VIDEO: Legendary Former Republican Senator Alan Simpson Disgusted By Santorum's Homophobia

 

 

If the Republican Party had a Jimmy Stewart-like figure it might just be the tall 'ah-shucks' former Senator Alan Simpson. Representing Wyoming for 18 years in the United States Senate he comes across as the lone cowboy on the endless ranges of that state. He was Minority Whip under Bob Dole in the Senate for ten years until Southern Trent Lott defeated him for the post.

The quirky Simpson has never been accused of being moderate and is a die-hard conservative but more in the Barry Goldwater school than the Santorum school. On Sunday he gave a remarkable interview with Bob Schieffer on "Face The Nation." Here is what he said about Rick Santorum and his views on LGBT Americans. Be sure to listen to the entire interview. It is a treat. (via Towleroad.com).

He said, 'I want a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage,' and they said, 'Well, what about the people who are already married?' And he said, 'Well, they would be nullified.' I mean what is, what's human, what's kind about that? We're all human beings, we all know or love somebody who's gay or lesbian so what the hell is that about? To me it's startling and borders on disgust."

LGBT: Five Actions The LGBT Community Must Do To Win The Ballot Measures

 

 

In just seven months, Americans will start their 'early voting' for the November election. That means for the LGBT community that all of our television time, mailers, calls, endorsements, etc must be completed and ready to implement. Now is the exactly the time our leaders, organizations and major donors should be finalizing plans to win the pending ballot measures that will be on the November ballot.

Now is not the time to wait, hold back, speculate and second guess. Delay is our enemy since I can promise you the other side, as in previous elections, is getting its act together. If we can win at least Maine and Washington State it will be huge victory. If we can add Maryland and Minnesota to that tally then it will be a 'knock out' punch to the anti-marriage equality folks.

A four or five state victory would make marriage equality an inevitability.

Here are five actions the LGBT community should be working on (or continuing to work on in some cases):

1. President Obama: Having the President stake an unequivocal position in favor of our side in different states is essential to victory. Our opposition last time used his statement that 'marriage is between a man and woman" against us in California. We must have the kind of statement from the President and First Lady that can be used in ads, robo-calls, targeted mailings, etc. This must be done sooner than later. His assistance will be especially needed in Maryland where the African American community is 30% of the state vote.

2. Republicans: Yep, that is right, I am saying we need to mobilize among the Republicans. The operational models used and in New York and Maryland should be extended to the electorate. Ken Mehlman has done a spectacular job of mobilizing Republican support for these efforts. If that same team would be able to obtain persons like Laura Bush / Dick Cheney to do targeted mailings or robo-calls, it would not be out of the question that we could increase by at least 5% the number of Republicans voting for marriage equality.

3. Money: Now is not the time for our major donors to hold back and play coy. They must coordinate and get early money into the campaign organizations or set up their own super PACS. Early money is the name of the game. Fortunately because of the Mehlman operation there are significant Republicans funds this time around. In addition, New York and California major donors should be made aware of the consequences of delay and the real opportunity of victory if step forward in a timely manner.

4. Endorsements: Freedom to Marry is doing an excellent job of lining up major endorsements. HRC has its video program of prominent people endorsing marriage equality. Of great assistance in Washington State was the entire business community (Microsoft, Amazon and Starbucks) endorsing marriage equality. Now we have to get national sports stars, entertainers, business folks, etc who will make ads or sign mailers not 'generally' coming out for marriage but specifically in different states asking people to vote the right way.

5. LGBT Community: No one in this community gets a free ride this election. Every single one of us must step forward and be counted. The grassroots around the country can do an enormous amount to help the different efforts.

-Have house parties, dances, etc to raise funds. Do one a month for a different state.

-Individuals can write $10, $20 or even $100 checks for each state contest. Some of you can do it every month. To pledge $10 a month for each of the five states is the cost of five drinks each month. Think about it.

-Using social media urge everyone you know to give, write relatives and friends in those states, volunteer at national organizations that are assisting the efforts, beg your national professional organizations to take a stand, write letter to editors.

-Pray for Victory!

LGBT: Five LGBT Marriage Equality Ballot Measures In 2012?

 

 

If the Maryland State senate passes the marriage equality bill being sent to it by the Maryland Assembly, the likelihood of a referendum in Maryland is extremely high. If that is the case, then the LGBT community will face five ballots measures in the 2012 election come November. Two of them will be defensive and three will be to keep/establish marriage equality.

Over the next week is a good time to reflect on how we can prepare effectively in each of these states. Needless to say, money is always essential but quite honestly we are getting to the tipping point - people's minds are mostly made up on the issue. There are of course targeted communities where an enormous amount of work needs to be done, including getting out the vote and the responding to any lies and inevitable distortions by our opponents.

