Gay Rights
stcynic | July 10, 2006The Pope visited Spain, where gay marriage was recently legalized, on Saturday. He delivered an address about the importance of protecting traditional marriage from...well, he doesn't actually say what. Some of his statements are just baffling to me. Can he really not realize how empty and hypocritical his rhetoric is? You be the judge.
At an evening celebration with pilgrims from around the world, the Pope urged politicians to value the traditional family.
"This is the best way to counter a widespread hedonism which reduces human relations to banality and empties them of their authentic…
stcynic | July 5, 2006Continuing their crusade to insure that gay couples are punished as much as possible for being gay, the Thomas More Law Center has sued Michigan State University over their policy of providing health care benefits to gay couples employed by the university. This is the second such lawsuit the TMLC has filed, the first being against Ann Arbor Public Schools (that case was dismissed by the appeals court on a technicality). In addition, the ACLU and the National Pride at Work organization has filed suit against Governor Granholm from the other side of the issue because Granholm voided the…
stcynic | July 5, 2006If you didn't see it live on TV, you should see this transcript of Bill O'Reilly making a fool of himself while interviewing William Eskridge and Darren Spedale. They are the authors of a book called Gay Marriage for Better or For Worse: What We've Learned from the Evidence. O'Reilly claims to have gone over the statistics in the book "all afternoon", but then he draws the most absurd conclusion from them. Eskridge and Spedale show that in those nations that have gay marriage in one form or another, the state of traditional marriage actually improved after gay marriage became a legal reality…
stcynic | July 4, 2006Agape Press has an article about gay straight alliance groups in public schools, of which there are now some 2000 or so around the country. There's a controversy going on in Michigan in the Forest Hills School District, where religious right groups are trying to get the school district to disband the three GSAs that exist there. The school board so far is refusing to do so and the American Family Association is spreading some manure around to grease the skids.
Despite the objections of concerned parents, the Forest Hills School Board has vowed it will not shut down three GSA clubs in the…
stcynic | July 1, 2006The three Abrahamic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - have been fighting each other, killing each other and oppressing each other for centuries, a fact that many lament. Which is why it's so heartwarming to see all three religions unite together, joined by their hatred of gays:
Jewish and Muslim religious leaders say that an international Gay Pride gathering set for Aug. 6-12 in Jerusalem could trigger a worldwide Islamic uprising more intense than the riots and bloodshed generated by the cartoons in European newspapers of the profit Mohammed.
Representatives of conservative…
stcynic | June 30, 2006The Arkansas Supreme Court has handed us another major victory for gay adoptions, ruling that the state's child welfare board cannot prohibit gays from being foster parents.
"There is no correlation between the health, welfare and safety of foster children and the blanket exclusion of any individual who is a homosexual or who resides in a household with a homosexual," Associate Justice Donald Corbin wrote in the opinion.
In addition, the court said, the testimony of a Child Welfare Agency Review Board member demonstrated that "the driving force between adoption of the regulations was not to…
stcynic | June 29, 2006James Dobson has written a commentary for CNN's webpage on gay marriage that is amusing both in its lack of logic and its misuse of statistics. The statistics come first, as he is claiming that the media provided "cover" for the Senate voting down the Marriage Protection Amendment by claiming that the public didn't want the amendment:
Again this year, the amendment failed to pass by a wide margin, falling 18 votes shy of a required two-thirds majority. The final tally was 49 in favor, 48 opposed.
Rarely has there been a greater disconnect between members of the Senate and the American people…
stcynic | June 27, 2006You gotta love this kind of fevered rhetoric from the religious right:
The president of the American Family Association (AFA) of Pennsylvania says lawmakers in her state have voted to destroy traditional marriage. The pro-family group is decrying a move by Pennsylvania senators that weakened a proposed state marriage protection amendment by stripping from it a ban on civil unions.
Last week, the state Senate voted 38-12 in favor of a proposed constitutional amendment protecting marriage but removed language prohibiting civil unions. That June 21 vote follows one earlier this month, in which…
stcynic | June 21, 2006Okay, not quite. But it may at least bring peace to Israel, or so some are suggesting. There is an international gay pride event scheduled to take place in Jerusalem in a few weeks and that finally gives the bigots on both sides of that country's wars something to agree on. Rabbis and Imams called a press conference together to condemn the event and discuss ways to stop it.
