Today in Gay History

April 26, 2000

Vermont's Governor Howard Dean
signs the nation's first civil union bill. That was the state's response to the fact that its state Supreme Court had ruled that to deny legal state recognition to committed same-sex couples was unconstitutional as violative of the principles of equal protection.

In April 2009, the Vermont legislature passed overwhelmingly, and by a single vote to spare overrode the Republican governor's veto of a law phasing out Civil Unions. Commencing September 1, 2009, no further civil unions will be created. Civil unions created prior to this date will retain their status, but these couples will have the option of entering a marriage. Marriage Equality is legislated in America for the first time.

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Today in Gay History

April 21, 2005

Connecticut Governor M. Jodi Rell signed that state's historic Civil Unions law. Even the Log Cabin Republicans bestirred themselves and came out in praise of her actions back then:

" ...Governor Rell becomes the first Governor in history to sign civil union legislation without being forced to do so by the courts. We thank Governor Rell for recognizing that all families deserve basic fairness, including gay and lesbian families," said Log Cabin Republicans President Patrick Guerriero.

Legislation establishing civil unions in Connecticut passed the State House and State Senate by wide margins and with bipartisan support. Governor Rell previously signaled her support for civil unions by stating, "I don't believe in discrimination of any sort, and I want people to have equal rights and equal opportunities."

"The Governor's signature on this bill is an important reminder that the fight for basic fairness for gay and lesbian families is a bi-partisan fight," continued Guerriero. "Log Cabin praises the bi-partisan work of the Connecticut legislature and the state and local groups, including Love Makes a Family, who have encouraged this important debate on civil unions and civil marriage equality, . . ."

Governor Rell, having assumed the office in 2004 (upon the less than auspicious and premature departure of her predecessor) learned to navigate the troubled Connecticut political waters. As a Republican she worked toward bipartisan progress with the heavily Democratic state legislature on many issues. She was elected in her own right in 2006 by a wide margin of victory.

In October 2008, the Connecticut Supreme Court struck down the Civil Unions Law declaring it violated the Equal Protection of Laws by creating a separate but unequal system parallel to marriage.

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Breaking News from IOWA

Marriage equality in Iowa!

Marriage Equality in the Heartland

by: Pam Spaulding of Pam's House Blend

Fri Apr 03, 2009 at 08:00:00 AM EDT

Read the entire opinion here --+

Marriage equality comes to the heartland! . . . Fundies will go APESH*T! So much for blaming the coastal liberal radical homosexuals for this one. Des Moines Register:

The Iowa Supreme Court this morning struck down a 1998 state law that limits marriage to one man and one woman.

The ruling is viewed as a victory for the gay rights movement in Iowa and elsewhere, and a setback for social conservatives who wanted to protect traditional families.

...Richard Socarides, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton on gay civil rights, said today's decision could set the stage for other states. Socarides was was a senior political assistant for Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin in the early 1990s.

"I think it's significant because Iowa is considered a Midwest sate in the mainstream of American thought," Socarides said. "Unlike states on the coasts, there's nothing more American than Iowa. As they say during the presidential caucuses, 'As Iowa goes, so goes the nation.'"

And the rumbling is already beginning -- the Republicans want to take up an amendment in the lege."If you'll remember when we proposed the Iowa marriage amendment, the Democrats' excuse for not taking it up was that it was in the hands of the Iowa Supreme Court," Senate Republican leader Paul McKinley of Chariton said Friday. "It was implied that should they find against traditional marriage, that the Legislature would handle that. I would certainly hope they'll keep their promise."

Highlights from the court opinion:


All Justices concurred-- – it was a unanimous decision !

[The Court considered the] five primary “interests of society” advanced [by the proponents of one man one woman marriage] in support of the legislature’s exclusive definition of marriage. The first three interests are broadly related to the advancement of child rearing. Specifically, the objectives centered on promoting
procreation, promoting child rearing by a mother and a father within a
marriage, and promoting stability in an opposite-sex relationship to raise
and nurture children. The fourth interest raised by the County addressed
the conservation of state resources, while the final reason concerned the
governmental interest in promoting the concept and integrity of the
traditional notion of marriage.

[In finding none of the reasons for denying marriage equality legally valid, the court stated, in conclusion:]

In the final analysis, we give respect to the views of all Iowans on the
issue of same-sex marriage—religious or otherwise—by giving respect to our
constitutional principles. These principles require that the state recognize
both opposite-sex and same-sex civil marriage. Religious doctrine and views
contrary to this principle of law are unaffected, and people can continue to
associate with the religion that best reflects their views. A religious
denomination can still define marriage as a union between a man and a
woman, and a marriage ceremony performed by a minister, priest, rabbi, or
other person ordained or designated as a leader of the person’s religious
faith does not lose its meaning as a sacrament or other religious institution.
The sanctity of all religious marriages celebrated in the future will have the
same meaning as those celebrated in the past. The only difference is civil
marriage will now take on a new meaning that reflects a more complete
understanding of equal protection of the law. This result is what our
constitution requires.

