Tag: Gay Politics

Did you get the email from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, signed by Harry Reid, with a link to sign a petition asking the Senate to get real? If not, here’s the gist:

…it’s election season and down-in-the-polls Republicans are turning to their same old playbook – fear and division. Later this week, Bill Frist, in an attempt to appease extreme right wing elements of the Republican Party, has promised that the Senate will vote on the Federal Marriage Amendment and attempt to write discrimination into the Constitution for the first time in 230 years.

…We don’t need another Terri Schiavo moment where we spend valuable time away from the important work…

…Senate Republicans and their big oil friends have forced more than ten votes to drill for oil in ANWR, but not a single vote to lower gas prices…

We need a President and a Congress that doesn’t play divisive politics. At a time of war, Republicans should unite the country and focus on the real issues, not divide and undermine its founding principles.

Go here to sign the petition.

According to the Unification Church owned rightwing magazine Insight, there is dissension in the Republican upper ranks over the upcoming debate over a proposed anti-gay amendment to the Constitution:

The issue of gay marriage is causing divisions within the Republican Party, including the highest reaches of the White House.

Unlike her husband, whose approval ratings are languishing in the low 30s, Laura Bush’s polling was as high as 82 in January.

The split has been so pronounced that President Bush faces strong opposition within his own administration to a constitutional amendment that would outlaw gay marriage. The split has pitted Mr. Bush against his own wife, first lady Laura Bush.

Mrs. Bush has warned that promoting the amendment could backfire against the GOP in congressional races in November. She has suggested that
a constitutional amendment would hamper any constructive debate over gay marriage.

“Well, I don’t think it should be used as a campaign tool, obviously,” Mrs. Bush said. “But I do think it’s something that people in the United States want to debate. And it requires a lot of sensitivity to talk about the issue, a lot of sensitivity.”

The president even finds himself on the opposite side of the issue from his vice president:

Vice President Dick Cheney, whose daughter is a lesbian, also opposes the bill. Administration sources said Mr. Cheney has argued against introducing a constitutional amendment in 2006.

So who supports the amendment in the president’s inner circle?

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove have been forceful proponents of the legislation.

Both Mr. Frist and Mr. Rove have assessed that the legislation will help mobilize the Christian Right to support GOP candidates for Congress. Recent polls show a sharp drop in support for the administration among conservatives.

“I basically say, Mr. Vice President, right now marriage is under attack in this country,” Mr. Frist said. “And we’ve seen activist judges overturning state by state law, where state legislatures have passed laws defining marriage between a man and a woman, and that’s being overturned by a handful of activist judges around the country. And that is why we need an amendment to come to the floor of the United States Senate to define marriage as that union between one man and one woman.”

Mea culpa: Okay, okay, so I was a little wrong in my last post — the Senate is debating a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as between a man and a woman, not gays or lesbians. But as today’s National Journal PollTrack notes, a majority of Americans don’t support changing the Consitution.

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee last week passed a bill proposing the amendment 10-8 on a party-line vote and sent the bill on for debate in the full Senate. But analysts suggest the bill is unlikely to pass. A new Gallup survey suggests that although opposition to gay marriage still enjoys majority support among the public, the idea of changing the Constitution has lost popularity.

Asked if they would favor an amendment defining marriage in heterosexual terms, “thus barring marriages between gay or lesbian couples,” half said they would favor an amendment, and 47 percent said they would oppose one — statistically even.

Previous surveys showed a more substantial split— a spring 2005 survey showed 53 percent in favor and 44 percent opposed, and a March 2005 survey showed 57 percent in favor and 37 percent opposed.

The new Gallup survey found that nearly six in 10 respondents told pollsters that “marriages between homosexuals” should not be considered valid in the eyes of the law; 39 percent said they should be.

Support increases slightly when the phrase “same-sex couples” is substituted for “homosexuals,” with 42 percent saying the marriages should be recognized like heterosexual unions. But a 56-percent majority still said they should not be valid.

Gallup’s analysis found “no appreciable change over the past two years in Americans’ attitudes about legal recognition for same-sex marriage.”

