N A T T E R I N G S 2011

THE UPSIDE TO A HEART ATTACK

2011-07-11T22:45:00.018-04:00

If you have to have one at all, I’d say a “silent” heart attack is definitely preferable to the other kind in most ways.

Accurate as it may be, however, “silent” is something of a misnomer. I presume it is used instead of “painless,” which would sound misleadingly benign. Whether it comes with searing chest pains or simple shortness of breath, a heart attack is a heart attack. But it may not always be what you’d expect, as I recently found out.

What the so-called silent attack lacks in drama it makes up for in mystery and angst. If you’re in otherwise good health and wake up one morning unable to breathe, you can’t necessarily be sure what’s going on unless you’re predisposed to an awareness of the more subtle effects that can accompany a heart attack. It may not occur to you to go to the insufferable ER but if you’re lucky your primary care doc might be able to see you right away, as mine did most mercifully.

If he or she is on the ball they may pick up on the telltale signs (like a BP of 189/120) and start you on an ACE inhibitor (e.g. Lisinopril – “to treat high blood pressure, congestive heart failure, and to improve survival after a heart attack”) & Lasix along with 4 or 5 other drugs, while ordering a battery of tests to find out what’s actually causing you to feel so weird: short-of-breath, restless, fatigued, unfocused and generally out-of-sorts. Tests may include blood draws, multiple EKGs, echocardiograms, various sonograms, a nuclear stress test & cardiac catheterization, all to be reviewed by a good cardio specialist who can hopefully make sense of what’s bugging you at last, and help you decide what to do about it.

Before getting to that point, while sloughing through all these tests & assessments you are likely to hear one wildly conflicting opinion after another about your chances of dropping dead at any minute or it all just being a fluke of nature that you’ll get over with a few changes in habits & lifestyle. Even if you usually feel, as I do, like you’ve had a good run and whatever happens happens, the resulting uncertainty can be quite distressing and it may be a good idea to ask your doctor to prescribe some kind of psychotropic and/or anti-anxiety med along with everything else you’re on -- just to keep yourself from freaking out. I found low dose Klonipin and Celexa to do the trick.

If by chance, during this time you also happen to have a previously-scheduled appointment with your optometrist for new glasses, you may even get independent confirmation that something is amiss, which you might have otherwise missed. As your eyes show no outward sign of redness, who would have thought to look directly behind your corneas to find that they are hemorrhaging like crazy? If you have a day to spend after this in your local eye hospital being examined by a team of ophthalmologists you might get to see the most amazing 3-D spectral images depicting geysers of bright red blood gushing from the backside of your orbs! That can’t be good but it does add to the evidence of your condition.

Of course you may never have the opportunity to experience any of this fun stuff if you don’t have the good fortune of being employed by a company or organization that provides decent healthcare benefits. If I weren’t so lucky I may well have not made it past day one of this scenario. Having lived at both ends of the U.S. healthcare spectrum I have such an aversion to avoiding encounters with any emergency room that I would rather just let nature take its course than try to live through the trauma & maltreatment of the welfare-dependent heart patient I might otherwise be today. As it is, I’m in the very capable hands of a crack medical team that has me feeling better than I have any right to feel, given my diagnosis.

By all indications, it turns out that I did have a “silent” heart attack about a month ago – one that’s been coming on for the last several years, as I may have known if I were paying attention to certain symptoms and effects that were routinely dismissed as anything other than heart disease: “the Number One Killer of Americans today.” Not that I blame anybody for missing it – I’ve personally found that denial has always been a very effective coping mechanism, as far as it goes. If it weren’t for the confluence of those streams of fortune or whatever may be responsible for landing me in my current situation, I might already be toast. And the best that could come of my experience would be as a lesson to those who might be thereby compelled to pay attention earlier to this killer’s stealth indicators.

As it is, I’m currently faced with the decision of how to deal with the progressive mitral regurgitation, which “may begin suddenly, most often after a heart attack” (Medline Plus, 2011) and my annoyingly enlarged left ventricle. It’s a deadly combination if I do nothing but I’m told that the meds I’m on & the “lifestyle changes” I’ve already made will keep me viable long enough for the docs & me to decide which kind of surgical intervention will be best: valve repair or replacement.

My own research on the subject has me leaning strongly toward a repair job, which is much less invasive and considered the safest alternative in the early stages of this syndrome. If anything is clear, as a degenerative condition it’s not going to fix itself.

If I do need a replacement sooner rather than later I’ve already decided I’m putting in for a pig valve. I hear they’re the best.

Oink!

References

American Heart Association (2011). Silent Heart Attack http://www.silentheartattack.org/

http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/

Medline Plus (2011). Mitral regurgitation – chronic. Website viewed 07/11/2011; http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000176.htm

Suri RM, et al (2011). Management of less-than-severe mitral regurgitation: should guidelines recommend earlier surgical intervention? Eur J Cardiothorac Surg, doi:10.1016/j.ejcts.2010.11.068

Karalis D (2011). Pathophysilolgy of valvular heart disease, Drexel University College of Medicine, handout

Yuksel UC, Kapadia SR and Tuzcu EM (2011). Percutaneous mitral repair: patient selection, results, and Future directions, Curr Cardiol Report, 13:100-106. doi 10.1007/s11886-010-0158-x

Is Healthcare Unconstitutional?

2010-12-14T19:19:00.019-05:00

So now that the Bush-appointed Federal District Court Judge has chimed in with his opinion that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional, it seems like a good time to review some of the basic popular arguments for and against healthcare reform as it stands.

Briefly, we have heard - and Congress agreed - that we cannot have tax-payer supported universal healthcare coverage in the United States because that would amount to socialism. As a result, rather than reforming healthcare costs and cost-drivers, what Congress ended up enacting was a bill that the President signed, mandating that everyone must eventually buy into the completely capitalistic system of contracting with profit-driven health INSURANCE companies.

Now back up a second. What is the basic idea underlying capitalist health insurance? It is to collect and maintain a large reservoir of funds by having a large number of people contribute relatively small amounts of money, on a regular basis over time, into health insurance accounts controlled by capitalist corporations, most of which are euphemistically called Health Management Organizations (HMOs). This system is feasible and necessary in our capitalist economy because only a very few of us could possibly bear the financial burden of getting sick or injured and having to engage with the bloated profit-driven US medical industry, without going bankrupt every time we felt a pain or physical discomfort.

So, all subscribers pay in to those accounts which theoretically make funds available to each one when he or she gets sick or injured and needs to pay for their always-catastrophic medical expenses. These pools of money are supposed to become capital resources, which are presumedly only made available to the minority who are sick or hurt at any given time. All subscribers pay into the pool and continue to pay regularly through their time of illness and after their recovery, ad perpetuum. Whether sick or well, you never stop paying into the system that provides tons of money - unused for medical care at any given time - to the private controlling interests who primarily use the excess funds to pay their top brass outrageous salaries & bonuses and leave plenty to invest in other capitalist corporate ventures.

Universal healthcare would have provided for a tax-supported system of paying for health care that would operate according to the same basic idea as health insurance - spreading medical costs across the widest number of contributors - all US taxpayers - but it would be a radically different system than the capitalist model in that it would naturally eliminate, for one thing, the HMO & Insurance Company profit motive that insures bloated costs and removes most incentives to promote health over illness. And it would mean that the contributions to health insurance that each of us would make, could be equitably distributed, potentially reducing the individual burden we all bear to the absolute lowest possible. This is the (shudder) socialist system that was taken off the table early on in the process of formulating "healthcare reform." But it is not this type of system that was ruled unconstitutional in the Federal District Court.

What was ruled unconstitutional was the idea that our representative, elected government could legislate a requirement that capitalist, profit-driven insurance companies would have to spread the cost of subscribing to health insurance to everyone. In doing so they would accomplish the (quiver) socialist agenda item of minimizing individual costs for health insurance coverage for all of us. This is framed as a matter of infringing on our individual right to decline health insurance coverage altogether -- which we should be able to do as a free people. If we are a freedom-loving citizenry, the argument goes, how can our government force us to pay for any "product" on the free market if we individually decide that we do not want it?

Skipping over many of the inherent absurdities of this situation -- including the argument about whether insurance is a "product" or not (a product you never really get to own, sell, exchange or get any reasonable return on) -- what effect does all this have on the concept of "socialist" vs "capitalist" or "free market" spending decisions when it comes to paying the costs of healthcare?

For one thing, it may be argued that requiring everyone to subscribe to health insurance implies a certain loss of competition and control over price-fixing by insurance company moguls. Being less able to justify gouging us with outrageous rates & premiums companies would instead be compelled to undercut each others' prices to garner the greatest market share in order to stay profitable. If everyone were legally bound to find a policy that they could afford it would shift the whole paradigm around to make insurance largely a buyer's market.

But, sticking with the status quo rather than mandating that everyone subscribe to some kind of health insurance, we all still end up needing medical care at some point and it will have to be paid for somehow. So those who opt out of the insurance game will either be faced with unbearable out-of-pocket costs or they will, as now, have to rely on the limited, inferior care provided by way of public assistance, welfare, medicaid/medicare system or some other TAXPAYER-SUPPORTED system.

Doesn't that mean that all of us freedom-loving taxpayers end up paying for the healthcare of others anyway? If so, then the status quo means capitalist healthcare for those who can barely afford it (for the most part) and socialist healthcare for those who can't pay for it themselves.

Of all the disingenuous arguments we have heard against healthcare reform or even health insurance reform, then, the idea it may be unconstitutional to mandate coverage for everyone, the most insidious is this idea that our "freedom" is somehow compromised by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The politicians and their cronies who oppose this provision of the bill on the grounds they claim are unconstitutional should have the balls and integrity to put forth an alternative bill that would accomplish what will happen by repealing the mandatory coverage provision while totally dismissing universal healthcare.

That is: anyone who wishes to opt out of insurance coverage should have the absolute freedom to do so. But in the name of pure-bred free-market capitalism they will either have to pay the full cost of any medical care they may need or forego medical care altogether. No exceptions.

If universal healthcare is unconstitutional by one means or another then NO taxpayer-supported healthcare should be available to anyone. That would, of course, extend to old people, the indigent and government employees - even military personnel and veterans, judges and all elected officials. Especially members of Congress. Our taxes pay their salaries and benefits, why should we be paying for their healthcare coverage as well as our own?

Fly that up your pseudo-patriotic flag pole and see who salutes!

LGBT Business Owner of the Year: Ed Hermance / Giovanni's Room

2010-06-30T20:40:00.009-04:00

Just last week I heard about a this competition for LGBT Business Owner of the Year and figured it would be a no-brainer to make the case for my friend, Ed Hermance, owner of Giovanni's Room: the world's oldest LGBTQ bookstore. The deadline was today, June 30th and I'm happy to say we got it together and mailed in this afternoon. What follows is the text I wrote on Ed's behalf, followed by his bio and the two required letters of support from prominent supporters of the nomination. Keep your fingers crossed!

Philadelphia’s Giovanni’s Room is arguably the most successful LGBT bookstore in existence. Founded in the wake of the Stonewall Rebellion, when American communities seemed to be sprouting new Gay and Feminist bookstores by the week, Giovanni’s Room continues to thrive in 2010 as the country’s longest standing retail business serving the out & proud LGBT Community at its bricks-and-mortar bookshop and worldwide through www.queerbooks.com. Owner Ed Hermance acquired the business in 1976 in partnership with Arleen Olshan and has been sole proprietor since 1986.

Giovanni’s Room has doubled in size three times over its original 1973 storefront location. Today the business completely occupies a connecting pair of 2- & 3-storey buildings in the heart of Philadelphia’s “Gayborhood.” With shelves holding more than 7,000 books and a database of over 48,000 LGBT titles, Giovanni's Room stocks literally thousands more LGBT titles than the biggest of the general interest mega-bookstores.

While other prominent LGBT bookstores have sadly closed up shop in recent years, Giovanni’s Room continues to grow in significance: an enduring retail enterprise based on an increasingly rare LGBT-focused business model. The basic paradigm underlying this store’s operations is informed by the same spirit that compelled the formation and management of all gay and feminist bookstores that came to be in the late 1960s/early ‘70s. That basic, high-profile, purpose-driven, community-focused independent bookstore prototype was, in fact, the first business model ever adopted for common use by any number of LGBT-identified retail businesses.

Rather than maximizing profits, however, the largely intuitive business plan that still drives Giovanni’s Room is notably predicated on creating markets, which was not an option but a necessity in the 1970s. Few people had even dreamed of marketing to a self-identified LGBT consumer base. In the sense of an “arena where an identifiable group of buyers & sellers consciously seek contact with each other for the purpose of openly exchanging goods and services,” an LGBT market simply did not exist ‘above ground.’ There were no legitimate classes or categories of business operating by, for and in the common interest of Out LGBT people: no self-identified LGBT businesspeople and certainly no official associations of Out LGBT professionals anywhere.

In very real ways, the Out & Proud commercial markets and LGBT professional entities we now take for granted are rooted in the now-anachronistic gay and feminist bookstore movement, the best of which is represented today in the still-going concern known as Giovanni’s Room. If only by its own standards the store’s success can be measured not merely in its longevity or profitability, but more so in the effective role it has played in the very creation and legitimization of today’s lucrative LGBT markets. Consider history…

Giovanni’s Room was among the first commercial enterprises that dared give voice in the marketplace to “the love that dare not speak its name.” When mainstream bookstores, venues, publishers and distributors declined to risk openly promoting talented but little known LGBT “niche” writers to their general interest customers, Giovanni’s Room gave the most deserving among them top-shelf attention. The store promoted their LGBT-themed works through their own critical reviews in the store’s catalogue, through advertising and hosting in-store readings/autograph parties that fueled many a writer’s rise to fame, at times resulting in their ultimate cross-over to a mainstream audience. Many of today’s most successful LGBT writers are quick to acknowledge their debt to Hermance and Giovanni’s Room for assertively marketing their early works.

Older, established writers have also gained new audiences for their work through the leadership efforts of Giovanni’s Room. Authors, editors and publishers of scholarly and scientific works exploring LGBTQ topics; political, religious and self-help books, including those dealing with coming out, relationship and family issues; journals, periodicals, entertainment and news magazines; performing artists and filmmakers: all these and still others owe the management and customers of stalwart LGBT bookstores like Giovanni’s Room a debt of gratitude for creating the markets that made and sustain their careers.

Hermance’s former business partner, Arleen Olshan notes that

“the bookstore also specializes in feminist books and books relevant to youth - young children as well as tweens and teens. In addition, one of the aims of the store has been to be a comprehensive collection of material that has been helpful to scholars and students - we are mentioned in many doctoral dissertations.”

Giovanni’s Room was also a leader in the 1970s and 80s efforts to expand LGBT markets globally by way of its international wholesale business. Always a strong proponent of free speech and expression, Giovanni’s Room alone stepped up to help stock the shelves of newly opening LGBT bookstores in Europe, Australia and New Zealand with lesbian and gay materials at a time when American distributers dared not risk challenging archaic and repressive import laws on the books of our country’s supposedly enlightened allies and partners in free-trade.

Those perceived risks were substantiated in several highly publicized seizures of shipments from Giovanni’s Room at ports of entry in England and even in Canada when foreign printed materials of LGBT content were still legally banned. Hermance and his fellow booksellers abroad fought those seizures each time, waging long and costly legal challenges, eventually prevailing in court, sweeping away those international market barriers once and for all. Of all American businesses and people who may have been able to help bring those challenges to censorship around the world, Giovanni’s Room alone showed the courage and commitment to free expression and international exchange when it counted, which helped ensure the foundation of today’s global LGBT markets.

Other challenges Giovanni’s Room faced through the years stemmed from homophobic reactions to the store’s unapologetic, high-profile LGBTQ identity. Fortunately such actions and threats have abated for the most part, but through the 1980s and into the ‘90 they included instances of:
• eviction from the previous rented store space when the building ownership changed hands and its new owners refused to rent to LGBT occupants (before Philadelphia’s Fair Practices Act outlawed such discrimination in 1983);
• violence in the form of anonymous, window-smashing overnight attacks against the store’s building, purchased in 1979 to avert any further homophobic evictions;
• homophobic pickets, organized by local reactionary radio announcers who called on their listeners to come out and demonstrate in front of the store, and;
• verbal threats of violence/anonymous expressions of hatred delivered by phone and mail.

Ironically, success spawned ever-growing challenges to Giovanni’s Room by way of increasingly competitive, sometimes ruthless conditions in the very markets that the store helped to create. The overall LGBT market grew to a level of maturity in the 1990s, becoming not only commercially viable but quite lucrative as well, drawing the interest of large corporations who always put profits first, not that there’s anything wrong with that! Our community institutions however are known to have become the unwitting targets of extreme predatory marketing strategies by mega/chain/discount stores driven by lust for profit achieved through the virtual monopolization of market share.

These retail monsters mercilessly undercut all independent booksellers, destroying most in the process, siphoning away cost-conscious customers with their volume based discounts on front-list titles (a handful of books that comprises their entire LGBT inventories at any given time). Such tactics are impossible for small independents like Giovanni’s Room to match especially in a tightening economy where consumers have less and less available to spend on “nonessential items,” including books.

The recession is widespread, of course: extending also into the global markets that Giovanni’s Room had opened for exchange of LGBT materials. There is more and bitter irony in the fact that the store’s once promising venture into the export business was effectively displaced by the large American and British distributors who moved in on it once the risks of shipping LGBT materials overseas were relieved, thanks, of course, to the hard fought efforts of Giovanni’s Room. Hermance has risen graciously to all these challenges, implementing sometimes-difficult changes in the store’s practices to keep the business viable. But the greatest challenges the store has faced rose just this past year, including an issue with the store’s 130-year-old building façade, found to be unstable by city inspectors: safety mandated immediate demolition of the wall and its reconstruction, raising the need for an infusion of a whopping $50,000 into store coffers in order to pay for it.

The high regard in which the LGBT literary, scholarly and bookselling worlds hold Giovanni’s Room, along with the largely unsung contributions the store has made to the professional world of LGBT business and commerce in general, tell only part of the complex and layered story that is Giovanni’s Room. The store’s support for local LGBT community organizations, activities and events in Philadelphia is duly considered a foregone conclusion: something taken for granted by community activists, organizers, fundraisers, artists and performers. In this respect Giovanni’s Room still fulfills a traditional role that LGBT bookstores had long assumed: that of community center by proxy. LGBT stores had filled many community needs in the days before actual Center facilities came to exist and may still provide services that are beyond the capacity of LGBT Community Centers, which have by now opened in most of our larger urban areas, including Philadelphia. Hermance still permits use of store space after business hours for reading groups and organizing efforts.

Art exhibits, author appearances, readings and book signings, continue to happen there, as do performances and poetry readings including the monthly “Holler!” open mic night. In addition to providing a safe and relaxed atmosphere for patrons to browse the stock, the store has several community bulletin boards and literature racks where flyers, brochures, and other free materials are made available to help LGBT people find resources to serve them in all areas of life, from job-seeking and leisure activities to housing and health care options. Staff members and volunteers are often called upon to provide telephone peer counseling, referrals and informational services equivalent in many ways to a community center’s LGBTQ hotline.

A high-profile LGBT street presence - still rare in most neighborhoods - has become the norm for Giovanni’s Room through their store window displays. Crossing the store's threshold has been an extraordinary symbolic and emotional experience for thousands of LGBT people just coming to terms with their sexual orientation or gender identity. Once inside they invariably find safe space, a welcoming environment and a friendly knowledgeable staff on hand to offer help if needed. In similar fashion the store holds special interest for out-of-town visitors who find a full range of LGBT literature including imported books not likely to be available elsewhere in the United States. Giovanni's Room is the traditional place from which LGBT tourists and foreign visitors begin their visit to Philadelphia. Its “heart-of-the-Gayborhood” location is also centrally located in this historic city: within easy walking distance of the theatre district, major hotels, the finest restaurants, world-class shopping and, of course, the most intriguing sites in the colonial/historic section of the city as well. The store provides city maps, guides, and knowledgeable friendly advice to travelers, free of charge. On occasion, LGBT community activists are known to set up tables outside the store, raising awareness around LGBT civil rights, health and political issues/actions including HIV/AIDS awareness, voter registration and fundraising.

Heshie Zinman, a respected community organizer and fundraiser on HIV/AIDS issues says,

“As well as being an important conduit for LGBT/HIV event promotions and ticket sales Giovanni's Room also provides a critical service to the community by making information about HIV/AIDS Prevention, Treatment and Care available to all those affected by HIV/AIDS.”

Since the tragic passing of beloved former staff member and promising young writer Joseph Beam (ed. In The Life: A Black Gay Anthology) brought home the harsh realities of the epidemic to Giovanni’s Room, everyone closely associated with the store has shared far too many such times of anguish wrought by HIV/AIDS. But times of hope and triumph have been shared in the store as well, fostering a sense of what can only be described as “family,” which remains strong today. In the broader community, too, support for the store was found to still be strong when it was put to the test this year, though customers may have drifted away, taking for granted, perhaps, that the store would always be there, with or without their patronage. Unfortunately, circumstances beyond the store’s control, including a steady decline in the number of periodicals in print, have meant a conspicuous loss in the most dependable revenue generators the store had.

Yet, as word got out that the future of Giovanni’s Room may be in jeopardy if $50,000 is not found this year, an impromptu team of friends, including former store owners, employees and volunteers, began to meet with Hermance on their own time to devise strategies for raising that formidable sum, while also raising awareness -- reminding the world of the special place the store holds in our community, our history and our lives.

As one of the last original Out Gay leaders still in business Ed has devoted over 40 years his life to opening doors and laying foundations for the LGBTQ business community through his groundbreaking efforts with Giovanni’s Room. Since first becoming involved with the store Ed has worked full-time alongside employees and volunteers, sharing in the operation and benefits of the store. We who love him proudly nominate Ed Hermance as Business Owner of the Year – an honor appropriate in 2010 of all years.

For having reached the age in life when retirement may be an attractive option and with printed books threatening to become virtually obsolete, Hermance’s days as a bookstore owner may be numbered, much to our dismay. Ed is frank in his feeling that,

“the LGBTQ community created the store to meet their needs, which are changing all the time, as are the products that Giovanni's Room can offer. The shrinkage of available products, including the uncertain future of printed books makes the future of the store uncertain.”

If the store does not survive much longer he pledges to “return its assets to the community through the Delaware Valley Legacy Fund (a local LGBT foundation).” But the ad hoc volunteer fundraising group is by no means resigned to that eventuality. The group includes some who had risen to the task before, devoting time, talent and muscle to the painstaking creation of an enduring and beautiful space to house ‘our’ store over 30 years ago. Through our recent and ongoing efforts we have been able to pay down the wall reconstruction bill by more than $42,000 so far. That amount has been raised in donations to the Wall Fund, made by individuals primarily in gifts ranging from $5 to $50.

A $5,000 grant will be awarded to the winner of this year's competition for Business Owner of the Year. If Ed wins it he will, of course, apply it entirely to the Wall Fund, helping to complete the fundraising campaign to cover the store’s reconstruction expense.

Biographical Statement: Ed Hermance
Born in Houston, Texas, in 1940, Ed Hermance graduated Dartmouth College (’62, BA, philosophy) and Indiana University, Bloomington (’65, MA, comparative literature). His teaching credits include Auburn University (Alabama), Indiana State University, and Tuebingen University (Germany) where he taught English at the same time as the future Pope Benedict XVI was also teaching there. Fearing that he might never escape the closet as long as he remained a teacher, Ed abandoned academia and joined a hippie commune in the mountains of Southern Colorado, still a going concern with a long history of distinguished perennial guests, including Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and John Corso.

Ed moved to Philadelphia in 1971 to manage Ecology Food Co-op, a natural foods outlet. There he learned how to run a retail business and to manage a largely volunteer staff. In 1973 he met one of the early owners of Giovanni's Room, who introduced him to the collective behind The Gay Alternative magazine for which he soon became treasurer. Consequently, he was appointed treasurer of another organization that would soon open the doors of Philadelphia’s LGBT Community Center. At a Community Center retreat in 1976, he and fellow board member Arleen Olshan agreed to form a partnership to purchase Giovanni's Room. He has since devoted his life to expanding the store’s services as widely as possible. Ed’s interest in foreign languages and European countries led to close relations with European LGBT bookstores. Supplying books and African-made movies to the embattled LGBT community in Uganda this year continues a long engagement overseas.

Selected Publications List

Colletta, Jen: Community rallies behind Giovanni’s Room Philadelphia Gay News (PGN) 07/30/2009

Iorio, Karen: It All Started With a Letter, Gay and lesbian alums have Ed Hermance ’62 to thank for the spark that led to their own alumni organization, Dartmouth Alumni Magazine (DAM), Nov/Dec 2009

Drake, Scott: Giovanni's Room kicks up fundraising efforts, PGN 10/08/2009

Cardwell, Thom: What It Looks Like From Here: An Evening with Christopher Rice to Support Giovanni’s Room, QUEERtimes Weekly, vol.3 #35, 01/22/2010

Colletta, Jen: Historical marker sought for bookstore, PGN 02/11/2010 http://epgn.com/view/full_story/6029431/article-Historical-marker-sought-for-bookstore

Schechner, Karen: Community Support for Giovanni's Room Continues, Bookselling this Week (American Booksellers Association) 06/17/2010

Dunham, Kelli: Our Stores, Our Lives: LGBT Bookstores find a way to survive in hard times, Curve Magazine, Vol 20 #5, June 2010

Letters of Support for Ed Hermance as Business Owner of the Year

Opinion Piece

2010-05-31T13:32:00.014-04:00

I am just so sick of hearing and reading about people’s dumb ass opinions, aren’t you?

I mean, sure, we all have the right to form our own opinions and we are blessed in this country with that wonderful Constitutional right to freedom of speech. But, sorry, I am just totally sick of being constantly bombarded by moronic opinions from every Tom, Dickhead and Mary Jane Smoker with a keyboard and an ax to grind. Obviously, this massive over-saturation of uninformed opinion is wholly attributable to these here interwebs.

It is perhaps an inevitable - but somehow unforeseen - consequence of the Internet’s anarchic rise after bursting out of its roots in the closed electronic communications network - developed for military and espionage purposes - to become the ubiquitous commercial network tool that invades every nook and cranny of our miserable lives today.

Back in the day it took a shitload of motivation for illiterate, ignorant and hateful Americans to bother trying to write (write?!) down their thoughts and share them with the world. Back then it took the chancy act of composing a letter and taking it to a mailbox, having invested the dimes for postage and hoping – just hoping! - that it met the approval editor of your local newspaper and that it will maybe appear in some barely recognizable form (after editing) someday not too long after sending it off. Only then you had to identify yourself and there was still no guarantee that your opinion would ever see the light of day in a public forum. That’s the beauty, wisdom and utility of newspapers: they have editors to try and keep moronic ill-informed crap out of print or make sure it was offset with an opposing and reasonable point of view. And may the goddess bless them for sparing us the tons of crap that they surely have for all these years. That is, before all newspapers went online.

Nowadays, any cockamamie online news story is followed by a string of inane comments that normally range from the vapid or merely idiotic to the downright hateful and threatening -- full of misspellings, dreadful grammar and always, always anonymous. Why anyone with half a brain bothers to read those comments anymore is beyond me.

Now everyone has a Blog (like this one), or at least a Facebook or some other Social Networking site. Christ! Now the morons don’t even have to wait for something to appear in print or on the tubes to evoke a jacked-up outrage in response. The 24 hour hyperbolic newsfeeds stream in from Fox and every other irresponsible ratings whore: individuals as well as those organizations not quite satisfied with having thoroughly polluted our TV and radio airwaves to death with their erratic insane-sounding opinions that stupid people (i.e. the apparent majority of Americans) take seriously as FACT and react to predictably and on cue.

The primary function, role and raison d’etre of the Internet, of course, is as a marketing tool. The Internet would be nowhere nearly as vast and accessible as it is if not for its usefulness and profitability to our corporate overlords in big business. Not only does the World Wide Web provide a still new way of advertising and product delivery through online sales, it is even more useful as a somewhat covert data collection system driving the development, availability and pricing of new and useless products based on what we consumers can be sucked into buying, shopping for or even looking at on our home computers.

Besides the “cookie” functions and other clandestine ways they tap into and steal our personal information we are constantly bombarded by customer surveys that tell us how important our opinion is, inflating our pathetic little egos by pretending to care what we think, which stupid people mistake for caring about who we are. What builds us up more effectively than being told that someone cares who we are? Stupid people are thus led to believe that their identity exists within the opinions they are fed (well, what else do they have?).

“Your opinion counts! Your opinion matters! Never mind the depths of ignorance from which your opinion stems. We want it: we NEED your opinion! It is important to us!”

The political implications of this gross inflation in the assigned value of mass opinion over intelligence are far-reaching and very threatening to humanity’s progress as a civilized species.

Sadly, the exploitation of ignorant opinions in this democracy occurs across the political spectrum, stretching from the extreme right to what exists of a far left wing in America. Politicians, Political Action Committees and grass roots organizers alike pander to the basest instincts of voters, trying to outstrip each other with promises so far overreaching that they cannot possibly live up to the campaign hype. The difference between the way this plays out on the extreme right as compared to the left is that right wing neo-cons and ATBCs are far more willing to push the limits of reason for political purposes by blatantly promoting the supposed value of orthodoxy or conformity, where the left tends to shun those so-called “traditional values” in favor of recognizing the value of non-conformity and the reality of human diversity (I hope).

