Martha Stewart gets jail time, while....

Check this out. I repeat: where is the special prosecutor?

"We have 27 legislative days until adjournment"

More great FMA testimony, this time from Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) (thanks to Brad for this):

"Mr. President, after today, we have 27 legislative days until adjournment – 27 legislative days to deal with the most pressing issues facing this country. We should be passing the Port Security bill and the Rail Security bill, both of which were approved by the Commerce Committee unanimously in April.  We should be passing the Transit Security bill, which was approved by the Banking Committee in May.  We should be passing the Nuclear Plant Security bill, the Chemical Plant Security bill, and the First Responders bill, all of which were approved by the Environment and Public Works Committee last year.  We could be working on those bills to improve our safety instead of worrying about two people of the same gender who have decided to care about each other. So there you have it.  In the face of all this, what does this Administration want us to do?  A constitutional amendment to prohibit gay marriage – a constitutional amendment that denies millions of Americans equal rights because, even if it does not say so explicitly, it will mean those in domestic partnerships or civil unions will not get equal rights or equal responsibilities....One of my colleagues says that marriage is under assault from gay relationships.  Well I must tell you straight from my heart – not one married couple has ever come up to me and said their marriage was under assault because two people of the same gender down the street care about each other.  If we were truly concerned about strengthening marriages and strengthening families in this country, we would pass an increase in the minimum wage.  We would pass a bill to make sure people had the same health insurance that members of Congress have.  We would pass a bill to make sure that all children have a high quality education.  And instead of freezing the number of kids in after school programs, we would allow them to partake in programs that keep them safe until mom or dad comes home from work....It truly is a disgrace on the Senate to play politics with the Constitution, and I hope and pray that the American people see this for what it is. Mr. President, we are all God’s children."

Why hookers love Republicans

From the SF Chronicle. 

Martha vs. Ken

I just watched someone named Jerry Knight from the liberal-establishment Washington Post speaking on MSNBC about the Martha Stewart verdict.  The anchor asked him whether Martha Stewart's situation was at all comparable to that of Enron executive Kenneth Lay. 
 
His response?  That Stewart's case involved an executive who corrupted the whole company by lying to the government, whereas in the Lay situation, the reverse was the case: a broad corporate culture of corruption had come to taint the executive. 
 
Yeah.  Uh-hunh.  Let's not talk about the amount of money involved in the two cases.  Let's not talk about how many people lost their life savings as a result of the two crimes.  Let's not talk about the relative weight and depth of evidence in the two cases.  Let's not talk about who was a #1 presidential campaign contributor and keynote speaker at a major-party convention.   And let's definitely not talk about gender.  Not even for a minute.  Because except for her criminality, Martha Stewart is pretty much the picture of an American corporate CEO.  Right?

The sweet ironies of the FMA denouement

The embarrassing collapse of efforts to ram a Constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage through the Senate this week provided a sorely needed reason for optimism about the health of American democracy. "The fight has just begun," says the Family Research Council. But they come across sounding a little bit silly when not even a simple majority of Senators voted to force the thing to a vote.

It was widely reported in recent weeks that the whole point of the Republicans' efforts to get a floor vote on the amendment was to force John Kerry and John Edwards to cast a vote for same-sex marriage that they could run with in the fall campaign. On one level, one (meaning: I) would have liked Kerry and Edwards to express such intense outrage at the Republicans' exploitation of a vulnerable minority that they would insist on returning to Washington to vote against the procedural "cloture" vote. On another level, though, one must admit in retrospect that there is something satisfying about the fact that the Republicans didn't even get the one prize they thought was a sure thing: getting John Kerry to cast a vote "against" traditional marraige on the Senate floor. And he was right, too, to draw a clear distinction between the relative importance of Republican procedural shenanigans, and a vote over amending the Constitution. The Democrats called the Republicans' bluff by being willing to bring the amendment to a vote; all that was left for the Republicans, then, was to squirm and shriek as they tried, in all seriousness, to turn the Constitution into what is often called an election-year football.

