Gay, lesbian, and bisexual people who live in communities with high levels of antigay prejudice are more likely to have a life span that is 12 years shorter than their peers who are not discriminated against.Of course, the anti-gays are all in favor of that.
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As an ordained Christian pastor, I am angered by my co-religionists' collaboration and complicity with these laws that specifically target the LGBT community. How outrageous -- how sinful -- that our religious tradition should be used in the service of the demonization and denigration of our fellow human beings. It has gone on long enough. It is time for justice-minded Christians to get up off the sidelines and in the famous words of the Stonewall drag-queen Sylvia Rivera: "Not take any more of this shit."
The good news is that many Christians both in the pews and in leadership positions are already standing with LGBT people. ...
Those of us who are Christian have to add to and embolden these voices with our own. Christians should make sure that their churches, friends and denominational leaders have a chance to meet and talk to LGBT people and understand how being targeted by these laws makes us feel. Christians should take to their own Facebook pages and other social media and stand with LGBT people.
Religious leaders on every level must directly speak out against the complicity of Catholics, Orthodox and Protestant Christians in the targeting of God's LGBT children. Pope Francis, I'm talking to you. It is time for you to use your prophetic voice and speak out against use of violence and for the full equality of LGBT people. All of those on Twitter should reach out to @Pontifex using #PopeSpeakOut
Recent events around the world show us that sitting on the sidelines is no longer permissible -- especially for Christians. We cannot let others speak for Jesus. Our faith is being used to do serious harm to LGBT people. Showing love for our neighbor today, as commanded by Jesus, means stepping up and standing in solidarity with our LGBT sisters and brothers around the world.
While I was sleeping, Federal District Judge U.S. District Court Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen found Virginias constitutional amendment banning marriage equality and the recognition of same-sex marriages from other states as a violation of the due process and equal protection clauses of the U.S. Constitution.
Virginia’s same-sex marriage ban is considered one of the most sweeping bans in the country. It’s only fitting, then, the Judge Allen’s ruling is similarly sweeping.From the opinion:
Justice has often been forged from fires of indignities and prejudices suffered. Our triumphs that celebrate the freedom of choice are hallowed. We have arrived upon another moment in history when We the People becomes more inclusive, and our freedom more perfect.
Almost one hundred and fifty four years ago, as Abraham Lincoln approached the cataclysmic rending of our nation over a struggle for other freedoms, a rending that would take his life and the lives of hundreds of thousands of others, he wrote these words: “It can not have failed to strike you that these men ask for just. . . the same thing–fairness, and fairness only. This, so far as in my power, they, and all others, shall have. “
The men and women, and the children too, whose voices join in noble harmony with Plaintiffs today, also ask for fairness, and fairness only. This, so far as it is in this Court’s power, they and all others shall have. [Emphasis in the original]More from Think Progress
A federal judge has ruled that Kentucky must recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states, striking down part of the state ban.
In 23-page a ruling issued Wednesday, U.S. District Judge John G. Heyburn II concluded that Kentucky's laws treat gay and lesbians differently in a "way that demeans them." The constitutional ban on same-sex marriage was approved by voters in 2004. The out-of-state clause was part of it.This doesn't address marriages IN Kentucky, but says they can't discriminate against people like me who are legally married in another state.
[Judge] Heyburn said that while ‘religious beliefs … are vital to the fabric of society … assigning a religious or traditional rationale for a law does not make it constitutional when that law discriminates against a class of people without other reasons,’” the Courier-Journal reports.
Three weeks ago I was on the television and I said that I believed that people who actively campaign for gay people to be treated less or differently are, in my gay opinion, homophobic. Some people, people who actively campaign for gay people to be treated less under the law took great exception at this characterisation and threatened legal action against me and RTÉ. RTÉ, in its wisdom, decided incredibly quickly to hand over a huge sum of money to make it go away. I haven’t been so lucky.
And for the last three weeks I have been lectured by heterosexual people about what homophobia is and who should be allowed identify it. Straight people – ministers, senators, lawyers, journalists – have lined up to tell me what homophobia is and what I am allowed to feel oppressed by. People who have never experienced homophobia in their lives, people who have never checked themselves at a pedestrian crossing, have told me that unless I am being thrown in prison or herded onto a cattle train, then it is not homophobia.
And that feels oppressive.
So now Irish gay people find ourselves in a ludicrous situation where not only are we not allowed to say publicly what we feel oppressed by, we are not even allowed to think it because our definition has been disallowed by our betters.
And for the last three weeks I have been denounced from the floor of parliament to newspaper columns to the seething morass of internet commentary for “hate speech” because I dared to use the word “homophobia”. And a jumped-up queer like me should know that the word “homophobia” is no longer available to gay people. Which is a spectacular and neat Orwellian trick because now it turns out that gay people are not the victims of homophobia – homophobes are.
THe wheels of justice creak along....
The Justice Department on Monday will instruct all of its employees across the country, for the first time, to give lawful same-sex marriages sweeping equal protection under the law in every program it administers, from courthouse proceedings to prison visits to the compensation of surviving spouses of public safety officers.
In a new policy memo, the department will spell out the rights of same-sex couples, including the right to decline to give testimony that might incriminate their spouses, even if their marriages are not recognized in the state where the couple lives.