The annoying right wing backlash we’re witnessing today in the emergence of the Angry Tea-Bagger Cult (ATBC) follows directly from the many neat little manipulative tricks of miscommunication and disinformation that neo-cons have practiced for years and with which they honed their skills before, during and after the rise of the Internet.

Oh yes. The neo-cons were poised and ready to take charge of people’s minds through the internet once it became the sloppy and ubiquitous cyber-pig trough we now know it to be. The real-life “newspeak” you hear today spewing from neo-cons on TV & radio, in elected office and behind the scenes may be traced and attributed to the evil talent embodied in whatever Hollywood PR machine that, half a century ago, turned a B-grade movie actor/leading man to a chimp named Bonzo - and Van Heusen Shirt salesman - Ronald Reagan into an absurd caricature: one still called the “Great Communicator” by stupid and naïve people today. Well, that’s the opinion they decided to swallow, and they have every right to it. But they are dead wrong and I don’t see any reason to go along with it. Reagan was no orator. He was a pre-packaged fake patsy and always a really bad actor, IMHO.

Since Reagan it has always been the first trick and prime directive of all wanna-be neo-cons that they master the art of LABELING and re-PACKAGING. While in office, Reagan’s Orwellian handlers used their power to get people in the fourth estate to use words THEY chose to label and rename all kinds of things, usually branding them in a package slapped with a label opposite in meaning to what their real intent, effect and use would be: e.g., they cleverly re-dubbed a gang of brutal right-wing Nicaraguan terrorists known to be death squads as “Freedom Fighters” (and secretely funded them with profits from illegal drug sales). Reagan’s people also conned all the news media to use the phrase “Peace Keepers” when referring to our arsenal of 300-kiloton nuclear missiles. Each of these supposedly pacifist missiles was twenty times more powerful than the bomb used to bring lasting peace to the Island of Hiroshima during WWII. And who can forget when the Reagan administration repackaged the condiment ketchup as a vegetable for purposes of denying sufficient funds for healthful school lunch programs across the country? The list goes on and on… ad nausea.

A not-so-subtle subtext that runs through all the real-life newspeak we have watched and heard sullying ever more the political discourse in this country is the deliberate elevation of opinion over fact.

Never mind that “Peace Keepers” were built for the sole purpose and intent of raining fiery mass death and utter destruction on our fellow human beings. In the Reagan groupthink opinion those missiles were the deterrent that kept the peace during the Cold War. And never mind that “Freedom Fighters” were shown to be nothing more than a bunch of wild thugs who would kidnap, torture, rape and execute civilians, including children, burning down civilian houses and targeting health care clinics and health care workers for assassination. It was the opinion of Reagan’s handlers that the Contras were on the side of capitalism – our side – against the socialist Sandanistas who had overthrown the dictatorship that had long ruled their country and… Oh, Sorry! I know. Blah blah blah! TMI. Too much information! Historical facts getting all up in our opinion grills! Never mind. We can just call them “Peace Keepers” and “Freedom Fighters.” Let’s just go with the opinion that it was all about freedom vs socialism: bringing up nasty and brutal South American dictatorships and nuclear devastation just causes brain freeze.

See how that works? If you let it…

“Opinion: noun. A belief or judgment that rests on grounds insufficient to produce complete certainty” (Definition #1 at Dictionary.com).

The lack of complete certainty is what is so easy to exploit. It is also the essence of our human condition. We do not really know anything for certain – except most of us believe that we damn well know what our opinions are! The certainty of our opinion, no matter how shaky its base may be, far outweighs the certainty of our knowledge. That’s what makes the opinions of stupid people so ripe for exploitation.

Just look at how certain the so-called “Birthers” are in their opinion that President Obama is not an American citizen. No matter that a verified birth certificate has been produced and that there is not a shred of reason to support their claims, they are absolutely certain in their opinion that Obama was not born in the USA. To paraphrase a common adage, they don’t know what smart is but they definitely know what they like to think.

In the modern era it is “newspeak” from the Reagan era that first elevated opinion over fact as a deliberate political ploy to curry favor with stupid and lazy people in this country – stupid and lazy people who can be nonetheless motivated to vote. After all, a stupid person’s vote is just as valid and valuable as a smart person’s vote. And as Karl Rove will tell you, there is such a huge majority of stubbornly stupid people in this country that any politician would be stupid herself NOT to pander to them as a voting bloc.

That’s why Sarah Palin is so enduring. She appeals to all those stupid people who buy into her professed idea of the “Real America” (though it’s not really her opinion, of course. She’s just whoring for the glamour and glitz of her extended 15 minutes in the spotlight, IMHO).

In the end, power in this democracy is totally based in nothing but numbers: numbers of votes, that is. Votes that can be wrenched out of people by exploiting and manipulating the one thing we ALL have, each and every one: opinions.

It’s quantity, not quality. That was the essence of the architectural plan for which Rove was given due credit, giving the Presidency to Cheney and his sock puppet twice in a row! Pretty simple, really: you don’t try to educate people, don’t befuddle their pathetic little brains with facts, truth, science, or reality. Rather, play on the one thing they definitely have going for them: their OPINIONS!

As the old saying goes, opinions are like assholes. Everyone ‘s got one and everyone thinks that everyone else’s stinks.

Whores of Babylon or Life Imitating Art?

2010-03-06T08:22:00.010-05:00

News out of the Vatican brings the "shocking" expose of a huge male prostitution ring being operated by top aides to the highest holy homophobe, Pope Ratzinger Benedict. The only thing shocking, really, is that it actually made the news. Did anyone actually expect that Ratzinger, the aging unreformed brownshirt, would rely on common Italian pimps to secure his boy sex slaves?

Where do I get these images that come to mind of wild Papal orgies involving sex, blood and torture in splendiferous settings - right under the nose of Michelangelo's magnificent paintings and sculptures, between the Bernini Columns involving Powerful Nazi perverts?

Oh yeah! Right out of the great Pier Paolo Pasolini's final oeuvre, "SALO: 120 Days of Sodom."

Perhaps the best, most accurate review of the "Ratzinger Sex Fantasy Film" comes from the Cinema Snob and is worth a look today...

Philadelphia! Just like I imagined it!

2010-02-25T08:22:00.004-05:00

The thing I love about the city I have grown up in - over the last 31 years - is how here things never change. This nostalgic video from 1955 shows the city and our surrounding neighbors exactly how it all exists today. It's the world that time forgot. Just like Havana, Cuba we don't even have many cars on the street newer than the '56 models in this clip.

Queer Books Save Lives!

2010-02-18T22:13:00.044-05:00

A recent article posted at the website CarnalNation.com is titled “Queer Books Saved My Life.” It is worth a read.

I can totally relate to the idea of queer books saving lives, my own included, as well as many up and coming queers I've known over the 35 years that have passed since I came out. And I think the time has come for us long-term survivors to remember and appreciate the people who have struggled to create the environment that brought queer books and queer authors out of the closet. Let us not forget those brave and determined queer pioneers who began to venture into the commercial book world nearly half a century ago and ultimately drew queer literature into the mainstream market where you may find it today. More or less.

To many of us Queers of a Certain Age it was a sad awakening indeed, the day we realized that the phenomenon of the Queer Bookstore, so important to our queer development, has become an endangered species. A dying breed. Almost anyone who wants to buy a queer book today seems to follow an automatic impulse leading them to log on to Amazon.com or, if they’re feeling adventurous, to seek out a Borders Bookstore in some nearby mall. Do they even know how the modern queer book market that everyone takes for granted owes its very existence to an all-but forgotten network of local lesbian-and-gay-focused shops that began to open then in cities across the US and, in fact, around the world?

Is it just me or does anyone else think it's important to preserve the memories of those heady days when it seemed that wonderful new queer bookstores were springing up in every city you'd visit? Queer bookstores were dependable spots to find all the information you'd need to get your bearings in any new locale. This was long before the rise of the mega-chains and their hostile takeover of most storefront book selling and before Amazon.com came along to sack what remained of the market originally created by those now mostly bygone independent booksellers. In those days, kids, only a smidgen of the mainstream bookstores would dare risk carrying the few lesbian and gay titles that came into print before 1973. And few queer book buyers would have even thought to look to the mainstream stores for what they wanted: there were no sections in straight bookstores designated for queer titles. Most positive queer books of the time only came to be by way of self-publishing or in very limited print runs put out by the random independent small press in search of their niche market. The big publishing houses were often tinged with homophobia and, in any case, could not be convinced that there was any real money in queer books.

Into this virginal, but surprisingly fertile field stepped a few bold lesbians and gay publishers with a passion if not a mission. They came looking for themselves as much as to try and fill a vacuum in the market. They risked everything to take chances on a new generation of emerging authors who had begun to create contemporary queer genres – chances the big publishing houses dared not take. As yet unknown and untested, the potential profit in these authors and genres would only be noticed by the big publishing houses after a return on investment was proven through a sound track record of sales. The only place those sales were happening was out of the storefront bookstores that gay people had opened in gay neighborhoods of most major cities. These early shops included Oscar Wild Bookshop in New York, Glad Day Books in both Boston and Toronto, and Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia.

“The gay bookstore movement began in 1967, two years before Stonewall, when Craig Rodwell opened the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York City. By the late '60s and '70s people were opening gay bookstores in other cities at a time when censorship laws were being repealed.  ’After Stonewall, gay bookstores began opening up in different places across the country, and I think that interestingly, gay bookstores grew up at the same time that the phenomenon of the adult bookstores came into being’ says Michael Bronski, an occasional contributor to Bay Windows who is an author, journalist, and scholar of LGBT studies. Around the same time women's bookstores began to spring up around the country, and lesbians began gravitating towards these stores, particularly since they were often underserved by the predominantly male-oriented gay bookstores. Bronski says all of these stores became hubs of different branches of the LGBT community as de facto community centers and as cruising areas, sometimes both at the same time.”
-- From a 2005 article by Tom Jackson @ gaybookblog.net.

Today, Glad Day Bookshop in Toronto, the first such Canadian store, is the longest surviving lesbian and gay bookstore worldwide. A critique in a Toronto city guide says of Glad Day, it is “a pain to find and no fun to browse… (quite cramped), but it does have an astonishing range of queer titles.” This description could have been applied to nearly every queer store at one time, even before there were enough books to fill more than one wall of shelves. Small, cramped spaces were the rule, not the exception, as real estate affordability has always been an issue. Profits from retail book sales, even in the best of times, always limited the status of queer bookselling to that of a labor of love, a de facto not-for-profit enterprise.

Back in time and on US soil, Giovanni’s Room opened shop in a typically cramped South Street storefront in Philadelphia, when rents were still low enough to make a go of it there. It was 1973, almost twenty years after the first appearance of the novel Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, perhaps the most prominent author of the 1950s to deal openly with the subject of homosexuality from a personal perspective. No less typical of books at the time with its bleak portrayal of gay life (Giovanni, a murderer, sits awaiting the guillotine throughout the story) but for once, gay men were presented as complex characters with some room for sympathy.

By 1979 Giovanni’s Room, the book store, had moved to another small, first floor space on Spruce Street, in closer proximity to the gay bar area, though not yet beyond the reach of homophobia. In their wisdom the storeowners would soon decide to take advantage of Philadelphia’s relatively inexpensive real estate market of the time. They signed a mortgage that year on a charming corner-property, a century-old shop in a nice part of town that some would eventually refer to as the “Gayborhood.” This gave the store a permanent home that could not be pulled out from under them for reasons of anti-LGBT discrimination. This happy outcome followed a hateful eviction from their rented space after the Spruce Street property changed hands. Philadelphia landlords were free then to exercise blatant homophobia by overtly refusing to extend a lease if they objected to the renters’ (or customers’) sexual orientation – a practice that was outlawed in the City soon after (1982). For whatever reasons, queer bookstores in other locales facing similar situations did not follow the lead of Giovanni’s Room. No other storeowners chose to invest in property ownership as a hedge against further disruption of business, no doubt due to the commitments required of their time and money. By one (unverified) count I heard recently, there now exist only six queer bookstores in North America.

“By the mid-'80s the market for independent bookstores as a whole began to take a downturn. [Former gay bookstore owner, John] Mitzel says one of the greatest difficulties faced by bookstores has been the shrinking availability of affordable real estate. [Boston’s] Glad Day closed down, despite strong sales, when the owners of its Copley Square location decided to transform the location into luxury condominiums. When Mitzel was looking for space to open up Calamus [Books], he was told that no one would rent to him in the Back Bay or South End.” -- Ibid.

An aspect of Giovanni’s Room that may speak of something else unique to Philadelphia is an undeniable sense of commitment to the store shown time and time again by the local LGBT community. When the store purchased its new building an army of volunteers came forward to invest hundreds of hours and quality effort into lovingly renovating the space. Scores of volunteers have devoted time to staffing the store on a regular schedule, some continuing to do so over decades of time without compensation. Like all the other queer bookstores who have suffered in the failing economy Giovanni’s Room has been forced to make steep cutbacks in levels of paid staffing, hours of operation, and certain store amenities. But the Philadelphia LGBT Community and our allies have clearly shown that we are far from ready to lose this beloved landmark. We have rallied once again to keep our Giovanni’s Room from fading into obscurity as so many others have. We will not let it fall victim to the times, a bad economy or - as almost happened last year – to the forces of gravity. You may have heard the story.

The local customer base - hit hard as anyone by the bad economy - has thinned considerably, with many presumably won over by the deep discounts that internet-based services offer through aggressive online marketing. How can you blame anyone for counting pennies, trying to save money? But when word got out that the store was facing extremely tough times due to an overwhelmingly expensive but necessary rebuilding of the façade/supporting wall, the community snapped into action once again. Customers may not have been drawn back to the store in massive numbers yet, but over six months time another virtual army of volunteers and contributors have rallied to help plan and participate in an on-going series of fundraising events to benefit the store. Author appearances, readings, dinners with the likes of Edmund White and Christopher Rice, a street fair and a raffle have all been part of the soon-to-be successful effort to reach the more than $50,000 goal, which is the amount needed to pay the construction bills.

Giovanni’s Room’s affable owner, who everyone knows as Ed, is naturally very encouraged by the community’s response and by the support he’s received from customers and authors from near and far. A number of customers who have never even seen the store have pitched in from their homes as far away as Alaska and Hawaii. They learned of Giovanni’s Room’s problem through the store’s website, www.queerbooks.com. Yes, the store has an online presence and books can be ordered through it as easily as they can through Amazon, which continues to undercut all independent booksellers mercilessly with outrageously aggressive advertising. Amazon has volume, volume, volume! But they certainly don’t have the heart of a queer bookstore owner. Nor do they have the queer community’s interest at heart. Nor do they have any interest in anyting about you other than your money.

It is a sad but fascinating exercise to do a Google search for information on Queer or Lesbian and Gay bookstores. What you’ll find are so many websites that contain outdated information about scores of defunct queer stores across the country and lists of links to websites that just don’t lead anywhere anymore. Some of these sites seem to stand as eerie ghosts of queer bookstores past. You quickly learn not to trust their currency and you’ll find more often than not something like “last updated on Sunday, April 20th, 1997” as you can still see at http://www.qrd.org/qrd/www/media/print/bookstores/glbbnets.html.

This particular website stands as a forlorn monument to the golden age of queer bookstores. Words of warning unheeded, pleading, a cry in the desert is frozen there in time as a prophecy fulfilled, much to our detriment...

“Please consider this before you make your next book purchasing decision: Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered bookstores exist in a fragile ecosystem made up of the members of our community who support them with their purchases, the small gay, feminist, and lesbian publishing houses which supply them, the authors who write the books, and the stores themselves. This living web is very fragile and easily disrupted. It could possibly even be destroyed if we let the large "discount" chain stores influence us into "discounting" the efforts of all these people and saving a few cents on the purchase of a book, even the latest Times bestseller, at the expense of our sisters and brothers and friends.

Make no mistake our bookstores are under attack, as are all independent bookstores. The large chains (and there are only a very few) want to control all our book-buying decisions and are deliberately targeting areas where large independent stores have a loyal customer base. You'll pardon me, I'm sure, if I say that I believe feminist, lesbian, and gay stores are under particular assault. A recent issue of Ms. Magazine (May/June, 1995, Volume V, Number 6) had a graphic illustration of this in the form of a photograph of the new Borders Bookstore which "just happened" to open up directly across the street from Sisterhood Bookstore in West Los Angeles, California. Look it up if you haven't seen it. It's scary.

Fight back! If you're browsing in a big chain store and see an interesting title your local store might not carry, jot down the name and author and have your local gay and lesbian bookstore order it for you. They need the business and you need them. Many of these stores, and the publishing houses and authors who depend on them to sell their books, may not be there when you want and need them unless you continue to support them with your purchasing power and with your time.”

RIP Queer Bookstores. You are missed. Long live the surviving stores! Which can only happen with our help, of course. If you're lucky enough to live in a city with one of these gems that has not closed down, please support your local queer bookseller. And when you must buy books online, why not give www.queerbooks.com a look? You may be surprised how good it feels to place an order with one of the last virtual queer bookstores.

People always talk about the weather

2010-02-10T08:49:00.004-05:00

When you're Blizzard-bound there's little else to do, little else to say.

"In summer you wish it were cooler and in winter you wish it were milder. Conditions, they are never in your favor. You can always talk about the weather."

Might as well sing about it. Hit it, Yonderboi.

Corporate What?! You Gotta Be Kidding!

2010-01-23T19:00:00.016-05:00

by Al Falafal

In September 2008 I wrote an essay about “The seismic activity rocking World financial markets” as the inevitable outcome of that garden path down which we had been lured nearly three decades prior. 28 years later after we installed Corporate America's Henchman-in-Chief, Ronald Reagan, as President the ultimate promise of “free market” deregulation had been brought fully to term by the outgoing Bush/Cheney Administration.

I had to be fair, noting that the path Corporate America had us treading was actually blazed much earlier than the Reagan Era. In fact, you can trace the rise of corporate domination of American Society to a 19th Century lawsuit taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court which has often been cited - wrongly, but persuasively - as the basis for corporations right to run amok, free of nearly any governmental authority to control them.

It was the 1886 case of Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad that was purported to be a precedent-setting decision that granted "personhood" to American corporations. Reagan's economic and political voodoo was entirely based on the assumed rights and freedoms that they firmly assert were granted to non-human entities for the first time in history by the Court's ruling in that case.

These rights would include the same Constitutional freedoms of speech and association to which only We The People - living, breathing human citizens - were previously entitled.

On the precedent set by the Santa Clara County case, corporate lawyers argue that the Bill of Rights’ protection of free speech, and of redressing the government extend specifically to that speech and money which all “persons” are free to use to influence political campaigns for representative office. As we know, this precedent was upheld again this week in the devastating ruling handed down in Citizens United v Federal Elections Commission.

But don't we all know by now that that precedent was a total shameless lie? Didn't the Supreme Court know that it's a lie?

The truth is that nowhere in the formal Southern Pacific Railroad decision is the concept of “corporate personhood” mentioned. Not a word. Contrary to generally accepted beliefs and lessons still taught in law school Corporate Law Classes today, and obviously taken as fact by the current Supremes, the Court most certainly did NOT establish corporate personhood in that case or any other - up to this day.

The only place where the concept of “personhood” is referenced in that 1886 decision in a court record "headnote" attached to the case. A “headnote” has no precedential status whatsoever. It is far less relevant, binding or persuasive than a judicial dissent, which is at least penned by a bona fide member of the Court.

Rather than any one of the sitting Justices, It was a hired Court reporter, by the name of J.C. Bancroft Davis, who wrote the headnote for the case of Santa Clara County declaring, on the basis of NOTHING that corporations are henceforth entitled to the privileges of "personhood."

And who was this Davis guy? It just so happens that he was a former railroad executive, clerking for the Court at the time of this ruling! A former RAILROAD EXECUTIVE! See any red flags yet?

Davis’ totally non-authoritative, layman’s case summary begins with this sentence: 'The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteen Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.'"

The current Supremes apparently read no further than the headnote in this ruling, which is to say they did not read the ruling at all. Apparently they only read the part that was totally made up by a person with a huge bias and interest in the case - a former RAILROAD EXECUTIVE!

This persuasive revelation was brought to light most famously by author Thom Hartmann in his 2002 book, Unequal Protection: the Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights. Hartmann, a prolific author and scholar of the history and textual analysis of the United States Constitution points out that any suggestion that corporate personhood was “provided” by the ruling in Santa Clara County is a gross and deadly mistake that has naturally had devastating consequences, the worst of which we may be experiencing today.

It is vitally important to distinguish what a “headnote” is and is not. What it is is a summary description of a Court decision, written into the casebook by a court reporter. It is not in any way part of the Court’s opinion and holds not an ounce of weight as legal precedent - a fundamental lesson learned on the first day in Paralegal Studies 101.

A “headnote” is similar to an editor’s “abstract” in a scientific journal or a research grant proposal or the executive summary in a business text. Because they are not products of the Court itself, however, headnotes carry no inkling of legal authority; they can never establish precedent in law and should have no real bearing on our lives.

To argue that corporate personhood was supposedly established by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1886, Hartmann says, is simply and unequivocally illegitimate.

John Chandler Bancroft Davis, the Court reporter in question, knew exactly what he was doing. He was a graduate of Harvard Law School. And Thom Hartmann knows of what he speaks: 12 books authored by Davis exist mostly as original editions in his personal library. The books reveal Davis’s close alliance with the railroad industry, and they support Hartmann’s implication that Davis injected the personhood statement deliberately, to achieve by deceit what corporations had tried but failed to achieve in litigation before then. It was a brilliant move - install a corporate mole in the US Supreme Court, preferably in a position where he can re-write any legislation that did not favor the industry! But you don't want to over use this advantage. No. It's best to be strategic. Don't do anything that would draw attention but strike decisively when the opportunity presents itself.

Hartmann admits that we cannot determine what was in Davis’ mind on composing the misleading headnote as he left no direct evidence that would implicate him in the distortion. Through the ensuing decades, however, corporate interests have successfully exploited this erroneous interpretation of the record of that ruling as the basis for consideration of “equality” between individual tax-paying persons and U. S. corporations who, coincidentally, are also subject to taxes. Thankfully corporations have never sought to have a right to vote. This concept was still taught as part of the underlying determination of how taxes are levied when I studied tax law at Wharton in the 1990s and in my Corporate Law classes that were part of my Paralegal Studies degree program.

In the last days of the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln wrote to his friend Colonel William F. Elkins, 'We may congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its end. It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood. The best blood of the flower of American youth has been freely offered upon our country's altar that the nation might live. It has indeed been a trying hour for the Republic; but I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.'

'As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless.'

Lincoln's suspicions were prescient. "[Thomas] Jefferson and [James] Madison proposed an 11th Amendment to the Constitution that would 'ban monopolies in commerce,' making it illegal for corporations to own other corporations, banning them from giving money to politicians or trying to influence elections in any way, restricting corporations to a single business purpose, limiting the lifetime of a corporation to something roughly similar to that of productive humans (20 to 40 years back then), and requiring that the first purpose for which all corporations were created be 'to serve the public good.'"

How do you think that worked out? Look around...

Here we are. In the first few weeks of 2010 the fate of our democracy is sealed. Thanks, Surpreme Court. Is this the change we needed? The only thing left is for those huge corporations to bid against each other for absolute control of the government.

If Corporations are persons in this country, would I get the death penalty if I murdered one?

May You Stay Forever Young...

2010-01-12T22:51:00.003-05:00

This movie is surprisingly uplifting - a word I usually despise - but good god, y'all... It's currently playing on PBS - check your local listings. If you think Sinead O'Conner's rendition of "Nothing Compares 2 U" is haunting, here it is sung by a lovely 70-something woman in eulogy for a member of the chorus who died during the filming...

Happy New Year 2010!

2009-12-30T13:41:00.006-05:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Decade in Review - 2009

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

BOYCOTT BALLOTS ON MARRIAGE EQUALITY!

2009-12-23T12:09:00.011-05:00

Opponents of marriage equality for same-sex couples brag about the fact that 31 states have already voted on same-sex marriage at the ballot box, and all 31 states have rejected it.

With New Jersey set to pass Marriage Equality legislation that Gov. Corzine has indicated he would sign during his lame duck time left, we can expect that the right wing nuts in the State will be out collecting signatures to put the issue on a ballot soon enough. If not in New Jersey, it will likely come up on a ballot in DC or somewhere else. When it does, will we continue our losing strategy or try something new, daring and truly meaningful?

Now, we all know that putting civil rights issues up for a vote is intrinsically wrong. We have been through this enough that explaining why it is wrong is just preaching to the choir. So now, if we are serious in our conviction that our civil rights should not, must not and cannot be the subject of a popular vote or referendum, it seems to me that we must be ready to do more than waste our time, money and effort by trying to defeat any such ballot measure next time it comes up.

Wasting time, effort and money is all we do whenever we mount an opposing effort to vote FOR marriage equality (or any other civil rights issue). By going along with an election that is mounted to formally deny our rights, aren't we just playing the anti-gay movement's game? Aren't we playing right into their hands?

In fact, when we participate in a vote on any Civil Rights issue aren't we just buying into a system that we duly hold as invalid?

WE NEED TO STOP PLAYING ALONG WITH THE BIGOTS IN THEIR NEVER-ENDING GAMES THAT ALWAYS END IN THE DENIAL OF OUR RIGHTS.

So the next time any anti-gay group collects enough signatures to put our rights up for a vote in any jurisdiction we should not just let the smug opposition add another humiliating defeat to what they count as 31 straight victories over us.

WE MUST MOUNT A VIGOROUS CAMPAIGN TO TOTALLY BOYCOTT ANY SUCH ELECTION.

We've heard calls for boycotts AFTER ballots were taken in California and Maine. After the election is too late. We should have called for a boycotts OF those elections.

Obviously, it does no good to simply vote Yes or No to support LGBT Civil Rights. It does no good - we will be outnumbered and outmaneuvered every time by the well-funded expert manipulators of public opinion who have a stake in maintaining the status quo: keep the queers in their place!

In the next electoral campaign we should put out the word: "If you support LGBT Rights and Marriage Equality DO NOT VOTE on this ballot measure."

Make the BOYCOTT be the campaign. Publicize the boycott far and wide. Urge EVERYONE among our friends and allies who wish to show their support for our cause NOT to vote one way or the other but to BOYCOTT the election altogether as it is an unfair, inappropriate and insulting action against the LGBT Community to ever put our rights up for a vote.

If a ballot measure wins with such a lopsided majority it simply cannot be seen as valid. Think of how we scoff at those fraudulent elections in foreign countries where the corrupt President wins by 100% of the vote. It's a joke at best: an expose of the absurdity of the electoral process.

Just think of it: in any American election where zero votes are cast for one side of an issue the same would have to hold: the vote would have to be seen for what it is: a cynical vicious attack on the rights of a minority.

ZERO VOTES should be our goal in any such future referendum: ZERO VOTES in opposition to the anti-gay question. We should not dignify the question with any response.

CONSCIOUSLY NOT VOTING SHOWS THAT WE REFUSE TO ADDRESS THE ISSUE BY BALLOT. Voting on Civil Rights issues is absurd.

BOYCOTT ANY BALLOT ISSUE THAT DEALS WITH CIVIL RIGHTS INCLUDING MARRIAGE EQUALITY!!!

BOYCOTT BIGOTRY! It's what we should have been doing all along.

Health Care Reform Nightmare

2009-12-23T07:38:00.006-05:00

It looks like the worst case scenario is actually about to become reality in imminent passing of the much ballyhooed so-called "health care reform" bill brought to you by the National Democratic Party. Of course, this only comes after the Dems totally caved in to the Repugnican Party's demands in order to win the support of the repugnicans hiding out in their own midst. It sure hasn't done anything to win over any out-of-the-closet Repugs.

It's all Business As Usual in the Nation's Capital. Happy Holidays!

Anything with even a remote chance of actually reducing our health care expenses (Medicare buy-in, prescription drug re-importation, even a feebly weak public option) has been systematically stripped out of the Senate Bill on direct ORDERS from the White House, not that corrupt members of Congress needed any serious prodding from that end.

President Obama is out there right now laying it on thick with three primary promotional touts, all of which are such transparent bunko it is astounding that they even need to be debunked.

First, he says the Senate Bill is a good thing because it contains a so-called "bill of rights", and isn't that all we wanted anyway he says, to just curtail a certain laundry list of the most egregious medical insurance industry rip-offs. Second, he talks about how wonderful any bill that provides health care to 30 million new people must be. And third, he argues that the Senate bill must be something great, because he claims the insurance companies are strongly opposed to it.

As to the "bill of rights" spin job, how drop kick stupid do they think we are? Wasn't it just last May that they passed with great fanfare a so-called Credit Card Holder's Bill of Rights. Oh yes,
that's exactly the same deceptive way they framed that one too. Didn't we just fall for this same PR ruse? The worst credit card abuses would be stopped the sell job went. But in just the same way, any provision that would have ensured a real reduction in outrageously usurous credit card interest and charges (like a reasonable cap on interest rates) was rejected.

Instead, credit card companies have played every possible game to raise rates since, and just this week we heard that one of the worst offenders came out with a new card with, get this, an effective interest rate of 80%, all in full compliance with the shiny new bill of rights law. What a mean-spirited, cruel and pathetic trick to play on the American people. Are you starting to get it yet, folks??

The Shinola Stops Here Action Page: http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1024.php

2009: Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid. And DO Something!