HRC lauded John McCain's "ironclad opposition" to the amendment, which was indeed very welcome. In the spirit of public information, I offer several snippets from the Congressional Record:

Senator McCain (R-AZ): "The constitutional amendment we are debating today strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans. It usurps from the states a fundamental authority they have always possessed, and imposes a federal remedy for a problem that most states do not believe confronts them, and which they feel capable of resolving should it confront them, again according to local standards and customs." McCain cited James Madison's concept of federalism as his main reason for opposing the amendment.

Senator Jeffords (I-VT): "Having witnessed Vermont's approach, I beg to differ with anyone in this body who argues that States are not able to decide this issue for themselves. Here in the Senate we should be spending our time debating legislation that is inclusive, not exclusive."

Senator Kennedy (D-MA): "President Bush will go down in history as the first President to try to write bigotry back into the Constitution. No one can now claim with a straight face that he has lived up to the campaign promise to be a uniter and not a divider. The manner in which this amendment has been brought up to the Senate floor is disgraceful....In 1783, the issue of slavery came before the Massachusetts Supreme Court, and Massachusetts has the only constitution of all 50 States that has been interpreted as barring slavery. We were the first State of all the States to ban slavery, the only State that banned it in the constitution itself, Massachusetts, under John Adams, the only State, in 1783. And we had slaves in my State for 150 years before it. So it is nice to hear our colleagues talk about Massachusetts and about our court and our judges there. I remind our colleagues, of the seven Massachusetts judges who voted, six were and are Republicans. Only one is a Democrat....I happen to be someone who supports the court decision in Massachusetts. I am proud of them....The true threat to religious freedom is posed by the Federal marriage amendment itself, which would tell churches they cannot consecrate a same-sex marriage, even though some churches are now doing so. The amendment would flagrantly interfere with the decisions of religious communities and undermine the longstanding separation of church and state in our society....More and more children across the country today have same-sex parents. What does it do to these children and their well-being when the President of the United States and the Senate Republican leadership say their parents are second-class citizens?"

Senator Clinton (D-NY): "As Henry Clay once observed: 'The Constitution of the United States was made not merely for the generation that then existed, but for posterity---unlimited, undefined, endless, perpetual posterity.'...I have had occasion in my life to defend marriage, to stand up for marriage, to believe in the hard work and challenge of marriage. So I take umbrage at anyone who might suggest that those of us who worry about amending the Constitution are less committed to the sanctity of marriage....Now, if we were really concerned about marriage and the fact that so many marriages today end in divorce, ...perhaps 20, 30 years ago we should have been debating an amendment to the Federal Constitution to make divorce really, really hard, to take it out of the States' hands and say that we will not liberalize divorce, we will not move toward no-fault divorce We should not amend the Constitution to federalize an issue I believe marriage should be protected....I believe marriage is essential, but I do not, for the life of me, understand how amending the Constitution of the United States with respect to same-gender marriages really gets at the root of the problem of marriage in America."

