In the video above, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow interviews former DNC Chair Howard Dean — who, as governor of Vermont, was also the first governor to legalize civil unions — about the homophobic language used by the Obama Justice Department last Thursday in its brief in support of the Defense of Marriage Act.

Hateful formulations in the Obama brief, according to Maddow, include comparing gay relationships with incest and pedophilia, as well as the entirely false claim that marriage between one man and one woman is an ancient tradition:

• Consensual same-sex marriage between two adults is comparable to “marriage of uncle to niece and “underage marriage.”
• The government needs to preserve the “traditional form of marriage” which is an “age-old societal institution.”

In fact, polygamy, not monogamy, was the age-old practice among Old Testament figures, notably including Abraham, father of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Transcript:

[…]

Rockstar boycotters appeared at the 2009 Los Angeles Gay Pride Parade dressed in “V” masks

As if events* around the boycott against Rockstar Energy Drink weren’t surreal enough, a protest group’s appearance in the Los Angeles Gay Pride Parade yesterday took the oddness of the campaign up a notch.

Dressed in black and masked as “V,” the anarchist in the 2005 film, “V for Vendetta,” the protesters handed out stickers that bowdlerized Rockstar’s logo as “Hatestar.”

The boycott has been called because the CEO and founder of Rockstar is Russell Weiner, the son of radio hatemonger, Michael Savage. Weiner also shares his father’s extreme right-wing political views. And Savage’s wife, Janet Weiner, is the corporate secretary-treasurer for Rockstar — the same position she holds for Savage’s production company.

[…]

In a dramatic move just hours after author/activist Wayne Besen, founder of Truth Wins Out (TWO), posted a round-up of growing dissent among gay writers and activist arising from Pres. Obama’s lack of progress and even backtracking on gay issues, a decorated Air Force pilot came out of the closet on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and announced that he was being fired from the military today because of the Obama administration’s failure to act to rescind the ant-gay “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

Here’s an overview of the pilot’s career from Aubrey Sarvis, executive director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, writing for the Huffington Post:

Lieutenant Colonel Victor J. Fehrenbach, a fighter weapons systems officer, has been flying the F-15E Strike Eagle since 1998. He has flown numerous missions against Taliban and al-Qaida targets, including the longest combat mission in his squadron’s history. On that infamous September 11, 2001, Lt. Col. Fehrenbach was handpicked to fly sorties above the nation’s capital. Later he flew combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has received at least 30 awards and decorations including nine air medals, one of them for heroism, as well as campaign medals for Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is now a flight instructor in Idaho, where he has passed on his skills to more than 300 future Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force weapons systems officers.

Since 1987, when Fehrenbach entered Notre Dame on a full Air Force ROTC scholarship, the government has invested $25 million in training and equipping him to serve his country, which he has done with what anyone would agree was great distinction. He comes from a military family. His father was a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, his mother an Air Force nurse and captain. Lt. Col. Fehrenbach has honored that tradition.

And the Air Force is about to discharge this guy, a virtual poster boy for Air Force recruiting, because he is gay? Someone has to be kidding. This is sheer madness.

In his interview with Rachel Maddow, Lt. Col. Fehrenbach said that, until his appearance on her show last night, no one in the Air Force knew he was gay, except for superior officers and military lawyers working on his discharge.

In an email to supporters before Fahrenbach’s surprise announcement yesterday, TWO’s Besen offered a round-up of growing discontent among influential gay writers:

[…]

Given his continuing series of gaffes and dumb-ass statements, I have been wondering why the Republican Party keeps Michael Steele as chairman. But then I read about his recent comments regarding the potential of gay marriage to wreak havoc on small businesses, or at least using that message to expand the base, which right now is limited mainly to dittoheads over 65 years old.

Steele said that was just an example of how the party can retool its message to appeal to young voters and minorities without sacrificing core conservative principles.

Steele’s new party message goes something like this: if gays are allowed to marry, small business owners will have to pay for … well, that part is not really very clear. Here, we’ll let Steele himself explain it:

“Now all of a sudden I’ve got someone who wasn’t a spouse before, that I had no responsibility for, who is now getting claimed as a spouse that I now have financial responsibility for,” Steele told Republicans at the state convention in traditionally conservative Georgia. “So how do I pay for that? Who pays for that? You just cost me money.”

There, isn’t that clearer?