But despite widespread opposition to same-sex marriage, the evangelical Bible-thumpers are still on the fringe, as I noted before.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Penn.) voted to move an anti-gay constitutional amendment that he didn’t agree with out of his committee for a vote by the full Senate — and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) lost it:

A Senate committee approved a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage Thursday, after a shouting match that ended when one Democrat strode out and the Republican chairman bid him “good riddance.”

“I don’t need to be lectured by you. You are no more a protector of the Constitution than am I,” [Specter] shouted after [Feingold] declared his opposition to the amendment, his affinity for the Constitution and his intention to leave the meeting.

“If you want to leave, good riddance,” Specter finished.

“I’ve enjoyed your lecture, too, Mr. Chairman,” replied Feingold, D-Wis., who is considering a run for president in 2008. “See ya.”

Amid increasing partisan tension over President Bush’s judicial nominees and domestic wiretapping, the panel voted along party lines to send the constitutional amendment which would prohibit states from recognizing same-sex marriages to the full Senate, where it stands little chance of passing.

Democrats complained that bringing up the amendment is a purely political move designed to appeal to the GOP’s conservative base in this year of midterm elections. Under the domed ceiling of the ornate and historic President’s Room off the Senate floor, senators voted 10-8 to send the measure forward.

Among Feingold’s objections was Specter’s decision to hold the vote in the President’s Room, where access by the general public is restricted, instead of in the panel’s usual home in the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

Specter later said he would have been willing to hold the session in the usual room had he thought doing so would change votes.

Not all those who voted “yes” support the amendment, however. Specter said he is “totally opposed” to it, but felt it deserved a debate in the Senate.

“Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman,” reads the measure, which would require approval by two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the states.

The snarling, hypocritical, hyper-aggressive apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, as they say.

While her father’s boss has frequently given his full-throated support for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, Mary Cheney has remained silent during the six years her father has served as vice president.

Well, now she’s talking. She is out promoting her new book out (the title escapes me), for which she received a million dollar advance, and from what we have heard from her thus far, in the Vancouver Sun and other sources, it is apparent that Mary, like both her parents, is a major jerk.

Cheney has harsh words for the Democratic candidates who ran against her father and President Bush in 2004, “calling Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry a ‘son of a bitch’ and his running mate, John Edwards, a ‘total slime” for discussing her sexual orientation during nationally televised debates during the campaign.”

She characterizes the Democrats’ references to the fact that she is gay as “sleazy” politics. She was in the audience at the debate when Edwards referred to her orientation. “Cheney said she looked at the vice-presidential candidate and mouthed the words ‘Go F*** Yourself,’ a phrase her father had earlier employed against Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy.”

No, Mary, calling Bush-Cheney 04 on its hypocrisy on gay issues by pointing out that one of the candidates’ family members is gay is not “sleazy.” Sleazy is a bunch of queer Gop operatives like yourself playing the homobigot card by placing anti-gay marriage initiatives on ballots in battleground states in order to tip the election to your side. That is sleazy, Mary.

Every now and then, a homophobe sees the error of his ways:

Larry Miller, the Utah theater owner who pulled Brokeback Mountain from his theaters last January, met with about 30 gay and lesbian students at the University of Utah who enlightened him about what it’s like to be gay. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, students told Miller about the difficulties of coming out and the fear of being physically harmed. The discussion appeared to change Miller’s previously unwavering stance on his decision to pull the movie.

Said Miller: “Now, I understand how something I said inadvertently made them feel demeaned as individuals. Maybe their well-being trumps my beliefs, my rights to express myself…In 2006, it’s wrong that they have to live in that fear.”

We’ll give Larry a pass on the fact that he expressed his homophobic views deliberately, not “inadvertently,” but can’t resist pointing out that in addition to the cineplex, Miller also owns a huge car dealership in Stalt Lake City as well as part of the Utah Jazz basketball team, which makes his change of heart illustrative of the fact that bigots who make their fortunes from consumer-oriented services are the most vulnerable to being flipped.