Earth to gay marriage opponents: It’s over. You lose

Washingto Post: Half of all Americans believe that gay men and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll in which a large majority also said businesses should not be able to deny serving gays for religious reasons.

Fifty percent say the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection gives gays the right to marry, while 41 percent say it does not.

Beyond the constitutional questions, a record-high 59 percent say they support same-sex marriage, while 34 percent are opposed, the widest margin tracked in Post-ABC polling.

It’s important to note that the number of people who say they support marriage equality is higher than the percentage who say the Constitution requires it. If you believe that the right to marry is written into the Constitution, you can still be grudgngly homophobic; i.e., “OK, you win. It’s a constitutional right. But I still don’t have to like it.” That a huge majority supports marriage equality — despite the fact that they don’t all believe it’s a constitutional right — says a lot about the acceptance of the LGBT community at large.

But the holdouts are Republicans. Greg Sargent notes, “opposition to gay marriage among Republicans seems to be concentrated among the Tea Party. According to the Post polling team, Republicans and GOP-leaning independents who support the Tea Party oppose gay marriage by 54-38. By contrast, non-Tea Party Republicans and GOP-leaners support gay marriage by 57-36. Tea Party Republicans are often said to be more libertarian-leaning on social issues than other segments of the GOP base (such as evangelicals), but a majority of them still opposes same-sex marriage.”

So the ‘baggers are “Libertarian” — only, without all that pesky liberty.

“All of this sheds more light on the question of whether Republicans need to evolve their party to keep in step with diversifying America,” he goes on. “As Ron Brownstein and Dem pollster Stan Greenberg have suggested, Dems may continue to profit politically in national elections from the GOP inability to broaden its appeal to segments of the electorate that include ‘diverse America’ and the portions of white America ‘who are comfortable with diverse America.’ If this is right, then on gay rights, the GOP continues to be captive to a base that shows no signs of wanting to move into that latter category.”

This is really another example of how gerrymandering is making the GOP a regional party. By drawing lines around the people most likely to vote for them, Republicans are basically choosing which people they’ll represent. And that smallminded, bigoted population is becoming narrower and more isolated on issue after issue after issue.

It says a lot about Republican ideals when they have to actually seek out the most hateful and gullible voters in order to maintain a fingerhold on power. When the only motivations to vote fore you are meanness and ignorance, your ideas can’t possibly be any good.

[photo by Elvert Barnes]

A Cheney Family Thanksgiving

Mike Luckovich.

Marriage equality comes to Britain after Queen finalizes the process

Associated Press: Britain on Wednesday legalized gay marriage after Queen Elizabeth II gave her royal stamp of approval, clearing the way for the first same-sex weddings next summer.

Lawmakers cheered as House of Commons Speaker John Bercow said royal assent had been given — one day after the bill to legalize same-sex marriage in England and Wales cleared Parliament.

The queen’s approval was a formality and is the last step necessary for a bill to become law.

The law enables gay couples to get married in both civil and religious ceremonies in England and Wales, provided that the religious institution consents. The Church of England, the country’s official faith, is barred from performing such ceremonies.

It also will allow couples who had previously entered into civil partnerships — which were introduced in 2005 and carry similar rights and responsibilities to marriage — to convert their relationships to marriage.

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[photo via Wikimedia Commons]

Even in Mississippi, openly homophobic bigotry is becoming bad politics

Laura Conaway: The Southern Equality campaign continues its swing through Mississippi. Last week, same-sex couples tried to get marriage licenses in the southern part of the state. On Wednesday, a couple that includes a member of the Air Force Reserve got turned down in tiny Poplarville.

Today in the capital city of Jackson, more couples asked for the right to marry. That’s one of them, pictured above (photo by Jessica Bowman of WLBT).

As far as protest and awareness efforts go, this is pretty run of the mill stuff, really. Laudable and worthwhile in putting a human face on an issue that may lack them for some, but hardly unusual.

And that’s when Conaway makes a good catch:

After one of the couples today got turned down, Clarion-Ledger reporter Dustin Barnes tweeted that “sounds of laughter could be heard in clerk’s office." A few minutes later, Barnes added more. "Hinds Circuit Clerk Barbara Dunn said when gay man cried in her office about denial of marriage license, 1 of her employees almost cried too," he tweeted. “Dunn said she was sure her employees weren’t laughing at same-sex couples who were denied marriage license in Jxn today." I know it may not seem like much in blue states, but I can tell you from experience that when it’s no longer acceptable for there to be any hint of making fun of gay couples in Mississippi — and when it’s OK to show some empathy for them — you’re looking at real change.