2009-12-18T08:38:00.004-05:00

This recap of the events of 2009 is worth spreading far and wide. No comment is really necessary. The lies and lying liars who tell them speak for themselves. And Media Matters puts together a good, though incomplete selection - mostly from Faux News of course...

Orthodox Homophobia

2009-12-07T07:48:00.004-05:00

They tried it in California and in Maine, and now in New Jersey, they're...

"trying to change the name of an institution that has existed for thousands of years: homophobia!"

Same-sex marriage supporters march on statehouse

What are YOUR plans for Black Friday?

2009-11-24T21:57:00.003-05:00

Everybody's asking...

When Black Friday comes I'll stand down by the door And catch the grey men when they Dive from the fourteenth floor
When Black Friday comes
I'll collect everything I'm owed And before my friends find out I'll be on the road
When Black Friday falls you know it's got to be Don't let it fall on me
When Black Friday comes I'll fly down to Muswellbrook Gonna strike all the big red words From my little black book
Gonna do just what I please Gonna wear no socks and shoes With nothing to do but feed All the kangaroos
When Black Friday comes I'll be on that hill You know I will

When Black Friday comes
I'm gonna dig myself a hole
Gonna lay down in it 'til
I satisfy my soul
Gonna let the world pass by me
The Archbishop's gonna sanctify me
And if he don't come across
I'm gonna let it roll
When Black Friday comes
I'm gonna stake my claim
I'll guess I'll change my name

Make the Call -- US OUT of Afghanistan!!!!

2009-11-19T18:18:00.005-05:00

Thanks to our good friends at AFSC.

Action Needed: Your call can stop the government from sending more troops to Afghanistan.

Now is a critical time to make your voice heard.

Call the White House comment line today and say you are opposed to sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. The comment line number is 202-456-1111.  

In the coming week, President Obama will likely be making a decision about the role of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. He has rejected the current proposals for additional troops until there is an exit strategy. We believe this is a good sign, and we need more — a decision not to send more troops to the region and to deescalate the war.

The decision will have a dramatic effect on the future of Afghanistan and the stability of the region. This is the moment when we can have an impact.

If you only take one action for peace this year, please make this phone call to the White House today. Tell them you’d like the administration to put these elements into their Afghanistan plan.

White House comment line: 202-456-1111

No additional troops to Afghanistan.

A timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops and for diplomacy and dialogue with all parties to the conflict, without preconditions.

Badly needed development aid provided, to be coordinated by civilian-led organizations, not the military.

Redirect the more than $44 billion spent yearly on war to supporting real human needs in Afghanistan and at home.

Help President Obama make the best decision on Afghanistan. Please take a moment and make your call today. 

Wage Peace.

LGBT Civil Rights

2009-11-17T20:04:00.005-05:00

It has been very fashionable in the straight white world to be outwardly pro-civil rights for black people no matter how you really feel (I know because I am able to pass among them - yes, it's spooky!). It has become faux fashionable to be tolerant of homosexuals but the idea of civil rights only applies to white people's black friend. Straight white people - and some blacks straights I know - act offended at the very suggestion that our struggle for equality may be equivalent to the black struggle for civil rights - which it is of course. But our experiences are obviously different and so what? As all my fierce black LGBT brothers & sisters realize, it IS all about civil rights. Many differences in our struggles, of course. We homos were never enslaved en masse against our will for several hundred years (except for the black slaves that happened to be gay - yes, there were gay slaves!) and we have had fewer riots. But I can give you one huge similarity and one huge difference.

Similarity: the bible. Fundamentalist Christianity has been used to justify racism and homophobia equally. You know those White supremecists - the KKK? Steeped in Christian racism! Steeped in it! Now the Klan and its influence has been cut down to size, thank god! - still a threat but not like they were at the height of the struggle for black civil rights. The face of homophobia in this country, however, is today the full-blown face of fundamental Christianity. There is nothing else to it.

Difference: I may not be totally accurate but it seems to me that the civil rights struggle for equality among the races was NEVER put to a popular vote. Has it? On any scale? I'd like to know. What I do know is that interracial marriage rights - that have been DEFINED as CIVIL RIGHTS - were not won by popular vote and they have never been subjected to a public referendum. Interracial marriage was legalized once and for all by the Supreme Court Decision in Loving v. Virginia (1967!). White racists (who were and still may be the majority of America) decried the decision but the uproar soon settled down and white racists contented themselves to quietly seething under their breath instead of mobilizing to restore miscegenation laws that were based on their racist biblical values.

Why? because when interracial marriage was legalized the white christian racists were too frightened to do anything about it.

Why is this important? Well, what do you think would have happened if interracial marriage HAD ever been put on the ballot somewhere in the country? Behind the safety of that ballot box curtain white people would have had no problem voting what they believed - voting against what they feared. But then again, blacks were getting so uppity during that time - who knows what kind of wild mayhem would have befallen our already riot-torn cities?

The point is that, out of abject fear, Catholics and fundamentalist christians dropped their opposition to interracial marriage after the Supreme Court settled the dispute. THE CHURCH WAS FORCED TO CHANGE THEIR BELIEFS THAT THEY SAID WERE BASED ON THOUSANDS OF YEARS OF TRADITION - THAT MARRIAGE IS ONLY LEGITIMATE BETWEEN A MAN AND A WOMAN OF THE SAME RACE. After saying over and over that Marriage ALWAYS meant one thing - no mixing of races - suddenly they CHANGED their definition of marriage.

Now the Catholic Church makes another claim: that Marriage has ALWAYS only meant one thing - union of one man and one woman. That it would be "changing the meaning of marriage" if two people of the same sex were recognized as fully equal with their demand that marriage can only be between one man & one woman (at a time).

And now, once again, the Catholic Church claims that GOD HAS DECREED THAT THEY CANNOT and WILL NOT change their beliefs to accommodate the modern world. And since LGBT people are not at all scary to them - they can see that we are basically harmless - they have no reason to fear retribution the way they feared it in their tiny racist minds by inventing images of big black scary bogeymen - rampaging African Americans - who they had spent so long convincing themselves and each other were nothing but savage rapists and murderers.

White racist homophobic christians are not afraid of everyday queers because there are enough of us who look just like them. So they have no problem overstepping their boundaries as religious non-political organizations and spending millions of dollars funding referenda like Prop 8 & Maine's Question 1. They would never have done this after the law between interracial marriage was struck down.

To put the best spin on it - civil rights legislation, based on race has been seen, even by racist white christians, as settled law. No one dares put THOSE Civil Rights questions on a ballot. It would probably NOT be allowed. If they did put the question on the ballot as to whether blacks should be considered equal to whites, the racist white majority in this country would surely have re-legitimized the institution of slavery for blacks by now. Especially in the Southern States.

Did anyone ever suggest that interracial marriage rights be a matter of individual states to decide? I don't think so. But when it comes to OUR CIVIL RIGHTS, it seems all you have to do is get a number of signatures on a petition and then get the Catholic Church and Mormons to pump millions of dollars into a hateful campaign to motivate the hateful ignorant and voila! The majority has spoken - they must be appeased in their ignorance because it has something to do with god. And you don't want to piss god off, you know.

Sarah Palin: The Movie!

2009-11-16T08:08:00.003-05:00

Starting on her whirlwind book tour this week, Sarah Palin has consciously set herself up for a flurry of attacks from the left, right, and center (So go to it folks!). The more she is attacked the more the far far right of the Repugnican Party will rally around her, boosting her credentials as the standard bearer for the lunatic fringe.

Why can't the Republican establishment retire her to a quiet life of moose hunting in the political wilderness? Why has her appeal only increased in the wake of her catastrophic political expeditions? Why won't she listen to, or abide by, conventional political wisdom?

The answer lies beyond the realm of polls and punditry in the political psychology of the movement that animates and, to a great degree, controls, the Republican grassroots -- a uniquely evangelical subculture defined by the personal crises of its believers and their perceived persecution at the hands of cosmopolitan elites.

http://www.alternet.org/story/143967/sarah_palin_rules_the_gop_--_and_she_will_destroy_it/?page=2

Talibangelism

2009-11-08T20:40:00.007-05:00

(Buy this t-shirt at: Radical Rags)

I never heard the word "Talibangelist" before today. I just LOVE it! Very descriptive. This and "Repugnican" get my vote for the most meaningful made up new terms to enter the English vocabulary this year.

I read about talibangelism in someone's response to the latest crop of annoyingly tiresome, stupid and irrelevant religious crap that Facebook homophobes have been posting in response to the vote in Maine to re-criminalize same-sex marriage. Why do we have to keep hearing what fundamentalists (some who strongly deny being bible thumpers) have to say about our right, as same-sex couples, to access the benefits of marriage bestowed by our secular government.

Enough, I say, with giving a shit what anyone thinks was written in any ancient book that may have had some relevance in a totally different reality than what we are dealing with here in the 21st Century.

Like the Taliban and other Militant Muslim groups, Christian fundamentalists in America want to perpetuate the mores of the dark ages - particularly in regard to negative attitudes toward homosexuality - while they twist everything else in their bible to rationalize their desire to indulge in advances of civilization that brought us to the 21st Century.

The concept of democracy, for instance, was completely foreign to the ancient minds responsible for all those stories that make up the bible. Didn't matter if they did not agree with or like the authority of their overlords and monarchs that ruled over them. They did whatever they were told to do and thought what they were told to think. They knew their place. Did not even matter what they experienced or wanted out of life for themselves.

The authors of the bible did not even envision a time when human slavery would be frowned upon, much less when democracy would be the basis of government anywhere on earth.

People who live in this democratically-ruled country today and claim to base their world-view on the bible are therefore nothing more than hypocrites if they do not refrain from participating in our democratic process.

Times have change, baby! And you know the changes have been mostly been for the better. If not, then take your sorry ass out of this modern context altogether. Go back to living without electricity, cars, TV and the freakin internet. Where does your all-encompassing bible give you the permission to indulge such vices?!

If you insist on imposing a medieval mindset - with its strictures against homosexual relationships and many other things that are facts of life in this contemporary world - then YOU HAVE NO RIGHT to enjoy ANY of the modern conveniences and privileges that have developed since the time the last book of your precious little bible was written.

You may be able to impede the progress of an enlightened civilization, but you cannot stop it. We SHALL overcome! Oh yes we will.

You all who have blocked our way for so long will soon be totally irrelevant, just as you were when ruled over by medieval monarchs and patricians who told you what to do, how to think and what to believe.

And you can all just go to hell!

Boys Beware!

2009-11-03T20:30:00.008-05:00

One of the lost 10 minute classics of 1961. Believe it or not, life was not all "Father Knows Best" and "Leave It To Beaver." Thank God there were people like Producer Sid Davis around to warn us of the dangers that lurked in the world of black and white.

As usual, the music in this film is fabulous!

The Amazing Power of the Repugnican Talking Point

2009-10-31T16:04:00.008-04:00

Dithering: a word that had probably never been uttered in the history of television news was suddenly on the lips of every talking head this week.

It is a testament to the awesome power of the Repugnican Smear Machine that they always seem to find the perfect new damning term to use against the Obama Administration to recharge their wild-eyed attacks at the very point where it seems they have exhausted the lexicon of slurs on any particular topic. Their rolling out of their exciting new term for their same old shit is blithely picked up and repeated so often it becomes "conventional wisdom" in the world of "reporting." Had Dick Cheney's speech writers used any regular term like "waver, hesitate, falter" or even "vacillate" there would be little news value in his latest criticism of Obama's mishandling of the Afghanistan occupation.

There is definitely much to criticize in Obama's distressing Afghanistan policy, of course, and he has been getting it hard and heavy from the left since he took office. But the strength of the left's objections and protests is generally only reported as data collected in polls designed to rate the President's popularity on a positive/negative percentage scale. The Left's opposition to Obama's Afghanistan folly is not considered "news" because it is apparently too hard a task for the simple minds who report the news - and the simpler minds who listen to them - to grasp the non-black & white, non-bipolar complexities of the real world.

What is too deep for them to fathom is the nature of that tension which exists uncomfortably between Obama and the political left - who want to support him despite his flaws. It's so much easier to "get it" when a Dick Cheney, Sara Palin or Joe Wilson exposes the high-strung, knee-jerk tension between Obama and the right - which just wants to see him fail at all costs. Because of the way the news industry has been reshaped by Fox News in recent years any criticism of this president and his administration is only considered newsworthy if it totally demonizes them. And they've found that this need not be done only by screeching "You Lie!" on the floor of Congress or making brazenly truth-less statements about death panels in the health care reform bill. Now it only takes the dropping of a single term into a speech, pricking up reporters' ears with a nebulosity of meaning to the average American. The underlying Repugnican strategy for foiling the Democrats has not changed. We're just seeing the phase where they resort to semantic vagaries after the insane things they've tried to assert outright have been thoroughly debunked as boldfaced malicious lies.

So Dick Cheney utters a familiar sounding Smear Machine-manufacture word, "dithering," with its built-in wink-wink connotations of Democratic light-weight feathery flaccidity on issues where Repugnicans have long been portrayed as stronger: warmongering. And though it's a term that has never been used before - and one that has plenty of synonyms in any cheap thesaurus, the Right Wing mouthpieces on Fox "News" and Limbaugh's Daily Spew obligingly repeat it like some nerdy kid who has just add another new word to his vocabulary and strains to use it every time he opens his mouth, often inappropriately.

As pathetic as all this is, of course, it is all the worse that the word is picked up intact, reported and repeated without question, by every news organization that still considers itself legit, even though they take their cues and news straight-up from the mouths of the Repugnican propaganda machine that is Fox.

They're all just a bunch of dithering fools.

Fortunately, we can still count on the calm, measured and reasonable voice of most trusted name in journalism to expose the hypocrisy and lies on all those Fox-ass-kissing news shows: Jon Stewart.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Eff'dghanistan - John Kerry & Dick Cheney

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

A Semi-Public Option?

2009-10-24T20:45:00.009-04:00

It is beginning to look like we will soon have some kind of health care reform in this country afterall, within our lifetimes even!

The rational, wide-ranging kind of change we need, however, is only likely to come in increments, if at all. And depending on what part of the country you live in, may not come for you anytime soon.

Only lately has the idea of allowing states to opt out of the public option been floated with any seriousness. On the surface, it seems to me to be a very intriguing compromise on the most contentious issues involved in the shouting matches that have passed for debate. If this is what it takes to get the blue dog Democrats on board with passing health care reform, along with the weary Repugnicans who are only interested in their political survival, might we really be seeing a light at the end of this long, ridiculous tunnel?

If it works out that a reform bill is put forth with a public option "option-out" for those states whose Senators oppose all reason then maybe we should just go for it and let the cards fall where they may. Chances are that once government-sponsored health insurance is up and running in certain states of the country, there will soon be a clamoring of people in the out-opted states who continue to get ripped off by their insurance companies. I would not be surprised if it will be those same loudmouth crazies who spent last summer disrupting town meetings who will be crying about being left out and demanding that they too be included in the government plan as well.

Afghanistan War: A Human Tragedy

2009-10-07T07:24:00.002-04:00

At one time, Contemporary Art seemed to have the power to wake the world up about atrocities of modern war.

Picasso's Guernica has been called the most famous work of modern art of the 20th Century. Whitechapel Art Gallery in East London, which has a long history of presenting timely, provocative, anti-war visual and performing art, presents an event today - October 7, 2009 - in recognition of the eighth anniversary of the Western Invasion and Occupation of Afghanistan.

Roger Lloyd Pack, National Theatre actor and well-known for playing Trigger in Only Fools and Horses, joins musician Brian Eno, actor Janie Dee, George Galloway MP and other prominent figures, who will be appearing at an event marking the eighth anniversary of the Afghanistan invasion, taking place beneath the tapestry of Picasso’s painting Guernica, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery on Wednesday 7 October from 11am to 12.30pm. All welcome.

AFGHANISTAN: A HUMAN TRAGEDY
EIGHT YEARS ON, TIME TO GO
CULTURAL, MILITARY AND POLITICAL VOICES SPEAK OUT

Sunday Morning with Michael

2009-10-04T09:52:00.001-04:00

While getting myself together to go see the early showing of "Capitalism: A Love Story" this Sunday morning I received the note below in an email from the film's Director. I think it is worth sharing...

For Those of You on Your Way to Church This Morning ...a note from Michael Moore

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

Friends,

I'd like to have a word with those of you who call yourselves Christians (Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Bill Maherists, etc. can read along, too, as much of what I have to say, I'm sure, can be applied to your own spiritual/ethical values).

In my new film I speak for the first time in one of my movies about my own spiritual beliefs. I have always believed that one's religious leanings are deeply personal and should be kept private. After all, we've heard enough yammerin' in the past three decades about how one should "behave," and I have to say I'm pretty burned out on pieties and platitudes considering we are a violent nation who invades other countries and punishes our own for having the audacity to fall on hard times.

I'm also against any proselytizing; I certainly don't want you to join anything I belong to. Also, as a Catholic, I have much to say about the Church as an institution, but I'll leave that for another day (or movie).

Amidst all the Wall Street bad guys and corrupt members of Congress exposed in "Capitalism: A Love Story," I pose a simple question in the movie: "Is capitalism a sin?" I go on to ask, "Would Jesus be a capitalist?" Would he belong to a hedge fund? Would he sell short? Would he approve of a system that has allowed the richest 1% to have more financial wealth than the 95% under them combined?

I have come to believe that there is no getting around the fact that capitalism is opposite everything that Jesus (and Moses and Mohammed and Buddha) taught. All the great religions are clear about one thing: It is evil to take the majority of the pie and leave what's left for everyone to fight over. Jesus said that the rich man would have a very hard time getting into heaven. He told us that we had to be our brother's and sister's keepers and that the riches that did exist were to be divided fairly. He said that if you failed to house the homeless and feed the hungry, you'd have a hard time finding the pin code to the pearly gates.

I guess that's bad news for us Americans. Here's how we define "Blessed Are the Poor": We now have the highest unemployment rate since 1983. There's a foreclosure filing once every 7.5 seconds. 14,000 people every day lose their health insurance.

At the same time, Wall Street bankers ("Blessed Are the Wealthy"?) are amassing more and more loot -- and they do their best to pay little or no income tax (last year Goldman Sachs' tax rate was a mere 1%!). Would Jesus approve of this? If not, why do we let such an evil system continue? It doesn't seem you can call yourself a Capitalist AND a Christian -- because you cannot love your money AND love your neighbor when you are denying your neighbor the ability to see a doctor just so you can have a better bottom line. That's called "immoral" -- and you are committing a sin when you benefit at the expense of others.

When you are in church this morning, please think about this. I am asking you to allow your "better angels" to come forward. And if you are among the millions of Americans who are struggling to make it from week to week, please know that I promise to do what I can to stop this evil -- and I hope you'll join me in not giving up until everyone has a seat at the table.

Thanks for listening. I'm off to Mass in a few hours. I'll be sure to ask the priest if he thinks J.C. deals in derivatives or credit default swaps. I mean, after all, he must've been good at math. How else did he divide up two loaves of bread and five pieces of fish equally amongst 5,000 people? Either he was the first socialist or his disciples were really bad at packing lunch. Or both.

Yours,
Michael Moore

It's the Profits, Stupid! Part deux

2009-09-27T20:13:00.009-04:00

Picking up on whatever misguided ideas I may have had about taking the profits out of health insurance in a previous rant, and wondering what the federal government’s role could be in effecting such a thing, the natural thing to do may be to look for precedents and models in our history. Could there be some instance where the feds ever stepped in and authorized the formation of nonprofit consumer-controlled groups to take over the function of out-of-control profit-driven companies, giving us in effect, a “public option?”

I would submit that there is.

On June 26, 1934 U.S. unemployment stood at 22%, the Dust Bowl disaster had ravaged the Central Plains and President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law ”An Act to establish a Federal Credit Union System, to establish a further market for securities of the United States, and to make more available to people of small means credit for provident purposes through a national system of cooperative credit, thereby helping to stabilize the credit structure of the United States.”

For anyone seriously worried about what a public option in health insurance might do to our cherished capitalist system, please note that the rise of credit unions in this country did not cause the banking system to collapse and did not lead us right down that slippery slope to socialism. In fact, the credit union movement has quietly flourished for three quarters of a century and manages to thrive even during the ongoing global economic recession - and no taxpayer dollars have ever been used to bail out a credit union.

Credit Union deposits are backed by the National Credit Union Share Insurance Fund (NCUSIF) much the same way the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) covers bank deposits. Apparently people have forgotten that the FDIC is a federally sponsored independent insurance company that protects profit-driven financial institutions against loss of profits. I’ve heard no one bother to mention this in any debate over a public option in health care. Rather, we are expected to swallow the lie that any federally sponsored insurance company is an unaffordable and ill-advised step on a slippery slope toward socialism! Apparently, this only applies to one that would protect our health rather than protecting corporate profits.

Congress authorized the NCUSIF in 1970 along with the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), the independent management agency created by a law that then-President Richard M. Nixon signed. NCUSIF is a public option insurance resource funded completely by participating credit unions. At the end of 2007 the fund had a balance of $7.3 billion and insured nearly 87 million accounts at 5,036 federal credit unions and 3,065 state-chartered credit unions.

According to www.creditunionsonline.com:

“A credit union is a non-profit, cooperative financial institution owned and operated by its members. Organized to serve and democratically controlled, credit unions provide their members with a safe place to save and borrow at reasonable rates. Credit unions differ from banks and other for-profit financial institutions in that members of a credit union are also owners. The board of directors are elected in a democratic one person-one vote system regardless of the amount of money invested in the credit union. Not for profit, not for charity, but for service is a credit union motto. Since profit is not a motivation, interest rates have been historically favorable for consumers at credit unions compared to banks."

I do not understand why our esteemed leaders in the federal government are not looking into these established and successful ways that they provided a public option in finance as models for providing a public option in health care. The closest they have come is the lame concept of health insurance “coops” that would still just benefit the for-profit insurance companies. Coops would do little more than allow groups of individuals to band together to purchase coverage from existing companies at group rates comparable to employer provided policies.

If We the People are going to be required to carry health insurance, as proposed in the bills now under consideration, it is only right that we should be able to participate in a plan that differs from commercial insurance companies in that we may join together as plan members who are also owners of the insuring institution. Like credit unions, the board of directors for these institutions should be elected in a democratic one person-one vote system regardless of the amount of money invested in the plan.

Not for profit, not for charity, but for service should also be the motto of our public option health insurance system.

It's the Profits, Stupid!

2009-09-22T22:36:00.010-04:00

Let's go back to square one.

Everyone agrees that the problem with health care in this country, If nothing else, is that health care distribution is way too expensive. Of anyone in this country who has no health insurance - or anyone who pays for their own private insurance - does anyone feel that we are all not paying too much for what we get? And what we are denied even after having paid into the insurance pool for however long?

So what is it that makes the current profit-driven health care distribution system so expensive?

To me, it's easy: profits.

Take out the profits and the obscenely high executive salaries and what have you got? An affordable health care distribution system? Why, yes, as a matter of fact. And a very good one at that.

To the folks who scream that a government run insurance program would not only foretell a socialist takeover but would, in the short term, mean unfair competition with the private insurance industry, President Obama made a very good point in his health care speech before Congress. Good, as far as it went.

He compared state-run universities who do a very good job of educating us to private universities that generally acknowledged as doing a better over all. The state-run schools do not threaten private universities in any way. And no one is calling American state colleges part of a scary socialist system.

But Obama's comparison of universities to insurance companies did not go far enough. It has to be noted that private universities exist almost exclusively nonprofit organizations. They do not produce profits, they do not enrich shareholders. They do accumulate endowments. University endowments can grow quite huge but they are not disbursed to shareholders who are already filthy rich. Rather, university endowments are used as investments to sustain those institutions.

This is not what happens with insurance companies. Instead of building endowments they pay out big dividends to their shareholders. And when their coffers run dry they end up blackmailing the government for taxpayer bailouts.

Insurance company executives make outlandishly huge salaries with very generous perques. Professors and top level administrators in nonprofit, private universities make nothing like the ridiculous money that insurance execs make. But they do make very handsome salaries.

Believe me. I have worked for years among many professors and college administrators in one of the top private universities in the country. I have been a relatively low-level administrator earning a totally livable salary myself and with access to the details of the professors' salary & benefits information. If you check the statistics you will find that "college professors," especially in medical schools (who are often physicians as well as professors) are listed among the highest paid professions you'll find.

Public & private universities alike get lots of money from the government in subsidies and research funding - especially medical research. But these institutions are required to be 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations in order to qualify for that government funding.

The current Senate bill voted out of committee requires everyone to carry health insurance. It may provide subsidies from the government - tax money - to pay for insurance for those who cannot afford it. That money will go to insurance companies.

There is nothing in the bill that requires those insurance companies to be nonprofit organizations even though they stand to receive millions in subsidies paid from our taxes. The Senate bill merely creates more customers for profit making companies who will then further enrich their shareholders and executives with our tax money.

If universities and research institutions are required to have 501(c)(3) status in order to qualify for government subsidies and research grants, why should insurance companies not be required to be 501(c)(3) organizations?

This may not necessarily be the silver bullet that cures all our health care woes, but it would be fair and reasonable.

As part of our health care system, private and State Universities are where a great deal of the research, testing and development of new drugs, technologies and treatments is conducted. This is an essential component of health care in this country and is what gives it the real value it has. This is as it should be.

The research that goes on in universities as well as in drug company laboratories is very heavily regulated by the government at both private and state run institutions as well as industry laboratories. It is regulated for the safety of subjects who take part in clinical trials and to make sure everything at this stage is done ethically and soundly according to the highest scientific standards. And so that any drugs, treatments, or devices that come onto the market after this rigorous testing are safe for general use. This is all done largely within an environment where profits are not part of the picture while costs and methodologies are strictly controlled.

Profit-driven drug companies are part of the health care system in this country too. But they are forced to submit to government regulation in the development and pre-market testing of those basic instruments - drugs, devices and all essential elements of medical practice.

Drug companies are, in fact, essential parts of our health care system. They pour large amounts of money into research and development of medical products and are therefore entitled to profit from their efforts. No one believes that medicinal drugs should be allowed to be sold on the open market before undergoing rigorous scientific testing for safety and efficacy. So testing of manufactured drugs is strictly regulated by the government and conducted largely in nonprofit university and other research environments. It is only after those drugs and devices have been put through rigorous testing that the idea of profit comes in.

Drug & device manufacturers do not profit from their efforts until they have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration and only then may be justified in pricing their goods to produce profits for their invention and work. Still, access to the most sensitive and dangerous drugs on the market is controlled by the government through requirements of prescription.

This heavy-handed application of government control is deemed appropriate by necessity. It is the role of the government to exercise this kind of control because no one would trust a profit-driven enterprise with such authority.

Manufacturers' profits are justified in the end because they have actually produced something of value and spent millions of dollars in research and development, complying with a barrage of government regulations. I hear no one arguing that drug companies who bring goods to the market should not profit from them.

But the most outrageous profits in our health care system are made by the middle men, the distributors of health care, insurance companies and their investors, who add nothing of value to the product or system but only step in after all the work is done. They step in and totally queer the system. They do nothing but reap the benefits of production, testing and labor done in industry and in the nonprofit sector, after the fact.

The astounding profits insurance companies make come without their doing anything more than gambling with the money we must pay to them for coverage. It is literally legalized gambling. The games of chance they play and force us into are carried out through strategic decision-making in matters of how health care products and services will be distributed in the market. Their decisions are necessarily based on what it takes to return the highest profit to their shareholders.

Given the fact that healthcare is by no means a luxury, what they do is way way above and beyond unfairness. It is unspeakably immoral.

It is immoral for profit-driven health insurance companies to jump in after all the work is done and take control of how much we have to pay and who will get access to treatment - life and death decisions - while taking huge obscene profits and salaries just because they can.

Insurance companies are only incidentally a part of our health care system. And they are the part that adds nothing of value to health care itself.

The only thing they do is make it expensive.

Under the current system, health insurance companies are nothing more than virtual casinos where we the people are forced to place high stakes bets against the odds that we will not stay healthy. As long as we are playing the game and not losing - that is, not getting sick - we just keep ponying up, because it is the only thing that makes us feel at all secure against the knowledge that without insurance we could lose everything. We pony up hoping for a big payoff when we need it.

But as with all casinos (suspiciously also prime attractions for organized crime) the house always wins.

That is the ultimate function of for-profit insurance companies - to make sure the house always wins.

They assure this by controlling the distribution of health care among the losers and infrequent winners who have no choice but to gamble with them - to pay into their schemes. Because there is no alternative. There is no not-for-profit choice. No government control over access and distribution in the market as there is in every other area of health care right here in America.

For those who fear that a government health care system will take away your freedom of choice, listen up! You have NO CHOICE now but to gamble with your health. Call it public option or socialized medicine if you want. We do not have it. And we are the worse off without it. The only ones who are guaranteed a benefit in the current system are those who run the system and profit from all the money you pay into it. The house always wins.

Is this practice really what the tea baggers are so up in arms about defending?

If Health Insurance companies were mostly nonprofit 501(c)(3) organizations - that is, if profits were taken out of health care distribution - then politics would also be taken out of health care to a very great extent.

Just as Universities and all other 501(c)(3) organizations are barred from participating in electoral politics and lobbying, so would health insurance organizations be barred from trying to influence legislation. This may be the biggest fear of the health insurance industry - the loss of their ability to influence legislators with campaign contributions and the loss of their ability to use propaganda targeted at ignorant angry insecure crowds to motivate them to lean on their elected representatives to keep their profits rolling in.

