protect exactly what rights citizens of the country possess. The correction the amenders proposed is simple: every citizen has every right and all citizens are equally protected by the law. Civil rights don't stop at state borders. You don't become a second-class citizen just because you cross a state line.
That rumbling you hear is the gay rights avalanche sweeping across this country. There's no stopping it. The feeble obstructions bigots have placed in their state constitutions will all be swept away by federal statute and Supreme Court rulings. We're not going to keep fighting a skirmish here and a skirmish there indefinitely. We're not going to fight the way the bigots want us to fight. We're fighting to win. We're going to win this war with overwhelming force and destroy our enemies. Period.
The oldest civil rights organization in the country, the NAACP, has just endorsed gay marriage. Civil marriage, says the group, is a civil right and civil rights are for every American.
Hooray! This endorsement is a consequence of Barack Obama's recently announced support for gay marriage. But the NAACP sees him and raises the ante. None of this "leave it up to the states" crap for them. Nobody left black civil rights "up to the states" because "states rights" meant no rights for black people. We are citizens of the United States of America, not merely citizens of Idaho or Maine. All citizens enjoy the same rights: that's what the 14th amendment to the Constitution says. It was ratified in 1868 precisely to correct the Founding Fathers' error of minimizing the federal government's responsibility to articulate, define, guarantee, and protect exactly what rights citizens of the country possess. The correction the amenders proposed is simple: every citizen has every right and all citizens are equally protected by the law. Civil rights don't stop at state borders. You don't become a second-class citizen just because you cross a state line.
That rumbling you hear is the gay rights avalanche sweeping across this country. There's no stopping it. The feeble obstructions bigots have placed in their state constitutions will all be swept away by federal statute and Supreme Court rulings. We're not going to keep fighting a skirmish here and a skirmish there indefinitely. We're not going to fight the way the bigots want us to fight. We're fighting to win. We're going to win this war with overwhelming force and destroy our enemies. Period.
Friday, May 18, 2012
More good news yet again!
Today the Maryland supreme court legalized gay marriage. In a unanimous ruling the court declared that gay marriages performed in other states must be recognized as legal marriages in Maryland. The case dealt with a lesbian couple married in California but seeking a divorce in Maryland. The court requires the state to permit the divorce as it would with any other marriage whether in-state or out-of-state.
This ruling makes no reference to the current political debate going on in Maryland. Early in the year Maryland's legislature and the governor signed gay marriage into law. Because Maryland has one of those despicable voter veto laws, the anti-gay losers immediately launched a petition drive to put the issue on the November ballot. That process is still underway. But no matter what the outcome, the supreme court says that out-of-state gay marriages are legal in Maryland.
Which to all intents and purposes legalizes gay marriage in Maryland. Gay marriage is legal in the District of Columbia, so gay Marylanders can simply drive to DC, get hitched, and drive back home with a fully legal marriage license that the state must now recognize completely. Earlier in the week Rhode Island's governor issued an executive order requiring the state to recognize out-of-state gay marriages thus effectively legalizing gay marriage there. So we have two big wins in a single week! Hooray for justice and equality.
Maybe this ruling along with Barack Obama's public support of gay marriage will help preserve in-state gay marriage in Maryland. Blacks are a big voter block. Polls taken after Obama's announcement are starting to show movement toward accepting gay marriage among blacks who have previously opposed gay marriage by the widest margin among voter groups. The times are changing fast.
November is the watershed moment for gay marriage. Probably we'll have three states deciding gay marriage (Washington state, Maine, and Maryland) and one state deciding a constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage (Minnesota). Supporters of equality and justice for gay people can win all four. If so, that's the effective end of the anti-gay marriage opposition: they're losing in state legislatures, in courts, and soon at the ballot box. Then it's on to the US supreme court for California's Prop 8 and possibly a landmark ruling that sweeps away all the state prohibitions and obstructions and burdens bigots have placed in the way of gay people who simply seek the same opportunities in life that everybody else enjoys. It's becoming clear as a bell now: anti-gay bigotry is losing politics. Republicans had better figure out really quick how to accommodate gay marriage or that party will be by-passed by history and relegated to the dump.
I'm going to enjoy watching the haters get squashed. Couldn't happen to more deserving people.
This ruling makes no reference to the current political debate going on in Maryland. Early in the year Maryland's legislature and the governor signed gay marriage into law. Because Maryland has one of those despicable voter veto laws, the anti-gay losers immediately launched a petition drive to put the issue on the November ballot. That process is still underway. But no matter what the outcome, the supreme court says that out-of-state gay marriages are legal in Maryland.