However, we enter this political season with more resources than ever before including a lead in some states. Powerful people from around the country are now willing to step forward as indicated by the willingness of former Vice President Cheney to make some calls to Republicans in Maryland. The political playing field is becoming more even. Some of the states have been preparing for this moment for quite some time (for example Maine) and others are facing this issue with limited resources (North Carolina).

Here are the five states and a quick summary:

MAINE: On the ballot in November will be a measure to institute marriage equality in the state of Maine. Marriage equality has been a battleground issue in this state for at least three election cycles. The LGBT community and its allies are well organized. The last election was a reasonably close one and a great deal has changed since then. They will always need financial assistance but they seem in great shape organizationally. LGBT Americans have a real opportunity to make Maine our ninth marriage equality state.

MARYLAND: The measure will be to overturn the passage by the legislature of marriage equality in November. The state has good resources both in the Washington suburbs and Baltimore. Maryland has one of the highest African American populations in the United States (30%) and they will vote heavily in the fall because of President Obama. While we are in very good shape with that community's leadership, the faith leaders are more of a challenge. You know that NOM will focus on them heavily. This is where we will win or lose in the state.

MINNESOTA: In November there will be a measure to place into the State Constitution an amendment to ban marriage equality. The state has a large progressive base that is very energized by the issue but the latest polls have it running almost dead even between no and yes. Their major problem is that the focus nationally will be on protecting marriage equality and adding states (Maine, Maryland and Washington) instead of a more defensive battle.

NORTH CAROLINA: The Republicans have placed on the ballot a state constitutional amendment similar to Minnesota's. In an effort to 'fix the game' they have placed it on the May primary ballot where there is only a Republican Primary for President. Meanwhile the governor has to step down and there might be a Democratic Gubernatorial primary. Because of how the Republican 'rigged the election,' this one is an uphill battle.

WASHINGTON: Like Maryland, this effort will be to save marriage equality recently passed by the legislature. The LGBT community in this state has been working for years for this moment and has successfully faced initiatives so far. The polls are looking good and along with Maine, this might be our best shot.

Court Case: Reflections On A Historic Day......

 

 

When the news broke that we had won the Proposition 8 Court Case in Federal Court for a moment it seemed almost unbelievable. Surely, at long last, the Courts of the United States not only bestowed equality upon the LGBT community but did so with such grace and dignity. Yesterday was a major step, a historic one, for the LGBT community. Yes, we still have far to go and there are many appeals and rulings ahead. However, to understand the full scope of this victory we need to acknowledge how far we have traveled over the last decades.

I will never forget, while in college, my first awareness with the role that the courts would play in my life as a gay man. In the paper was just a minor article that most readers would miss entirely. Being in the closet it might as well have been the front page headline for the impact that it had on so many lives. A judge faced four young men from good families who had taken a baseball bat and beaten to death a gay man coming out of the bar. The judge at the sentencing noted their 'good families' and gave them all probation. In meting out the sentence, this judge praised the young men for performing 'a community service' in dealing directly with such perversion. That article and that injustice never left my mind. Oh, how I wish I could remember the victim's name and honor him here today.

Then I reflect on the hundreds of millions of dollars....yes, hundreds of millions ...that the LGBT community has had to raise over the last decades since the late 1970's fighting ballot measures that enforced our status as second class Americans. In city after city and state after state, this noble and proud community was forced to fight over and over again for our Constitutional rights. In a sense, it became a form of societal terrorism when LGBT Americans saw their neighbors and fellow citizens strip us of the protection of the Constitution. The pain of those election nights was horrific and the campaigns against us were barbaric. Many of the issues of self-hatred among our young and the high suicide rate came from the hateful and bitter rhetoric in those campaigns directed to this community.

Then in 1986, while we were fighting to stay alive and save our friends, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Bowers v. Harwick a decision by a 5 to 4 vote that made the sodomy laws legal. Reinforcing to the nation that the way we made love was against the law and it was entirely correct, if the government chose, to put us in jail. Stunned doesn't even begin to describe our reaction that day over 25 years ago. The decision was a like a knife to our guts.

Of course we must never forget the thousands who fought by our side and were taken too soon by HIV/AIDS and never lived to see this day. The names of two brilliant legal minds come to the fore - Tom Stoddard and Dan Bradley.

Yesterday I was jubilant with our victory in the Federal Court. Our second major court victory on Proposition 8 was given to us and which was led by the incredibly talented team at the American Foundation for Equal Rights and without a doubt the two best lawyers in America, David Bois and Ted Olson. This organization and our lawyers' names should be remembered forever by our community.