“I will not defend what I, in my judgment, deem to be an unconstitutional law.” “If I determine it not to be constitutional,” he explained [in a debate], “I will not defend it. My first obligation is to the Constitution and the people of Virginia.” (source)
The litigation seeks not only to overturn the state’s 2006 constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage, but also to enjoin state official from enforcing a “marriage evasion law” prohibiting couples — gay and straight — from going elsewhere to marry if the marriage would be prohibited in the state.
The penalties of violating the marriage evasion law in Wisconsin, which is the only state to have such a statute, include up to $10,000 in fines and nine months in prison.
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The marriage evasion law is particularly problematic for same-sex couples in Wisconsin because the Obama administration in most cases has elected to recognize same-sex marriages even if the state doesn’t recognize them — provided these couples are able to marry in a jurisdiction that allows it.
John Knight, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBT project, called the marriage evasion law a “Catch-22″ for same-sex couples living in Wisconsin who want to marry.
“Wisconsin is unique in that sense, and so we think that argument particularly exemplifies the harm or the animus toward same-sex couples in some parts of the country,” Knight said.How can that be considered anything other than rawest animus?
Same-sex marriage legislation has been supported in a final vote at the Scottish Parliament today.Well done, Scots!
MSPs passed the Marriage and Civil Partnership (Scotland) Bill by 105 votes to 18.
Back in the United States, nine states impose limitations on how educators can talk about homosexuality in ways that mirror Russia’s law.The state by state list includes the fact that Texas state policy on sex education actually states that homosexual relations are criminal. Even though the Supreme Court, in Lawrence v. Texas, overturned their law and decriminalized gay sex.
That’s not to suggest that the anti-gay laws in the states are “good,” by any means. But there’s something to be said for proportionality. During the 1980s, the US (as it does today) most certainly had a problem with racism. As did South Africa. But to suggest that the US, and the world, should not have spoken out about the evils of apartheid, since the US still suffered from racism itself, is not only absurd, it’s also incredibly counterproductive to the cause of human rights....
Gays in America are getting married, while gays in Russia are getting beaten. Gays in America serve openly in Congress, the judiciary, and the highest levels of government. In Russia, they most certainly do not.
When the U.S. Supreme Court made history in June by striking down the Defense of Marriage Act, the substantive holding was immediately clear: the discriminatory federal law “demeans the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects, and whose relationship the State has sought to dignify.” What was not exactly clear was what, if any, sort of legal standards the justices set for future courts. A federal appeals court ruling issued Tuesday finds the justices set a new, heightened standard for justifying discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.This came in a case where the court found that a juror could not be dismissed from a jury siimply because he was gay.
Many scholars believe that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation demands heightened scrutiny. We meet all the requirements: we have been burdened by discrimination for generations, our sexuality is irrelevant to our ability to serve as jurors, we have traditionally lacked the political power to realize our full rights in the political sphere, and we have a defining characteristic essential to our identity as a group.
But the Ninth Circuit went a step further and argued that the Supreme Court'sWindsor decision suggests that heightened scrutiny is appropriate. Review inWindsor, the Ninth Circuit wrote, was not the traditional lowest form of review that had for years been applied to anti-gay discrimination. It was something more, something higher, something "intermediate."
How could the Ninth Circuit justify this conclusion if Windsor never explicitly said it was using heightened scrutiny?
The argument is simple: Look at what the Court actually did, not what it said. In Lawrence v. Texas, for example, the Supreme Court was similarly confounding, but by looking at the Court's decision, it was clear it was not using traditional rational basis. After all, the state had to do more justifying and the cases Lawrence relied on also used something more than rational basis. The same was true for Windsor. The state had to do a lot of work to justify DOMA, the precedent Windsor cited all used more than rational basis, and the Windsor Court did not go through a list of possible rational justifications for DOMA, all of which would normally be the case in a standard rational basis case.
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If the Ninth Circuit's opinion catches on, if sexual orientation discrimination gets heightened scrutiny post-Windsor, our battle is more than half over. It is hard to justify banning us from the institution of marriage under rational basis review; heightened scrutiny takes away all doubt.
Following a seismic political shift in Virginia, the new attorney general has concluded that the state's ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional, and on Thursday he joined a lawsuit challenging it.
Attorney General Mark R. Herring says in a brief filed in federal court in Norfolk that marriage is a fundamental right and the ban is discriminatory.
Virginia, widely considered a battleground state in the nationwide fight to grant same-sex couples the right to wed, is siding with the plaintiffs who are seeking to have the ban struck down, a spokesman for Attorney General Mark Herring said in an email to The Associated Press.Florida:
The timing of Brito’s idea was so inopportune, and its execution has been so lackluster, that some wonder if this might be a stealth campaign, secretly launched by anti-LGBT forces, and engineered to fail on purpose. An alternate explanation might be that this tax-exempt campaign could have been created to funnel some of its supposed $6 million of donations into revenue at Brito’s political consulting business, MYami Marketing, Incorporated.Indiana:
The Indiana House Elections and Apportionment Committee voted 9-3 along party lines Wednesday evening to advance House Joint Resolution 3, a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. It also passed a bill that expresses legislative intent in regards to how the amendment should be enforced. House Speaker Brian Bosma (R) assigned the amendment to this committee on Tuesday after it seemed like the Judiciary Committee might not approve it. The amendment now advances to the House floor.
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The Indiana General Assembly previously approved the amendment in 2011. It must now be approved again during this legislative session before it can advance to voters for approval.