Of course that sounds like nonsense because it is nonsense. I am married, but that has absolutely no impact on my boss, except that I am a more reliable employee because I have a mountain of debt like everybody else, so I show up for work on time and regularly. Even if my spouse was on my health insurance, I would pay the additional cost, not my employer. There is absolutely no way that I can conceive that an employee having a spouse impacts an employer’s bottom line.

[…]

(Note: This article was updated on Feb. 19, 2010)

Four polls released over the last week show that the American public is slowly but steadily coming to support the idea that marriage equality should be the law of the land.

The latest Washington Post/ABC poll shows the highest support, finding for the first time that more people (49 percent) are in favor of gay marriage than are against it (46 percent). That’s a whopping 17 point jump in support in the poll from five years ago.

In a CNN poll released yesterday, opposition to gay marriage was ahead, 54 percent to 44 percent, while 60 percent favored same-sex civil unions. (The most significant finding in the poll may have been the 58 percent support for gay marriage among young voters.)

The New York Times/CBS poll found that 42 percent supported gay marriage — the highest number ever recorded in that poll. And the Quinnipiac University poll reported that 55 percent opposed gay marriage while 38 percent favored it. On the other hand, by 57 percent to 38 percent, these same voters said they favored civil unions.

One factor behind the steady growth in support for marriage equality is that as fair-minded people delve into the arguments for and against gay marriage, the rationales promoted by anti-gay activists collapse under scrutiny.

In 1968, the year after the “activist” Supremes legalized interracial marriage in its decision on Loving vs. Virginia, a Gallup poll found that the vast majority of Americans still opposed the idea that blacks and whites could marry — 72 percent to 20 percent. Just 10 years earlier, in the wake of a California Supreme Court decision that overturned newly minted anti-interracial marriage laws in the state, Gallup found that 94 percent of Americans opposed mixed-race marriages.

As meager as support for gay marriage is now — 49 percent in WashPost, 44 percent in CNN, 42 percent in the Times/CBS and 38 percent in Qunnipiac — it is still about double the 20-percent approval for interracial marriage in the country a few months after mixed marriages became legal. (The average of support in the four new polls is 43.25 percent.)

In fact, it wasn’t until 1991, almost a quarter century after Loving, that opinion flipped on interracial marriage, 48 percent to 42 percent.

The most interesting number in the current round of polls comes from CNN, which found that 49 percent of Americans said they knew someone who is gay. It’s this factor that is likely prompting fair-minded people to apply more rigorous analysis to the flimsy excuses for opposing gay marriage.

The fact that half the people in the country say they have a gay friend or family member also proves that coming out works. Bigotry is a byproduct of ignorance. Nothing debunks stereotypes and popular misconceptions than actually knowing someone who is gay.

(The fact that 49 percent of Americans claim to know someone who is gay also appears to belie anti-gay activists’ assertion that only 1 or 2 percent of the population is gay. By comparison, about 1.5 percent of the country are Mormons, but it seems unlikely that half of Americans would say they personally know someone who is a Mormon. For example, I don’t.)

On “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” a few weeks ago, conservative columnist George Will warned Republicans that it was folly to continue to pin their party’s future on drumming up hatred for gay people to turn out votes. Young conservatives, he said, see being gay as no more controversial than being left-handed.

That statement from one of the Beltway’s leading expositors of conventional thinking was a sign of defeat for the dwindling army of homophobes and their anti-gay agenda.

The start of the “coming out” movement roughly coincides with the Stonewall Riots in June 1969 — just five years after the Loving decision. While there is a long way to go, this is a remarkable — and, yes, historic — turnaround in public attitudes in just 40 years.

Frank Schubert is the president of Schubert-Flint Public Affairs, the political shop hired to manage the campaign to revoke the right of gay people to marry in California.

Under Schubert’s direction, California voters were bombarded with false advertising, including ads that purported that if Prop 8 failed, school children would be forced to learn about gay marriage, kindergartners would be taught sex ed and churches would lose their right to free speech.

Other than deep and abiding bigotry, it’s hard to imagine what would motivate someone to foment such hatred toward a minority group. And yet, in an interview with the New York Times, Schubert revealed that he has a gay sister:

For his part, Mr. Schubert said he is neither anti-gay — his sister is a lesbian — nor happy that some same-sex couples’ marriages are now in question. But, he said, he has no regrets about his campaign.

So he did it for the money? In any case, Thanksgiving should be interesting for the Schubert family.