Gay Rights
stcynic | August 7, 2006Bleu Copas is the latest in a long line of arabic-speaking military personnel - something we have an enormous shortage of - to be discharged for being gay. ABC News covered his story, and the video can be viewed here. He makes a very important point. At a time when the military has been scrambling to find enough people who speak Arabic to keep up with the flow of intelligence information that needs translating, an astonishing 55 American soldiers with Arabic language skills have been discharged solely because they're gay. It all points out some undeniable hypocrisy on the part of the anti-gay…
stcynic | August 7, 2006Terrence at the Republic of T has a post up that details a rash of anti-gay violence around the US lately. The list includes a gay man in New Mexico beaten and brutalized for hours by two thugs; thankfully the men have been caught and charged. It includes three punks beating up 6 people as they left a gay pride event in San Diego in five separate attacks. Those attacks were so brutal that the assailants are being charged with multiple accounts of attempted murder. It includes attacks on two people, one involving a crowbar, on two people in Detroit after a gay pride event. It includes a…
stcynic | August 7, 2006The Indiana state Supreme Court rejected an appeal of a lower court decision that paves the way for gay adoptions in that state. Bravo.
stcynic | August 7, 2006Via Jody Wheeler comes this story about Guy Adams, one of the national directors of Alan Keyes' Renew America, making this insane claim in a radio interview:
"Anyway... we were talking about homosexuality and basically about how a lot of homosexuals are beginning to have sex with animals and infants..."
His source for this information? An unnamed woman he talked to whose daughter is a lesbian. You can't make this stuff up. For full coverage of this, see Joe Brummer's blog.
stcynic | August 5, 2006Volokh has a post about an ongoing legal battle for custody involving two state courts. Here's the backstory, from a Vermont Supreme Court ruling:
Lisa and Janet lived together in Virginia for several years in the late 1990's. In December 2000, the parties traveled to Vermont and entered into a civil union. In 2001, while Lisa and Janet were still a couple, Lisa began to receive artificial insemination from sperm provided by an anonymous donor. Janet participated in the decision that Lisa become impregnated and helped select the anonymous donor. In April 2002, Lisa gave birth to IMJ, with…
stcynic | August 4, 2006Media Matters has an excellent entry about the latest false claim from the anti-gay crowd - the notion that there are 10,000 studies that show that gay parents are bad for children. This is the equivalent of so many fake quotes from the founding fathers, or false creationist claims, in that the claim just gets passed around and repeated blindly without anyone ever bothering to ask for any actual evidence for it. In a recent NPR interview, Arkansas state senator Jim Holt, a particularly nasty bigot, made the claim:
The [lower-court] judge had said that there are no studies that show that the…
stcynic | August 3, 2006I just encountered a new argument against allowing gay/straight alliance clubs in schools, or at least it's one I've never seen before. It comes from a guy running for attorney general in Georgia, who is upset that a Federal judge in Georgia ruled that a school there had to allow such a club (as have judges all over the nation). Agape Press reports:
McGuire, a former corporate attorney and one-time state senator, feels the court's ruling in this case has turned the Equal Access Act on its head. "I think the problem here, and I think where the court substantially erred, is that the intent of…
stcynic | August 2, 2006This is an unbelievable story. Just when you start to think that maybe there is sanity in the world, you see a story like this.
For J.R. and Robin knight, owning a bed and breakfast is everything they've always wanted. "We came here in search of our dreams, my wife always wanted a bed and breakfast and I always wanted a restaurant," says California native J.R. Knight.
But recently their dream has turned into a nightmare, all because of a flag they're flying outside. "It's a rainbow flag - to some people it means friendship to some people it means gay pride," says Knight. But for knight, it…
stcynic | August 1, 2006Dan Savage had a compelling op-ed piece in the Sunday New York Times about the recent rulings against gay marriage in New York and Washington. Some of the better passages:
What the New York and Washington opinions share -- besides a willful disregard for equal protection clauses in both state Constitutions -- is a heartless lack of concern for the rights of the hundreds of thousands of children being raised by same-sex couples.
Even if gay couples who adopt are more stable, as New York found, don't their children need the security and protections that the court believes marriage affords…
stcynic | July 29, 2006Here is an absolutely textbook example of that simplistic binary thinking that comes up so often in political discourse. It's from David Bass, a "20 year old homeschool graduate" who writes for several of those ubiquitous conservative commentary sites, and it's published, predictably, in the Worldnutdaily. Get a load of this irrational thinking. He begins by quoting someone who is in favor of gay marriage making an argument I have made many times, that the benefits of marriage - and there are many, both personal and societal - apply just as well to gay marriages as straight ones:
Couples who…
stcynic | July 28, 2006You gotta hand it to the military for having their priorities straight. With a long track record of white supremacist groups stealing military equipment and giving it to their KKK buddies, they still won't do anything to break up a network of such people operating at military bases around the country - but even while facing a shortage of Arabic translators that endangers our troops and impedes our intelligence gathering, they still find the time to boot a gay Arabic linguist out of the military.