Americans are right to feel insecure about the health insurance system as it is and how it may be changed without giving us a not-for-profit alternative. If the tea bagging crowd is concerned about the government taking over health care in this country and forcing us into a socialist dictatorship, it's too bad they do not understand that the government already has control of healthcare in this country, as it should. The government controls every area of health care except where it comes into our lives in a meaningful way and is most needed.

And as it has had this kind of control for more than a half a century.

In the screaming matches over the politics of health care there is never any mention of the DHHS: Department of Health and Human Services - a department of the federal government that has been around since Dwight Eisenhower signed it into existence as the Dept. of Education & Welfare in 1953. It became Health & Human Services in 1979 and incorporated the National Institutes of Health beginning in 1979. DHHS includes the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the 27 agencies that make up the National Institutes of Health (NIH) today. After the enormous Department of Defense the DHHS represents the largest government endeavor measured in spending. This dedication of government resources is what gives us the claim to having the best health care system in the world, which we do have -- in every respect except in benefit distributions. And this is due to the lack of a governmental health distribution system.

After more than 50 years of government control of our health care system only now are we being sold the absurd idea that government involvement in health care is a socialist idea.

Clinging to power in the federal government, Repugnicans who defend the status quo profit-driven health care distribution system are the most hypocritical and immoral people in public life today. They may not be totally evil monsters driven by a desire to deprive anyone of access to health care but they are clearly driven by political lust for the power they have lost. They are, then, totally evil monsters because they are intent on reinforcing the ignorance that their tea bagger base brings to the table - by repeating debunked misconceptions, lying and crying about being shut out of the process - only as a calculated strategy to regain power. They are not interested in reforming health care distribution at this time. They only care about making the Democrats fail at the expense of the country.

Based on current and recent experience, there is no reason to trust that any Repugnicans will vote for whatever watered-down bill that comes out of this Administration. Not even the sickeningly weak bill the Senate Committee has produced that gives the profit-driven insurance companies nearly everything they want: most of all millions more unwilling profit-generating customers.

All that Repugnicans want out of the whole flim flam show is to make the Democrats look stupid or weak so that voters will go back to the Repugnican Party next election by default - in order to teach the Democrats a lesson. As usual, the Democrats are feeding right into their stupid game. But the Repugnicans are playing the dirtiest form of power politics at the expense of our lives and well being - and they know it. And it all seems to be working. In the end they are all evil monsters and we are all screwed.

Military Industrial Complexities

2009-09-17T18:32:00.004-04:00

Hard to believe but there actually was a time when the National Republican Party had not completely sold its soul to the extreme Right Wing Repugnicans who own it lock, stock & barrel today. Ah... those were the days! For a little perspective on what we are dealing with today, let's go back now to those heady days of 1961, shall we?

There was this guy named Eisenhower...

Cornholing Teabaggers?

2009-09-12T21:05:00.009-04:00

"The Cajun Boy" Posted an article on Cornholing Today at Deadspin.com

I had almost forgotten about my own cornholing experience -- as pertains to the game.

A few years ago I made a rare visit back to the natural habitat of that clan that spawned me many years before - Northern Kentucky. I was talked into making the long grueling drive south in a regrettable moment of weakness by a relative who had planned a sort of outdoor family reunion. At the time Anthony and I had only been together for a year or so and his curiosity about the environment I had escaped only added to the pressure to make the trip together. My first partner had flown the same coop as I had and we spent the rest of his life sharing an equal disdain for all that crap we left behind. Our trips back "home" were so blessedly rare that we missed more than a whole generation of drama and growing pains inflicted on scores of nieces & nephews we'd never know.

The last trip I made, for all its unmemorable qualities was almost made worth it by my discovery that the whole lot of them were totally into this hot new game they called "Cornhole." I can't tell you how giddy it made me to indulge my inner smartass by throwing out every outrageous but obvious joke and irreverent remark that came to mind whenever the subject came up in conversation. What did they expect? Do they know not what they do when they indulge in cornholing?

When I arrived at my brother's house the night before the party they were cornholing right out on the front lawn! In front of God and everybody! No shame at all. They went right on cornholing all evening, in turns, watching each other as they got their own turn to cornhole. Changing partners! My own drunken siblings trading off their wives as cornhole partners - Lord Almighty I have arrived in the land of Sodomites & GaMorons!

All these things I said loud and clear and they laughed along while the night was young. Of course, my brothers grew annoyed at me later - the way straight guys often feel after getting drunk past their limits or when sobering up from a good cornholing.

When we arrived the next day at the outdoor family reunion, what was the first thing I see? "Oh my god!" I had to cry out, "They've got the children cornholing! Have these people no shame at all? What are they doing to these precious children!"

They laughed at my fake admonishments when I huffily condemned them for making a game out of what I call "love!" Ha ha ha... More than once after sensing some confusion I had to ask the particular relative in front of me, whoever it was, "Do you understand what cornholing is? You know it has another, older definition than your little game here." My favorite response was "Yup, I know it something guys in prison do..." To which I obliged the obvious comeback, "Yeah. If they're lucky!"

It was all just too easy. Just like the morons who want to teabag the President, these people have no sense of the irony in their word choices. To them words and phrases are things you find in books and reading leads to socialism so screw it.

I'm sure there was a cornhole tournament somewhere on the DC mall today. It was probably one of the attractions that Ace Cornholer Glenn Beck used to lure the teabaggers there.

Van Jones Resigns

2009-09-07T10:35:00.007-04:00

Van Jones' abrupt resignation this weekend is the most disturbing development in Obama's young administration since the announcement of the President's ill-advised surge of troops in Afghanistan. It stinks of typical Democratic Party back-room deals, throwing one of their most expendable associates under the bus in a bargain for some political leverage with the Repugnicans.

Is this the Democrats' idea of a sacrificial offering to the bloodthirsty Repugnicans to win their votes for a watered-down health care reform bill?

Who even heard of Van Jones before now? What was his crime? Calling the Repugnicans by a name they clearly deserve: Assholes? That's even being polite, if you ask me.

Jones once signed a petition calling for an investigation into possible US government collusion in the 9/11 attacks.

This is reason enough for him to resign? More than that - is this reason enough for Obama to accept his resignation?

Dick Cheney shot a guy in the face and did far worse things we'll never hear about. He survived the entire two terms of Bush. And he is still on a mission of unapologetic disinformation, fear and lie-spreading about Obama. There's even talk of drafting him for a run at the presidency.

An article from AlterNet.org sheds some light on the forces taking credit for the sacking of Jones

A very powerful alliance, designed to motivate various iterations of the grass roots of the right wing, is taking shape, and its players are determined to win by any means necessary -- be they racism, red-baiting, violence or lies. Americans for Prosperity, Grassfire, Freedom Works (the Astroturf group led by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey) and the Murdoch empire -- especially as represented by Glenn Beck -- have teamed up to keep the air dirty, the poor in their place and more people dying every day for lack of health care. But more than anything, they've joined hands to keep the preponderance of the earth's riches in the hands of a very few -- the rest of us be damned. They're determined to die with the most toys, leaving a poisoned and impoverished planet as their legacy.

http://www.alternet.org/story/142481/big_business%27s_hidden_hand_in_the_smear_job_on_van_jones?page=entire

No One Does It Like You

2009-09-02T07:41:00.003-04:00

Department of Eagles' new (official) video directed by Patrick Daughters and Marcel Dzama for the single "No One Does It Like You" premiered at MoMA on September 1, 2009. Deceptively simple imagery/haunting music, recommended by my good friend Judith so you know it is going to be disturbing in the end.

The Tea Baggers Have a Point.

2009-08-17T18:52:00.005-04:00

If we allow the government take over the Health Care System in this country where will that lead?

Next they'll want to control the Military - Our National Security System!

Then they'll want to meddle in the Courts and claim ownership of our whole Legal System!

Local Police and Fire departments will become tools of the government!

Prisons will be run by bureaucrats in Warshington DC!

The Postal Service too!

Look out! Even the Education of our Children will become a state run enterprise!

Oh my God! Think if the government got control of ANY of those things we would be well on our way to being a Godless SOCIALIST country!

It's a slippery slope, people! And it's creeping up on us. Mark my words.

The day will come when the government steps in and takes over control of the ELECTIONS in this democracy!

Thank the Glorious Gods of Capitalism that their true representatives on Earth, our Benevolent Corporate Overlords will NEVER let that happen!

Never!

Greed is Good! Health Care? WHO Cares?

The Gods must be appeased!

Losing Afghanistan

2009-08-16T13:31:00.003-04:00

General Stanley McChrystal, the recently appointed commander
of the US army in Afghanistan, has given an extraordinary
interview to the Wall Street Journal, in which he says America
is losing the war and the military has one year to get
results before public support evaporates.

Read the interview here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124986154654218153.html

Average Americans?

2009-08-06T21:27:00.005-04:00

By tradition, the Congressional Summer Recess, now under way, is a key time when our representatives in Washington have to go home and spend time in States and districts. They often use these breaks in their normal schedules to check in with their constituencies - We the People - providing opportunities to be seen by the average Americans who elected them, and to let us hear from their own mouths what they're up to as our representatives.

This gives us, the people, a rare chance to engage them personally the same way that well-paid professional lobbyists do routinely while they are at work in DC.

One of the most pressing issues that will be on the table when our legislators reconvene is the pending Health Care Reform bill, which you no doubt know already -- unless you've been living under a rock. Democrats in Congress have shown willingness to enact the most radical reform yet in our health care system, though their version is still far from a universal system, otherwise known as "Socialized Medicine" that we really need and deserve. The best idea they have been pressured into including is to provide a "public option." This would presumably allow all Americans the choice of signing on to an employer-provided insurance plan, another group plan with private insurance or to use a health insurance plan paid for out of public funds - a tax supported insurance plan.

The Repugnicans, on the other hand, have reacted to the very idea that our health care system may need fixing with predictable over-the top fake outrage and hyperbole -- but no alternative other than to sustain the untenable and expensive status quo. Obviously, their only concern is to protect the ridiculously high profits that insurance companies reap under the status quo -- those same companies that own what has become the increasingly bizarre Repugnican franchise, lock stock and barrel.

For this summer's recess, in the year that health care reform has a chance of actually passing, the Repubnican syndicate is taking its noisy empty-headed freak show on the road, exploiting cadres of excitable racists, homophobes, religious fanatics and other deviants and malcontents who are fed up with having to endure life with a queer-loving, satan-worshipping, secret muslim/commie, half breed nigger getting so much air time up there on their TV sets. The job these simple minds are given is simply to attract attention by being their rude true selves which is guaranteed to land some of their own pasty white faces and red necks on TV to lend some balance to the dark sinister face of that Obama character who wasn't even born in this country as far as they know. Health care? Who cares? There could be any issue on the table and they'll be there if they might get on TV. Heck, you don't even have to pay a lot of them!

The Repugnicans learned how exploitable these volunteer hotheads can be to their Stop Obama/Fail America campaign during the 2008 presidential campaign when their hot but stupid VP pick, Ellie Mae Clampett, played better with the ignorant hillbilly gang than Gomer Pyle did as the top of their ticket. Not enough to win, thank god, but enough to stop any kind of progress by pissing us all off so much we have no rational choice but to block them out. So all these rude and hateful meat puppets have to do to shut down any discussion about important things is to rudely, loudly disrupt the exchange, no matter what the topic may be.

I am getting so sick and tired of these ugly hateful mobs that I just end up feeling dirty and, moreover, inadequate to the task of thinking up enough invectives with which to denounce them. There is just no way I can think of to talk about them with any kind of respect that humans deserve. All I can think to do is turn to a professional who is skilled in talking about such things with appropriate restraint. Who would that be, you ask?

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News,

If these are "Average Americans" all I can say is how sad it is that the bar has been set so low. And whatever happened to the good old American idea of bettering yourself through competition to become above average?

Now the goddamn idiots at Faux News and that lying sack of excrement, Rush Limbaugh, have the nerve to try and portray supporters of Health Care Reform as the ones who are stirring up trouble! Those Repugnican mouthpieces are decrying the Service Employees International Union as violent thugs after an SEIU member was violently teabagged at a Town Hall meeting yesterday (Aug 6)! See for yourself and then sign the SEIU petition at their website.

World News, and News about the Economy

If you want to know what truth there is behind the charges those nutbags are spouting against the Health Care Reform bill, check out the point-by-point debunking featuree at Salon.com
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/08/06/healthcare/print.html

This October: Take it Back to Washington!

2009-07-23T10:09:00.006-04:00

by Al Falafel

It's been quite some time since we had a good old fashioned National March on Washington for LGBT-Q Rights. Momentum is starting to build for a massive gathering on the Mall in October. Cleve Jones is recognized as the driving force behind this one dubbed "EQUALITY ACROSS AMERICA."

Jones was the originator of the AIDS Memorial Quilt twenty years ago. At its first national appearance the AIDS Quilt literally blanketed more than half the Mall for our last big March in 1988. It was overwhelming then to walk among the thousands of panels, each one created for a person lost to AIDS.

By 1992, for the National March for AIDS Awareness it had grown to be too big to lay out on the Mall and we only got to see part of it.

Now the sad fact is that the quilt could probably drape the moon :(!

It's always been too much for me to get anywhere near without having a total emotional breakdown.

WILL YOU BE THERE? Sign up at the website for news, updates, and developing information. http://equalityacrossamerica.org/

SEE YOU IN OCTOBER!

Lies, Damn Lies, and... Statistics?

2009-07-18T10:13:00.030-04:00

In his Autobiography, Mark Twain famously wrote " There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

This phrase came up recently on BBC Radio's coverage of the American debates on health care reform. BBC commentators often ridicule our overwrought fears in the US of socialized medicine and universal health care, which they take for granted. And feel very protective of. As do most of the industrialized countries in the world. It is hard for most people on the planet to conceive of a situation where free access to health care is not considered a basic right.

And they are not afraid to call it what it is: Socialized Medicine. It seems that the only people on the planet who let any form of the word "socialism" stall needed health care reform efforts are easily manipulated citizens of a country that professes a natural right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

When it comes to health care you can always count on scaring Americans into voting against their own self interest if you frighten them with the "specter of Communism," as Karl Marx called it.

Even Repugnican proponents of the status quo that is our profit-driven, insurance-company-controlled system acknowledge ours as the most expensive health care system in the world. But since high cost to consumers means high profits to corporate shareholders Repugnicans take this as a positive thing! No matter how it is framed, however, the rest of the world sees right through this disingenuous point and laughs at us for allowing shameless Repugnicans to get away with it. They marvel at how ignorant and gullible we Americans are to buy into such baloney, especially when they hear that 40 million of us have no health care coverage at all!

It was in reference to our glaring inadequacy and the often suppressed statistics which embarrassingly point up the inferiority of the US health care system - our relatively high infant mortality rate and short life expectancy - that the BBC commentator made the observation that Repugnicans "have long engaged in lies, damn lies and statistics... but now they don't even bother with the statistics!"

Infant mortality rate - number of deaths/live births per thousand & number of deaths-by-age-5/thousand live births - coupled with average life expectancy is a common sense and widely accepted measure of health care effectiveness. In both cases the US ranks behind all the European countries, including those that provide socialized medicine. We barely outrank Croatia, Malta, Martinique and Poland: our nearest competitors in infant mortality. New Caledonia, Cyprus and Brunei slightly beat us on this measure. That's the company we keep though. And it's no better in the area of life expectancy where we do a little better here than they do in Albania and Kuwait. But one area where we consistently outrank every other country in the world is in health care SPENDING! According to statistics, spending on health care in the US is 53% higher than all other countries! USA! USA! USA! We're number 1!

Speaking of damn liars, the Repugnican ogre we know as Pat Buchanan reared his ugly head again this week and had it neatly handed to him by the wonderfully unflappable Rachel Maddow. On her nightly MSNBC program Maddow graciously provided Buchanan an opportunity to show his true colors, which are, of course, white, whiter and whitest. Never one to back down from any chance to assert his racist ideology, Pat gave a spirited defense of his heart-felt belief in the superiority of "his people" (whites) and their exclusive entitlement to the best of everything that exists. He summed it all up in his statement that "White men wrote the Constitution and it was White men who built this country!"

When it comes to recalling how this country was founded and built, of course, Buchanan ignores certain embarrassing historical facts while selectively affirming others, like all damn liars do. He would undoubtedly agree that those white men of the 18th Century who wrote the Constitution and before it the Declaration of Independence, relied heavily on the then revolutionary principles that came out of Western Philosophy's Age of Enlightenment.

Sounds so nice, doesn't it? Enlightenment!

At that time however, the onset of the Industrial Revolution had not yet hit the North America shores. So through most of the 18th and 19th centuries the bulk of work that it took to build this nation's agriculture-based economy was done primarily by our indispensable reliance on slave labor.

Remember slavery and slave ownership?

Especially in the Southern States where Buchanan, native to Washington DC, has his strongest following today, the indisputable fact is that mostly African slave labor provided the means of production that built this country. It was the introduction of internal combustion machinery and electrification of our farms and cities that made slavery obsolete. American-owned slaves, who comprised less than a tenth of the total Southern population in 1680, grew to a third by 1790. According to Economic History Services: http://eh.net , "Nearly 4 million slaves with a market value of close to $4 billion lived in the U.S. just before the Civil War."

Who did you say built this country, Pat?

,

Old fogies like Buchanan and his Repugnican ilk would have us ignore the historical record of these last couple of centuries if it works against their political agenda. When working their "strict constructionist, original intent" theories of interpreting Constitutional law, they resent outright any mention of this country's and our founders' greatest shame: an accommodation of slavery.

They argue that the War Between the States and the Emancipation of Slaves in the 19th Century negated all that ugliness so why does it ever have to come up again?

Of course, when arguing against such things as women's equality, reproductive rights and especially same-sex marriage they feel it is wholly appropriate and legitimate to rely on intentional misinterpretations of not just centuries but millennia of history to falsely justify continuing ignorance and legal discrimination in the 21st Century.

Rachel Maddow told Buchanan he was "dating" himself by spouting such racist, sexist and homophobic arguments.

She is right, of course. And the same applies to all those crude and despicable Repugnican Senators who had the gall to suggest that Justice Sotomayor is a racist like themselves. They ineloquently twisted her powerful and inspiring words into something vile that supposedly needs to be defended. They demean her obvious wisdom while addressing her, a sitting Federal Judge, with little more than thinly veiled contempt. All of this as the glare of TV lights and cameras captured every malicious crack in their ultimately impotent attempts to quash her All-American aspirations for a seat on what they would preserve as a whites-only bench in the ultimate old boys' club.

Viewers were spared an even uglier spectacle than what could have come during the televised Senate confirmation hearings -- thanks only to the Repugnicans' considerable restraint of their true feelings toward Puerto Ricans and African Americans such as our President who nominated Sotomayor for Supreme Court Justice.

The Repugnican Party is rightfully concerned about alienating what's left of their inexplicable but dwindling voter support among immigrant and minority populations. After being beaten by an honest-to-God black candidate topping the Democratic ticket, Repugnicans have failed to stop the hemorrhaging of their minority membership. Nor have they fooled many minorities by reacting to the outcome of the last election: propping up an unknown and ineffective token, Michael Steel to confuse them (black faces do not all look alike to people who aren't totally racist). And their cynical embrace of that back water blow-up doll named Sarah Palin as a potential party leader on the national level continues to blow up in their faces.

So concerned are they for their survival as a Party that their behind-the-scenes leadership, for the benefit of the viewing audience, obviously enforced a muzzle on their rabid bitches who hold seats on the Judiciary Committee: Lindsey Graham, John Cornyn, Orin Hatch, Jeff Sessions, Charles Grassley, Jon Kyl and Tom Coburn. Each of them a white male, barely able to hide his snarling frustration at being a member of the dominant race that is soon to reach statistical minority status in the United States.

On Rachel Maddow's show Pat Buchanan pathetically decries what he sees as rampant discrimination against white males everywhere. With minority populations growing fast, long suffering white Repugnican men seem to be in practice under Big Daddy Buchanan's tutelage. Is he teaching them how to cry "discrimination!" in preparation for an ever nearer future when they will finally lose their last ostensibly credible claim to privilege and entitlement as part of some majority that no longer exists?

It is correct to say that by their attitudes they date themselves.

It is perhaps more correct to say that they have outlived their usefulness to their party, their country and humanity itself. Isn't it time the Repugnicans, as a national political Party go the way of the Whigs?

What Judge Sotomayor SHOULD have said?

2009-07-15T08:03:00.006-04:00

What Judge Sotomayor now famously said in that speech at the University of California in October, 2001 was this...

"I would hope that a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Given the desperate lengths that Repugnican blowhards have gone to read some evidence of "reverse racism" into this expression of Sotomayor's "hope" (not stated as a belief), we can assume that the remark would have been better received among the GOP if she had just worded it a little differently.

I can imagine that, if she had just put it another way, she may have been nominated earlier by Bush and would have breezed through the confirmation process when the Repugnicans were in charge. We could already have her as Chief Justice on the Court if she had just tweaked her wording to read something like this...

"I would hope that any white male would more often than not reach a better conclusion than the wisest Latina woman whose wretched life experiences could obviously never measure up to those of her white male superiors."

EXPOSED: CORPORATE SABOTAGE OF US HEALTH CARE REFORM EFFORTS

2009-07-11T07:19:00.011-04:00

Wendell Potter recently stepped down as Head of Corporate Communications for Philadelphia based CIGNA Corporation, one of the largest "managed-care" health insurance companies in the world. In that job he served as the top commander in the industry's propaganda war against real health care reform in the US. His charge was to protect and advance the exorbitant profits of his employer and its investors -- at all costs.

Potter now admits to making full use of scare tactics, lies, disinformation and well-funded efforts to discredit any attempt to make the American public aware of the truth behind our corrupt, greed-driven HMO system.

In May he defected from the dark force army of Corporate Health Insurance and joined up with the Center for Media and Democracy where he has assumed the title and role of Senior Fellow on Health Care. Potter has newly committed himself to exposing those "No holds barred/Take no prisoners" tactics he previously employed to keep Americans ignorant and in debt to CIGNA and other profit-gouging companies, no matter what the expense to our health and even our lives.

His courageous turnaround at this moment in history is an act of true patriotism as a heavily-lobbied Congress grapples with reforming the American Health Care system. The industry, on the other hand, only continues to defraud the people. And, by its on-going profiteering and buy-outs of our representatives in Congress, they have played a mostly stealth role in the wrecking of the global economy. They have not yet found a rationale for trying to bilk the government for a bail out like other industries have .

You can follow Potter's blog on CMD's website at http://www.prwatch.org/blog/35267

One of the health industry's major targets in the propaganda war Potter managed was the 2007 documentary "SICKO" and its director Michael Moore. The depths to which CIGNA stooped to discredit Moore and his movie's comparison of our pathetic for-profit health care system to the state-run systems in other countries is downright astounding. This weekend PBS stations across the country are airing an episode of Bill Moyer's Journal where Potter reveals in an interview how his job was to stop the movie from reaching a wide audience (and, more importantly, from having the widespread political impact the industry feared "Sicko" would have).

Potter tells Moyer that "Sicko," in fact, "hit the nail on the head" and told the real truth about how much better people in other countries have it when it comes to their health care.

See the clip below and check your local listings...

See also ABC News Report:Health Insurance Insider: 'They Dump the Sick'
Retired Health Insurance Executive Blows the Whistle on His Former Industry

And, "In the Belly of The Beast: Interview with Wendell Potter" at OpEdNews.com

A Pitch for PDA

2009-07-09T06:50:00.008-04:00

Is there a single progressive-minded person out there who regrets the election of Barack Obama over John McCain?

Ousting right-wing Repugnicans from the White House was THE major victory that progressives of every stripe fought for and achieved as a united and determined force.

Yet it is a maddening reality that the Obama administration has embraced a number of offensive and unacceptable policies--from serious backtracks on civil liberties to massive corporate-friendly bank bailouts to the escalation of war in Afghanistan.

Progressive principles don’t take a holiday when a Democrat is in the Oval Office. In no way do we side those brainless anti-American bigots who "want Obama to fail." But we must continue to work for such core agendas as defense of the Bill of Rights, economic justice, environmental protection, clean elections and guaranteed health care (not merely insurance policies) for all.

And--no matter how many people are opting for silence in the midst of what Martin Luther King Jr. described as “the madness of militarism”--true progressives WILL continue to work for peace.

Among the many organizations that were formed over the course of the bygone regressive Bush/Cheney years, the Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) is one that has effectively fought for progressive principles. They continue to do so without compromise.

PDA does not chase popularity. But it is significant that every year since PDA was born half a decade ago, they have grown stronger nationwide.

Progressive Democrats of America is a grassroots PAC that works both inside the Democratic Party and outside in movements for peace and justice. Our goal in 2009: Expand progressive influence in Congress as we build on our 2008 electoral successes. PDA's advisory board includes seven members of Congress and activist leaders such as Tom Hayden, Medea Benjamin, Thom Hartmann, Jim Hightower, and Lila Garrett.

Some folks seem to believe that integrity requires self-marginalization, perhaps with wooden rhetoric thrown in. Others have become so obsessed with winning that they’ve forgotten the ideals that made political work compelling in the first place.

PDA’s mission isn’t about such false choices. It’s about educating, organizing--and agitating. As PDA board member Jim Hightower observed many years ago: “What’s wrong with being an agitator? In a washer, the agitator gets the dirt out.”

In celebration of their fifth anniversary PDA has set a goal of signing up 500 new supporting partners who will strengthen our common efforts. Their program, "Change Makes Change" provides an easy way to join and help sustain this vital organization. I urge you to consider joining me in this program and help keep our elected leaders' feet to the fire in the face of the right-wing regressive backlash that has only just begun.

For more information about Progressive Democrats of America go to: http://pdamerica.org/index.php

Thanks for all you do.

Independence Day in Alaska

2009-07-04T13:57:00.015-04:00

The citizens of one state have a big extra reason to celebrate Independence Day this weekend.

The announcement of Sarah Palin's abrupt resignation as governor frees Alaskans, at long last, from the embarrassing public perception of them as a pathetic people who think they can see the other side of the world from their bathroom window. Not to mention the much -ballyhooed neo-conservative, ethically-challenged, backward political stranglehold she has held them under.

Congratulations to the good people of our 49th state! Happy Independence Day! A very happy nation celebrates with you!

Obviously, there is much more to Palin's decision to quit all of a sudden than she is letting on about. For any aspiring contender to the Presidency or other political office, this is the stupidest move a sitting governor can make. Especially since her most stinging, sneering criticism of Barack Obama is that he had little prior experience in any executive position. Now she has shown that she cannot even complete a single term in the executive office of the country's least populous state!

If she is doing this to help seal her credentials as some new kind of mavericky politician, she must think Americans have no memory at all and/or are even stupider than she is.

Speculation about what her real motives may be is rampant across the internet and in the mainstream news.

I'm just wondering how long it may be until we learn the name of the person who, all this time, held back the indisputable proof that Palin is not the mother of Bristol's unfortunate little Trig - as she swears to be.

I know. I know! We are not supposed to talk about this. Ever since it first came up during the campaign - with so much credible supporting evidence - the idea is so distasteful on every level I must say I dutifully feel dirty just mentioning it here.

But what else could it be? After all the scandals, gaffs, ethics probes, in-fighting with her own party that thrust her into our consciousness less than a year ago (thanks for nothing, McCain!)... and after her recent desperate grabs for media attention through totally fake outrages directed at the press and at the likes of David Letterman, it seems that it would take a real and irrefutable expose of her deepest shameful secret to get her to give up the national spotlight.

We don't really need to know what her deeply guarded secrets are. Since she has opted to step off the national stage, largely as she says due to how she and her family have been treated in the media, let's hope that the media finally gives her what she wants. Let her fade away now - back into the blessed comfort of obscurity forever.

Speaking of unspeakable scandals - why is the media ignoring the definitive DNA evidence that proves the real father of Michael Jackson's children is none other than Chaz Bono?

I'm just asking...

In Their Boots

2009-07-04T11:16:00.002-04:00

Defending the Indefensible DOMA

2009-06-27T22:16:00.032-04:00

"In recent years, several States have guaranteed gay and lesbian couples the freedom to marry as a basic civil right."

Right off, I feel nauseous reading this opening volley in the current Justice Department's Brief filed in the US District Court Case challenging the so-called "Defense of Marriage Act." It sickens me since I know where this is leading.

This is how you start an argument against same-sex marriage as a basic civil right?

It is the height of cynicism, worthy of Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, or George W. Himself, to assert that the issue at the bottom of all this is no issue at all - and never was.

This business about "several States [having] guaranteed same-sex couples the freedom to marry" sets the disingenuous tone of this argument, which is carried through the entire brief:

"You uppity perverts should just shut the hell up and be grateful that a few backward states have so graciously - but wrongly - granted you the right to offend us 'real' Americans with your existence and to mock our real marriages-made-in-heaven with your godless fake ones!"

Such heartfelt sentiment was to be expected from the Bush Administration. But - appallingly - it seems to have spilled over into the allegedly gay-friendly Obama Justice Department.

It is, in fact, partly the work of one W. Scott Simpson, a Bush holdover (Mormon by coincidence?) who is named as Senior Trial Counsel on page 1 of the brief filed June 11, 2009.