It may not seem like it sometimes, but progress is being made every day. That said, let’s see if we can’t speed it up a bit.

Gun nuts in love

Adam Zyglis, Buffalo News.

Kid’s mind warped without the influence of same-sex parents

Raw Story:

A child in North Carolina spent part of his Easter Sunday morning protesting outside a Winston-Salem church that has vowed not to host any wedding ceremonies until same sex marriage is legalized.

Kelly Carpenter, the pastor of Green Street United Methodist Church, said last month that no weddings were being scheduled because his congregation was becoming more diverse and the heterosexual members wanted same sex couples to “share a sense of the love that they have found.”

Anti-LGBT activist Brian Cranford, who says that the “Lord has called Me specifically into evangelism Street ministry,” on Sunday posted a YouTube video of an unidentified child standing outside Green Street Church and yelling at the congregation as they exited after Easter services.

“You have your chance to repent, to stop your sinning, to quit affirming the gay people!” the kid shouts in the eight-minute video clip. “The Bible talks about the homosexuals, they’re worthy of death!”

“And you people approve of that! And that’s why you’re going to hell! You can turn from your sin. You can turn to Jesus or go to hell!”

Now color me confused. I thought we were all afraid that having same-sex parents screws up kids’ heads. This boy seems to be evidence that it’s not the gender of the parents, but their character that counts.

Georgia Republican demonstrates typical GOP reasoning skills

Talking Points Memo:

A top Republican in Georgia has sounded an ominous warning that legalization of same-sex marriage may also lead to fraud.  

Sue Everhart, chairwoman of the Georgia Republican Party, told the Marietta Daily Journal in a story published Saturday that once gay nuptials are legally permitted, there will be nothing to stop a straight person from exploiting the system in order to claim marital benefits.

“You may be as straight as an arrow, and you may have a friend that is as straight as an arrow,” Everhart said. “Say you had a great job with the government where you had this wonderful health plan. I mean, what would prohibit you from saying that you’re gay, and y’all get married and still live as separate, but you get all the benefits? I just see so much abuse in this it’s unreal. I believe a husband and a wife should be a man and a woman, the benefits should be for a man and a woman. There is no way that this is about equality. To me, it’s all about a free ride.”

You noticed the problem here right away, didn’t you? Yeah, there’s nothing keeping straight people from entering into mixed-gender marriages to commit fraud, either. Therefore — if we follow Everheart’s “reasoning” here — neither same-sex nor mixed-gender marriages should be allowed.

From now on, it would be a great idea for Republicans not to take their policy cues from awful Adam Sandler/Kevin James movies. They don’t make any more sense in a newspaper interview than they do in movie theaters.

Conservatives resort to junk science in marriage equality debate

Nelson Lund, Wall Street Journal:

The Supreme Court is hearing two cases this week that represent a challenge to one of the oldest and most fundamental institutions of our civilization. In Hollingsworth v. Perry and United States v. Windsor, the court is being asked to rule that constitutional equal protection requires the government to open marriage to same-sex couples.

The claimed right to same-sex marriage is not in the Constitution or in the court’s precedents, so the court must decide whether to impose a new law making marriage into a new and different institution. The justices are unlikely to take so momentous a step unless they are persuaded that granting this new right to same-sex couples will not harm children or ultimately undermine the health of our society.

A significant number of organizations representing social and behavioral scientists have filed briefs promising the court that there is nothing to worry about. These assurances have no scientific foundation. Same-sex marriage is brand new, and child rearing by same-sex couples remains rare. Even if both phenomena were far more common, large amounts of data collected over decades would be required before any responsible researcher could make meaningful scientific estimates of the long-term effects of redefining marriage.

First off, what would Lund’s argument be if science showed that same-sex parents did a better job of raising children than mixed gender parents? Would he be advocating that mixed gender marriage be abolished? I kind of think he wouldn’t, for the same reason that he’s not advocating that marriage rights be reserved only for the very rich — obviously, children in that circumstance have all the advantages, which means everyone else’s kid is at a disadvantage. So the argument that the Supreme Court needs to consider social science is pretty much dead right there. If they were to decide who was allowed to marry based on outcomes, very few people would be allowed the privilege.

But he’s not content to leave it at sloppy logic. He goes on to cite a controversial study that showed that same-sex relationships were bad for children:

There has been only one study using a large randomized sample, objective measures of well-being, and reports of grown children rather than their parents. This research, by Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas Austin, found that children raised in a household where a parent was involved in a same-sex romantic relationship were at a significant disadvantage with respect to a number of indicators of well being—such as depression, educational attainment and criminal behavior—compared with children of intact biological families.