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Tip O' the Bonnet to Julian Bond of NAACP

Julain Bond Spoke on Saturday March 14th to a Human Rights Campaign Dinner. He eloquently acknowledged the commonality of LGBT struggles with the Black Civil Rights movement, and decried especially black homophobia.



Some excerpts courtesy Pam's House Blend:

...When someone asks me, "are gay rights civil rights?" my answer is always, "Of course, they are." Civil rights are positive legal prerogatives: the right to equal treatment before the law. These are the rights shared by everyone. There is no one in the United States who does not, or should not, enjoy or share in enjoying these rights. Gay and lesbian rights are not special rights in any way. It isn't "special" to be free from discrimination. It is an ordinary, universal entitlement of citizenship.

...People of color ought to be flattered that our movement has provided so much inspiration for others. That, it has been, that our movement has been so widely imitated. That our tactics, our methods, our heroes, our heroines, and even our songs, have been appropriated or served as models for others.

...Now, no parallel between movements is exact. African-Americans are the only Americans who were enslaved for more than two centuries and people of color carried the badge of who we are on our faces. But we are far from the only people suffering discrimination; sadly, so do many others. And those others deserve the law's protection and civil rights too.

Herebelow: The entire speech, containing some amazingly refreshing declarations. The video is 25 minutes long, but its WELL worth watching!

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Today in Gay History

March 17, 1910

Happy Birthday -

Brother Outsider Bayard Rustin

H/T Wiki

Bayard Rustin March 17, 1910 –August 24, 1987 was an American civil rights activist, important largely behind the scenes in of the 1960s and earlier, and one of the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington. It was his early mastery of the philosophy of Gandhi that led him to be foremost in counseling the Rev. Martin L. King, Jr. on the techniques of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience .

For much of his career, Rustin lived in New York City's Chelsea neighborhood, in the union-funded Penn South complex, from 1978 with his partner Walter Naegle. He became an advocate on behalf of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people and causes in the latter part of his career; however, his homosexuality was the reason for attacks from many governmental as well as interest groups.

Solely because of his homosexuality, he agreed to remain largely in the background of the civil rights movement once Dr. King rose to leadership.

A year before his death in 1987, Rustin said: "Twenty-five, thirty years ago, the barometer of human rights in the United States were black people. That is no longer true. The barometer for judging the character of people in regard to human rights is now those who consider themselves gay, homosexual, or lesbian."

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BEWARE TEH 'GAY' MARRIAGE!

Get the latest news satire and funny videos at 236.com.

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Happy 200th Birthday, Mr. Lincoln

We Celebrate with Pride His Vision and Another NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

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February 12: Psst- Spread the Word

On National Freedom to Marry Day, Thursday, February 12, 2009, at local marriage counters in cities all over the country, same-sex couples will request marriage licenses at their local County Clerk's Offices to raise awareness of the harms and impact that the inability to marry causes on their families. This national event is hosted yearly by Marriage Equality USA (MEUSA) and this year they are being joined by Join the Impact [the largest organizer of country-wide marriage equality actions] to make this the largest Marriage Counter Action yet!

"Marriage Equality USA started the Marriage Counter Action/Get Engaged for Marriage Equality in 2001. We do this annual direct action during Freedom to Marry week to make marriage discrimination visible, it forces our local clerks to have to look us in the eye, see our children, and enforce a discriminatory and unjust law at their counter – it moves everyone who witnesses this sad, but powerful event and gives us the opportunity to tell our stories and show that we live in every community and want to honor and protect our families like everyone else." - Jordan Palmer, Vice President of Development & Organizational Relationships for Marriage Equality USA.

HOW TO GET INVOLVED

Please lend support to Marriage Equality USA and draw national attention to the many committed couples who are not afforded the right to marry.