Senator Dayton (MN): "...in the entire New Testament, there is only one reference to same-sex relationships, in Chatper Two of Paul's Letter to the Romans. Jesus Christ does not mention them even once in any of the four Gospels. Instead, His overriding instruction was to love they neighbor as thyself. That was his second great commandment, which superseded all the rest. Jesus also warned several times to beware of false prophets. How could they be identified? He said that they spread hate, instead of love....Thousands of Americans have been fired from their jobs, evicted from their homes, harassed, threatened, assaulted, even murdered, because of their sexual orientations. Some other Americans have spread that hatred and caused that harm, while professing their own religious piety and moral superiority....This political ploy is not about 'saving marriage'; it is about saving politicians' jobs. Thank goodness we have Senator so-and-so, they will say back home, to save us from the heathen hordes. Thank goodness we have the President for saving us, too. We may not have jobs or health care. We cannot afford prescription drugs or gasoline. They are bankrupting the Federal Government with deficits, they are destroying our credibility throughout the world, they made a mess of Iraq, they cannot find weapons of mass destruction or Osama bin Laden or whoever shut down Congress with anthrax or ricin, but they are defending marriage---again and again and again. Let's reelect them. It is a tragic day in America when politicians exploit the Constitution of the United States to get themselves reelected. It is a tragic day for millions of Americans who are being exploited by these politicians. This is a hurtful, hateful, harmful debate for America....If marriage belongs to God, as I believe it does, then our separation of church and state government should not interfere with its administration by the properly chosen religious authorities. Instead, government should adopt a different term to use for the legal rights and responsibilities under a civil contract, which I believe any two adults should equally be able to enter into. Giving marriage back to the churches, synagogues, and mosques and separating it from government is marriage's salvation and society's solution. Let us direct our efforts to protecting America from al-Qaida. Leave the Constitution alone and leave marriage to God. I yield the floor."

Now compare, by contrast, the preparation and sophistication shown in the remarks of Senator Santorum (R-PA), which he has proudly linked from his website: "It is politically correct to say there is not a difference, but the fact is that fathers and mothers contribute different things to children....By the way, this is a remarkably similar strategy to that which was used in the 1950s and 1960s with respect to the issue of abortion. What happened in that case was a little different. Instead of the courts imposing abortion on the States---although that may have been done; I am just not aware of, maybe as well as I should be, the history---but I do know certain legislatures throughout the country began changing the statutes with respect to abortion....We debate a lot of important issues here, but there is nothing---nothing---more important than the future survival of this country. That is what we are here for. "

News flash: Drug executives are greedy assholes

The New York Times recently ran a story on how drug companies are facing a public image problem because Americans are getting fed up with paying for their extraordinary, indeed utterly unprecedented historically and unmatched internationall, levels of subsidy and assistance from the federal government.

Apparently these schmucks thought the Medicare bill was going to solve the problem. Now, even the Bush administration concedes that as a result of the bill, private insurance and pension plans are reducing their coverage of prescription drugs. To a considerable extent the plan amounts, then, to a handout to drug companies and employers, not seniors.

Take this passage from the Times story:

The pharmaceutical industry earns nearly two-thirds of its profits in the United States since drug prices in the rest of the industrialized world are largely government controlled. Those profits rely almost entirely on laws that protect the industry from cheap imports, delay home-grown knockoffs, give away government medical discoveries, allow steep tax breaks for research expenditures and forbid government officials from demanding discounts while requiring them to buy certain drugs.

Apparently the public and even members of Congress are beginning to realize this is insane. Let's remember, these are the folks who are fighting tooth and nail against the global expansion of access to generic HIV/AIDS drugs, which would save lives and slow the epidemic but hurt their (entirely outrageous) profit margins. People are beginning to realize what an obscene parody of free-market capitalism we are living through. The question, as with Bush administration policy generally, is this: how terrible will the human cost have to get before people will demand real change?

"With values like these . . ."

Harold Meyerson in today's Washington Post:

This is not a president who has it in him to spend money on improving the education of poor children or to side with consumers over such mega-donors as the drug industry. In a similar vein, the administration's on-again, off-again attempt to increase its support among Latino voters by backing a pseudo-immigration reform that offered residency but not citizenship to the immigrant workers it would cover hasn't yielded any increase in its Latino backing, either.

So the GOP outreach strategy for November focuses on conservative churchgoers far more than anyone else. The Republican National Convention will showcase the party's otherwise marginalized moderates -- Arnold Schwarzenegger, John McCain -- for the great moderate audience. But I doubt the convention planners really believe that this late in the game they can fool anybody. The Republicans' campaign is all about scapegoating John Kerry for the ills of modernity. It's about exploiting homophobia, provincialism and cultural insecurity. Or, as they put it, values.