So, from the days of a judge praising our deaths, I have reached a point when I can listen to the news and read the reports and hear Federal Judge Stephen Reinhardt say:

“Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect in California, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples. The Constitution simply does not allow for laws of this sort...'

How sweet it is!

LGBT: Major Survey Says College Freshmen Want LGBT Americans To Get Married!

 

 

The Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA has released results of a survey of incoming college freshmen in 2011. More than 200,000 first time, full time students participated in the survey. The students at the four year colleges were generally more liberal on marriage equality, abortion and legalizing marijuana than they were two years ago.

The students certainly want to get LGBT citizens to the 'church on time"! An amazing 71% of college freshmen believe same sex couples should be able to legally get married. That is up from 64% in 2009. Now if all those freshmen could just convince their parents and grandparents we would be in great shape.

Regarding the issue of abortion, 61% believe in a women's right of choice. That is up from 58% two years ago. As for smoking a joint, 49% believe it should be legal and that is an increase of 3%.

LGBT: Ecuadorian "Change The Gay" Clinics Use Torture

 

 

In Ecuador, clinics have been offering programs to 'cure homosexuality and parents have been placing their children in them. Under the guise of addiction clinic's, these institutions have been using torture and humiliation as means to create behavior modification.

The Ecuadorian government has been cracking down on the clinics especially since a CNN Report was aired highlighting the massive violation of human rights. The government recently appointed a new national Health Minister, Carina Vance, who has been an LGBT activist and she has been closing some of the clinics. CNN reported specifically on the story of lesbian Paola Concha. The report said,

Paola Concha is openly homosexual and is not afraid to speak about her sexual orientation publicly. But the 28-year-old Ecuadorian woman says her family didn't feel the same way.

Five years ago, when she was 23, she says, her family contacted a center that promised to cure Concha of her homosexuality. That, she says, is when her nightmare started.

"On December 8 of 2006, they stormed into my house, overpowered me, they put me inside a van and took me to a so-called 'therapeutic' center. By the time I got there, I was already handcuffed and beat up," Concha said.

The clinic was called Puente a la Vida, or Bridge to Life. In December, CNN was granted limited access to the clinic. It looked like a mid-level tourist resort with buildings, houses and meeting rooms where patients were treated. The facility is located on the outskirts of Quito, Ecuador's capital.

Concha says she endured all kinds of demeaning and abusive treatment during the 18 months she was held there.

"I was kept in handcuffs for more than three months. I would be left without food for more than three or four days. They would handcuff me in a bathroom to a toilet bowl facing a toilet that was used by 60 people at the center," Concha said.

Shame on Governor Chris Christie....

 

New Jersey's Governor Chris Christie loves to give the appearance that he is tough and often swaggers around loudly proclaiming his views. As he campaigns for the Vice Presidency on a Romney ticket he tells those that disagree how "things are done in Jersey." Wonder if the governor shares with those voters that the way a governor acts these days in Jersey is cowardly? Wonder if tells about a governor of the Garden State distorts history and advances division in order to advance his creeds with the right wing religious extremists who have taken over his party?

Bigotry is exactly what the cowardly Governor Chris Christie is currently practicing "Jersey style."

The New Jersey legislature is set to pass marriage equality and the governor promises to veto the civil rights bill. He wants a referendum on the issue and to allow the voters of New Jersey to vote on the rights of its neighbors. In pressing his case, he said that African-Americans would have loved the right to have the public vote on their rights in the 1960's.

What planet is he living on? Does he really believe African-Americans in Mississippi wanted the public to vote on their rights in the 1960's? Are you kidding me, Governor? African American leaders in New Jersey were the first to respond to this insanity. Mayor Cory Booker of Newark said,

"I shudder to think what would have happened if the civil rights gains, heroically established by courageous lawmakers in the 1960's, were instead conveniently left up to popular votes in our 50 states,"

The first African-American Speaker of the New Jersey Assembly, Shelia Oliver, was shocked and offended at the governor's suggestion and said,

“Governor, people were fighting and dying in the streets of the South because the majority refused to grant minorities equal rights by any method. It took legislative action to bring justice to all Americans, just as legislative action is the right way to bring marriage equality to all New Jerseyans.”

Even President Eisenhower and Republican Minority Leader Everett Dirksen opposed a referendum on civil rights for African Americans.  Republican Minority Leader Dirksen said in 1959:

“Do we have legislative responsibility or don’t we?” he said during the debate on the Senate floor. “I’m ready to accept my responsibility. I’m not going to pass the buck to the people back home and say, ‘I’m thinking about the next election.' And they would say, ‘Haven’t you got any guts to stand up under the Constitution of the United States?’”