Which to all intents and purposes legalizes gay marriage in Maryland. Gay marriage is legal in the District of Columbia, so gay Marylanders can simply drive to DC, get hitched, and drive back home with a fully legal marriage license that the state must now recognize completely. Earlier in the week Rhode Island's governor issued an executive order requiring the state to recognize out-of-state gay marriages thus effectively legalizing gay marriage there. So we have two big wins in a single week! Hooray for justice and equality.
Maybe this ruling along with Barack Obama's public support of gay marriage will help preserve in-state gay marriage in Maryland. Blacks are a big voter block. Polls taken after Obama's announcement are starting to show movement toward accepting gay marriage among blacks who have previously opposed gay marriage by the widest margin among voter groups. The times are changing fast.
November is the watershed moment for gay marriage. Probably we'll have three states deciding gay marriage (Washington state, Maine, and Maryland) and one state deciding a constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage (Minnesota). Supporters of equality and justice for gay people can win all four. If so, that's the effective end of the anti-gay marriage opposition: they're losing in state legislatures, in courts, and soon at the ballot box. Then it's on to the US supreme court for California's Prop 8 and possibly a landmark ruling that sweeps away all the state prohibitions and obstructions and burdens bigots have placed in the way of gay people who simply seek the same opportunities in life that everybody else enjoys. It's becoming clear as a bell now: anti-gay bigotry is losing politics. Republicans had better figure out really quick how to accommodate gay marriage or that party will be by-passed by history and relegated to the dump.
I'm going to enjoy watching the haters get squashed. Couldn't happen to more deserving people.
Monday, May 14, 2012
More good news again!
More good news on the gay marriage/gay equality front. Today the governor of Rhode Island signed an executive order directing the state's agencies to recognize the marriages of gay people living in the state. Rhode Island itself does not allow gay marriage, so the order requires that the state recognize marriages performed elsewhere. About a year ago the governor and his allies in the legislature tried to enact gay marriage but could not win sufficient support and had to settle for civil unions instead. So today, the governor gets revenge for his loss by enacting gay marriage by edict. Gay Rhode Islanders can drive to Massachusetts, get married, drive home, present their license to the state, and voila they're married as far as Rhode Island is concerned. Clever!
Of course we'll hear grumbling and moaning by opponents and certainly shrieks of "tyranny!" (as if the rabid anti-gay haters aren't supporting raw tyranny against gay people). Too bad, folks. There's more than one way to skin a bigot. Kudos to Governor Lincoln Chaffee for having the guts and tenacity to stand up to the bigots and to the Catholic clergy who tried to thwart civil rights for gay people.
The cause of gay marriage is on a roll. That vile vote in North Carolina was sadly inevitable. North Carolina is after all the state that sent the mad dog racist and gay-hater Jesse Helms to the US senate for term after term. It is part of the old Confederacy. Who has been out of step with the march of history more or longer than white southerners? But with Barack Obama's long overdue discovery that he has a spine and therefore can stand for gay rights instead of just yacking about it and today's victory in Rhode Island, nobody should doubt that the cause of equality for gay people is now rolling forward. The bigots are in retreat. This November there will be game-changing votes in Washington state, Maine, Minnesota, and Maryland. This year's election is the watershed. Everything will be different after the first Tuesday in November, 2012. The retreat will become a rout and our enemies, who are enemies of human freedom in general, will be crushed and thrown onto the garbage dump of history.
Of course we'll hear grumbling and moaning by opponents and certainly shrieks of "tyranny!" (as if the rabid anti-gay haters aren't supporting raw tyranny against gay people). Too bad, folks. There's more than one way to skin a bigot. Kudos to Governor Lincoln Chaffee for having the guts and tenacity to stand up to the bigots and to the Catholic clergy who tried to thwart civil rights for gay people.
The cause of gay marriage is on a roll. That vile vote in North Carolina was sadly inevitable. North Carolina is after all the state that sent the mad dog racist and gay-hater Jesse Helms to the US senate for term after term. It is part of the old Confederacy. Who has been out of step with the march of history more or longer than white southerners? But with Barack Obama's long overdue discovery that he has a spine and therefore can stand for gay rights instead of just yacking about it and today's victory in Rhode Island, nobody should doubt that the cause of equality for gay people is now rolling forward. The bigots are in retreat. This November there will be game-changing votes in Washington state, Maine, Minnesota, and Maryland. This year's election is the watershed. Everything will be different after the first Tuesday in November, 2012. The retreat will become a rout and our enemies, who are enemies of human freedom in general, will be crushed and thrown onto the garbage dump of history.