One might expect this work at least to raise a caution flag, but it has been vociferously attacked on methodological grounds by the same organizations that tout the value of politically congenial research that suffers from more severe methodological shortcomings. This is what one expects from activists, not scientists.

To say it’s been “attacked” isn't quite right. The Regnerus study has been thoroughly debunked. Even the author of the study admits it’s flawed — although it would be more accurate to say it was rigged. It basically compared all sorts of different households to stable married families. It doesn’t actually study the parenting of same-sex couples at all.

“He doesn’t have an actual category of gay parents in the project that you can isolate and say the most important thing in this kid’s childhood is that they were raised by gay parents,” Judith Stacey, a sociologist at New York University, said of the study. “These are kids whose parents, maybe they divorced, maybe they separated, maybe they had a scandalous affair, we just don’t know.”

Of course, Lund’s “science” is burning up the rightwing blogosphere, because it’s so much more comforting to hate when it’s justified somehow — even if that justification is bullshit.

[photo by MiiiSH]

Huckabee: ‘Evangelicals will take a walk’ if GOP supports marriage equality

Christian Post:

Evangelicals will leave the Republican Party if it supports redefining marriage to include same-sex couples, Mike Huckabee said.

When asked if he believes the Republican Party will change its position and support gay marriage in a Wednesday Newsmax interview, Huckabee remarked, “They might, and if they do, they’re going to lose a large part of their base because evangelicals will take a walk.”

Huckabee currently hosts a Fox News show called “Huckabee.” He was formerly the governor of Arkansas and ran for president in 2008. Before he entered politics, Huckabee was a Southern Baptist pastor and a religious radio broadcaster.

“And it’s not because there’s an anti-homosexual mood, and nobody’s homophobic that I know of,” he continued, “but many of us, and I consider myself included, base our standards not on the latest Washington Post poll, but on an objective standard, not a subjective standard.”

“I don’t hate people, my religion does” is a crappy argument that cowardly haters use to dodge accusations of bigotry. But Mike doesn’t have to worry, RNC chairman Reince Priebus says that, while he wants the party to be more accepting of people who do support marriage equality, the party’s platform will still have the “we hate gays!” plank. At least for now, anyway.

Besides, where would these evangelicals “walk” to? Certainly not the Democrats and not Libertarians, either (that is, real libertarians. Not Republicans who don’t want to call themselves Republicans like Rand and Ron Paul). Start up an Evangelical Party? I suppose they could, but by leaving the GOP coalition, they’d actually be losing power.

The GOP will drop the marriage-inequality plank eventually. Probably within Huckabee’s lifetime. So I guess we’ll have the opportunity to find out where he’ll walk to when that day comes.

Alito’s naked judicial activism

Steve Benen:

I’m still working my way through the transcript (pdf) of today’s Supreme Court oral argument on California’s Prop 8, but there’s one quote that already seems to be generating quite a bit of attention. It comes by way of Justice Samuel Alito:

“Traditional marriage has been around for thousands of years. Same-sex marriage is very new. I think it was first adopted in The Netherlands in 2000. So there isn’t a lot of data about its effect. And it may turn out to be a — a good thing; it may turn out not to be a good thing, as the supporters of Proposition 8 apparently believe.

“But you want us to step in and render a decision based on an assessment of the effects of this institution, which is newer than cell phones or the Internet? I mean we — we are not — we do not have the ability to see the future. On a question like that, of such fundamental importance, why should it not be left for the people, either acting through initiatives and referendums or through their elected public officials?”

Alito’s argument seems to be one focused on the calendar. Perhaps, the theory goes, millions of Americans can be denied equal rights for an indefinite period of time, and jurists can revisit the issue in the future. At that point, they can revisit whether or not allowing two consenting adults to get married is “a good thing.”

Remember the fine print in the Declaration of Independence? We have an inalienable right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, just so long as the specific type of happiness is older than mobile telephones.

There’s a term for handing down a decision that’s based on personal beliefs, rather than the Constitution and law: “judicial activism.” Seems to me there was a time when conservatives thought that was a bad thing. It’s not their job to decide whether or not a law or a finding is a good idea, only whether it’s just.

We didn’t hire Samuel Alito to be a speculative anthropologist, we hired him to be a Supreme Court Justice. No one’s asking him to predict the future, because that’s not in the job description.

[photo via Wikimedia Commons]