The governor pointed out that individual rights had been voted on before in New Jersey. In 1915, male voters in the states voted overwhelmingly to deny women the right to vote. Does Governor Christie really think this was a bright spot in New Jersey's history? That this vote was the right action to be taken in the suffrage movement?

Even The New Jersey Star-Ledger, a conservative paper, took on the governor's lack of courage in an amazing and powerful endorsement of marriage equality that must be read in its entirety but here is a powerful excerpt:

Imagine how different American history would be if this rule by referendums had carried the day from the start.

Take race relations. If Southern states could have held a referendum on free speech rights for Martin Luther King Jr., can anyone doubt how it would have turned out? How long would it have taken for voters in Mississippi to integrate its public schools?

Gallup has traced attitudes toward interracial marriage for decades. Note that when the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s ban in 1967, fewer than 1 in 5 Americans supported the court’s position. If Christie’s philosophy had carried the day, the ban would have remained in place until the late 1990s.

The point is that minority rights should not be subjected to majority vote. That misses the gist of constitutional rights.

As James Madison put it in Federalist Paper 51: “It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. If a majority can be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.”

Christie is not bothered by such niceties. He is a politician who sees this kind of restraint as an obstacle to be overcome, not a principle to be respected. He has even threatened to ignore Supreme Court rulings that he doesn’t like.

He is, in other words, exactly the type of politician that Madison had in mind when he drafted the Constitution’s restraints on majority power.

Americans must remember in this time of historic struggle for civil rights that Governor Chris Christie was nothing more than a coward, bully and horrible historian.

LGBT: An Important Couple of Weeks for Marriage Equality

 

 

The election year of 2012 is shaping up to be a major one for those who support marriage equality. The states of New Jersey, New Hampshire, Maine, Washington, Minnesota, North Carolina and Maryland all have serious marriage equality efforts taking place. In some states we are fighting off repressive initiatives or repealing existing marriage equality legislation (Minnesota, North Carolina and New Hampshire). In the other states we are proactively fighting for the passage of full equality in the legislatures.

While Minnesota and Maine are next November and North Carolina is this May, we face some real action over the next couple of weeks.

-The passage of marriage equality is moving rapidly through the New Jersey legislature and the pro forces might have enough votes to override a veto by Governor Christie.

-In Washington State it appears we are currently just one vote short in the State Senate and passage is likely with the Governor signing the legislation. The likelihood of a referendum is high.

-The recent opposition by the Democratic Senate President in Maryland has slowed down that effort.

-New Hampshire has postponed a vote until February in the Republican effort to repeal marriage equality.

The next couple of weeks promise to be a really interesting and extremely important time for marriage equality supporters.

Tebow: Much Ado About Nothing....

 

 

Tom Brady

As you watch the "Tebow Phenomenon" continue with major endorsements, tons of media coverage and almost deity-like status among the Christian community, you have to wonder what really legendary quarterbacks like Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady (photograph) and Drew Brees are thinking about it.

The fact of the matter is Tim Tebow is simply not ready for prime time. There was even a question if he would start Saturday's playoff game. He completed only 9 out of 26 passing attempts in the game vs Brady setting a record for touchdown passes. Tebow, is at best, a star in the making and in the next year or two he might actually deserve all this attention.

For now Tebow has become famous for his public displays of great faith at the games. Bless his heart. He has every right to practice his faith.  He isn't the first player ever to thank God for a touchdown with some players pointing to the heavens or others kneeling . If his faith develops him a fan base that is perfectly fine. After all, I am still waiting to root for that out gay quarterback when he comes along so I really can't deny Christians the right to have their own hero.

However, I believe it is time for the media to pull back and wait for him to deserve their coverage for his playing skills and not his personal beliefs. Endorsers might want to offer their lucrative contracts to those who have earned the right to them. The one thing I have to give to Tebow is that the LGBT community is paying more attention to football if for nothing else than to root for the opposition given his religious beliefs on homosexuality.

LGBT: Marriage Equality Vote Is Very Close In Washington State

 

 

Attempting to become the seventh state in America to pass marriage equality, Senators in the State Legislature submitted legislation on Friday. Even more exciting is that the legislation has 23 sponsors and only 25 votes are needed for passage. Since the Governor has promised to sign the legislation and passage in the House is easily expected, finding just two more votes in the Senate will bring Washington into the marriage equality column.

This is the closest that any state has been to passing marriage equality since the magnificent victory in New York State.

If passed it is expected that anti-marriage equality forces will attempt to put it on this November's ballot to repeal the legislation. The latest polling in Washington showed that 55% of the people of the state support full marriage equality.

Equality Maine is expected to announce by the end of January that they have double the number of needed signatures to put marriage equality on the ballot this November.