We All Look Alike to Them

DOES MAGGIE GALLAGHER WANT TO REPEAL AGE OF CONSENT LAWS??

The National Organization for Marriage has hired an active bigot, Louis Marinella, to run its Summer for Marriage Campaign (thanks to goodasyou for exposing this).

I know, NOMmers hate the b-word. They bat their eyes in sad, innocent victimhood when anyone calls them bigots. Perhaps, then, they shouldn’t partner with someone who tweets stuff like:

#nevertrust activists of the homosexual agenda – they are deceitful people who care only about themselves and not what’s best for society!

Guilt-by-association is a dicey accusation, so I’m not saying NOM endorses this.  I’d just like to know which of Lou’s bigoted jeremiads they do and don’t accept.  For instance, he  created this attack video based on the 1972 (!) Gay Rights Platform.  Our craziest opponents love throwing this document at us, so I’m happy to do a quick take-down.

First, spend two minutes watching Lou’s insanity.

What do we know about the authors of this platform?     Read more…

Share:
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • email
  • Reddit

Glenn Beck Wants to Overthrow God?

This is the logo of Glenn Beck’s new money-making scheme university.

People are reading it as Tyrannis Sedito, Obsequium Deo (“Overthrow tyrants, submit to God” or some such).

I, however, first read it as Tyrannis Obsequium, Sedito Deo, which would have Beck saying…

“Submit to tyrants, overthrow God.”

Share:
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • email
  • Reddit

On Caricatures and Straw Men

A commenter named NorthDallas30 has stirred up some intense debate on this blog.  That’s useful.  We’ve seen previously that the more explicitly our opponents state their positions, the easier it is to dismantle their reasoning.  ND30 has some utility because he offers up a common straw-man caricature of our beliefs and tries to use it against us.  That gives us a chance for target practice.

For instance, he insists our arguments for marriage equality would also legitimize things like adult-child marriage.  He defies us to prove otherwise, and insists we abide by the following rules that we ourselves supposedly established.

1) You must prove how your own relationship is negatively affected by people marrying children, animals, multiple people, cousins, etc.

2) You are not allowed to use any form of moral disapproval

3) You are not allowed to invoke majority rules or laws

4) You have no right to deny anyone else marriage to the person they love or the companion of their choice.

These are all nonsense, but I’ll start with the last one because it’s the most pernicious.

4) You have no right to deny anyone else marriage to the person they love or the companion of their choice.

I’ve heard people go into rhetorical overload and say this as hyperbole, but I never said it myself, so I was stunned when he claimed I had actually “stated” that “everyone has the fundamental Constitutional right to marry whatever or whomever they ‘love.’” I asked him to point where, and he failed.  Instead, he pointed to Ted Olson’s opening statement in the Prop 8 trial, which I had linked to and called a “lovely read.”

Ignoring ND30′s misuse of the verb, “to state,” did Olson really say “everyone has the fundamental Constitutional right to marry whatever or whomever they ‘love’”?  Or, as ND30 put in a comment on this blog,

…being called “degenerates, targeted by police, harassed in the workplace, censored, demonized, fired from government jobs, excluded from our armed forces, arrested for their private sexual conduct, and repeatedly stripped of their fundamental rights by popular vote” automatically means that laws preventing such people from marrying are wrong.

I added the emphasis, because “automatically” is the part he’s dishonestly sneaking in.  It’s ironic that he points to Olson’s opening statement for this, because Olson disproves ND30′s point.  In his opening statement, Olson promised to establish three things:

  1. Marriage is a vitally important good.
  2. Excluding same-sex couple from marriage excludes them from that good, and in fact does them harm.
  3. Proposition 8 perpetrates this harm for no good reason.

Olson’s argument stands on these three legs, and item 3 is crucial: Olson acknowledges his burden to show there is no good reason for Prop 8.  Why?  Because even rights explicitly guaranteed in the Constitution are rarely absolute.  We have freedom of speech, but not the right to incite violence.  We have free exercise of religion, but not the right to perform human sacrifice.

Olson knows that, of course, so he takes his three-pronged approach seriously.  Read the trial transcript, and you’ll find he spends much time establishing the harm done to gay and lesbian families (he even gets the opposing side’s star witness to agree).  And far from arguing it doesn’t matter whether there is good reason for Prop 8, he devotes considerable effort to demolishing the ban’s supposed rationales.

In other words, with this three-pronged strategy Olson acknowledges there can be good reason for banning some types of marriage, and accepts responsibility for knocking down the alleged good reasons for Prop 8.  That’s about as far as you can get from saying that, “You have no right to deny anyone else marriage to the person they love or the companion of their choice.”

At this point we should thank ND30, because he’s shown us the dangers of over-the-top rhetoric.  He’s also readied us to correct ridiculous caricatures of pro-equality legal reasoning.

Now let’s quickly dismiss ND30′s other points.    Read more…

Share:
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • email
  • Reddit

Happy Fourth of July!

The United States was founded not on Christian principles but on Enlightenment philosophy, which upheld reason and individual liberty.  Well, for straight white men, anyway.  But something in our national character has driven us for centuries — and keeps driving us — to better live up to the ideal  that all men are created equal  — where by “men” we mean “human beings” and by “all” we mean “all.”  That has to be a never-ending battle, but the LGBT community is in now in the heart of that fight.  And we’re on the right side of it.

