Regarding my post on Senate Democrats giving a free ride to judicial nominee Timothy Tymkovich, a critic of the Supreme Court's Romer vs. Evans ruling that found Colorado's Amendment 2 (barring localities and the state from passing gay anti-discrimination provisions) to be unconstitutional, a libertarian correspondent e-mailed to take me to task. He wrote, "I don't believe anyone should be considered anti-gay merely because of their support of Amendment 2. Looking at it as a libertarian, there is nothing anti-gay about refusing to extend laws you think are bad to yet another class of people."
Let me say, in response, that I don't in fact favor most laws that dictate to private employers whom they can hire and fire (while I do favor shareholder petitioning, customer lobbying, and employee organizing against companies that discriminate). But Colorado's Amendment 2, by singling out gays as the one group for whom localities and the state government would be constitutionally barred from enacting anti-discrimination protections, legally enshrined gays as second-class citizens. Again, if Colorado wanted to bar all such anti-discrimination laws for all categories, I'd probably be in favor.
Thus, I think Evans was not only correct, but of historic importance in holding that, as a matter of equal protection under the law, gays cannot be singled out for special discrimination (as the one group for whom no protections can ever be enacted) based solely on anti-gay animus. Tymkovich, of course, feels otherwise.
For Shame.
If you're interested in reading our opponents legal brief's
supporting anti-gay "sodomy" laws in the Lawrence case now
before the Supreme Court, here's
a link. The
amicus brief filed by the states of Alabama, South Carolina,
and Utah (give it a few minutes to download -- it's long), holds
that:
a constitutional right that protects "the choice of one's partner" and "whether and how to connect sexually" must logically extend to activities like prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia (if the child should credibly claim to be "willing").
For all intents and purposes, petitioners seek to enshrine as the defining tenet of modern constitutional jurisprudence the sophomoric libertarian mantra from the musical "Hair": "be free, be whatever you are, do whatever you want to do, just as long as you don't hurt anybody." ...
The States should not be required to accept, as a matter of constitutional doctrine, that homosexual activity is harmless and does not expose both the individual and the public to deleterious spiritual and physical consequences.
You'd be hard-pressed to find another example of how anti-liberty these right-wing conservatives truly are.
Moreover, sodomy statutes can rear their ugly heads in surprising and disturbing ways. The Boston Phoenix has a piece by Michael Bronski on the application of the Kansas same-sex sodomy law, under which a slightly retarded man, who was 18 at the time, has been sentenced to 17 years in prison for sexual activity with a minor aged 14. If the two had been of opposite sexes, however, there would have been no prosecution because the state's "Romeo and Juliet law" decriminalizes sexual activity between young people under the age of 19 who engage in consensual sexual activity with teens between 14 and 16 years old. Special discrimination has very real consequences.
Rubbing It In.
"Senators find irony in staunchly anti-gay colleague's voucher bill" is a headline from a Denver Post story about the unintended consequences of increasing the freedom to choose. It's convoluted, but a school voucher bill put forward by an extremely homophobic Colorado state senator has a funding mechanism that gives a higher tax credit to "two persons who own property as joint tenants with right of survivorship" than to single people -- thus earning it the support of local LGBT groups, to the chagrin of the measure's sponsor.
"I want to thank Sen. Cairns for allowing gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender couples to participate" in the tax credits, said one activist, making sure to be oh-so politically correct. Liberal Democrats, however, are voting against the bill because they oppose school choice.
How Low Will Chirac Go?
As he shakes the bloody hand of dictator Robert Mugabe, a fanatically anti-gay purveyor of torture and terror, it becomes clear that French President Jacques Chirac has never met a mass murderer he didn't like.
He's Telling.
The
Miami Herald has a nice piece on IGF supporter Steve Herbits, a
highly regarded Pentagon consultant who hasn't shied away from
speaking out against the increasingly self-defeating "don't ask,
don't tell" policy and other matters of gay equality.
--Stephen H. Miller