Since that filing just weeks ago, other Repugnicans have used different language to convey the same sentiment and to advance the same political agenda. In Pennsylvania, for instance, State Sen. John Eichelberger (R. Bumphuk County), has introduced a Constitutional Amendment to ban same-sex marriage in the commonwealth. When asked in an NPR interview if the state's only policy toward same-sex couples should be to punish them, Eichelberger relied on his Repugnican talking point cheat sheet to declare, "They're not being punished! WE'RE ALLOWING THEM TO EXIST," damn it!

No big surprise, perhaps, in the land of "man-on-dog" Santorum to hear a Repugnican saying such things out loud. But what the hell is the Obama Administration and a Democratic-controlled Justice Department doing using those same talking points in a case against DOMA? Isn't this is one of the federal benchmarks of institutionalized homophobia that Obama vowed to use the full force of his office to repeal?

Fanning the flames of outrage over Obama's crass betrayal of his LGBT supporters on this key issue was the Administration's quick response to the initial uproar that only began to surround it. Disturbingly, vocal criticism of this action was quelled by deft political manipulation of the media by Obama's White House response team.

Due to the tedious legal language of this motion it took a few days for anybody to digest and convey to the rest of us how truly damaging its implications are to the struggle for LGBT civil rights. A few days was time enough, however, for Obama and his handlers to smack together a headline-grabbing proclamation of some "positive" crumb they could toss out there to distract their fuming LGBT constituency while at the same time not draw too much blow-back from the repugnant right. What they came up with and announced with enthusiastic fanfare is that partners of LGBT federal employees will now be eligible for spousal benefits!

Flash! Boom! Brilliant! Take a bow, Mr. President. A grateful queer nation thanks you for allowing us to exist in your government. And the Repugnicans of 2009, having become inured to our existence on this planet, will raise no fuss since this small gesture is clearly devoid of any meaning or substance and it can just as easily be undone.

The Fed's granting of spousal benefits is not just mimicking what most private sector employers of any size have already been doing for decades. It is actually just little more than a totally empty gesture since it lacks the single most important measure granted by other employers - health insurance coverage! (I don't know what LGBT spouses do get out of the new acknowledgment of their existence - maybe an invitation to the annual employee picnic?)

But the maneuver worked. The media bought it, hook line and stinker! Nary a peep in the press about how the LGBT civil rights movement may be set back by decades if Obama allows the offensive action of his Justice Department to go forward and if it succeeds in supporting the constitutionality of DOMA. And now, if the straight majority catches any word about the LGBT population being at all upset with our liberal President then WE come off looking like a bunch of whiney ingrates!

There is so much wrong with this deeply offensive motion and the politics surrounding it. So much has been written about it already by legal scholars and critics, some of whom are ardent LGBT Obama supporters. If the President does not soon and strongly disavow it (preferably firing Simpson and Co. in the process) then we can only assume that this is where his true sentiments lie. Regardless of the elegant lip service he pays to us when he needs our votes we will have to see him as being no more enlightened than the most repugnant Bush Administration official.

How can we not feel as though we've been made fools of again?

The crass cynicism of the motion does not stop with opening clause, of course. It carries all through the long and twisted brief painting a background scenario of the issues in the dankest tradition of historical revisionism. Reading through the motion you are asked to suspend your disbelief and ignore the turbulent experience that brought us same-sex lovers to this contentious point in our long struggle for equal rights. You are, in effect, asked to swallow the fantastical idea that the State legislatures of this great nation have spent the last decade or so reasonably and civilly considering the idea of encoding same-sex marriage into their laws on a benevolent "experimental" basis.

In this Bizarro World scenario it was not a hard-fought civil rights trench battle - declared a "culture war" on "perversion" by opportunistic Religio-pugnicans in the 1980s - that has actually raged on the public scene for over forty years. We have not been oppressed by ignorance and hatred for centuries, or claim to have ever been victims of mass violence, murder and often driven to suicide. We were never a people forced to deny our deep personal identities and conform impossibly to societal roles enforced by the tyranny of majority opinion. And we are not now forced to accept an inferior legal status steeped in religious tradition and other irrational forms of prejudice.

It is, in fact, only a deep but baseless sense of heterosexual entitlement that continues to deny homosexuals our rights to life, liberty and our pursuit of happiness as American citizens. Homosexual activity was decriminalized in America in 2003 but homosexuals in relationships are still oppressed by the assumed supremacy of those who claim to be purely heterosexual. But this boast is obviously a lie perpetrated even by self-righteous closet cases who enforce it until caught having homosexual relations themselves.

The sense of this brief in support of DOMA is that our benevolent state governments, in their wisdom, voluntarily looked down upon their citizenry and discovered that people were forming "nontraditional" relationships among themselves. The states apparently saw this and wondered how they could help us. Their approach was to be "cautious" so as to preserve the peace of the land by not upsetting those citizens who might not understand. A few states were chosen or volunteered to act as "laboratories" where the novel concept of tolerance would be tested using those poor misguided souls who wanted to "marry" each other (for goodness sakes!) as guinea pigs.

After the opening clause, this is how that concept is introduced in the Justice Department's motion:

"Yet, as same-sex couples in these States have won what they understandably view as a vital personal right of surpassing importance to their happiness and well-being, other States have reaffirmed the traditional understanding of marriage as the union of a man and a woman as husband and wife, an understanding held as a matter of profound moral and religious conviction by many of their citizens."

Since this is a case against the federal government, the Obama Feds are arguing that it should be dismissed on the grounds that the States, in taking on this "experiment in alternate forms of marriage," effectively relieved the federal government of any responsibility for its citizens in regard to marriage. It's the usual Repugnican cop-out, mouthed even by former VP Darth Cheney, that it should be up to the states to decide whether his lesbian daughter can have what he takes for granted as a non-lesbian everywhere across this country (think he really believes that?).

The most infuriating thing about all this is that the Feds did not HAVE to do or say anything concerning this case. Rather than going to the disgusting lengths they did - later using the tired old repugnancy of equating homosexual activity to incest, bestiality and child abuse - they did not need to file a brief at all. The original case, Smelt & Hammer v. USA, is a very weak one. It was never our best chance to defeat DOMA and it could be thrown out of court still on purely technical grounds.

The hearing for Obama's motion for dismissal of this suit is scheduled for August 3, 2009.

It can be withdrawn - and Obama should see to it. Pronto!

Repugnican Healthcare Horror Show!

2009-06-21T18:05:00.002-04:00

Let's pause for a moment to check in on how goes the Repugnican campaign to convince us Americans that healtcare reform would not be good for us...

.

Feel the O U T R A G E ? ! ! ! ! !

2009-06-16T21:11:00.001-04:00

Since last Wednesday, June 10, I have been operating with blinders on, working on a super big deal deadline-driven project that required me to focus! focus! focus! for my day job. For six days I dutifully blocked out all background noise: TV off. No radio or newspaper. Only an occasional glimpse at the fleeting news alerts that popped up in my email, which I noticed when I had to check in to see if any communications had come in from the folks I was working with on this heavy loaded thing. The only time I was able to tear myself away from this task was when I could no longer focus my eyes and found myself stretching my fingers in pain and still hitting the wrong keys on the keyboard. When that happened I would creak away from my desk and plopped down in bed for a few hours rest only to jump back into the fire when I woke up.

You get the picture.

So, now that all that is behind me (for the most part) and I am ready to start catching up on those lost and foggy days, what happens? I find out that, during my work-induced stupor the equivalent of a freakin' nuclear bomb was dropped on this country's LGBT population. It happened last Friday!

How did I miss it? Where were the outraged queers I would expect to hear screaming in the street, their angry cries piercing the air and blasting through my apartment windows?

Our hope is lost! Obama has betrayed us!

His Justice Department mowed LGBT America down last week: kicked us to the curb, burned us to a crisp with the brief they filed in a suit brought against DOMA. A suit they came out on the wrong side of. OUR President, Mr. Hope and Bliss, who had pledged to destroy the hated beast, DOMA, has done worse than turn on us. With no warning or even a simple "by your leave," he has apparently joined forces with those who feed and worship the DOMA dragon that lives for one purpose and one purpose only - to crush us, the American LGBT population.

I can't bring myself to read too much about this disaster as my work is not yet completely done and this just pisses me off so bad that I am already STEAMING way too much about it. I cannot afford this upsetting imposition on my time just yet.

The best thing I could think of doing was to ignore most of the reports that are streaming through the cybersphere and to go right to the source so I could see for myself what it is that has everyone on the net buzzing with righteous outrage. I located a copy of the brief and began to read through it and - god damn it!!! - It's bad. Really really bad. I can't begin to think about how ripping angry I will get when I have the time.

In a couple of days, when I CAN afford to start processing this catastrophe, they are going to hear from me. Oh boy, are they gonna get a letter! Obama first. And then the boneheaded jerks who put their names to this brief - some nobody called Tony West (such a gay name!), who is Assitant Attorney General, and James J. Gilligan, Assistant Director (Little Buddy? Is this a joke?). Their names appear right under "Respectfully submitted" on the official Obama Adminstration brief, viewable at "Obama's Motion to Dismiss Marriage case."

Also taking responsibility for this brief is another big nobody, W. Scott Simpson, (Doh!) Senior Trial Counsel. His email is even listed right on the brief, scott.simpson@usdoj.gov and fax: (202) 676-8470. And phone: (202) 514-3495.

If anyone has the kind of time I don't have right now and if they want to vent their anger over this shit as much as I do, well, it seems like this guy is just asking for it by putting his contact information out there.

Repugnant Party Politics

2009-05-28T06:50:00.027-04:00

The nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for Supreme Court Justice is just one of the latest triggers to set the Repugnican Party trash-talk machine a-sputtering.

(Why is it that a nominee's personal experience, race or gender is only an issue when it is not a straight white male being considered? hmmmmm... Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito would never let their personal backgrounds influence the way they think or how they apply the law. No siree. It's a white thing. Minorities just wouldn't understand.)

Making such a significant decision that will shape the legal and social landscape of this country for years to come is one of the most powerful functions that the victor in any US Presidential campaign gets to perform. So it is perhaps no surprise that the biggest sore losers in the race would be going so totally spastic over Obama's pick, especially coming so soon as it does after the bruising the repugnant GOP took in the recent election.

Of course, you could pick any issue in the news of the day and relate this same observation about this New Repugnican Party: whatever the Obama-led Democrats are doing or proposing is automatically met by vicious knee-jerk opposition from the GOP's designated repugnant mouthpieces. And when it's time for a vote, the remaining elected Repugnicans in Congress, on orders from the home office follow the party line and "Just Say No."

In a democracy, the minority party (or more preferably parties) in opposition to the ruling party can always be expected to clash over differences in policy and ideology. But it is safe to say that no sitting President of any party has ever been so publicly vilified so quickly - starting from day one of this new administration. That Obama has not enjoyed the traditional "honeymoon" as prior Presidents have had with both parties is only undetectable because of the overwhelming support he has earned within his own Party - who, with the progressive independents who helped oust the despised Repugnicans eight months ago, now constitute the majority opinion of Americans.

Though not unexpected, the immediate full-blown obstructionist posture the New Repugnicans have adopted after the 2009 election signals something radically different in American politics from what we have ever seen before.

It is now obvious that their current stance represents no mere difference in vision among members of Congress in different parties and the Executive branch of government which can only be held by one party at a time. It is clearly the substance of a calculated political Master Plan devised by Repugnican Party strategists as a means to keep the extremist voter base emotionally engaged. Having let slip their monopolistic grip on power, they can ill afford to lose the only numerically significant voter base they have: those who can be easily manipulated to vote against their own self-interest simply by exciting their most irrational fears, prejudices, and undeserved feelings of entitlement.

The unconscionable political twist they have added is a provision of deniability to those elected members of Congress who actually have constituencies to whom they can be held accountable. You may have noticed that most Congressional Repugnicans, currently in office, tend not to speak out publicly with anything near the level of vehemence that their unelected mouthpieces do with no inhibition in the least.

In fact, most of the official rhetoric used in responding to the Democratic agenda - the floor speeches in the House and Senate - is empty at best. It is either pointless and bereft of any workable ideas or it consists of blatant regurgitation of the garbage that brought us to this point of desperation (i.e. "blah blah blah... don't tax rich people or corporations... blah blah blah.").

A look through the official Talking Points posted at GOP.gov is revealing in that it relays those points in the restrained way their party's legislators are commanded to address them in their official roles. You will not find there any off-the-wall sound bites like "We want Obama to fail!" But the crafty effect of the Talking Points overall is to frame every issue in baseless projections about the future effects Obama's agenda will have on the US economy if super-rich people have to continue paying taxes.

This provides the required cover for those schmucks who have the job of casting votes as elected Representatives to do so with no further explanation and the potential to say "I told you so" later when some of the measures do not fully achieve the goals set for them. At the same time the language in which they are stated allow the Talking Points to be picked up and run with by the designated mouthpieces at Fox News and elsewhere.

Of course, the Talking Points are primarily intended to have an audience of one: the syndicated Repugnican fathead, Rush Limbaugh, who has proved his seemingly super-unhuman capacity to cast the fearful projections in the most extreme light allowable within the rules of the FCC, which were compromised under the Bush Administration (for just this purpose?).

With few exeptions (the insane Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-MN springs to mind) Congressional Repugnicans are dutifully following the script and sticking to the role assigned to them. That is: to keep their mouths shut other than just saying "nay" (witness the totally partisan House vote on the first economic recovery bill).

As though by long-advanced planning it is now the function of those unbridled Limbaughs, Hannities, Becks and the whole Faux News gang of loudmouth idiots and unelected jerks WHO REPRESENT NO ONE but their commercial sponsors, to do the dirty work of keeping the base engaged until the next election cycle.

Even the token/puppet Repugnican leader, Michael Steele, was forced to bow his head in submission to the Master Plan and retract his critical remarks about the ignorant arrogance of Rush Limbaugh. Failing to bow down to Limbaugh would have thrown a monkey wrench into the plan and no doubt cost the hapless Steele his patronage job.

The unelected backroom Repugnican strategists - including their once-acknowledged evil-genius leader Karl Rove (Bush called him "the Architect") - have even applied a mid-level layer of deniability to their blueprint for rebuilding the Repugnican power structure.

Former office holders like the has-beens Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney are given a special role to play that ostensibly adds a level of credibility to the Repugnican cause since they have not yet signed any lucrative contracts with Fox News or another GOP propaganda organization. Since the Party cannot risk losing any more seats they currently hold, and since the ones filling those seats are only assigned one word to use ("no") these stand-in losers have to make themselves available to spout the party line on talk shows where they are interviewed by the has-beens who have signed up as talk-show "entertainment" hosts.

The Repugnican Mater Plan is a gamble, of course, that is firmly rooted in a confidence in the ignorance of the American masses. While the Democrats in and out of office have to look like they are actually trying to do something to fix the unfathomable mess they stepped into, Congressional Repugnicans just have to stand by and offer nothing but complaints about the partisan nature of the Democrats' actions (the nerve!) and just make sure to just show up and use their one-word vocabulary when the yay or nay vote is taken.

The only other complaint they make is that the President is trying to accomplish too much ("accomplishment" a forbidden word in their vocabulary and the idea of it is totally outside their realm of experience as highly paid "servants of the people").

The "unaffiliated" GOP mouthpieces on radio and TV are doing their part extremely well: conjuring the most extremely damaging, discredited and absurd fears about Obama's "socialist" agenda, among all the other ridiculous lies they make up on the spot. Of course, they are counting on the tried and true Rovian tactic by which the spewing of so much insipid crap, regurgitated as often as possible, creates solid truth in a calculated percentage of the thick ditto-heads of their listeners. This is how the Party will be guaranteed a reliable number of votes in the next election.

The rejected candidates who are assigned those stand-in roles in the game plan also deserve credit for dutifully mouthing and affirming the lies spread by those wired-in players on talk shows and taking the heat for those who still hold their seats in Congress. They have little to lose personally since they have been written off as potential candidates for office in the future, though this fact is contrary to the image they would like for themselves.

The Repugnican strategists are not interested in re-running those losers. Their past failures as politicians make them expendable pawns in the game. They can always find fresh meat heads to fill the roles of political candidates who can be thrust into the national spotlight that will be distracted by the novelty without having to repack all the known baggage of a Sarah Palin, say, or that dorky governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, who they suckered into following Obama's first major address and became an instant laughing stock.

_____________

If you want to keep up with the Repugnican trash-talk sputterings but can't stomach the thought of actually listening to Rush Limbaugh's daily three-hour spew, the good folks at Media Matters for America are providing a real-time digest, dispatched by the hour, every day of the week. You won't believe this fathead's mind-boggling audacity! From what I can tell Limbaugh's role in the Repugnican Master Plan is modeled on that of Japan's Tokyo Rose during WW2.

Spinning The Proposition 8 Decision

2009-05-27T07:54:00.000-04:00

The State Supreme Court Ruling in California legalizing same-sex marriage for those already married - but nobody else - should be proof enough that the left coast referendum process is fundamentally retarded.

This stupidly divisive waste of time and energy - not to mention $$ in this weak economy - ends up in a cop-out decision by the high court, guaranteeing either an ugly re-play of the voter campaign or - best case scenario - setting up a case to be taken by the US Supreme Court.

Though such a case could and should, in one fell swoop, strike down all restrictive state marriage laws in the country , it only comes about because the State Court took the easy way out, tried to have it both ways and just passed off a politically risky decision to somebody else to decide. Why don't they just do their damn jobs and issue a real opinion?

Margaret Cho's reaction is the best I've heard. She said, "I blame Miss California!"

Memorial Day 2009

2009-05-23T21:06:00.014-04:00

This weekend Americans will stop at some point in their White Sale Shopping Frenzy to pay obligatory tribute to our veterans. Our most somber tributes will be reserved for the hundreds of thousands (could it be millions?) of our countrymen and women who died in service, in combat, or after surviving their tours of duty. The memories of their service and their wars are kept alive by veterans who served with them marching in parades every year even as their bodies age, their steps falter, and their numbers dwindle with the passage of time.

By one statistic I heard in the lead up to this 2009 Memorial Day, WWII veterans are now dying at the rate of about a thousand per day. It's sobering by itself but inevitably also makes you flash ahead to that time coming when no one is left from the era of the last "Great War." The time is not too far off when few Vietnam Vets who will still be able to shuffle along in the processions and parades will be pushing their elderly commanding officers in wheelchairs, and those now dying in Iraq and Afghanistan will be honored by their great grandchildren.

How many lives of those born this year will be memorialized on the twentieth and later anniversaries of Memorial Day 2009? Whatever names will be given to the future military actions whose dead will be remembered then, how long will it be before our gestures of gratitude and respect - for those we will have sent to early graves in battles today and yet to come - can be felt with no need to rationalize that gnawing sense of the ultimate futility of waging these wasteful senseless wars?

Remembering our losses, what can we say we have gained in Iraq and Afghanistan, or for that matter, Vietnam?

Kurt Vonnegut was once questioned about his sentiments behind those brilliant semi-biographical fantasies he wrote like Slaughterhouse Five, which included many references to his real-life experiences as a soldier and prisoner of war during the last Great War. He was asked if the recurring critically satirical themes of his novels should be taken as anti-war statements? Surprisingly, he objected to the idea that he may have been constitutionally anti-war.

While Vonnegut acknowledged the absurdity of war he also considered it absurd and useless to be opposed to it as a matter of practicality. To be anti-war would be as pointless as to be opposed to tides, he said.

Maybe he was right. Humans as a group seem to be as capable of avoiding war as we are of stopping the ocean tides. It seems to be a compulsion of our collective nature. Throughout my life - which began not so long after World War II, there have been continual wars on the planet and not one of them has proven necessary, productive or, least of all, by any means "great."

On Memorial Day, we may accept that war is inevitable, but do we think there will ever be another "Great War" to remember?

Is that really something we should be hopeful for?

It would be shameful to say that we yearn for the next "Great War," if only to assuage our conflicted emotions that surface on these morbid holidays each year. But we must be looking forward to just such an eventuality.

We revere our troops and military machinery and we tithe with extreme monetary obligation to the Pentagon on high as though we believe that someday they will deliver our salvation. Only in this context I think that this reverence for our saviors in uniform is what compels the true believers among us to be so faithfully committed to maintaining the false ideal of the military's moral purity.

The desire to hold our troops to standards beyond what is acceptable in civil society seems the only rational basis for rejecting otherwise good and honorable servicemembers who are known to possess the human "flaw" of an inclination toward homosexual gratification. Only it's not rational. It is, in fact, as absurd to be anti-gay as it is to be anti-war. And for the same reason.

As long as people are sexual, we will be homosexual. As long as there is a military, there will be homosexuals in the military. Always have been, always will be.

"There you go - disrespecting the military again. Throwing sex in where it don't belong! Especially on this solemn occasion of Memorial Day! Why do you have to bring up queers on this solemn occasion, boy? The dead don't have sex. It's disrespectful and totally irrelevant!"

Which is, of course, the point.

Statistically, we can surmise that among those who die in service of our country, there are and will be a number of homosexuals. One study conducted by the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network after the 2000 Census, estimated that 2.5% of active military personnel were exclusively homosexual.

It may be safe to apply that seemingly low figure to our heroes and casualties of all past wars as well as those to come. In recent years, especially since "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," had those gay dead troops survived and later been found out, they would have been humiliated, their careers condemned and they would be discharged abruptly and unceremoniously.

As it is, having given the ultimate sacrifice alongside their straight comrades before taking a chance on coming out, they are honored for once without discrimination. By their deaths, the truth of their and honor and sacrifice in equal measure to all our other dead soldiers cannot be denied or abrogated.

Ironically, it is only after they've "given their last full measure of devotion" that the irrelevance of their sexuality may finally be acknowledged.

It is the lot of those gay men and women heroes that survive even the harshest of battlefield conditions to later face the judgement of a cynically ungrateful and disrespectful policy of expulsion on the grounds of "moral inferiority."

All those who died in service to our country are generally memorialized with a reverence accruing to the fallen as a group.

I guess when they're dead it's just up to God to sort them out.

Gay Men & Lesbians in the US Military: Estimated from Census 2000

The US Military. More than National Defense: It's a Job.

2009-05-20T20:49:00.004-04:00

...and some people are still being fired from their jobs with the Military just for being gay.

President Obama pledged to end "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" -- but in slightly more than 100 days as Commander In Chief he has done nothing to prevent 206 more gay military employees from being fired in that same time.

Lt. Col. Victor Fehrenbach is one of those Obama is firing. Fehrenbach is an F-15E aviator in the Air Force and, guess what? Turns out this decorated war hero and seasoned combat veteran who has served with honor for 18 years has apparently been unfit to serve all this time!

Ain't that a kicker?

Lt. Col. Fehrenbach is about to lose his whole career on account of being "heterosexually challenged." It's almost as though not being straight is some kind of disability as far as the military is concerned. But if it were discovered that he lasted so long and achieved so much with an actual disability just now discovered, he would likely be the focus of much praise and appreciation. Maybe even given a tenth medal to add to all those others he earned. Certainly, they would not force him out under a cloud with only two years to go before he can collect the full retirement package the has worked for over these 18 years of service.

The following video is lifted from the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. If any of this makes sense to you and seems at all fair, don't bother going to their site and learning more about the issue and what you can do to help end it. Like President Obama, who has so many other things on his plate right now, you probably don't feel it's a big enough issue to give any time to right now. Not your problem, right? Not right now.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Did I hear the Repugnicans right?

2009-05-20T07:11:00.006-04:00

This morning I am hearing the news about Chris Dodd's Credit Card Reform Legislation which was passed in the Senate yesterday. Under this bill certain predatory practices would be outlawed. In particular, those skyrocketing rates that the Credit Card companies spring on consumers after luring them into their trap with irresistibly low introductory rates will no longer be allowed.

Of course the Repugnicans are against it.

The reporter may have been paraphrasing the official Repugnican talking points on this. She said that their opposition is based in the expectation that such legal limitations would be ineffective since the Credit Card companies will obviously "have to make up the difference somewhere."

The idea is to stop the outrageous rip-off practices of Credit Card companies.

But Repugnicans insist that ripping people off is not only a right of the free market - for Credit Card companies it IS their business. If you try to regulate them by outlawing those surprise spikes in interest rates they will have to make up the difference somewhere...

They'll surely find some other way to rip us off!

The Cost of War

2009-05-15T06:28:00.004-04:00

"Sometimes great presidents make mistakes" - Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass

By a vote of 368-60, the US House of Representatives passed a $96.7 billion bill for military spending and foreign aid efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Nearly the entire Republican delegation supported the measure.

The bill is modeled on President Obama's request for $85 billion in continued support for the Iraq occupation and the war against Taliban forces and Al Queda in Afghanistan. The final House proposal, which now must be reconciled with a Senate version, contains almost $12 billion more than Obama asked for in his budget proposal.

The Senate is expected to approve spending up to $91.3 billion in a bill just voted out of Committee which more in line with Obama's request. It includes $50 million for the Pentagon to begin closing down the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The House calls for no such spending on Gitmo but does come with a resolution that detainees from the prison should not be released on U.S. soil. It does, however, allow for some of the 241 Guantanamo detainees to be moved to the United States to stand trial or serve their sentences.

As both bills were being developed, President Obama made a last minute request that an additional $108 billion be added to his request, earmarked for the International Monetary Fund. This would constitute a US contribution to the expanded $500 billion IMF loan fund designed to assist poor countries struggling through the global economic downturn. As an outcome of last month's summit meeting of the "Group of 20" nations in London, the IMF will issue interest-bearing assets, bringing the immediate taxpayer cost of this loan to about $5 billion for this contribution.

This request was immediately incorporated into the Senate version by Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye of Hawaii.

House Republicans oppose adding the IMF funds to the war-funding measure. But they would include $2.2 billion in other foreign aid to the amount Obama requested. However, the bulk of the $12 billion they would add to Obama's budget would go mostly for new weapons and military equipment such as cargo planes, mine-resistant vehicles, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Stryker armored vehicles.

Even as the US war budget inflates, a growing number of Democrats are expressing skepticism about the increase in spending for military operations in Afghanistan.

Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., Chair of the House Appropriations Committee that produced the legislation, called it "a bill that I have very little confidence in." Still, he said, "I think we have a responsibility to give a new president — who did not get us into this mess — the best possible opportunity to get out of it."

Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., is one of 51 Democrats opposed the expansion of war funds. He remains unimpressed with Obama's plans for Afghanistan. "Sometimes great presidents make mistakes, and sometimes great presidents make even great mistakes. I hope that doesn't happen here," McGovern said.

"As the mission has grown bigger, the policy has grown even more vague."

The Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday voted unanimously in favor of its version of the spending bill. Most of that money, about $73 billion, would go to the Defense Department to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, part of which will pay for the extra 21,000 troops being sent to Afghanistan.

Despite the panel's unanimous endorsement, several Republicans said they will try to amend the bill to strip out the $50 million to be spent on closing Gitmo.

Wanda Sykes on How People in Straight Marriages can be as Happy as Their Gay Married Friends

2009-05-10T19:27:00.008-04:00

May 10, 2009: Wanda Sykes cracked them up at the White House Press Corps Luncheon yesterday, as the opening act for Barack (Yo Mama) Obama's stand up act.

Below is a clip from an earlier performance by Sykes - before she came out as a lesbian last year - where she told it like it is about gay marriage.

Empathy Schmempathy!

2009-05-09T09:47:00.011-04:00

RNC chair denigrates Obama desire for empathy
By Beth Fouhy –

NEW YORK (AP) — Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele has a message for President Barack Obama and his stated goal of replacing Justice David Souter with a judge who brings empathy to the Supreme Court bench: "Empathize right on your behind!"

Sitting in for host Bill Bennett on the "Morning in America" radio show Friday, Steele, a lawyer, said Obama should be searching for a judge who understands the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law.

"Crazy nonsense empathetic! I'll give you empathy. Empathize right on your behind. Craziness!" Steele told a radio audience.

Speaking to reporters last week to announce Souter's retirement, Obama said he would seek a replacement who combines an impeccable legal background with "empathy and understanding" for how the law is applied. -- Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Of course, as Media Matters pointed out about such stupidity spewing from the mouths of many TV & radio neo-cons:

"Blinded by the rest of Obama's statement, they ignored the simple fact that immediately after stating that he saw the "quality of empathy" as "an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes," Obama stated that he would "seek somebody who is dedicated to the rule of law, who honors our constitutional traditions, who respects the integrity of the judicial process and the appropriate limits of the judicial role."

When confronted with the President's actual words, those neo-cons put their fingers in their ears, closed their eyes tight and responded:

"Nah nah nah nah na I can't hear you I can't hear you I can't hear you nah nah nah nah na I can't hear you I can't hear you I can't hear you nah nah nah na I can't hear you I can't hear you I can't hear you..."

So what's all this fuss over the word "empathy" about?

Let's get a definition from Dictionary.com:

em⋅pa⋅thy [em-puh-thee]
noun
1. the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

2. the imaginative ascribing to an object, as a natural object or work of art, feelings or attitudes present in oneself: By means of empathy, a great painting becomes a mirror of the self.

Right there in definition #1 we see the problem. There is something "intellectual" about the word, which automatically places it beyond the realm of a Republican's ability to understand. Intellectualism itself is something that the brainless lot fears and despises.

I don't think that definition #2 is what Obama had in mind -- but the goombah fascists in the GOP are very familiar -- by practice -- with "imaginative ascribing to [someone], feelings or attitudes present in oneself."

