"If you really want to increase your wealth, get married and stay married," says Jay Zagorsky, research scientist at Ohio Sate University. The reasons: (household) economies of scale and marriage's stabilizing factor. It's just more evidence of why the anti-gay-marriage forces are fundamentally unconservative.
As to the headline "Marriage Builds Wealth More than Being
Single," one wag commented: John Kerry could have told them
that!
An overview of the Golden Globes, via the Washington Post.
I was surprised that Philip Seymour Hoffman, accepting his
best-actor award for "Capote," didn't bother to mention much less
offer his respects to the brilliant if tortured man whose life he
portrayed. Not classy, and in marked distinction to all the kind
and deserved tributes the "Walk the Line" folks paid to Johnny and
June. It's one reason I wish more gay actors played gay roles (I
think they'd get it).
While the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force has reiterated
its "adamant opposition" to the confirmation of Judge Alito, its
latest statement
contains some welcomed balance:
Judge Alito, addressing a case brought by students seeking to protect their right to express anti-gay views, for which he received an award from the Family Research Council, explained his vote against the constitutionality of an extraordinarily broad school anti-harassment policy as required by the controlling constitutional standard, a view we share, and offered up his ruling in another case where he voted to allow a student thought to be gay to transfer to another school because the "student had been bullied unmercifully...to the point of attempting...suicide" as an example of favoring "the small person." (emphasis added)
Recognizing that Saxe v. State College Area School District was not an anti-gay ruling but a pro-free-speech ruling, and that Shore Regional High School Board of Education v. P.S. was a gay-friendly ruling, distinguishes NGLTF from the ridiculously partisan position taken by the Democratic Party lobbyists who now run PFLAG. As noted previously, that formerly nonpartisan group issued a statement condemning Alito's free-speech ruling in Saxe while making no mention at all of Shore Regional.
More: Assessing the Alito hearings panderfest,
Paul Horowitz of Prawfsblog
writes:
I appreciate the value that interest groups such as NOW and NARAL have to the Democrats in the political process, but if I were running the party I would be seeking a Sister Souljah moment with those groups at least once a week, or better yet ignoring them altogether.
And then, if the Republicans would only ignore the Family
Research Council and Focus on the Family!
More Recent Postings
01/8/06 - 01/14/06
There's more than a little disingenuousness here:
[Anti-gay Sen. Sam] Brownback wanted to know if Alito believed that the Federal Defense of Marriage Act which says states do not have to accept same-sex marriages from other states is counter to the full-faith-and- credit clause of the Constitution. Without directly answering the question Alito said that the issue is the subject of disagreement by constitutional scholars.
"Its unfortunate that Alito has given completely non-answers to questions," Laura Schwartz, chief legislative counsel for the Human Rights Campaign told 365Gay.com.
Sounded like an appropriate answer to me.
Note: liberal judicial nominees also refuse to publicly prejudge issues likely to come before them, as everyone in Washington knows.
More: In response to Democrats' charge that he
never stands up for the "little guy," Alito pointed to his 2004
decision protecting a high school student from anti-gay bullying by
letting him go to the school of his choice. The Advocate
reports:
This was a case in which a high school student had been bullied unmercifully by other students in his school because of their perception of his sexual orientation, Alito said. He'd been bullied to the point of attempting to commit suicide, and his parents wanted to enroll him at an adjacent public high school. And the school board said, 'No, you can't do that,' and I wrote an opinion upholding their right to have him placed in a safe school, in an adjacent municipality.
Of course, standing up for gay kids against government educrats
isn't what the Democrats had in mind. Which is why PFLAG and others
ignored this decision in their anti-Alito screeds. (hat tip:
gay patriot)
The ACLU argues,
correctly, that his arrest was unconstitutional. I hope this
experience leads Rev. Latham to come out.
According to Reuters, the top court of the Cherokee Nation has declined to strike down a marriage between two women performed in May 2004, before tribal law was changed to ban the practice. A lawyer for the tribal council says it's possible the U.S. government will have to recognize the marriage because of the sovereign status of Indian tribes, which could, in theory at least, make them eligible for federal tax benefits denied to date to gay couples.
DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act) vs. tribal sovereignty. We'll
see how this one plays out.
IGF gets mentioned in an anti-gay marriage op-ed, from the Jan. 8 Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Charles H. Darrell of Minnesota for Marriage/Minnesota Family Council takes note of Dale Carpenter's argument that civil unions are an incremental step that will help pave the way for full marriage equality. Now, if only we could convince more gay activists of this!
More. Guess there's some confusion on ends and
means. Commenter "Mickie" gets it, though:
[I]n many (not all) states, demanding full marriage through the courts has breed a backlash that led to state constitutional amendments that ban both marriage and civil unions. Whereas states that have instead gone the legislative route for civil unions, such as Connecticut, have not faced such as draconian backlash. And before too long their electorates will be poised to pass full marriage for same-sex couples.
The United Kindom has civil partnerships that are not marriage, but everyone is now calling them marriage. That's smart strategy. Not dumb politics.
Hope that helps clarify things. For more, read Steve Swayne's
latest.
Ok, here's one more excellent Brokeback column, because it's by Pulitzer Prize winner Leonard Pitts Jr. and it backs up my take on Larry David's op-ed (which some commenters insisted was nothing but satire). And I'm very, very petty about such things.
Also, a very moving letter in our mailbag.
Most high school seniors support further restrictions on
abortion, but are twice as likely as adults to support legal
recognition of gay marriages. Those findings come from a highly
regarded national poll
by researchers at Hamilton College and Zogby International. It's
further evidence that (1) we'll win the gay marriage fight in time,
and (2) abortion and gay legal equality are not linked concepts
except in the minds of certain activists.
The anti-gay right's latest bit of dangerous nonsense gets dissected by Jon Rowe over at Positive Liberty. At issue: a new book by David Kupelian titled The Marketing of Evil. In the section on gay rights, Kupelian suggests that the gay movement is following a "master plan" that was spelled out in a book by gay PR strategists back in 1990. That long-since out of print work is After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the '90s, by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen.
The funny thing is, while After the Ball was a smart
book about using the mainstream media to counter negative
stereotypes and promote honest representations of gay lives, it was
dismissed by many self-styled progressive gay activists at the time
as a "sell out" that advocated "assimilation" and substituted a
"marketing strategy" for radical, grass-roots coalition building on
the left. That right-wing conspiracy buffs think it was some sort
of master plan would actually be funny if it weren't so
hateful.
More Recent Postings
01/1/06 - 01/7/06