A decorated sergeant and Arabic language specialist was dismissed from the U.S. Army under the "…
stcynic | July 27, 2006As if this story couldn't get any more bizarre, you've got to see the website of Yehuda Levin's group, Jews for Morality. It hasn't been updated in a long time, but it has information about last year's event that they tried mightily to stop. At last year's parade, one lunatic jumped into the parade and started stabbing people, injuring three marchers before police managed to subdue him. And these whackos actually blamed the victims:
Who stabbed the marchers at the Jerusalem homo-pride parade? Well, you say, it's obvious, the protestor who jumped into the line of march and stabbed three…
stcynic | July 26, 2006Another state court, Washington this time, has upheld their state's ban on gay marriage. This ruling was long awaited, to the tune of 17 months since the case was actually heard. I haven't read the ruling yet, and probably won't get to until tomorrow, but Dale Carpenter has his usual thorough and evenhanded analysis at Volokh. I'm interested to read it because of what Carpenter says about the suspect class analysis in the ruling, which I'll post below the fold because it's so long:
Unlike the New York Court of Appeals, the Washington court dealt substantively with the question of suspect-…
stcynic | July 26, 2006Last week it was announced that Julie and Hillary Goodridge, the lesbian couple whose lawsuit prompted the Massachusetts court decision and launched our ongoing national debate over gay marriage, were breaking up. The moment I read this, I knew we'd be subjected to a string of "A ha! We told you so! Gay marriages can't last!" arguments from gay marriage opponents. I was right. And it's coupled with lots of bigoted nonsense about how gay couples are incapable of the same human emotions and attributes that straight couples are.
Brian Camenker, executive director of the group Article 8 Alliance…
stcynic | July 25, 2006It always amuses me just how powerful the anti-gay loonies think homosexuality is. It's so powerful that it causes the very tectonic plates to crash together, causing earthquakes in San Francisco. It causes the weather patterns to change, causing hurricanes in Florida and New Orleans. And all of this, of course, accompanied by lots and lots of death and suffering for innocent (i.e. straight) people. One half expects to see a gay superhero who takes his heroic form by yelling "By the power of Garland!" at the top of his lungs.
Bartholomew, as usual, is on top of the latest developments in the…
stcynic | July 25, 2006I've written several times about the attempts by anti-gay Jews, Christians and Muslims to join forces in stopping a gay pride event in Jerusalem scheduled for the next couple weeks. Turns out that the outbreak of war with Hezbollah and Hamas was enough to actually do that:
This year's GLBT WorldPride parade, scheduled for Aug. 10 in Jerusalem, has been canceled because local police say they can't protect it...
Because antigay Orthodox Jews threatened to stage massive counterdemonstrations, Jerusalem police had planned to bring in officers from other cities to help protect the WorldPride march…
stcynic | July 23, 2006No, not really. But it's at least as plausible as the absolutely ridiculous argument from the religious right that gay marriage will "destroy traditional marriage". And the evidence, minimal as it is, at least points to a correlation at this point. Massachusetts has now had gay marriage for two years. What has happened to straight marriage in that state since then? Talk To Action has the story: the divorce rate has dropped. That isn't big news. Massachusetts has the nation's lowest divorce rate and the divorce rate has been going down nationally for two decades. But how about this trend:…
stcynic | July 19, 2006In yet another victory for the Equal Access Act, a Federal district judge in Georgia has ruled that a school must allow a Gay Straight Alliance club to meet on school grounds just as it does other groups. The response from the Alliance Defense Fund is stunning in its dishonesty:
But Mike Johnson, senior legal counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund, points out the Equal Access Act cited by the ACLU was intended to ensure that religious clubs in public secondary schools receive the same treatment afforded to secular non-curriculum-related student clubs. Johnson says for the last 20 years, that…
stcynic | July 12, 2006Dale Carpenter has had a series of interesting posts at Volokh about last week's ruling from the NY Court of Appeals (which is their state supreme court) that said that gay marriage was not required by the state constitution of New York. Carpenter is a law professor who advocates gay marriage but is opposed to having it imposed by the courts, which makes his points even more compelling. In the most recent post, he looks at the court's analysis of the rational basis test as applied to gay marriage (Kuznicki also wrote on this the other day, arguing that the court had misapplied the rational…
stcynic | July 10, 2006Eugene Volokh has written an excellent series of posts about the use of the One True Purpose fallacy by opponents of gay marriage. The argument takes one of two forms, one against gay marriage and one against homosexuality itself, but both have the same flawed premise: the notion that either marriage or our genitals have only One True Purpose. They argue that marriage exists only for the raising of children and since gays can't have children, gay marriage goes against the One True Purpose of marriage. This is all nonsense, of course. Gays can and do have children - hundreds of thousands of…