It makes sense, right? So if the Republicans are against empathy then they must be in favor of its opposite, right? For those unfamiliar with a dictionary (i.e. Republicans) opposite meanings are known as "antonyms." In the case of "empathy," its antonyms are, "apathy, misunderstanding and unfeelingness."

Yeah. That sounds about right for what the Republicans look for in nominees when they have a position to fill on the Supreme Court.

As always, Jon Stewart and the Daily Show has the best take on it all. At the tail end of his report on the announcement of Justice Souter's retirement comes the best expose of the GOP's anti-empathetic bent anywhere. Take it, Jon...

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

Justice Is Bland

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Economic Crisis

Political Humor

A Dying Breed? Suicidal Elephants!

2009-05-02T18:13:00.035-04:00

Dying Elephant Sculpture

The future of the Republican Party USA just looks brighter and brighter.

Yes indeed.

That is, for those of us who really want them to fail (sorry, they brought it on themselves!), prospects that the GOP will soon succumb to political suicide have never been better.

Just today we get this bit of giddy news from Politico.com:

A conservative faction of the Republican National Committee is urging the GOP to take a harder line against both Democrats and wayward Republicans, drafting a resolution to rename the opposition the “Democrat Socialist Party” and moving to rebuke the three Republican senators who supported the stimulus package.

In an e-mail sent Wednesday to the 168 voting members of the committee, RNC member James Bopp, Jr. accused President Obama of wanting “to restructure American society along socialist ideals.

Yeah, Republicans! All together, now. Join hands with your undisputed leader, Mr. Limbaugh, and take the plunge! Right off that cliff and into oblivian!

J U M P ! ! ! !

Isn't that what you want to say? Aren't we all getting sick and tired of their pathetic whiney death wish? Just do it already!

If you think the GOP does not have a death wish then what the hell are they doing?

Their appeal to average unsuspecting Americans has long been based entirely on manipulating our emotions (fear, mostly) rather than on ideas or actions that might benefit anyone but the super-rich. If they had a will to live you would think that whoever is in charge over there might try to capitalize on the positive feelings that most Americans now say they have about the direction our country is moving in.

How long do they think they can survive by making fools of voters, trying to frighten them out of their contentment with certifiably insane delusions such as the cynical urban legend that the US is being taken over by a gang of socialists?

After 100+ days as Commander-in-Chief, doesn't anyone realize that Obama could have done it by now? If he had a mind to stage such a coup, why would he drag it out?

The venerated GOP saint Ronald Reagan of B-movie fame wowed America with his wistful "City on a Hill" imagery. George H. w. Bush had his "Thousand Points of Light." Neither of these meant diddly-squat, of course, and were basically just silly metaphors meant to cover up and distract from their true intentions. But at least those seminal neo-cons were not so clueless when faced with one lost race after another to just go insanely bombastic, railing and voting against everything the Democratic Party was up to - particularly those things that a majority of people in every poll say they support.

Have the morons running that party today forgotten that they would need to win a majority of votes to stay alive politically? That after a while most voters with half a brain who happen to respond favorably to just some of the things that the Democrats are doing will eventually catch on and resent what the neo-cons are trying to pull?

At some point no rational voter will be able to deny that Republicans are just a bunch of ineffective empty headed nay-sayers. Sooner or later won't most of the few people left loyal to the GOP have to wise up and realize how they are being insulted by party leaders who ask for their votes while telling them how stupid they are if they do not buy into the GOP's rabid opposition to all things Democrat with no coherent ideas of their own?

I would hate to think this is giving Republican loyalists too much credit in the smarts department.

Illustration Credit: Fox News, of course

Even as acknowledged by the GOP, Arlen Specter's defection marks a milestone on the path of their imminent demise. If my home-town Senator did only abandon the Republican Party for self-serving opportunistic reasons, his changing affiliation at this time can only be taken as a sure sign that the GOP ship is sinking fast: the last of the plague-ridden rats are diving off in a desperate grab for survival. Those staying on board have obviously gone out of their minds.

Specter, long known as the most moderate Congressional member of the party that has run out of tolerance for liberals, leftists, or independent thinkers, will become one of the most conservative members of the Democratic Party in the Northern States (Lieberman doesn't count for anything).

But at 71, Arlen is more of an old-school conservative, coming out of a time when some Republicans still had an active brain cell or two that responded to something other than a sense of entitlement, greed and power-lust. Back in the day even Republicans were sometimes known to engage in something more than negative sensationalistic smears of their opponents even after losing major contests to them.

As junior counsel to the Warren Commission, Specter cut his teeth on his invention of the laughably implausible "single bullet theory." And who could forget how grossly lawyer-esque he was - in the worst conceivable sense - when he savagely grilled Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas nomination hearings?

But Arlen somehow managed to get that Commission to accept that people would not question the impossibly magical explanation of JFK's assassination which brought the official inquiry to a tidy end. And, to his disgrace, he managed to discredit Anita Hill so thoroughly as to assure a sexual predator's confirmation as the most ineffective Supreme Court Justice ever (see: The Truth About Arlen Specter).

Specter has always known how to achieve the means to an end, no matter how undesirable or premature that end may be.

That even he could not figure out a way to keep the Republican Party from imploding (and taking with it his chance for political survival) is very telling indeed.

One thing the last of the Republicans still know is that Americans, on the whole, do not like extremist political parties. That is exactly why the dwindling GOP is pouring every last ounce of energy into trying to convince their gullible clinging base that Obama and the Democrats are socialists, communists or even fascists. Far from gaining any ground with this last-ditch tactic, however, it is obviously backfiring on them big time.

As the once-dominant party slumps in numbers and influence, a few goofy loud-mouth extremists are left with nothing to offer but more of the same mindless arrogance and gutter-level politics that dragged this country to the brink of collapse under their rule.

Seriously, what little is left of the GOP as a national political party - its bitter dregs - no longer deserves a place at the table.

But if you don't like everything the Democrats are doing, please remember that we have a number of other minority parties besides the moribund GOP to choose from. And we urgently need to realize that some of them actually do offer viable ideas and agendas that may be serious workable alternatives to what the newly dominant party is putting out there. We The People know that, in addition to extremist parties, Americans also very much dislike the prospect of single-party rule. What most of us still have to learn is that Republicans are not just one among a number of alternatives to the Democrats - they are no longer a viable alternative at all.

Mostly what the other (non-Republican) minority parties lack are those deep pockets and a shadowy funding base that allow political parties to gain strength, membership and votes while also leading, invariably it seems, to political corruption. Witness our current reality where neither of our major parties are immune from the corrupting influence of money and power in any sense.

As the sole remaining political superpower, the Democrats now have to be very careful not to try and take undue advantage of the welcome demise of the Republican Party. We The People, on the other hand, have a responsibility to be more vigilant than ever, keeping the Democrats' feet to the fire while they are acting as the instrument to rid the land of this blight known as the GOP.

Ultimately, however, Obama and the Democrats will disappoint us - already have in a number of ways. As we become disillusioned with them as the ruling party, we as Americans have a responsibility to our country and each other to stay alert to - and support - real alternatives in the political arena, rather than just voting against the Democrats by voting for Republicans out of spite (talk about cutting off your nose!).

For an introduction to the array of alternative political parties see: Guide to American Political Parties at www.politics1.com. Any of the parties listed there are at least as deserving of our support as the Republican Party - which, to me, is on par with the American Nazi Party (regrettably, they too really do exist!).

Ah, Tradition!

2009-04-30T07:48:00.003-04:00

In 1959 Miss Oklahoma, Anita Bryant went on to be named second runner-up in the Miss America Contest.

In 1977, Anita Bryant launched the "Save Our Children" campaign in Dade County Florida after the local government extended legal protections against discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodation to include "sexual orientation," which gave queers of the time a modicum of security in a hostile homophobic environment.

In 2009, the reigning Miss California loses the top spot in the Miss America Contest and immediately launches a campaign to promote homophobia by joining forces with the contemporary movement to "Save Our Straight Marriages" even before she has a chance to enjoy life as a D-list celebrity and orange juice queen like Bryant did.

Carrie Prejean ought to talk to Anita Bryant before letting herself be used by the hateful forces trying to keep same-sex couples from marrying. But then she would have to find the rock of obscurity that Anita crawled under after her marriage was ruined and her lucrative contract with the Florida orange growers association was revoked for her being so obviously retarded.

Miss California: your 15 minutes of fame is up. Please join Ms Bryant and the other high-profile losers who chose to open their damn fool mouths instead of just doing your bimbo best to stand there, pose and give hard-ons to straight men.

What's all the fuss over a little Torture?

2009-04-27T22:41:00.009-04:00

Some people I know - and who should certainly know better - still don't get it.

To this day I continue to hear the opinion that the real problem was the release of those photos from Abu Ghraib that broke the news story, exposing the American torturous treatment of Iraqi detainees. As if it would be better had no one ever found out about how we conduct our invasions of any foreign country because "they" deserve it because "they attacked us."

Do you think I do not want to scream?

That kind of attitude may have been excusable in some quarters in the first days after 9/11 and was bound to survive in those who are predisposed to blind reactionary patriotism that was stoked and exploited by the war-hungry, profiteering forces that had inhabited the Administration after the Bush coup of 2000. But after all we've learned about the rationale for going to war in Iraq - WMDs, ties to Al Queda, yellow cake uranium - all now exposed and accepted for being nothing but a pack of self-serving evil lies - how can anyone separate out the well-known acts of torture from all the other surreal and malicious lies we are still force-fed by the cynics and apologists for the deposed Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rove/Rice/Ascroft/Gonzales cabal?

With the recent release of those torture memos it has come to light that this too - TORTURE of human beings - was just another part of their PR campaign engineered to establish a reason for the invasion of Iraq AFTER it became clear that all their other reasons were nothing but bold face lies.

Surprised?

Apparently, most of America is not.

Since the memos came out all the TV talk still centers on whether waterboarding is torture or whether torture "works" or not. We have become so jaded - so inured to hearing of the depths to which the Bush Administration was willing to dive in order to justify their nefarious war-mongering intentions - that we just gloss over the revelations that torture of detainees in the Iraq War were NEVER ABOUT obtaining useful information that might keep us safe or help defeat our enemies who threaten America.

It was all about justifying the Bush-led invasion of a foreign country on false pretenses and manufactured intelligence that has consistently proven to have been invented in order to rationalize and cover up their high crimes and misdemeanors.

Torture of human beings was plainly carried out by our troops and mercenaries under orders straight from the top of this country's government.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Rice and the whole criminal cabal then lied - and continue to lie - to cover up and distract from the facts that are now indisputably evident from their own official words contained in the de-classified memos. Those memos detail how our troops were used to force detainees to say what the cabal wanted to hear -- what they wanted US to hear whether it contained any truth or not.

Cutting through all the shit, this is the bottom line and perfectly explains why the Bush Administration officially authorized torture in blatant violation of the Geneva Conventions. So perfect that we are compelled to shrug it off with a great big, "duh."

Of course: after none of the other lies would hold any water for very long, torture was all they had left.

It was and is their only hope to find some salable justification of their criminal activities. Since no direct evidence could be found to substantiate their headstrong plunge into the huge Middle East catastrophe, they were "forced" to resort to sadistic torture of Iraqi detainees in order to force them to say something that would help make a case for the US having invaded their country and killed all those people including over 5,000 of our own troops!

Wasn't there once a time -- seems not so long ago -- that when the President and other Administration officials LIED about something an investigation was unquestionably warranted? No matter what the cost, how long it may take, or the eventually futile outcome of such an investigation and prosecution after such allegations were made was done almost by routine.

I seem to remember a few things called "Whitewater," "Filegate," "Travelgate" and "the Monica Lewinsky Affair" on which some $60 billion and up to eight years of hearings, house arrests, and impeachment proceedings were justified by the allegations against a SITTING President for things that never amounted to more than a squirt.

How the hell are we going to let the ex-officeholders get away with their devastating ruinous lies even while Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and their apologists are all over the TV circuit bragging about what they did and laughing in our stupid faces?

How now is there the slightest question about whether there should be an investigation and prosecution of those who authorized torture for purely partisan political reasons and, in the process, sold our entire nation out, ruined our reputation -- not to mention our economy -- and cost millions of human lives and trillions of dollars?

All the chatter about whether torture works, or whether it yielded any useful information (we would definitely know by now if it did) is utterly meaningless and wickedly distracting from this central element AND IT NEEDS TO STOP!

For humanity's sake doesn't this warrant more than a wussy "truth commission?" How can we not demand a very serious investigation of these very serious crimes followed by a serious prosecution of the criminals to the fullest extent of the law -- the International Laws against war crimes?

See the New York Times Op-ed piece at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/opinion/26rich.html?_r=1&em

You HAVE to wonder

2009-04-25T20:33:00.017-04:00

All the media are falling in line with the self-imposed requisite focus on the first 100 days of the Obama Administration -- as though there is some kind of legal or superstitious relevance to that nice round number. Not one of them has the creative or business impulse even to make it a focus on the first 99 days and scoop on the competition.

This can be considered an illustration, if one is needed, of the effects of that media consolidation which happened under the Bush Administration during the lead-up to the Iraq invasion where Bush's billionaire friends in corporate media were rewarded with the profitable ownership of nearly all the news outlets across the country while keeping the voices of dissent to a minimum. But all that is just a digression...

What may be more interesting, as a counter-point to the saturated examination of what has been going on in the new Administration, would be an intelligent analysis of the psychology behind the extreme and irrational opposition to it, the proponents of which have sunk to the level of lame side-show silliness (tea-bagging?). It's a malevolent silliness, of course, which is the only thing that makes it newsworthy.

We can hope it is just the dregs of a 20-year-long charade that most people who once bought into have become fed up with. With people like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove still pushing their delusional viewpoints on the gullible public rather than just shutting up and going away you have to wonder how the failed neo-conservative movement can rationally claim any credibility after their eight-year disastrous regime was - and continues to be - rejected soundly by people with half a brain.

Well, I wonder. I really do. I wonder why people en masse are compelled to glom onto prepackaged political mindsets that often cause them to take action against their own best interests? And I wonder if maybe that's just my point of view.

But, apparently, a lot of other people have been wondering about this too. Some who have the smarts and the luxury of thinking about such things for a living have been doing some structured wondering - otherwise known as research - about this very topic and have come up with some pretty interesting ideas and theories that try to make sense out of the circus going on around us.

Jonathan Haidt is one such person: an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. Haidt has been studying politics and morality for a number of years and written several books and articles on the subject. I recently came across an online video of a lecture he gave to the TED conference several years ago that I feel offers the most gratifying, balanced analysis of the underlying psychology of what we are currently seeing and a starting point from which we may be able to move beyond it.

Haidt has identified five foundational moral impulses relevant to how we live our lives as social beings. They are:

• Harm/care. It is wrong to hurt people; it is good to relieve suffering.

• Fairness/reciprocity. Justice and fairness are good; people have certain rights that need to be upheld in social interactions.

• In-group loyalty. People should be true to their group and be wary of threats from the outside. Allegiance, loyalty and patriotism are virtues; betrayal is bad.

• Authority/respect. People should respect social hierarchy; social order is necessary for human life.

• Purity/sanctity. The body and certain aspects of life are sacred. Cleanliness and health, as well as their derivatives of chastity and piety, are all good. Pollution, contamination and the associated character traits of lust and greed are all bad.

Haidt's research reveals that self-identified liberals feel strongly about the first two dimensions -- preventing harm and ensuring fairness -- but often feel little, or even feel negatively, about the other three. Conservatives, on the other hand, are drawn to loyalty, authority and purity, which liberals tend to think of as backward or outdated. People on the right acknowledge the importance of harm prevention and fairness but not with quite the same energy or passion as those on the left.

Whatever point you find yourself on along the political spectrum you may be fed up with bewilderment over the irrational viewpoints to which you are opposed. It would be well worth 20 minutes of your time to watch the video below. If you are moved, as I was afterward, you may consider signing on to the pledge Haidt has posted at his website to commit yourself to acting on the principles that come out of his analysis: http://www.civilpolitics.org/civpol-pledge.php

I was led to this discovery by Tom Jacobs who has written a revealing article about Jonathan Haidt currently posted at Miller-McCune's website: http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture_society/morals-authority-1099?article

Beware of Big Gay Weather Systems

2009-04-23T07:50:00.002-04:00

A Gaythering Storm from Jane Lynch

What's In YOUR Pocketbook, er... Lady?

2009-04-22T19:48:00.004-04:00

What are the chances you'll ever see a US Bank ad like this one from Argentina?

Torture Judge Must Be Impeached!

2009-04-21T07:08:00.001-04:00

From The Center for Constitutional Rights:

On April 19, 2009, President Obama released four formerly secret torture authorization memos written by the Office of Legal Counsel during the Bush administration. Among other things, these memos justified waterboarding and torture, laying out with chilling detail the methods to be used in torturing CIA prisoners. One of the principal authors of these memos was Jay Bybee, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel and today a federal judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Bybee must be impeached, as a first step in holding those responsible for torture accountable for their actions.

Bybee's memo was written to provide legal cover and attempted justification for torture approved at the highest levels of the Bush administration. It attempts to give a legal veneer to the most brutal of illegal actions, violating U.S. and international law and the U.S. Constitution [The formerly classified Memo is available here: http://ccrjustice.org/files/olc_08012002_bybee.pdf].

Along with justifications for facial “insult” slapping and the use of insects in a confinement box to torture prisoners, Bybee produced a lengthy pseudo-legal justification for the illegal practice of torture through waterboarding: ”Even if one were to parse the statute more finely to treat ‘suffering’ as a distinct concept, the waterboard could not be said to inflict severe suffering. The waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering.”

It is utterly unacceptable for an individual who produced transparent attempts to justify illegality using the framework of a legal memorandum, and who abused his status as a government lawyer to conspire with other high level government officials to violate the law, to sit as a federal judge, hearing and deciding on issues of supreme constitutional import.

Jay Bybee’s actions in crafting the torture memo constitute High Crimes and Misdemeanors by any standard. Such an individual only brings disrepute to the federal bench and shows a flagrant disregard for the very Constitution he is sworn to uphold.

On Sunday, The New York Times called for Bybee’s impeachment in its staff editorial. The Judiciary Committee must urgently hold a hearing to determine if grounds for impeaching Bybee exist and begin the process of holding those responsible for torture accountable.

Now is the time! The torture memo writers must be held accountable. Jay Bybee is unfit to serve as a federal judge. Write to the House Judiciary Committee to call for hearings regarding impeaching Bybee now:

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/383/t/4089/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=27088

Commercialized Gay Marriage

2009-04-20T20:53:00.001-04:00

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

The Colbert Coalition's Anti-Gay Marriage Ad

colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

NASA Name Contest

Iowa, and now Vermont? What's Going On?

2009-04-12T23:28:00.006-04:00

In the 1980s the issue of legalized same-sex marriage as an achievable political goal was not even a blip on anyone's radar. Of course it was the AIDS crisis that took all our energy up at the time: it's hard to think about advancing politically as a community when so many of you are faced with imminent death.

If that sounds at all overly dramatic it just means you are likely too young to have lived through it. That's OK. Many of us did not live through it either, including a sizable number of friends of mine and my partner: himself dead of AIDS in 1992 at the age of 38. Since the two of us were not exactly the conforming type we never fantasized about anything like marriage. We would have never gone that route even if it had been available except and until we were faced with the trauma of death and survivorship as a same-sex couple in America.

As difficult as it would have been had it played out on American soil, our situation was made all the worse for his having died suddenly (in a matter of weeks) while we were an American couple touring the country of Spain. Had our relationship been legally recognized anywhere it would have surly been less complicated to deal with the Spanish officials, the American consulate and the international issues surrounding his sudden collapse and death. Even after 17 years together I was pretty much a non-entity to all of them all and had to beg and kick and scream, humiliating myself in order to exercise my family rights which would have been assumed had we been legalized.

It was not so long ago that the focus of the LGBT community seemed to be divided between a desperate activism in the cause of basic survival and a much more common attitude of assimilationist denial and/or regression into "down-low" sexual attitudes and practices that are just barely less guilt-ridden that life in the closet. In 1992, with the AIDS crisis still raging, the big gay issue grabbing the attention of the general public and inflaming right-wing outrage was Gays in the Military. Even fewer of us really cared about than we did about the impossibly far-off issue of legalized marriage.

What a difference a decade and a half can make.

After years of frustrating defeats and political setbacks on issues that were never even on our agenda until 2003, and after the crushing disappointment of Proposition 8 just six months ago, it may suddenly seem like things are happening too fast and too much in our favor to be real. In just one remarkable week in 2009 the formerly solid, ages-old walls of prejudice and ignorance did more than crumble, They were blown to smithereens in two states on opposite ends of the American spectrum!

Wherever you stand on the issue of marriage, the decisions in Iowa and Vermont that struck down the bans on same-sex marriage may be the most important legal rulings for us as LGBT Americans since the Lawrence v. Texas Supreme Court decision that struck down all remaining US sodomy laws in 2003.

The Iowa decision is important because it is the first time that marriage rights have been upheld on the basis of an Equal Protection provision in a state's Constitution which portends a potential future argument before the US Supreme Court and could do the same for marriage restrictions as Lawrence did for anti-sodomy laws. If that happens it will be a momentous recognition of the equality of LGBT citizens that reaches far beyond the narrow right to marry. The Iowa decision was also the first time that a state Supreme Court has ruled unanimously in our favor.

The Vermont decision is important, of course, because it is the first time that a state ban on same-sex marriage was struck down by an act of the legislature rather than by a court ruling. And the bill that passed made it by a veto-proof majority.

In order to challenge either state's laws opponents of same-sex marriage will have to resort to unprecedented legal and political measures that would just betray the absurdity of their intentions. With the state of the world today - and where do you start to click off the problems we face? - how could it be worth so much to any rational group of people to pour so much time, energy and money into depriving same-sex couples of the right to marry?

Market Anthropomorphism

2009-04-12T10:47:00.013-04:00

Even as a Wharton grad with the mandatory grounding in economic theory (macro, micro and everything in between) it has never set well with me to hear talk of "behavior" in the stock market, as in its "reactions" to events reported in the news, its tendency to "correct itself," or any meaningful significance ascribed to the direction it seems to be moving in.

While such language may be used in modeling theories to analyze trends and economic effects for instructional purposes, it would be laughable in academia, or something on the level of blasphemy, to suggest that there is some unseen sentient force shaping the economy.

(I suspect the same is true in theology classes taught at Catholic seminaries. Those in training to perpetuate the faith cannot themselves buy into the silly myths that underlie its powerful hold over people)

Obviously, as consumers we are assumed to know no better than to accept the anthropomorphism of abstract market statistics as reported daily by the corporate media without question. Even though no one seemed to see the current economic collapse coming we are now hit with screaming headlines, breaking news flashes and "in depth analysis" by economic "experts" when the Dow drops a few hundred points in one day. Excitedly they tell us how and why we are facing imminent doom according to that great and mighty oracle of capitalism - the Market.

Often, within 24 hours we find that - no, we have not yet crossed that feared line of unthinkable disaster. In fact, the market has rebound in a "self correction" when the gains reported the next day are double in number of points by which it had fallen. Hallelujah! The Gods of capitalism have been appeased!

Someone must have sacrificed a virgin.

The oracle tells us we have been spared and are free to go on investing for another day. Or, for most of us, we can be happy that our capitalist overlords will continue to invest and keep us under their thumbs for another day even as our retirement nest eggs crumble.

What is this mighty oracle - the Market - but an unseen vehicle of communication with the spirits that supposedly drive our economy? It possesses human traits but no human form. Its force is felt but never seen - like the wind. Like those ancient seers we now look down on as primitive and superstitious, the media high priests we call "economic experts" measure and interpret signs found in market trends.

Rush Limbaugh, Spiritual Leader of the Republican Party and self-appointed economic oracle, recently proclaimed that the

Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 166 points today. It's been flirting around that 166 to 180. It's 'cause Obama is coming home. Remember when Obama left, the markets skyrocketed. The markets know Obama is coming back and so the markets are plummeting.

(see Limbaugh Wire transcript from Media Matters, 4/7/09)

Joe Bageant has a slightly different take on things. He is the author of the book Dear Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War.

As a recent blog entry Bageant addresses what he calls "The American Hologram" in the text of a lecture he has given to several college audiences, titled: Escape from the Zombie Food Court, excerpted below...

This financial-ization of our consciousness under American-style capitalism has become all we know. That's why we fear its loss. Hence the bailouts of the thousands of "zombie banks," dead but still walking, thanks to the people's taxpayer offerings to the money god so that banks will not die.

We believe that we dare not let corporations die. Corporations feed us. They entertain us. Corporations occupy one full half of our waking hours of our lives, through employment, either directly or indirectly. They heal us when we are sick. So it's easy to see why the corporations feel like a friendly, benevolent entity in the larger American consciousness.

Corporations are, of course, deathless and faceless machines and have no soul or human emotions. That we look to them for so much makes us a corporate cult and makes corporations a fetish of our culture. Yet to us, they are like the weather -- just there. We suffer under a mass national hallucination.

Americans, regardless of income or social position, now live in a culture entirely perceived inside a self-referential media hologram of a nation and world that does not exist. Our national reality is staged and held together by media, chiefly movie and television images. We live in a "theater state."

In our theater state, we know the world through media productions, which are edited and shaped to instruct us on how to look and behave and view the outside world.

As in all staged productions and illusions, everyone we see is an actor. There are the television actors portraying what supposedly represents reality. Non-actors in Congress perform in front of the cameras as the American empire's cultural machinery weaves and spins out our cultural mythology.

In any case, the media culture's production of martyrs, good guys and bad guys, fallen heroes and concept outlaws, is not just big corporate business. It is the armature of our cultural behavior.

It tells us who to fear (Middle Eastern terrorists, Mr. Chavez in Venezuela and foreign made pharmaceuticals), who to scorn (again, the same candidates, along with Britney Spears, for her lousy child-rearing skills).

Our daily news is the modern version of Roman coliseum shows. Elections are personality combat, chariot races, not examinations of solutions being offered. None are offered.

[After the initial uproar over Abu Ghraib] Americans, like children got bored with the subject of torture long ago, so we quit seeing the victims. Plenty of new evidence has been coming out for years since Lynndie [Englund]'s famous pics from Abu Ghraib. But the short American attention span, created by our rapid-fire media, says, "Move on to the next hologram please. Whoa! Stop the remote. Nice butt shot of Sarah Palin there!"

The result is that Americans cannot achieve [an effective psychic/emotional attachment to the world]. It is "beyond ideological challenge, because it is called into existence affectively." Americans are conditioned to reject any affective attachment that does not have a happy ending. And in that, we remain mostly a nation of children. We never get to grow up.

So, we tell ourselves the Little Golden Book fairy tales -- that we are a great and compassionate people and that we are personally innocent of any of our government's horrific crimes abroad. Guiltless as individuals. And we do remain innocent, in a sense, as long as we cannot see beyond the media hologram.

But it is a terrible kind of self-inflicted innocence that can come to no good. We are a nation of latchkey kids babysat by an electronic hallucination, the national hologram.

For the entire article go to Joe Bageant's Blog

OR: http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/135162/bageant%3A_we%27ve_let_corporations_and_media_rob_our_souls_--_it%27s_time_to_do_something_meaningful/?page=entire

IOWA Supreme Court Affirms Same-Sex Marriage!

2009-04-04T17:12:00.028-04:00

In one of the most amazing and unexpected court rulings ever, the State Supreme Court of Iowa has definitively declared same-sex marriage to be completely legal under the law! Yes. IOWA!

The unanimous decision brilliantly rips through every specious argument ever made for banning same-sex couples from full and equal access to the constitutional right to marry.

The more I read through the 69 page ruling the giddier I became until - I admit it - I totally choked up over the astounding reasonableness and logic of the Court. Even if I have no personal interest in getting married, I feel strangely validated by how this document establishes a legal framework for recognition of LGBT people's full constitutional equality.

Coming on the heels of Proposition 8 where California's electorate effectively stabbed every living LGBT person in the back with a single popular vote, this strong, well-thought out decision reads like a healing tonic.

Though it needs no sugar coating, I've gone through, re-formatted and edited it down to try and make it more palatable to those who find court cases daunting to read. It's still a lot to get through and, in some spots, it may still come off as so much legalese. But I took out most of the citations and all footnotes that make court renderings cumbersome to read.

If you prefer to read the ruling in the raw, see: http://www.scribd.com/doc/13921470/Iowa-Gay-Marriage-Court-Document

Enjoy!

IN THE SUPREME COURT OF IOWA
No. 07–1499 Filed April 3, 2009

Chief Justice CADY: In this case, we must decide if our state statute limiting civil marriage to a union between a man and a woman violates the Iowa Constitution, as the district court ruled. On our review, we hold the Iowa marriage statute violates the equal protection clause of the Iowa Constitution. Therefore, we AFFIRM the decision of the district court.

Background Facts and Proceedings

This lawsuit is a civil rights action by twelve individuals who reside in six communities across Iowa. Like most Iowans, they are responsible, caring, and productive individuals. They maintain important jobs, or are retired, and are contributing, benevolent members of their communities. They include a nurse, business manager, insurance analyst, bank agent, stay-at-home parent, church organist and piano teacher, museum director, federal employee, social worker, teacher, and two retired teachers. Like many Iowans, some have children and others hope to have children. Some are foster parents. Like all Iowans, they prize their liberties and live within the borders of this state with the expectation that their rights will be maintained and protected—a belief embraced by our state motto (“Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain” inscribed on the Great Seal of Iowa and on [the Iowa] state flag).