Rabbi Yehuda Levin, of the Brooklyn-based Jews for Morality organization, is now in Israel for the express purpose of trying to stop the parade from happening. He led a press conference on Monday, together with Israeli-…
stcynic | June 21, 2006In the incredible flood of comments on yesterday's gay marriage post (they were coming at a rate of one every few seconds for a while there), I missed completely Blake's response to the post. I saw several of his later responses to others, but missed the main one to me. I'm moving it up here so it doesn't get lost in the shuffle. He writes:
Ed: Your response is exactly what I expected -- lots of self-superior ad hominems and avoiding the real issues. First, you break your own rules of civil discussion that I had to certify I would obey before signing onto this blog: "let's recognize that even…
stcynic | June 20, 2006I post some of what I write to both Positive Liberty and Dispatches from the Culture Wars, so sometimes I get comments left at one place and not the other. In response to a recent cross-posted item on the religious right and "special rights" rhetoric, I got this comment left at PL. I'm going to respond to it in detail at both places in its own post. The first thing you will notice about the comment is that it does not even attempt to engage the argument of my post. The post was about the inconsistency and incoherency of the religious rights's rhetoric of "special rights" when arguing against…
stcynic | June 20, 2006Agape Press reports:
The president of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention (Richard Land) says amending the U.S. Constitution to protect traditional marriage will take time, but that such an amendment will eventually be approved on Capitol Hill.
Would you care to place a bet on that, Mr. Land? If you didn't get it passed in the last 3 years, with total control of the White House and both houses of Congress, not to mention all of the momentum from the initial culture shock in the wake of the Massachusetts SJC ruling on gay marriage, you're never going to get it passed. In…
stcynic | June 18, 2006Perhaps the most ubiquitous argument we hear from the religious right when fighting against any policy that would provide legal protection on the basis of sexual orientation is that we shouldn't give "special rights" to homosexuals. It's never explained what exactly a "special right" is, but in order to have any coherent meaning as an argument, the phrase must mean something like "a right that is not available generally, but only protected on the basis of sexual orientation." But it is trivially easy to demonstrate that the opposite is true, that in fact the religious right is not fighting…
stcynic | June 15, 2006These are great examples of why Jason Kuznicki and Jon Rowe are such valuable voices in the blogosphere. Jason posts here and Jon here about gay marriage, liberty and anti-discrimination laws. While I'm not sure their approach is necessarily correct - I frankly haven't thought this issue through very well at all - they offer a point of view you don't often hear, especially from people who are directly affected by such discrimination. They help us understand that the issue isn't quite as simple as we might like to believe. Stil, I love the comment that Jason quotes for sheer snarkiness:
We pro…
stcynic | June 14, 2006The New York Times has an interesting article about whether gay marriage will impinge on religious liberty. Mind you, it's not really talking about the religious right bugaboo that ministers will be forced to perform gay marriages; that's nonsense from the get go. But there are lots of ancillary questions that would seem inevitable. For instance, what about a caterer? Can a devoutly Christian caterer refuse to cater a gay wedding reception? My immediate answer is yes, of course he can, but given the recent controversies over pharmacists refusing to dispense morning after pills and other…
stcynic | June 9, 2006Jacob Weisberg has an excellent article at Slate about why the gay marriage amendment isn't going to help the Republicans this time. He points out that they've basically had the amendment behind a "break glass in case of flagging ratings" case, but it has far less traction this time than it did in 2004. The first reason is because it's patently obvious that it's nothing more than a political ploy. They knew it had no chance of passing and they haven't even mentioned it since just before the 2004 election. And even the religious right is coming around to the fact that they really don't care…
stcynic | June 7, 2006Via Crooks and Liars, you can watch the video of Jon Stewart making Bill Bennett babble like an idiot trying to defend a ban on gay marriage. Stewart makes a great point about Dick Cheney. Cheney is a social conservative right down the line, yet he is against the gay marriage amendment. Why? Because he has a lesbian daughter who is in a committed relationship. He gets to see up close that the relationship between Mary Cheney and Heather Poe is the same in every relevant way to opposite sex relationships. They love each other, they're committed to each other, they laugh and love and fight and…
stcynic | June 7, 2006I love it. In 2004, the anti-gay marriage amendment only got 48 votes in the senate, far short of the 67 votes required to send it to the states. This year, supporters crowed that it would at least pick up votes, but not only could they not get the 2/3 vote required to pass the amendment, they couldn't even get the 60 votes required to vote on it. A cloture vote failed 49-48, with 6 Republicans voting not to even hold a vote on the bill. But of course, they knew it wasn't going to pass anyway. Today was all about political posturing, not about actually achieving anything.
stcynic | June 7, 2006Among the many silly arguments made by the religious right about gay rights, the one found in this article by Charles Colson may take the cake. He says that the court will mandate gay marriage within 2 years without a constitutional amendment, and he traces three cases that allegedly prove this - Casey, Romer and Lawrence. He complains that Kennedy based his opinion in Casey on "a sweeping definition of liberty as the right of a person to determine for himself the meaning of life." You know, as opposed to Colson's definition of liberty, the right of a person to determine what others may do…
stcynic | June 7, 2006In the creation/evolution debate, the religious right loves to argue about missing links; in the debate over gay marriage, they seem to specialize in arguments with missing links. In column after column, we see the same argument repeated - gay marriage will "destroy" marriage - without any of them bothering to fill in the missing link. What is the causal link between allowing gays to marry and "marriage" (they always use the word as though it was an actual physical entity) being "destroyed" or "weakened" or "gravely damaged"? One of the silliest columns I've read is this one by Alan Sears of…