Hillary knows something about defending marriage

Tonight I had occasion to watch Ted Kennedy, Orrin Hatch, and Hillary Rodham Clinton speak on the Senate floor on the Federal Marriage Amendment. Kennedy warmed my heart by voicing his support for the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's ruling in the Goodridge case, but Hillary definitely wins the style point for noting, early in her remarks, that she has had occasion, in her public life, to defend marriage . . . .

(I have searched in vain for an online media report of this comment. Anyone who finds one will get a special prize from me!)

The best possible news . . . though not the most unpredictable

"Polls show most Americans oppose gay marriage, although the opposition is softening.

A Gallup poll in May showed 55 per cent against, down from 65 per cent six months earlier."
--from Australia

Bush comes out in favor of sodomy

(1) President Bush strongly supported sodomy laws as governor of Texas, but he appears to have done an about-face when faced with the even more heinous possibility of same-sex marriage: "What they do in the privacy of their house, consenting adults should be able to do. . . . This is America. It's a free society. But it doesn't mean we have to redefine traditional marriage." See stories at NYT and AmericaBlog.

(2) Now that the Senate Democrats, perhaps sensing their political position may be stronger than expected, have agreed to a vote on the FMA this week, the Republicans now want to vote on TWO different Constitutional amendments. This is literally making a mockery of the Constitution.

Democratic Senate whip Harry Reid (NV): "We are ready to rock and roll on the debate on this issue."

HRC president Cheryl Jacques: "I think it is outrageous and frankly surreal that at the 11th hour in this debate, they are literally rewriting the Constitution on the back of a napkin."

(3) This is a good time to recall the words of Chief Justice Earl Warren, in Loving v. Virginia (1967): "The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men."

(4) Finally: according to HRC, we're losing the phone-call war 2-to-1. Call your Senator now at 202-225-3121.

"Keep the authority of the states intact," says Lynne Cheney

The Vice President's wife has had little to say about most of the administration's policy initiatives, but she has something to say now. On Saturday, Lynne Cheney came out against the FMA, saying we should "keep the authority of the states intact." I gotta say, this is even more significant than if Mary Cheney, the VP's lesbian daughter, had stated her opposition. As Nina Totenberg put it on NPR this morning, "a lot of families are in this position. It's the reason the Republicans have to be careful here."

Republican leaders want to force Kerry to vote against the FMA this week, and he's pledged to do so if necessary. As Kerry's communications director put it, "There's a difference between being against gay marriage and being for a federal constitutional amendment on the issue." Let's make sure to emphasize to folks that John McCain will be voting against it, too.

And as Bob Barr, author of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, put it, "We meddle with the Constitution to our own peril. . . . If we begin to treat the Constitution as our personal sandbox, in which to build and destroy castles as we please, we risk diluting the grandeur of having a constitution in the first place."

Meanwhile, at the world AIDS conference, the Bush administration is joining with those countries whose HIV/AIDS programs have been the least successful, to promote abstinence-only approaches to preventing the spread of the virus, even though we know they don't work.

Congress drops the ball on the domestic HIV/AIDS crisis

Heads up: rates of new HIV infections among young gay men are now rising at levels not seen since the early 1980s, and urban African American communities are increasingly devastated. Yet a Congressional committee, following Bush's lead, wants to do nothing about it. Call your rep by Wednesday July 14; here's more info and what to say.

Kerry on marriage: we need less profile, more courage

I want John Kerry elected just as much as the next guy, and I'm doing everything I can to make it happen.

But I want it to be noticed that Kerry is giving me and my fellow queers shit for thanks for our support. In an interview saying he will return to Washington if necessary to vote against the Federal Marriage Amendment this week, Kerry added, "Let's be very firm about it. Both John and I believe firmly and absolutely that marriage is between a man and a woman." Thanks a lot, John, for that courageous position.