• Click here to a complete list of MEUSA locations (by states) and other critical information
• Click +Cities">here to find JTI cities that will be hosting events where MEUSA is not
• Download national toolkit

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Tribute to Brother Outsider Bayard Rustin

One of the most overlooked and shunned aside leaders of the modern Civil Rights era in the second half of the 20th Century was a gay man. Today Crapaud takes a break from caviling to pay tribute to Bayard Rustin. Here's a peek or two at his relevance for today's domestic human rights issues

Learn more Here

Bush's Legacy At Home: Divisiveness and Despair

Day #3 in Countdown to the Bush Termination Credit large swaths to www.thinkprogress.org

While campaigning for president, George W. Bush often repeated that he would seek to change the negative and partisan tone in Washington, D.C. "I'm a uniter, not a divider," Bush would say. "I refuse to play the politics of putting people into groups and pitting one group against another." A recent CNN poll found that a whopping 82 percent of Americans believe that Bush did not unite the country. In fact, Bush himself just recently admitted that he had not lived up to his "uniter, not a divider" rhetoric, saying last month that he "didn't do a very good job of it" (though he later blamed others for "needless name-calling").

POLITICIZING THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT: But over the last eight years, "pitting one group against another" is exactly the kind of politics Bush played. He and his allies exploited national issues, placed social hot-button issues in the forefront of all political discussions, viciously scapegoating gay people, immigrants and other groups. The Bushies ruthlessly attacked progressives for political gain, and politicized the federal government to serve the interests of the Republican party. Rove and the other Bushies schemed to establish a Third Reich style of Permanent Conservative Majority, deploying singularly unqualified graduates of Pat Robertson’s Regent University to scrub various agencies, most notably the Department of Justice, in Stalin-like purges of Democrats, Progressives, gay people, and often any career officers who were even “suspected” of harboring views that might be considered as standing in the way of the New Republican Majority.

The White House took a "permanent campaign approach" to governing, admitted
Bush's former press secretary Scott McClellan recently. In 2003, Bush's political guru Karl Rove or his top aide, Ken Mehlman, "visited nearly every agency to outline White House campaign priorities, review polling data and, on occasion, call attention to tight House, Senate and gubernatorial races that could be affected by regulatory action." Rove also led an unprecedented campaign to politicize the federal government to serve the interests of the Republican Party.

POLITICS TRUMPED SCIENCE, REASON: The White House also routinely favored politics over science: regarding climate change by muzzling NASA's chief global warming scientist James Hansen's climate change findings, censoring scientific evidence on global warming in an EPA report, and editing all government scientists' testimony to fit its political aims. Stem cell research? Politicize it, Ban it! Sane and scientific approaches to preventing deadly sexually transmitted diseases? Abstinence only education, no funding to any science based notions of prophylaxis. The Office of Faith Based Initiatives, the General Services Administration, the Interior Department, the Defense Department, Health and Human Services and the Office of National Drug Control Policy were also not spared of politics during the Bush years.

DIVIDING ON SOCIAL ISSUES: Shortly after taking office, Rove convinced Bush to issue an executive order that effectively ended federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research. Despite evidence showing the enormous scientific benefits to such research, Rove's move sought to appease the GOP base, rather than promote sound policy. In the run-up to the 2004 election, Rove orchestrated a campaign to significantly boost turnout of the GOP base by placing measures to ban gay marriage on the ballot in numerous battleground states. Patrick Guerriero, executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans -- the GOP's largest gay group -- said at the time that Bush's call for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage was part of a calculation by Rove that "4 million evangelicals stayed home in 2000. As a result, the 2004 campaign has focused on energizing the far right while ignoring mainstream Republicans."

EDUCATION REFORM: The completely duplicitous and misleadingly named “No Child Left Behind” predicated all federal public funding of education on meeting testing standards but without any adequate funding to the states to implement its many mandates. The design was clearly to PRIVATIZE education by mandating private “Charter” schools funded by portable “vouchers.” Our professional educators are worn out and resigning in ever larger numbers, completely stymied by the unfunded mandates that require them to throw traditional teaching methods out the window in favor of only “teaching to the test.”

DISMANTLING OUR CONSTITUTION: Bush used the tragedy of 9-11 to revamp the organization of security, law enforcement and intelligence communities, creating the Department of Homeland Security. The Transportation Security Administration was also born out of the wake of Sept. 11. The Patriot Act over road fundamental protections of the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments of our Bill of Rights.

The War on Terror was used an excuse to curtail civil liberties. All dissent was swept aside as “unpatriotic” and the trampling of our basic core liberties became the game du jour. The result was domestic surveillance programs under the Patriot Act, the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program, and FISA and warrantless wiretapping; military tribunals set up at Guantanamo; and “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as waterboarding. In other legal matters, "Plamegate," the controversy over the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA officer, was tangentially related to pre-war intelligence and fueled speculation that the Bush administration doctored intelligence claims.

As Bush prepares to leave office, people the world over now look at the U.S. in a "negative way" as a country that "went ahead and sanctioned torture." (See this blog on January 15, 2009). Paralleling President Obama’s repair of our international image, the abuses of the Bush domestic agenda must be swiftly and surely repudiated. A welcome return to sanity begins 1.20.09—ALLAH BE PRAISED!