I love America.

Share:
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • email
  • Reddit

Tea Party Jesus

Am I late to this party? Did anybody else know about this site?  It takes actual quotes from real conservatives and turns them into religious postcards.

   Read more…

Share:
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • email
  • Reddit

Google and the Federal Domestic Partner Tax

Google is now boosting the pay of its domestically-partnered gay and lesbian employees. This is to compensate them for federal income tax they have to pay on spousal benefits, a tax not levied on straight married employees. Predictably, many on the right see Google’s move as inequity rather than an attempt to wipe inequity out.

Here’s a reprint of something I wrote a few months ago, in which I calculate that my own domestic partner federal tax would amount to a $3500 annual salary cut:

I investigated how much it would cost to add a domestic partner to my heath plan. If I were a straight man adding a wife, I could find the answer right in my employee handbook: $729.04 a year. And of course I wouldn’t have to pay taxes on that money, which eases the pain.

But a domestic partnership is more complex, because the law says I do have to pay federal income tax on it — and by “it” I don’t just mean my own contribution. The feds tax me on my employer’s contribution, too: $5876.52 a year. This appears on my W-2 as “imputed income.”

Add it up, and being gay means my taxable income would be $6605.56 greater than if I were straight. So, at my marginal tax rate, my federal taxes would be higher by $1849.56.

But there’s more. That’s $1849.56 in take-home pay. What kind of salary cut does that represent? Don’t forget, take-home pay is only a fraction of your actual salary. My employers sent me to this site for calculating that sort of thing. It turns out a take-home hit like that is equivalent to a $3500 salary cut.

That’s right. Adding a spouse to my health plan is like getting $3500 pay cut, compared to what would happen if I were straight.

And this is at a company with full domestic partner benefits.    Read more…

Share:
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • email
  • Reddit

Facebook Status Update of the Day

Brad Parr cannot understand why Republicans can get away with claiming that morons like Bush make great presidents because they appeal and can relate to ordinary Americans, but decry “empathy” towards such normal Americans from Supreme Court justices.

I genuinely adore Brad.

Share:
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • email
  • Reddit

Collapsible Thinking: Tradition and the Slippery Slope

Collapsible thinking is my term for arguments so ludicrous they collapse under their own weight, without the need to refute them with studies and research and evidence.  Our opponents do lots of collapsible thinking.  Here’s one of my favorites, phrased nicely by a commenter on a conservative website:

If the traditional definition of marriage is changed by legal precedent or legislation, then marriage in the traditional sense will no longer have any meaning. People will then have the “right” to construe “marriage” to mean anything that suits their whims; for example…

…and he goes on to list marriage with children, with animals, and so.  It’s tempting to dismiss him as an idiot loon (he is, after all, the straight man who insisted straight sex is so good that straight people hardly ever want it).  Except we hear this stuff all the time — most recently from New Hampshire Republican candidate for Congress Bob Guida:

[I]n making his point on what he believes are the boundaries within the definition of marriage, Giuda reportedly said: “What’s going to happen next? Men and sheep? Women and dogs?

So much wrong with this, as usual.  But I’d like to focus on one horrifying implication this argument has for those who offer it, an implication so repellant that their argument collapses under its own weight.     Read more…

Share:
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • email
  • Reddit

More Craziness from Republican Platforms

Those crazy state Republicans officials are at it again. The Montana GOP platform says:

We support the clear will of the people of Montana expressed by legislation to keep homosexual acts illegal.

So much wrong with this. You can’t “keep” something illegal that isn’t illegal.  The US Supreme Court struck down all sodomy laws, and the state’s Supreme Court knocked Montana’s own such law.  But that’s too obvious.  My attention landed on the phrase “clear will of the people of Montana.”  I tried to find a Montana poll on the issue.  Couldn’t.  I did, however, learn this about people in the state (all figures are approximate):

  • Over 50% believe your same-sex partner should have the right to adopt your child, should you wish.
  • 57% believe in health insurance benefits for same-sex partners.
  • 62% believe in protecting gays and lesbians from job discrimination.
  • 67% believe gays and lesbians should be covered by hate crime protections.
  • 74% believe in protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination in housing.

Click to enlarge.

So here’s what Montana’s GOP wants us to believe:  Despite our majorities (sometimes super-majorities) on these issues, the people of Montana have a “clear will” to keep sodomy illegal.  They don’t want to discriminate against us, but they do want to throw us in prison.

Of course, these Republicans have a loophole:  “the clear will of the people of Montana expressed by legislation.”  Ah, so legislation expresses the clear will of the people.  Funny how our opponents don’t buy that when legislatures legalize gay marriage (“we need a direct vote by the people!”).  Mm hmm.

It’s almost as if the platform writers have a psychological disorder that keeps them from seeing the truth when it comes to gays and lesbians.  Wish there was a name for that.  Anyway, I opened this by referring to “those crazy state Republicans.”  I didn’t mean crazy as in those crazy kids.  I meant crazy as in complete and crazy break from reality.

Share:
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • email
  • Reddit

A Matter of Semantics, Really

There’s such a tiny difference between, “We are luscious,” and “We are lushes.”

Share:
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • email
  • Reddit