Although it's important to point out that Bush, with his radio address about traditional marriage, is fiddling while Al Qaeda plots, opposing the amendment is not the same as advocating for full marriage equality. Going out of his way to say he is against same-sex marriage isn't some kind of savvy political maneuvering: it's taking an anti-gay position, not to mention giving one of the most pro-Kerry voting blocs, as I said before, shit for thanks.

In the words of Dennis Kucinich, speaking at Boston's gay pride parade on June 12: "The right to marry ought to be clear, unambiguous, emphatic, and non-contradictory. It should not be minimized, given an asterisk, or subject to political sacrifice at political conventions."

Did the sexual revolution "take a wrong turn"?

The Swarthmore alumni magazine published a letter from me in its latest issue, in which I try to clarify some points made in a story on college students' dating habits that, I believed, was based on a misunderstanding of the history of sexuality. Here's the opening of my letter; you can read the rest here.

“The Swattie Dating Game” (March 2004 Bulletin) is astute and thorough but would have benefited from a more accurate version of the history of sexuality. Author Elizabeth Redden ’05 cites popular journalism and recent surveys by the Independent Woman’s Forum (IWF) to demonstrate that a “hookup culture” is widely accepted among college students. The fact that casual sex has become tolerated leads her to imply that such sexual behavior is a “millennial” development; she even quotes an IWF spokesperson who describes it as “where the sexual revolution took a wrong turn.”

Popular media images in the 1940s and 1950s showed tidy marriages and squeaky-clean young people, but the history of sexual morals is not the same as the history of sexual practice. The fact that casual sex was stigmatized and frequently kept hidden does not mean it didn’t happen—or even that it wasn’t discussed. As early as World War II, the sexual culture of American servicemen attracted considerable attention from journalists, public health officials, and both religious and secular moralists.

Fiddling while Al Qaeda plots

In the wake of a devastating, bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report on the remarkable failures and errors that justified the Bush war and concludes that Iraq did not pose a threat to the United States, and of Tom Ridge's latest report that Al Qaeda is planning an attack on the United States, what steps is President Bush taking to protect America?

Why, just what any President would do under these circumstances: he's urging Americans to amend the United States Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. In his weekly radio address, Bush assailed the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court for calling marriage "an evolving paradigm." He doesn't actually say the word "gay" or "homosexual" in his talk; instead, he refers repeatedly to what he calls "traditional marriage." It's clear that he intends us to understand this phrase to mean "heterosexual marriage." Yet "traditional marriage" could refer to many things, including the contractual denial of a woman's right to own property and the conferral on a man of the right to beat his wife. Surely Bush would not advocate those things, in public anyway.

The major professional organization for US historians has gone on record opposing the FMA, saying that "diverse types of families, including families built on same-sex partnerships, have existed across time, even as law and government have accorded some of those families unequal status." Yet Bush declares that "changing the definition of traditional marriage will undermine the family structure."

What's the evidence for this? That's the question we need to ask Mr. Bush, who has proven once again that he will do almost anything in the complete absence of supporting evidence---e.g., provoke World War III, violate the due process rights of American citizens, order nonadherence to the Geneva Convention in the handling of prisoners, and urge the permanent exclusion of a class of citizens from a major collective institution.

New Kerry-Edwards ads

Kerry's TV ads have been getting better, I think. Here's my take on some of the latest ones.

"Three Minutes" (July 10) shows John Edwards testifying passionately at a campaign rally about how John Kerry can keep us safe, and telling us we oughta spend three minutes with the men who fought with Kerry 25 years ago. This ad makes me think maybe Edwards really can help narrow the "charm gap."

"Team for America" (July 7) nicely promotes the strength of Kerry and Edwards as a team. It emphasizes Kerry's 30 years of experience, presumably to counter the Bush campaign's account that Edwards is inexperienced (after all, GWB was no more experienced, and arguably less so, in 2000). Then it rather effectively spins Edwards's pre-Senate career as a virtue (the text accompanying the narration says "from a working family - stood up for people - fought powerful interests"). I like it.