Call it what you will, Give me "Civil Marriage" or Full Equality

Most of what follows is lifted verbatim from Crapaud's friends at SOULFORCE http://www.soulforce.org/article/665 with a few embellishments by the Toad hisself.

Already, millions of lesbian and gay Americans live together as married couples, in loving, committed, long-term relationships. Every year, thousands of new same-gender marriages are being performed (overtly and covertly) not just by Gay Church clergy, but by enlightened and courageous Protestant, Jewish, and even Catholic ministers and priests as well. We have that rite and will continue to celebrate it, even in the face of bigotry and discrimination.

Lesbian and gay couples, even if they are married legally in one jurisdiction, in the eyes of God as blessed by their own church, and in the eyes of their supportive friends and family, are yet denied over 1,047 federal and state rights and protections that go automatically with mixed-gender marriage.

Legally, all it would take is the repeal of, or judicial pronouncement that the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is unconstitutional. DOMA purportedly overrules by federal fiat some 200 years of American jurisprudence that recognized that every state must give full faith and credit or "comity" to the marriages of every other state. After DOMA is gone, all marriages emanating from those states or countries which have already embraced marriage equality would legally have to be recognized in every other state.

This - constitutionally - is true, even if the other state chooses not to change its own laws regarding who can marry there. Overriding that long-standing federal notion of equal dignity of marriages, no matter where celebrated, was the whole "reason" DOMA was legislated. Its time for it to go, as a first good step. The US Supreme Court landmark decision in Loving v Virginia simply resulted in Virginia's ban of interracial marriage being overridden by the validity of that marriage contracted where it was legal. It did not say that anybody in Virginia had to perform any marriage at all.

No legislature would have to grapple with anything. No legislators would have to spend unnecessary time in demagoguery, scapegoating, and otherwise pandering to fringe elements of the voting public so fond of imposing their peculiar personal notions of "morality"---majority tyranny by those espousing a Puritanical theocracy.

The legal solution is simple, the political one is not. But some day soon the political will shall inevitably overwhelm the political expedience of the naysayers who delude themselves and convince others that they can save traditional marriage by banning other human couples from it.

The following is just a small sample of the rights that outlawing same-gender marriage deny:

• Automatic Inheritance
Note: Even with a well-drawn Last Will & Testament, a surviving gay spouse is:
a) Denied the Social Security survivor benefits that are made available to all married couples;
b) Heavily taxed on any retirement plan – 401(k) or IRA – they “inherit” from their partners, although married spouses can inherit these plans tax-free; and
c) Charged estate and inheritance taxes on the inheritance of a home, even if it was jointly owned – a tax that would not apply to married spouses.
d) At significant risk of losing their home when an elderly or chronically ill partner enters a nursing home. This is because federal Medicaid law permits a married spouse to remain in the couple’s home when a husband or wife enters a nursing home – but it does not grant unmarried couples the same right.
• Assumption of Spouse's Pension
• Bereavement Leave
• Burial Determination
• Child Custody
• Divorce Protections
• Domestic Violence Protection
• Exemption from Property Tax on Partner's Death
• Immigration Rights for Foreign Spouse
• Insurance Breaks
• Joint Adoption and Foster Care
• Joint Bankruptcy
• Joint Parenting (Insurance Coverage, School Records)
• Medical Decision on Behalf of Partner
• Various Property Rights automatically available to mixed gender spouses
• Reduced Rate Memberships
• Sick Leave to Care for Partner
• Social Security Survivor Benefits
• Tax Breaks
• Visitation of Partner's Children
• Visitation of Partner in Hospital or Prison
• Wrongful Death Benefits

How many times unsupportive parents have misused the law to cut off one partner from the love and comfort of another in his or her greatest hour of need? How many times surviving parents or more distant relatives have been awarded child custody instead of the surviving gay or lesbian parent or have been given prized possessions a couple has earned together?

This debate is not about marriage. It is about the immoral and unconstitutional practice of withholding those legal rights from millions of law-abiding, tax-paying Americans and their core families on the basis of sexual orientation alone. It is not only about the human dignity rights denied loving, committed couples, it is all the more about denying rights to their legal children to:

• Inherit from their parents

• Be supported financially by both parents and grandparents in the event of “divorce”

• Continue childhood relationships with a “divorced” parent or grandparent

Black comedians have said for years that "justice" must be spelled "just us" because black folk look at the criminal justice system and all they see is "us" being herded disproportionately though those portals. Gay folk see now that "just us" are denied the right to marry. How long will we have to wait for justice? Not long. How long can the demagogues stem the tide of just progress. Not long.