Despite the commonality shared with other Iowans, the twelve plaintiffs are different from most in one way. They are sexually and romantically attracted to members of their own sex. The twelve plaintiffs comprise six same-sex couples who live in committed relationships. Each maintains a hope of getting married one day, an aspiration shared by many throughout Iowa. Unlike opposite-sex couples in Iowa, same-sex couples are not permitted to marry in Iowa.

Despite this law, the six same-sex couples in this litigation asked the Polk County recorder to issue marriage licenses to them. The recorder, following the law, refused to issue the licenses, and the six couples have been unable to be married in this state. Except for the statutory restriction that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, the twelve plaintiffs met the legal requirements to marry in Iowa.

They seek to declare the marriage statute unconstitutional so they can obtain the array of benefits of marriage enjoyed by heterosexual couples, protect themselves and their children, and demonstrate to one another and to society their mutual commitment.

The individual rights claimed by plaintiffs to be adversely affected (by the action of the legislative branch in enacting the same-sex marriage ban and the action of the government officials of the executive branch in enforcing the ban) included the fundamental right to marry, as well as rights to privacy and familial association. Additionally, plaintiffs claimed the legislative and the executive actions unconstitutionally discriminated against them on several bases, including sexual orientation.

These disadvantages and problems include the legal inability to make many life and death decisions affecting their partner, including decisions related to health care, burial arrangements, autopsy, and disposition of remains following death. Various plaintiffs told of the inability to share in their partners’ state-provided health insurance, public employee pension benefits, and many private-employer-provided benefits and protections. They also explained how several tax benefits are denied.

Adoption proceedings are also more cumbersome and expensive for unmarried partners. Other obstacles presented by the inability to enter into a civil marriage include numerous nongovernmental benefits of marriage that are so common in daily life they often go unnoticed, such as something so simple as spousal health club memberships.

Yet, perhaps the ultimate disadvantage expressed in the testimony of the plaintiffs is the inability to obtain for themselves and for their children the personal and public affirmation that accompanies marriage. The parties also explored the reasons for defining marriage in a way that denies these benefits to same-sex couples.

(Summary of Arguments for maintaining the ban against gay marriage)

The County offered five primary interests of society 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.

Much of the testimony presented by the County was in the form of opinions by various individuals that same-sex marriage would harm the institution of marriage and also harm children raised in same-sex marriages. Two college professors testified that a heterosexual marriage is, overall, the optimal forum in which to raise children. A retired pediatrician challenged the accuracy of some of the medical research that concludes there is no significant difference between children raised by same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples.

A clinical psychologist testified sexual orientation is not as defined and stable as race and gender and can change over time. He acknowledged, however, it is difficult to change a person’s sexual orientation, and efforts to do so can be harmful to the person.

(Summary of Arguments for lifting the ban against gay marriage)

The plaintiffs produced evidence to demonstrate sexual orientation and gender have no effect on children raised by same-sex couples, and same-sex couples can raise children as well as opposite-sex couples. They also submitted evidence to show that most scientific research has repudiated the commonly assumed notion that children need opposite-sex parents or biological parents to grow into well-adjusted adults.

Many leading organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the National Association of Social Workers, and the Child Welfare League of America, weighed the available research and supported the conclusion that gay and lesbian parents are as effective as heterosexual parents in raising children.

For example, the official policy of the American Psychological Association declares, “There is no scientific evidence that parenting effectiveness is related to parental sexual orientation: Lesbian and gay parents are as likely as heterosexual parents to provide supportive and healthy environments for children. ” Almost every professional group that has studied the issue indicates children are not harmed when raised by same-sex couples, but to the contrary, benefit from them. In Iowa, agencies that license foster parents have found same-sex couples to be good and acceptable parents. It is estimated that more than 5800 same-sex couples live throughout Iowa, and over one-third of these couples are raising children.

The district court concluded the statute was unconstitutional under the due process and equal protection clauses of the Iowa Constitution and granted summary judgment to the plaintiffs. It initially ordered the county recorder to begin processing marriage licenses for same-sex couples, but stayed the order during the pendency of an appeal.

Constitutional Separation of Powers

We approach the resolution of this case with a keen and respectful understanding of our Iowa Constitution and the vital roles of the three branches of government, as well as the role of the people. It is important for these roles to be identified and expressed from time to time when individuals seek recognition of rights, if only to serve as a reminder of the process of governing that has served us so well as a state for over 150 years.

The Iowa Constitution is the cornerstone of governing in Iowa. Like the United States Constitution, the Iowa Constitution creates a remarkable blueprint for government. It establishes three separate, but equal, branches of government and delineates the limited roles and powers of each branch.

Among other basic principles essential to our form of government, the constitution defines certain individual rights upon which the government may not infringe.

This case, as with most other civil rights actions before it, implicates these broad constitutional principles of governing. The legislature, in carrying out its constitutional role to make public policy decisions, enacted a law that effectively excludes gay and lesbian people from the institution of civil marriage. The executive branch of government, in carrying out its role to execute the law, enforced this statute through a county official who refused to issue marriage licenses to six same-sex couples. These Iowans, believing that the law is inconsistent with certain constitutional mandates, exercised their constitutional right to petition the courts for redress of their grievance. This court, consistent with its role to interpret the law and resolve disputes, now has the responsibility to determine if the law enacted by the legislative branch and enforced by the executive branch violates the Iowa Constitution.

A statute inconsistent with the Iowa Constitution must be declared void, even though it may be supported by strong and deep-seated traditional beliefs and popular opinion. Iowa Const. art. XII, § 1 (providing any law inconsistent with the constitution is void). As Chief Justice John Marshall wrote over two centuries ago, “It is a proposition too plain to be contested, that the constitution controls any legislative act repugnant to it . . . .” [Marbury v. Madison,1803].

It is also well established that courts must, under all circumstances, protect the supremacy of the constitution as a means of protecting our republican form of government and our freedoms. As was observed by Justice Robert H. Jackson decades ago in reference to the United States Constitution, the very purpose of limiting the power of the elected branches of government by constitutional provisions like the Equal Protection Clause is “to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts.” [W. Va. State Bd. Of Educ. v. Barnette, 1943].

The same principle applies to the provisions of the Iowa Constitution that limit government power. The idea that courts, free from the political influences in the other two branches of government, are better suited to protect individual rights was recognized at the time our Iowa Constitution was formed. [Koehler v. Hill, Iowa 1883] “Judges ought not to be partisans, and be influenced by partisan control. Their duty is to interpret and apply the law, to the end that the liberty, and the rights and property, of the people may be secured.”

In fulfilling this mandate under the Iowa Constitution, we look to the past and to precedent. We look backwards, not because citizens’ rights are constrained to those previously recognized, but because historical constitutional principles provide the framework to define our future as we confront the challenges of today.

Our responsibility, however, is to protect constitutional rights of individuals from legislative enactments that have denied those rights, even when the rights have not yet been broadly accepted, were at one time unimagined, or challenge a deeply ingrained practice or law viewed to be impervious to the passage of time.

The framers of the Iowa Constitution knew, as did the drafters of the United States Constitution, that “times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress,” and as our constitution “endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom” and equality.

Equal Protection

A. Background Principles. The primary constitutional principle at the heart of this case is the doctrine of equal protection. The concept of equal protection is deeply rooted in our national and state history, but that history reveals this concept is often expressed far more easily than it is practiced. For sure, our nation has struggled to achieve a broad national consensus on equal protection of the laws when it has been forced to apply that principle to some of the institutions, traditions, and norms woven into the fabric of our society. This observation is important today because it reveals equal protection can only be defined by the standards of each generation

The process of defining equal protection, as shown by our history as captured and told in court decisions, begins by classifying people into groups. A classification persists until a new understanding of equal protection is achieved.

The point in time when the standard of equal protection finally takes a new form is a product of the conviction of one, or many, individuals that a particular grouping results in inequality and the ability of the judicial system to perform its constitutional role free from the influences that tend to make society’s understanding of equal protection resistant to change. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes poignantly said, “It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV. It is still more revolting if the grounds upon which it was laid down have vanished long since, and the rule simply persists from blind imitation of the past.”

This concept is evident in our past cases. In the first reported case of the Supreme Court of the Territory of Iowa, In re Ralph, 1 Morris 1 (Iowa 1839), we refused to treat a human being as property to enforce a contract for slavery and held our laws must extend equal protection to persons of all races and conditions. This decision was seventeen years before the United States Supreme Court infamously decided Dred Scott v. Sandford, which upheld the rights of a slave owner to treat a person as property. Similarly, in Clark v. Board of Directors, we struck blows to the concept of segregation long before the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

So, today, this court again faces an important issue that hinges on our definition of equal protection. This issue comes to us with the same importance as our landmark cases of the past. The same-sex-marriage debate waged in this case is part of a strong national dialogue centered on a fundamental, deep-seated, traditional institution that has excluded, by state action, a particular class of Iowans. This class of people asks a simple and direct question: How can a state premised on the constitutional principle of equal protection justify exclusion of a class of Iowans from civil marriage?

B. Legal Tests to Gauge Equal Protection. The foundational principle of equal protection is expressed in article I, section 6 of the Iowa Constitution, which provides: “All laws of a general nature shall have a uniform operation; the general assembly shall not grant to any citizen or class of citizens, privileges or immunities, which, upon the same terms shall not equally belong to all citizens.”

Like the Federal Equal Protection Clause found in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, Iowa’s constitutional promise of equal protection “ ‘is essentially a direction that all persons similarly situated should be treated alike.’

Even in the zealous protection of the constitution’s mandate of equal protection, courts must give respect to the legislative process and presume Plaintiffs’ challenge to Iowa Code section 595.2 is based on the equal protection guarantee in the Iowa Constitution and does not implicate federal constitutional protections. Generally, we view the federal and state equal protection clauses as “identical in scope, import, and purpose.” At the same time, we have jealously guarded our right to “employ a different analytical framework” under the state equal protection clause as well as to independently apply the federally formulated principles.

Here again, we find federal precedent instructive in interpreting the Iowa Constitution, but we refuse to follow it blindly. The United States Supreme Court has not resolved the broad question of whether an absolute ban of marriages between persons of the same sex violates the Federal Equal Protection Clause. [See Lawrence, 539 U.S (noting that case does not decide “whether the government must give formal recognition to any relationship that homosexual persons seek to enter”). Nor has the Court resolved many of the narrower legal questions presented by this lawsuit.

Nonetheless, the federal framework traditionally employed for resolution of equal protection cases provides a useful starting point for evaluation of Iowa’s constitutional equal protection provision.

Its enactments are constitutional. We understand that Iowa’s tripartite system of government requires the legislature to make difficult policy choices, including distributing benefits and burdens amongst the citizens of Iowa. In this process, some classifications and barriers are inevitable. As a result, courts pay deference to legislative decisions when called upon to determine whether the Iowa Constitution’s mandate of equality has been violated by legislative action. More specifically, when evaluating challenges based on the equal protection clause, our deference to legislative policymaking is primarily manifested in the level of scrutiny we apply to review legislative action.

In most cases, we apply a very deferential standard known as the “rational basis test.” Under the rational basis test, “[t]he plaintiff has the heavy burden of showing the statute unconstitutional and must negate every reasonable basis upon which the classification may be sustained.” In deference to the legislature, a statute will satisfy the requirements of the equal protection clause “so long as there is a plausible policy reason for the classification, the legislative facts on which the classification is apparently based rationally may have been considered to be true by the governmental decision maker, and the relationship of the classification to its goal is not so attenuated as to render the distinction arbitrary or irrational.”

The rational basis test defers to the legislature’s prerogative to make policy decisions by requiring only a plausible policy justification, mere rationality of the facts underlying the decision and, again, a merely rational relationship between the classification and the policy justification. Nonetheless, the deference built into the rational basis test is not dispositive because this court engages in a meaningful review of all legislation challenged on equal protection grounds by applying the rational basis test to the facts of each case.

The constitutional guarantee of equal protection, however, demands certain types of statutory classifications must be subjected to closer scrutiny by courts. Thus, courts apply a heightened level of scrutiny under equal protection analysis when reasons exist to suspect “prejudice against discrete and insular minorities . . . which tends seriously to curtail the operation of those political processes ordinarily to be relied upon to protect minorities.”

Under this approach, classifications based on race, alienage, or national origin and those affecting fundamental rights are evaluated according to a standard known as “strict scrutiny.”

Classifications subject to strict scrutiny are presumptively invalid and must be narrowly tailored to serve a compelling governmental interest.

A middle tier of analysis exists between rational basis and strict scrutiny. This intermediate tier has been applied to statutes classifying on the basis of gender or illegitimacy and requires the party seeking to uphold the statute to demonstrate the challenged classification is substantially related to the achievement of an important governmental objective.

It is known as “intermediate scrutiny” or “heightened scrutiny,” and groups entitled to this tier of review are often called “quasi-suspect” groups. To survive intermediate scrutiny, the law must not only further an important governmental interest and be substantially related to that interest, but the justification for the classification must be genuine and must not depend on broad generalizations.

C. Determination of Constitutional Facts. The parties expended considerable effort developing a summary judgment record to assist the district court in deciding the legal issues presented in this case, including which level of scrutiny to apply. Before proceeding to determine these legal issues, we consider the role of the evidence offered by the parties to support their legal arguments. The district court excluded some of the offered testimony, which the County has raised as an issue on appeal.

Our law recognizes a distinction between “adjudicative” and “legislative” facts. Most often, judicial decision-making is predicated solely on a finding of facts relating to the parties and their particular circumstances. These facts are referred to as “adjudicative” facts and the resolution of a dispute over these facts is done within the framework of a set of rules to determine the admissibility of evidence tending to prove such facts. At times, however, judicial decision-making involves crafting rules of law based on social, economic, political, or scientific facts [see McCormick on Evidence].

These facts have been denominated as “legislative” facts and become relevant to judicial decision-making when courts are required to decide the constitutionality of a statute, among other occasions. As a result, judicial decision-making in the context of constitutional issues can involve the “process of adapting law to a volatile social-political environment.”

Legislative facts are relevant in deciding these constitutional issues because courts must normally analyze “whether there exist circumstances which constitutionally either legitimate the exercise of legislative power or substantiate the rationality of the legislative product.” In fact, the common role of legislative facts in constitutional cases has led to an alternative designation of legislative facts called “constitutional facts” to better describe those facts “which assist a court in forming a judgment on a question of constitutional law.”

Unlike adjudicative facts, legislative or constitutional facts “may be presented either formally or informally.” There is no formalized set of rules governing a court’s ability to consider legislative or constitutional facts.

Thus, constitutional facts are introduced into judicial decisions through independent research by judges and written briefs of the parties, as well as testimony of witnesses.

Importantly, constitutional facts are not subject to the rules of evidence when presented by a party in the form of witness testimony. Conceptually, testimony relating to constitutional facts is only presented as authority for the legal decision the court is required to make, and it would be inconsistent to apply formal rules of evidence to facts in the form of testimony that a court can independently obtain and consider in deciding the case.

Nonetheless, courts consider the “actual truth-content” of constitutional facts. Such facts are generally disputable, and courts must rely on the most compelling data in order to give needed intellectual legitimacy to the law or rule crafted by the court. Consequently, we review all of the material tendered by the parties in this case to assist us in our review of the constitutionality of the civil marriage statute.

D. Similarly Situated People. The County seeks to undercut the plaintiffs’ equal protection claim by asserting the plaintiffs are not similarly situated to heterosexuals. We consider this threshold argument before proceeding to the application of our equal protection test.

We begin by recognizing the constitutional pledge of equal protection does not prohibit laws that impose classifications. Many statutes impose classifications by granting special benefits or declaring special burdens, and the equal protection clause does not require all laws to apply uniformly to all people.

Instead, equal protection demands that laws treat alike all people who are “ ‘similarly situated with respect to the legitimate purposes of the law.’ This requirement of equal protection—that the law must treat all similarly situated people the same—has generated a narrow threshold test. Under this threshold test, if plaintiffs cannot show as a preliminary matter that they are similarly situated, courts do not further consider whether their different treatment under a statute is permitted under the equal protection clause.

Not only have we utilized this test in the past, but courts from other jurisdictions have confronted it in cases involving equal protection challenges to statutes that restrict marriage to opposite-sex couples.

The County references this threshold test in this case and asserts the plaintiffs are not similarly situated to opposite-sex couples so as to necessitate further equal protection analysis because the plaintiffs cannot “procreate naturally.” In other words, the County argues the statute does not treat similarly situated persons differently, but merely treats dissimilar persons differently.

In considering whether two classes are similarly situated, a court cannot simply look at the trait used by the legislature to define a classification under a statute and conclude a person without that trait is not similarly situated to persons with the trait.

The equal protection clause does not merely ensure the challenged statute applies equally to all people in the legislative classification. “ ‘[S]imilarly situated’ cannot mean simply ‘similar in the possession of the classifying trait.’ All members of any class are similarly situated in this respect and consequently, any classification whatsoever would be reasonable by this test.”

In the same way, the similarly situated requirement cannot possibly be interpreted to require plaintiffs to be identical in every way to people treated more favorably by the law. No two people or groups of people are the same in every way, and nearly every equal protection claim could be run aground onto the shoals of a threshold analysis if the two groups needed to be a mirror image of one another. Such a threshold analysis would hollow out the constitution’s promise of equal protection.

Thus, equal protection before the law demands more than the equal application of the classifications made by the law. The law itself must be equal.

In other words, to truly ensure equality before the law, the equal protection guarantee requires that laws treat all those who are similarly situated with respect to the purposes of the law alike. This requirement makes it “impossible to pass judgment on the reasonableness of a [legislative] classification without taking into consideration, or identifying, the purpose of the law.” [Tussman & tenBroek]

The purposes of the law must be referenced in order to meaningfully evaluate whether the law equally protects all people similarly situated with respect to those purposes. For these reasons, the trait asserted by the County is insufficient to support its threshold argument.

Nevertheless, we have said our marriage laws “are rooted in the necessity of providing an institutional basis for defining the fundamental relational rights and responsibilities of persons in organized society.”

Therefore, with respect to the subject and purposes of Iowa’s marriage laws, we find that the plaintiffs are similarly situated compared to heterosexual persons.

Plaintiffs are in committed and loving relationships, many raising families, just like heterosexual couples. Moreover, official recognition of their status provides an institutional basis for defining their fundamental relational rights and responsibilities, just as it does for heterosexual couples. Society benefits, for example, from providing same sex couples a stable framework within which to raise their children and the power to make health care and end-of-life decisions for loved ones, just as it does when that framework is provided for opposite-sex couples.

In short, for purposes of Iowa’s marriage laws, which are designed to bring a sense of order to the legal relationships of committed couples and their families in myriad ways, plaintiffs are similarly situated in every important respect, but for their sexual orientation. As indicated above, this distinction cannot defeat the application of equal protection analysis through the application of the similarly situated concept because, under this circular approach, all distinctions would evade equal protection review.

Therefore, with respect to the government’s purpose of “providing an institutional basis for defining the fundamental relational rights and responsibilities of persons,” same–sex couples are similarly situated to opposite–sex couples.

E. Classification Undertaken in Iowa Code Section 595.2. Plaintiffs believe Iowa Code section 595.2 classifies on the bases of gender and sexual orientation. The County argues the same-sex marriage ban does not discriminate on either basis. The district court held section 595.2 classifies according to gender.

As we will explain, we believe the ban on civil marriages between two people of the same sex classifies on the basis of sexual orientation. While we have applied the threshold analysis in previous cases, we have, at times, directly or indirectly infused that analysis with principles traditionally applied in the complete equal protection analysis.

This approach is almost inevitable for the test to have any real value as an analytical tool to resolve equal protection claims. Consequently, we question the usefulness of the threshold test and express caution in the future use of the threshold analysis.

Because the plaintiffs here satisfy the threshold test we have followed in the past, the outcome in this case would not be affected by abandoning that test now. Therefore, we leave to future parties the task of arguing the applicability of the threshold similarly situated analysis in future cases. The County initially points out that section 595.2 does not explicitly refer to “sexual orientation” and does not inquire into whether either member of a proposed civil marriage is sexually attracted to the other.

Consequently, it seizes on these observations to support its claim that the statute does not establish a classification on the basis of sexual orientation because the same-sex civil marriage ban does not grant or withhold the benefits flowing from the statute based on sexual preference.

Instead, the County argues, section 595.2 only incidentally impacts disparately upon gay and lesbian people.

The County’s position reveals the importance of accurately and precisely defining the classification in analyzing all equal protection challenges. The manner in which a classification is defined impacts the utility of an equal protection analysis as a means of revealing discrimination. Therefore, it is critical that a court reviewing the statute identify the true nature of the classification.

It is true the marriage statute does not expressly prohibit gay and lesbian persons from marrying; it does, however, require that if they marry, it must be to someone of the opposite sex.

Viewed in the complete context of marriage, including intimacy, civil marriage with a person of the opposite sex is as unappealing to a gay or lesbian person as civil marriage with a person of the same sex is to a heterosexual.

Thus, the right of a gay or lesbian person under the marriage statute to enter into a civil marriage only with a person of the opposite sex is no right at all.

Under such a law, gay or lesbian individuals cannot simultaneously fulfill their deeply felt need for a committed personal relationship, as influenced by their sexual orientation, and gain the civil status and attendant benefits granted by the statute. Instead, a gay or lesbian person can only gain the same rights under the statute as a heterosexual person by negating the very trait that defines gay and lesbian people as a class—their sexual orientation

The benefit denied by the marriage statute—the status of civil marriage for same-sex couples—is so “closely correlated with being homosexual” as to make it apparent the law is targeted at gay and lesbian people as a class.

By purposefully placing civil marriage outside the realistic reach of gay and lesbian individuals, the ban on same-sex civil marriages differentiates implicitly on the basis of sexual orientation.

Thus, we proceed to analyze the constitutionality of the statute based on sexual orientation discrimination.

F. Framework for Determining Appropriate Level of Judicial Scrutiny. Our determination that the marriage statute employs a sexual orientation-based classification does not, of course, control the outcome of our equal protection inquiry. Most statutes, one way or the other, create classifications. [Clements v. Fashing, 1982) “Classification is the essence of all legislation, and only those classifications which are invidious, arbitrary, or irrational offend the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.”]

To determine if this particular classification violates constitutional principles of equal protection, we must next ask what level of scrutiny applies to classifications of this type.

The County argues the more deferential rational basis test should apply, while plaintiffs argue closer scrutiny is appropriate. Although neither we nor the United States Supreme Court has decided which level of scrutiny applies to legislative classifications based on sexual orientation, numerous Supreme Court equal protection cases provide a general framework to guide our analysis under the Iowa Constitution.

The Supreme Court has expressed a number of general principles to assist in identifying the appropriate level of scrutiny. Classifications based on factors like race, alienage, national origin, sex, or illegitimacy are so seldom relevant to achievement of any legitimate state interest that laws grounded in such considerations are deemed to reflect prejudice and antipathy.

Rather than bearing some relationship to the burdened class’s ability to contribute to society, such classifications often reflect irrelevant stereotypes. “For these reasons and because such discrimination is unlikely to be soon rectified by legislative means,” laws based on these types of classifications must withstand more intense judicial scrutiny than other types of classifications.

Instead of adopting a rigid formula to determine whether certain legislative classifications warrant more demanding constitutional analysis, the Supreme Court has looked to four factors: (1) the history of invidious discrimination against the class burdened by the legislation; (2) whether the characteristics that distinguish the class indicate a typical class member’s ability to contribute to society; (3) whether the distinguishing characteristic is “immutable” or beyond the class member’s control; and (4) the political power of the subject class.

Both parties recognize the relevance of these factors. They disagree, however, over how the factors should be applied to decide whether sexual orientation is a suspect or quasi-suspect class.

The County essentially views the factors as elements, asserting each must be fulfilled before we may abandon our deferential level of scrutiny. To this end, the County argues the immutability and political powerlessness “elements” are not satisfied in this case.

In its effort to treat the factors as essential elements, the County overlooks the flexible manner in which the Supreme Court has applied the four factors in the past. For purposes of state constitutional analysis, we likewise refuse to view all the factors as elements or as individually demanding a certain weight in every case.

Instead, we analyze each of the four factors and assess how each bears on the question of whether the Iowa Constitution requires a more searching scrutiny be applied to the specific classification at issue. We note the first two factors—history of intentional discrimination and relationship of classifying characteristic to a person’s ability to contribute—have always been present when heightened scrutiny has been applied. They have been critical to the analysis and could be considered as prerequisites to concluding a group is a suspect or quasisuspect class.

However, we consider the last two factors—immutability of the characteristic and political powerlessness of the group—to supplement the analysis as a means to discern whether a need for heightened scrutiny exists.

G. Determination of Appropriate Level of Scrutiny. Guided by the established framework, we next consider each of the four traditional factors and assess how each bears on the question of whether the constitution demands a more searching scrutiny be applied to the sexual-orientation based classification in Iowa’s marriage statute.

1. History of discrimination against gay and lesbian people. The first consideration is whether gay and lesbian people have suffered a history of purposeful unequal treatment because of their sexual orientation.

The County does not, and could not in good faith, dispute the historical reality that gay and lesbian people as a group have long been the victim of purposeful and invidious discrimination because of their sexual orientation.

The long and painful history of discrimination against gay and lesbian persons is epitomized by the criminalization of homosexual conduct in many parts of this country until very recently (see Lawrence v Texas, invalidating criminalization of homosexual sodomy in 2003).

Additionally, only a few years ago persons identified as homosexual were dismissed from military service regardless of past dedication and demonstrated valor. Public employees identified as gay or lesbian have been thought to pose security risks due to a perceived risk of extortion resulting from a threat of public exposure. School-yard bullies have psychologically ground children with apparently gay or lesbian sexual orientation in the cruel mortar and pestle of school-yard prejudice.

At the same time, lesbian and gay people continue to be frequent victims of hate crimes (see Criminal Justice Information Servs. Div., FBI, Hate Crime Statistics 2007, http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/hc2007/victims.htm: according to FBI-collected data, the only hate crimes occurring more frequently than sexual-orientation-motivated hate crimes are crimes based on race or religious bias).

The Iowa General Assembly has recognized the need to address sexual-orientation-based discrimination by including sexual orientation as a characteristic protected in the Iowa Civil Rights Act, by defining hate crimes to include certain offenses committed because of the victim’s sexual orientation, and by prohibiting “harassing or bullying” behavior in schools based on sexual orientation (see Iowa Code §§ 216.2–.18A: Iowa Civil Rights Act/sexual-orientation-based discrimination/school harassment and bullying).

These statutory enactments demonstrate a legislative recognition of the need to remedy historical sexual-orientation based discrimination.

In sum, this history of discrimination suggests any legislative burdens placed on lesbian and gay people as a class “are more likely than others to reflect deep-seated prejudice rather than legislative rationality in pursuit of some legitimate objective.” [Plyler]. This observation favors an elevated scrutiny to uncover any such prejudice.

2. Sexual orientation and the ability to contribute to society. A second relevant consideration is whether the characteristic at issue—sexual orientation—is related to the person’s ability to contribute to society.

Heightened scrutiny is applied when the classification bears no relationship to a person’s ability to contribute to society. The existence of this factor indicates the classification is likely based on irrelevant stereotypes and prejudice. [Kerrigan]

A classification unrelated to a person’s ability to perform or contribute to society typically reflects “prejudice and antipathy—a view that those in the burdened class are not as worthy or deserving as others” or “reflect[s] outmoded notions of the relative capabilities of persons with the characteristic.” [Cleburne Living Ctr.]

Not surprisingly, none of the same-sex marriage decisions from other state courts around the nation have found a person’s sexual orientation to be indicative of the person’s general ability to contribute to society.

The County references plaintiffs’ inability to procreate “naturally,” presumably pointing out each couple’s inability to procreate without assistance. Plaintiffs’ inability to contribute children to society by procreation through sexual intercourse with each other does not dictate the outcome of our consideration under this factor.

The inquiry into gay and lesbian people’s ability to contribute to society is a general one, designed to signal whether such classifications routinely risk elevating stereotype over ability. A person’s ability to procreate is merely one of many ways in which the person can contribute to society.

The inability of gay and lesbian partners to contribute by procreation through sexual intercourse with each other does not indicate whether legislative classifications based on sexual preference—which can conceivably occur in any legislative subject matter area—will generally be based on “stereotyped characteristics not truly indicative of their abilities.” [Murgia]

3. Immutability of sexual orientation. The parties, consistent with the same-sex-marriage scholarship, opinions, and jurisprudence, contest whether sexual orientation is immutable or unresponsive to attempted change.

The County seizes on this debate to argue the summary judgment granted by the district court in this case was improper because plaintiffs could not prove, as a matter of fact, that sexuality is immutable. This argument, however, essentially limits the constitutional relevance of mutability to those instances in which the trait defining the burdened class is absolutely impervious to change.

To evaluate this argument, we must first consider the rationale for using immutability as a factor.

A human trait that defines a group is “immutable” when the trait exists “solely by the accident of birth,” [Frontiero v. Richardson] or when the person with the trait has no ability to change it. [Bakke] Immutability is a factor in determining the appropriate level of scrutiny because the inability of a person to change a characteristic that is used to justify different treatment makes the discrimination violative of the rather “ ‘basic concept of our system that legal burdens should bear some relationship to individual responsibility.’ ”

“Legislation imposing special disabilities upon groups disfavored by virtue of circumstances beyond their control suggests the kind of ‘class or caste’ treatment that the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to abolish.”