"Middle Class Help" (July 7) ends with the on-screen text and simultaneous voiceover, "Stronger at Home, Respected in the World," which I think is actually a terrific slogan.

"Husband and Father" (July 7) wisely drops the clip of Teresa Heinz Kerry talking about her husband that was airing earlier this summer. She comes across as utterly elite and foreign, and I'm afraid she will have to be seen and not heard for the time being. Instead, this ad shows Kerry as not just a husband and father, but a hunter and hockey player too. I heard on NPR that the hunting-and-fishing set is quite unsatisfied with Bush's land use policies and is ripe for a Democratic appeal. (I'm still waiting for my own homo-target ad. John Kerry is an unstoppable clubgoer? He insists that the campaign bus has to stop at the Diesel store while he runs in to look at shoes?)

"Paperwork" (June 22) is a little silly; it basically has Kerry telling you that he can lower our health care premiums by reducing paperwork and administration. Of course, he's partly right; the private medical, hospital, and insurance industries do have far, far higher overhead and administrative costs than, say, Medicare or the VA hospitals. I would rather he didn't aim so low, but I guess the Clinton experience testifies that what "Americans" really want is lower premiums, not equity or a single-payer system---so, hell if I know what Kerry should be saying about this.

"Born in Colorado" is a shameless appeal to state boosterism. But why not?

"Nobody died when Clinton lied"

It's so true. I ordered this bumper sticker today.

It says so many things at once!

...that however bad Clinton was, Bush is far more dangerous
...that obviously Bush is a liar
...that the war is a lie
...that the blow-job impeachment was absurd
...and: where is the special prosecutor for Bush's crimes?

'Nuff said.

"...That feeling of disparity between two very different men and two very different measures of accomplishment is deliciously captured on the cover of the current New Yorker magazine." --NYT, 6/25

Canadians overwhelmingly support gay marriage

That's right. 57 to 38. That's up from 48-47 last September.

And last week's election showed another thing: the marriage card as a national wedge issue just doesn't work. Even when the three largest provinces allow same-sex marriage, straight folks just aren't taken in my right-wing claptrap: "Going into the election the Conservatives were ahead in the polls, but after playing the marriage card the party's support fell, allowing the Liberals to return to power, but with a minority government." And we US queers might not have to flee across the border just yet: opinions here on same-sex marriage are the same as they were before the backlash that followed on the heels of Lawrence. Even though they were produced by HRC (which is unfortunately lobbying for a version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act that would protect only those queers who are non-trans and gender-conforming), it was nonetheless a real joy to see, at the Chicago pride parade, so many folks wearing "George W. Bush: You're fired!" stickers.

The religious right is unlikely to abandon its bigotry, which is rooted in a totalizing, essentialist view of sex differences. But I think over the next few months we're going to learn something about the Nascar Dad, the Soccer Mom, and other mythical American heterosexuals. That most straight folks don't really care very much about gay marriage, once they get used to the idea, may one day seem as predictable as the marriages seem banal. As Hendrik Hertzberg said in the New Yorker, the best that can be said about Bush's support for the FMA - in light of his obvious discomfort speaking about the issue and his unwillingness ever to answer reporters' questions afterward - is that even he seems a bit embarrassed by it.

Or, as HRC said in recent print ads in Cincinnati, timed with a Bush campaign stop:

Jobs lost in Ohio since 2001: 255,000

Gay marriages in Ohio: 0

"'F9/11'...is a tribute to patriotism, to the American sense of duty"

--so says Fox News in its review (!). "It turns out to be a really brilliant piece of work, and a film that members of all political parties should see without fail."

There were long lines for every showing last night at the Landmark here in Chicago. And outside, there were volunteers registering voters. I gave them my number and told them I want to help.

See it without fail.