Put another way, when a characteristic is immutable, different treatment based on this characteristic seems “all the more invidious and unfair.” [Frontiero]

Additionally, immutability can relate to the scope and permanency of the barrier imposed on the group. Temporary barriers tend to be less burdensome on a group and more likely to actually advance a legitimate governmental interest. Consequently, such barriers normally do not warrant heightened scrutiny.

The permanency of the barrier also depends on the ability of the individual to change the characteristic responsible for the discrimination. This aspect of immutability may separate truly victimized individuals from those who have invited discrimination by changing themselves so as to be identified with the group.

As implied by Justice Ferren, in dissent, in Dean: The degree to which an individual controls, or cannot avoid, the acquisition of the defining trait, and the relative ease or difficulty with which a trait can be changed, are relevant to whether a classification is “suspect” or “quasi-suspect” because this inquiry is one way of asking whether someone, rather than being victimized, has voluntarily joined a persecuted group and thereby invited the discrimination.

Importantly, this background reveals courts need not definitively resolve the nature-versus-nurture debate currently raging over the origin of sexual orientation in order to decide plaintiffs’ equal protection claims.

The constitutional relevance of the immutability factor is not reserved to those instances in which the trait defining the burdened class is absolutely impossible to change. Compare [Sherman] (suggesting heightened scrutiny is applicable to gender classifications), with Iowa Code § 144.23 (providing legal procedure to obtain new birth certificate indicating change in gender).

That is, we agree with those courts that have held the immutability “prong of the suspectness inquiry surely is satisfied when . . .the identifying trait is ‘so central to a person’s identity that it would be abhorrent for government to penalize a person for refusing to change [it].’ ”

Also see [Kerrigan] (quoting Watkins v. U.S. Army, 875 F.2d 699, 726 (9th Cir. 1989) “Because a person’s sexual orientation is so integral an aspect of one’s identity, it is not appropriate to require a person to repudiate or change his or her sexual orientation in order to avoid discriminatory treatment.”

In this case, the County acknowledges sexual orientation is highly resistant to change. Additionally, “sexual orientation ‘forms a significant part of a person’s identity.’ ”[Kerrigan], . Sexual orientation influences the formation of personal relationships between all people—heterosexual, gay, or lesbian—to fulfill each person’s fundamental needs for love and attachment.

Accordingly, because sexual orientation is central to personal identity and “ ‘may be altered [if at all] only at the expense of significant damage to the individual’s sense of self,’ ” classifications based on sexual orientation “are no less entitled to consideration as a suspect or quasi-suspect class than any other group that has been deemed to exhibit an immutable characteristic [ Jantz v. Muci] .

Sexual orientation is not the type of human trait that allows courts to relax their standard of review because the barrier is temporary or susceptible to self-help.

4. Political powerlessness of lesbian and gay people. As observed, the political power of the burdened class has been referenced repeatedly in Supreme Court cases determining the level of scrutiny to be applied to a given piece of legislation. Unfortunately, the Court has never defined what it means to be politically powerless for purposes of this analysis, nor has it quantified a maximum amount of political power a group may enjoy while still receiving the protection from unfair discrimination accompanying heightened scrutiny.

The County points to the numerous legal protections gay and lesbian people have secured against discrimination, and the County argues those protections demonstrate gay and lesbian people are not a politically powerless class.

The County’s argument implies gay and lesbian people must be characterized by a complete, or nearly complete, lack of political power before courts should subject sexual-orientation-based legislative burdens to a heightened scrutiny.

Notwithstanding the lack of a mathematical equation to guide the analysis of this factor, a number of helpful general principles related to the political power of suspect classes can be culled from the Supreme Court’s cases.

First, these cases show absolute political powerlessness is not necessary to subject legislative burdens on a certain class to heightened scrutiny. For example, females enjoyed at least some measure of political power when the Supreme Court first heightened its scrutiny of gender classifications.

Second, Supreme Court jurisprudence establishes that a group’s current political powerlessness is not a prerequisite to enhanced judicial protection. “[I]f a group’s current political powerlessness [was] a prerequisite to a characteristic’s being considered a constitutionally suspect basis for differential treatment, it would be impossible to justify the numerous decisions that continue to treat sex, race, and religion as suspect classifications.”

Race continues to be a suspect classification, [Grutter v. Bollinger], even though racial minorities enjoy growing political power. Likewise, gender classifications receive various forms of heightened scrutiny, even though women continue to gain political power.

(By one measure—occupation of public office—the political power of racial minorities is unbounded in this country today. This fact was on display January 20, 2009,when Barack H. Obama, the African-American son of a native Kenyan, was inaugurated as the forty-fourth President of the United States of America).

While a more in-depth discussion of the history of the political-power factor is possible, we are satisfied, for the purpose of analyzing the Iowa Constitution, the political powerlessness factor of the level-of-scrutiny inquiry does not require a showing of absolute political powerlessness.

Rather, the touchstone of the analysis should be “whether the group lacks sufficient political strength to bring a prompt end to the prejudice and discrimination through traditional political means.”

It is also important to observe that the political power of gays and lesbians, while responsible for greater acceptance and decreased discrimination, has done little to remove barriers to civil marriage.

Although a small number of state legislatures have approved civil unions for gay and lesbian people without judicial intervention, no legislature has secured the right to civil marriage for gay and lesbian people without court order.

The myriad statutes and regulatory protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation in such areas as employment, housing, public accommodations, and education have not only been absent in the area of marriage, but legislative bodies have taken affirmative steps to shore up the concept of traditional marriage by specifically excluding gays and lesbians.

Like Iowa, over forty other states have passed statutes or constitutional amendments to ban same-sex marriages.

Thus, although equal rights for gays and lesbians have been increasingly recognized in the political arena, the right to civil marriage is a notable exception to this trend.

Consequently, the specific right sought in this case has largely lacked any extensive political support and has actually experienced an affirmative backlash.

We are convinced gay and lesbian people are not so politically powerful as to overcome the unfair and severe prejudice that history suggests produces discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Gays and lesbians certainly possess no more political power than women enjoyed four decades ago when the Supreme Court began subjecting gender-based legislation to closer scrutiny.

Additionally, gay and lesbian people are, as a class, currently no more powerful than women or members of some racial minorities.

These facts demonstrate, at the least, the political-power factor does not weigh against heightened judicial scrutiny of sexual-orientation based legislation.

5. Classifications based on sexual orientation demand closer scrutiny. In summarizing the rationale supporting heightened scrutiny of legislation classifying on the basis of sexual orientation, it would be difficult to improve upon the words of the Supreme Court of Connecticut: “Gay persons have been subjected to and stigmatized by a long history of purposeful and invidious discrimination that continues to manifest itself in society.”

The characteristic that defines the members of this group—attraction to persons of the same sex—bears no logical relationship to their ability to perform in society, either in familial relations or otherwise as productive citizens.

Because sexual orientation is such an essential component of personhood, even if there is some possibility that a person’s sexual preference can be altered, it would be wholly unacceptable for the state to require anyone to do so. Gay persons also represent a distinct minority of the population.

It is true, of course, that gay persons recently have made significant advances in obtaining equal treatment under the law. Nonetheless, we conclude that, as a minority group that continues to suffer the enduring effects of centuries of legally sanctioned discrimination, laws singling them out for disparate treatment are subject to heightened judicial scrutiny to ensure that those laws are not the product of such historical prejudice and stereotyping.

We agree with the observations of the Connecticut Supreme Court.

The factors established to guide our determination of the level of scrutiny to utilize in our examination of the equal protection claim in this case all point to an elevated level of scrutiny. Accordingly, we hold that legislative classifications based on sexual orientation must be examined under a heightened level of scrutiny under the Iowa Constitution.

H. Application of Heightened Scrutiny. Plaintiffs argue sexual orientation-based statutes should be subject to the most searching scrutiny. The County asserts Iowa’s marriage statute, section 595.2, may be reviewed, at most, according to an intermediate level of scrutiny.

Because we conclude Iowa’s same-sex marriage statute cannot withstand intermediate scrutiny, we need not decide whether classifications based on sexual orientation are subject to a higher level of scrutiny. Thus, we turn to a discussion of the intermediate scrutiny standard.

1. Intermediate scrutiny standard. “To withstand intermediate scrutiny, a statutory classification must be substantially related to an important governmental objective.”

In applying an intermediate standard to review gender-based classifications, the Supreme Court has stated: “Focusing on the differential treatment or denial of opportunity for which relief is sought, the reviewing court must determine whether the proffered justification is ‘exceedingly persuasive.’ ”

To this end, courts evaluate whether the proffered governmental objectives are important and whether the statutory classification is “ ‘substantially related to the achievement of those objectives.’ ”

2. Statutory classification: exclusion of gay and lesbian people from civil marriage. To identify the statutory classification, we focus on the “differential treatment or denial of opportunity for which relief is sought.

Plaintiffs bring this lawsuit complaining of their exclusion from the institution of civil marriage. In response, the County offers support for the legislature’s decision to statutorily establish heterosexual civil marriage.

Because the relevant focal point is the opportunity sought by the plaintiffs, the issue presented by this lawsuit is whether the state has “exceedingly persuasive” reasons for denying civil marriage to same-sex couples, not whether state sanctioned, heterosexual marriage is constitutional.

Thus, the question we must answer is whether excluding gay and lesbian people from civil marriage is substantially related to any important governmental objective.

3. Governmental objectives. The County has proffered a number of objectives supporting the marriage statute. These objectives include support for the “traditional” institution of marriage, the optimal procreation and rearing of children, and financial considerations.

The first step in scrutinizing a statutory classification can be to determine whether the objectives purportedly advanced by the classification are important.

“The burden of justification is demanding and it rests entirely on the State.”

Where we find, or can assume, the proffered governmental interests are sufficiently weighty to be called “important,” the critical inquiry is whether these governmental objectives can fairly be said to be advanced by the legislative classification.

First we must examine the legitimacy of the end to be achieved; we then scrutinize the means used to achieve that end.

In this analysis, we drill down to analyze the “link between classification and objective.”

a. Maintaining traditional marriage.

First, the County argues the same-sex marriage ban promotes the “integrity of traditional marriage” by “maintaining the historical and traditional marriage norm ([as] one between a man and a woman).”

This argument is straightforward and has superficial appeal. A specific tradition sought to be maintained cannot be an important governmental objective for equal protection purposes, however, when the tradition is nothing more than the historical classification currently expressed in the statute being challenged.

When a certain tradition is used as both the governmental objective and the classification to further that objective, the equal protection analysis is transformed into the circular question of whether the classification accomplishes the governmental objective, which objective is to maintain the classification.

In other words, the equal protection clause is converted into a “ ‘barren form of words’ ” when “ ‘discrimination . . . is made an end in itself.’ ” [Tussman & tenBroek]

This precise situation is presented by the County’s claim that the statute in this case exists to preserve the traditional understanding of marriage.

The governmental objective identified by the County—to maintain the traditional understanding of marriage—is simply another way of saying the governmental objective is to limit civil marriage to opposite-sex couples.

Opposite-sex marriage, however, is the classification made under the statute, and this classification must comply with our principles of equal protection.

Thus, the use of traditional marriage as both the governmental objective and the classification of the statute transforms the equal protection analysis into the question of whether restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples accomplishes the governmental objective of maintaining opposite-sex marriage.

This approach is, of course, an empty analysis. It permits a classification to be maintained “ ‘for its own sake.’ ” [Kerrigan]

Moreover, it can allow discrimination to become acceptable as tradition and helps to explain how discrimination can exist for such a long time.

If a simple showing that discrimination is traditional satisfies equal protection, previous successful equal protection challenges of invidious racial and gender classifications would have failed.

Consequently, equal protection demands that “ ‘the classification ([that is], the exclusion of gay [persons] from civil marriage) must advance a state interest that is separate from the classification itself.’ ”

“[W]hen tradition is offered to justify preserving a statutory scheme that has been challenged on equal protection grounds, we must determine whether the reasons underlying that tradition are sufficient to satisfy constitutional requirements.” [Kerrigan]

Thus, we must analyze the legislature’s objective in maintaining the traditional classification being challenged. The reasons underlying traditional marriage may include the other objectives asserted by the County, objectives we will separately address in this decision.

However, some underlying reason other than the preservation of tradition must be identified.

Because the County offers no particular governmental reason underlying the tradition of limiting civil marriage to heterosexual couples, we press forward to consider other plausible reasons for the legislative classification.

b. Promotion of optimal environment to raise children. Another governmental objective proffered by the County is the promotion of “child rearing by a father and a mother in a marital relationship which social scientists say with confidence is the optimal milieu for child rearing.”

This objective implicates the broader governmental interest to promote the best interests of children. The “best interests of children” is, undeniably, an important governmental objective. Yet, we first examine the underlying premise proffered by the County that the optimal environment for children is to be raised within a marriage of both a mother and a father.

Plaintiffs presented an abundance of evidence and research, confirmed by our independent research, supporting the proposition that the interests of children are served equally by same-sex parents and opposite-sex parents.

On the other hand, we acknowledge the existence of reasoned opinions that dual-gender parenting is the optimal environment for children. These opinions, while thoughtful and sincere, were largely unsupported by reliable scientific studies.

Even assuming there may be a rational basis at this time to believe the legislative classification advances a legitimate government interest, this assumed fact would not be sufficient to survive the equal protection analysis applicable in this case.

In order to ensure this classification based on sexual orientation is not borne of prejudice and stereotype, intermediate scrutiny demands a closer relationship between the legislative classification and the purpose of the classification than mere rationality. Under intermediate scrutiny, the relationship between the government’s goal and the classification employed to further that goal must be “substantial.”

In order to evaluate that relationship, it is helpful to consider whether the legislation is over-inclusive or under-inclusive.

A statute is under-inclusive when the classification made in the statute “does not include all who are similarly situated with respect to the purpose of the law.” [Tussman & tenBroek]

An under-inclusive statute means all people included in the statutory classification have the trait that is relevant to the aim of the statute, but other people with the trait are not included in the classification.

A statute is over-inclusive when the classification made in the statute includes more persons than those who are similarly situated with respect to the purpose of the law.

An over-inclusive statute “imposes a burden upon a wider range of individuals than are included in the class of those” with the trait relevant to the aim of the law.

As the degree to which a statutory classification is shown to be over-inclusive or underinclusive increases, so does the difficulty in demonstrating the classification substantially furthers the legislative goal.

We begin with the County’s argument that the goal of the same-sex marriage ban is to ensure children will be raised only in the optimal milieu. In pursuit of this objective, the statutory exclusion of gay and lesbian people is both under-inclusive and over-inclusive.

The civil marriage statute is under-inclusive because it does not exclude from marriage other groups of parents—such as child abusers, sexual predators, parents neglecting to provide child support, and violent felons—that are undeniably less than optimal parents.

Such under-inclusion tends to demonstrate that the sexual-orientation-based classification is grounded in prejudice or “overbroad generalizations about the different talents, capacities, or preferences” of gay and lesbian people, rather than having a substantial relationship to some important objective.

If the marriage statute was truly focused on optimal parenting, many classifications of people would be excluded, not merely gay and lesbian people.

While a statute does not automatically violate equal protection merely by being under-inclusive, the degree of under-inclusion nonetheless indicates the substantiality of the relationship between the legislative means and end.

As applied to this case, it could be argued the same-sex marriage ban is just one legislative step toward ensuring the optimal environment for raising children.

Under this argument, the governmental objective is slightly more modest. It seeks to reduce the number of same-sex parent households, nudging our state a step closer to providing the asserted optimal milieu for children.

Even evaluated in light of this narrower objective, however, the ban on same-sex marriage is flawed.

The ban on same-sex marriage is substantially over-inclusive because not all same-sex couples choose to raise children. Yet, the marriage statute denies civil marriage to all gay and lesbian people in order to discourage the limited number of same-sex couples who desire to raise children.

In doing so, the legislature includes a consequential number of “individuals within the statute’s purview who are not afflicted with the evil the statute seeks to remedy.” [Conaway]

At the same time, the exclusion of gay and lesbian people from marriage is under-inclusive, even in relation to the narrower goal of improving child rearing by limiting same-sex parenting.

Quite obviously, the statute does not prohibit same-sex couples from raising children. Same-sex couples currently raise children in Iowa, even while being excluded from civil marriage, and such couples will undoubtedly continue to do so.

Recognition of this under-inclusion puts in perspective just how minimally the same-sex marriage ban actually advances the purported legislative goal.

A law so simultaneously over-inclusive and under-inclusive is not substantially related to the government’s objective.

In the end, a careful analysis of the over- and under-inclusiveness of the statute reveals it is less about using marriage to achieve an optimal environment for children and more about merely precluding gay and lesbian people from civil marriage

If the statute was truly about the best interest of children, some benefit to children derived from the ban on same-sex civil marriages would be observable.

Yet, the germane analysis does not show how the best interests of children of gay and lesbian parents, who are denied an environment supported by the benefits of marriage under the statute, are served by the ban.

Likewise, the exclusion of gays and lesbians from marriage does not benefit the interests of those children of heterosexual parents, who are able to enjoy the environment supported by marriage with or without the inclusion of same-sex couples.

The ban on same-sex civil marriage can only logically be justified as a means to ensure the asserted optimal environment for raising children if fewer children will be raised within same-sex relationships or more children will be raised in dual-gender marriages.

Yet, the same-sex-marriage ban will accomplish these outcomes only when people in same-sex relationships choose not to raise children without the benefit of marriage or when children are adopted by dual- gender couples who would have been adopted by same-sex couples but for the same-sex civil marriage ban.

We discern no substantial support for this proposition. These outcomes, at best, are minimally advanced by the classification.

Consequently, a classification that limits civil marriage to opposite-sex couples is simply not substantially related to the objective of promoting the optimal environment to raise children.

This conclusion suggests stereotype and prejudice, or some other unarticulated reason, could be present to explain the real objectives of the statute.

c. Promotion of procreation. The County also proposes that government endorsement of traditional civil marriage will result in more procreation. It points out that procreation is important to the continuation of the human race, and opposite-sex couples accomplish this objective because procreation occurs naturally within this group.

In contrast, the County points out, same-sex couples can procreate only through assisted reproductive techniques, and some same-sex couples may choose not to procreate.

While heterosexual marriage does lead to procreation, the argument by the County fails to address the real issue in our required analysis of the objective: whether exclusion of gay and lesbian individuals from the institution of civil marriage will result in more procreation?

If procreation is the true objective, then the proffered classification must work to achieve that objective.

Conceptually, the promotion of procreation as an objective of marriage is compatible with the inclusion of gays and lesbians within the definition of marriage.

Gay and lesbian persons are capable of procreation.

Thus, the sole conceivable avenue by which exclusion of gay and lesbian people from civil marriage could promote more procreation is if the unavailability of civil marriage for same-sex partners caused homosexual individuals to “become” heterosexual in order to procreate within the present traditional institution of civil marriage.

The briefs, the record, our research, and common sense do not suggest such an outcome.

Even if possibly true, the link between exclusion of gay and lesbian people from marriage and increased procreation is far too tenuous to withstand heightened scrutiny.

Specifically, the statute is significantly under-inclusive with respect to the objective of increasing procreation because it does not include a variety of groups that do not procreate for reasons such as age, physical disability, or choice.

In other words, the classification is not substantially related to the asserted legislative purpose.

d. Promoting stability in opposite-sex relationships. A fourth suggested rationale supporting the marriage statute is “promoting stability in opposite sex relationships.”

While the institution of civil marriage likely encourages stability in opposite-sex relationships, we must evaluate whether excluding gay and lesbian people from civil marriage encourages stability in opposite sex relationships.

The County offers no reasons that it does, and we can find none. The stability of opposite-sex relationships is an important governmental interest, but the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage is not substantially related to that objective.

e. Conservation of resources. The conservation of state resources is another objective arguably furthered by excluding gay and lesbian persons from civil marriage.

The argument is based on a simple premise: couples who are married enjoy numerous governmental benefits, so the state’s fiscal burden associated with civil marriage is reduced if less people are allowed to marry.

In the common sense of the word, then, it is “rational” for the legislature to seek to conserve state resources by limiting the number of couples allowed to form civil marriages.

By way of example, the County hypothesizes that, due to our laws granting tax benefits to married couples, the State of Iowa would reap less tax revenue if individual taxpaying gay and lesbian people were allowed to obtain a civil marriage.

Certainly, Iowa’s marriage statute causes numerous government benefits, including tax benefits, to be withheld from plaintiffs. Thus, the ban on same-sex marriages may conserve some state resources.

Excluding any group from civil marriage—African-Americans, illegitimates, aliens, even red-haired individuals—would conserve state resources in an equally “rational” way. Yet, such classifications so obviously offend our society’s collective sense of equality that courts have not hesitated to provide added protections against such inequalities.

One primary requirement of the equal protection clause is a more substantial relationship between the legislative goal and the means used to attain the goal.

When heightened scrutiny is applicable, the means must substantially further the legislative end. Consequently, in this case, the sexual-orientation-based classification must substantially further the conservation-of-resources objective.

As observed in our analysis of the other reasons offered in support of the marriage statute, significant degrees of over-inclusion and under- inclusion shed light on the true relationship between exclusion of gay and lesbian people from civil marriage and the goal of conserving governmental resources.

Exclusion of all same-sex couples is an extremely blunt instrument for conserving state resources through limiting access to civil marriage.

In other words, the exclusion of same-sex couples is overinclusive because many same-sex couples, if allowed to marry, would not use more state resources than they currently consume as unmarried couples.

To reference the County’s example, while many heterosexual couples who have obtained a civil marriage do not file joint tax returns—or experience any other tax benefit from marital status—many same-sex couples may not file a joint tax return either.

The two classes created by the statute—opposite-sex couples and same-sex couples—may use the same amount of state resources. Thus, the two classes are similarly situated for the purpose of conserving state resources, yet the classes are treated differently by the law.

In this way, sexual orientation is a flawed indicator of resource usage.

Just as exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage is a blunt instrument, however, it is also significantly undersized if the true goal is to conserve state resources.

That is to say, the classification is underinclusive. The goal of conservation of state resources would be equally served by excluding any similar-sized group from civil marriage.

Indeed, under the County’s logic, more state resources would be conserved by excluding groups more numerous than Iowa’s estimated 5800 same-sex couples (for example, persons marrying for a second or subsequent time).

Importantly, there is also no suggestion same-sex couples would use more state resources if allowed to obtain a civil marriage than heterosexual couples who obtain a civil marriage.

Such over-inclusion and under-inclusion demonstrates the trait of sexual orientation is a poor proxy for regulating aspiring spouses’ usage of state resources.

This tenuous relationship between the classification and its purpose demonstrates many people who are similarly situated with respect to the purpose of the law are treated differently.

As a result, the sexual orientation-based classification does not substantially further the suggested governmental interest, as required by intermediate scrutiny.

4. Conclusion. Having examined each proffered governmental objective through the appropriate lens of intermediate scrutiny, we conclude the sexual-orientation-based classification under the marriage statute does not substantially further any of the objectives.

While the objectives asserted may be important (and many undoubtedly are important), none are furthered in a substantial way by the exclusion of same-sex couples from civil marriage.

Our equal protection clause requires more than has been offered to justify the continued existence of the same-sex marriage ban under the statute.

I. Religious Opposition to Same-Sex Marriage.

Now that we have addressed and rejected each specific interest advanced by the County to justify the classification drawn under the statute, we consider the reason for the exclusion of gay and lesbian couples from civil marriage left unspoken by the County: religious opposition to same-sex marriage.

The County’s silence reflects, we believe, its understanding this reason cannot, under our Iowa Constitution, be used to justify a ban on same-sex marriage.

While unexpressed, religious sentiment most likely motivates many, if not most, opponents of same-sex civil marriage and perhaps even shapes the views of those people who may accept gay and lesbian unions but find the notion of same-sex marriage unsettling.

Consequently, we address the religious undercurrent propelling the same-sex marriage debate as a means to fully explain our rationale for rejecting the dual-gender requirement of the marriage statute.

It is quite understandable that religiously motivated opposition to same-sex civil marriage shapes the basis for legal opposition to same-sex marriage, even if only indirectly. Religious objections to same-sex marriage are supported by thousands of years of tradition and biblical interpretation.

The belief that the “sanctity of marriage” would be undermined by the inclusion of gay and lesbian couples bears a striking conceptual resemblance to the expressed secular rationale for maintaining the tradition of marriage as a union between dual-gender couples, but better identifies the source of the opposition.

Whether expressly or impliedly, much of society rejects same-sex marriage due to sincere, deeply ingrained— even fundamental—religious belief.

Yet, such views are not the only religious views of marriage.

As demonstrated by amicus groups, other equally sincere groups and people in Iowa and around the nation have strong religious views that yield the opposite conclusion.

This contrast of opinions in our society largely explains the absence of any religion-based rationale to test the constitutionality of Iowa’s same-sex marriage ban.

Our constitution does not permit any branch of government to resolve these types of religious debates and entrusts to courts the task of ensuring government avoids them. See Iowa Const. art. I, § 3 (“The general assembly shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . .”).

The statute at issue in this case does not prescribe a definition of marriage for religious institutions. Instead, the statute declares, “Marriage is a civil contract” and then regulates that civil contract. Iowa Code § 595A.1.

Thus, in pursuing our task in this case, we proceed as civil judges, far removed from the theological debate of religious clerics, and focus only on the concept of civil marriage and the state licensing system that identifies a limited class of persons entitled to secular rights and benefits associated with civil marriage.

We, of course, have a constitutional mandate to protect the free exercise of religion in Iowa, which includes the freedom of a religious organization to define marriages it solemnizes as unions between a man and a woman. law . . . prohibiting the free exercise [of religion] . . . .”).

This mission to protect religious freedom is consistent with our task to prevent government from endorsing any religious view. State government can have no religious views, either directly or indirectly, expressed through its legislation. [Knowlton]. This proposition is the essence of the separation of church and state.

As a result, civil marriage must be judged under our constitutional standards of equal protection and not under religious doctrines or the religious views of individuals.

This approach does not disrespect or denigrate the religious views of many Iowans who may strongly believe in marriage as a dual-gender union, but considers, as we must, only the constitutional rights of all people, as expressed by the promise of equal protection for all.

We are not permitted to do less and would damage our constitution immeasurably by trying to do more.

”The only legitimate inquiry we can make is whether [the statute] is constitutional. If it is not, its virtues . . . cannot save it; if it is, its faults cannot be invoked to accomplish its destruction. If the provisions of the Constitution be not upheld when they pinch as well as when they comfort, they may as well be abandoned.” [Home Bldg. & Loan Ass’n v. Blaisdell, 1934]

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.

J. Constitutional Infirmity. We are firmly convinced the exclusion of gay and lesbian people from the institution of civil marriage does not substantially further any important governmental objective.

The legislature has excluded a historically disfavored class of persons from a supremely important civil institution without a constitutionally sufficient justification.

There is no material fact, genuinely in dispute, that can affect this determination.

We have a constitutional duty to ensure equal protection of the law. Faithfulness to that duty requires us to hold Iowa’s marriage statute, Iowa Code section 595.2, violates the Iowa Constitution.

To decide otherwise would be an abdication of our constitutional duty. If gay and lesbian people must submit to different treatment without an exceedingly persuasive justification, they are deprived of the benefits of the principle of equal protection upon which the rule of law is founded.

Iowa Code section 595.2 denies gay and lesbian people the equal protection of the law promised by the Iowa Constitution.

Remedy

Because our civil marriage statute fails to provide equal protection of the law under the Iowa Constitution, we must decide how to best remedy the constitutional violation.

The sole remedy requested by plaintiffs is admission into the institution of civil marriage.

The County does not suggest an alternative remedy.

The high courts of other jurisdictions have remedied constitutionally invalid bans on same-sex marriage in two ways. Some courts have ordered gay and lesbian people to be allowed to access the institution of civil marriage (Mass. 2004).

Other courts have allowed their state legislatures to create parallel civil institutions for same-sex couples. (N.J. 2006; Vt. 1999).

Iowa Code section 595.2 is unconstitutional because the County has been unable to identify a constitutionally adequate justification for excluding plaintiffs from the institution of civil marriage.

A new distinction based on sexual orientation would be equally suspect and difficult to square with the fundamental principles of equal protection embodied in our constitution.

This record, our independent research, and the appropriate equal protection analysis do not suggest the existence of a justification for such a legislative classification that substantially furthers any governmental objective.

Consequently, the language in Iowa Code section 595.2 limiting civil marriage to a man and a woman must be stricken from the statute, and the remaining statutory language must be interpreted and applied in a manner allowing gay and lesbian people full access to the institution of civil marriage.

Conclusion

Iowa Code section 595.2 violates the equal protection provision of the Iowa Constitution. Our decision becomes effective upon issuance of procedendo*.

AFFIRMED.
All justices concur.

*See Iowa R. App. P. 6.1208 (stating procedendo shall issue twenty-one days after the opinion is filed unless a petition for rehearing is filed).

Constitutional Law Breakers or War Criminals?

2009-04-03T07:00:00.004-04:00

Could it be that this whole global economic tsunami was engineered by Bush & Cheney at the end of their tenure just to divert attention away from their obvious culpability for their admitted war crimes and save their sorry asses from prosecution?

I'm just asking...

Smells like Karl Rove in the house!