The Moment Prop 8 was Overturned

It was an exhilarating day last Wednesday, waiting for the Prop 8 decision to come down and then reporting it all live on the show at around 4:30 ET. That hour,which encompassed a few minutes before and a while after Judge Walker's ruling -- and that moment we got it confirmed -- was pretty exciting for me and for many listeners. It really was privilege to do it all live on the show. I've shortened it down to this 8 minute or so clip. Check it out.

How Media Smeared Judge Walker

This is a piece I meant to post yesterday (actually did link to it in the show rundown) which I wrote on Huffington Post:

The way that the sexual orientation of Judge Vaughn Walker -- the federal judge who overturned Proposition 8 last week -- has been targeted and exploited by proponents of Prop 8 is not only an example of the ugly smear tactics of the theocratic thugs who call themselves Christians; it's a testament to how easily the media is manipulated by the right into doing things about which editors and reporters claim to be staunchly opposed.

Check out the full piece and let me know your thoughts.

Should Prop 8 Go Back to Ballot?

It's a question that Pam Spaulding poses, after posting Evan Wolfson's excellent piece on Huffington Post about the injustice that would prevail if the California Supreme Court doesn't overturn Prop 8. Pam isn't so sure we should bring this back to a ballot and thus buy into a system that that allows a minority's rights to come up for vote by the majority. I completely agree on how wrong the latter point is, but how else will Prop 8 ever be overturned if it's not a ballot measure? Do we have a choice? Says Pam:

The matter of "letting the people decide" is why I'm personally not keen on trying to put the whole matter back onto the ballot in 2010. Why do we want to legitimize an illegitimate process of putting civil rights up for a majority vote? In NC, we're fighting to keep an amendment off of the ballot because of the very principle that our rights shouldn't be determined by mob rule. The proposition system in California obviously works to our disadvantage, but that's not going away any time soon. The bottom line is that if the California Supreme Court is not ready and able to see the error it seemingly is about to make, it means we have to look to other states, rather than setting a precedent of putting the matter on a ballot. We have to pick the battles that place us on firmer, not shakier, legal ground. Ballot initiatives that go our way only lay the groundwork for the opposition to try to repeatedly overturn what it doesn't like, as we've seen with the anti-discrimination ordinances. The last thing our movement needs to have to do is re-win rights that have been won, then overturned because we affirmed majority rule in this important case.

And then there's the very real possibility we will lose as well. Then what? I will bring this up for a discussion the show today.

Today's Show: Obama's Gay Vow

At 3:30 ET: After successfully working to preserve marriage in Massachusetts,
Marc Solomon, heads to Equality California to lead the marriage effort in that state after the group came under whithering criticism from activists in the aftermath of the Prop 8 loss. He'll join me to talk about his new role and the future of marriage in California.

At 4:30 ET: former Clinton adviser Richard Socarides, will talk with me about the "tough spot" President Obama finds himself in regarding gay couple benefits. Will he break his vow to offer benefits or will he enforce DOMA, leaving repeal to another day? Is there a third way to handle this?

Abolishing Marriage

Via Towleroad) Overall this probably distracts from attempts to get Prop 8 repealed, as people are not going to vote to end marriage for all. Still, it's an idea I think we can all agree with: Getting the state out of the marriage business:

Meanwhile, two heterosexual Southern California college students – Ali Shams and Kaelan Housewright – want to take the state out of the marriage business.

Their proposed measure calls for the term "marriage" to be removed from state laws and replaced with "domestic partnerships."

Shams maintains the measure would provide equality to all couples, regardless of sexual orientation, while preserving marriage as a religious and social ceremony.

"This is a compromise," Shams said. "It says 'Get rid of marriage as a state institution. Make it a religious institution, keep politics out of it and stop the fighting.'"

More No on 8 Madness

This really is hard to fathom, though relative to the rest of the missed opportunities of the No on 8 Campaign it shouldn't come as a shock. Apparently Barack Obama did make a very emphatic statement against Prop 8 and, more powerfully, congratulated all of the gay and lesbian couples who got married in California -- except, the No on 8 Campaign decided not to let everyone know! The letter read as follows:

As the Democratic nominee for President, I am proud to join with and support the LGBT community in an effort to set our nation on a course that recognizes LGBT Americans with full equality under the law. That is why I support extending fully equal rights and benefits to same sex couples under both state and federal law. ...

And that is why I oppose the divisive and discriminatory efforts to amend the California Constitution, and similar efforts to amend the U.S. Constitution or those of other states. ...

Finally, I want to congratulate all of you who have shown your love for each other by getting married these last few weeks.

Activist Michael Petrelis dug up the letter and points us to a Bay Area Reporter article in which one of the outsourced heterosexual political strategists for the No on 8 Campaign explains that since the letter was sent to a Bay Area group most people across California wouldn't be familiar with the group, thus he decided not to use it. Jeez, it doesn't matter who the letter was sent to -- it was coming from Barack Obama! The impact would be enormous in many constituencies across the state if you put it in ads.

These people actually got paid our dollars, sent to the No on 8 Campaign, for this:

[L]ittle use was made of Obama's opposition in a letter last June to the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club, and right before Election Day the Yes on 8 campaign sent out a mailer featuring Obama's image and quotes that he is opposed to same-sex marriage.

"That was a close call," Smith said. "Maybe we should have."

Smith said that people outside the Bay Area wouldn't know what the Alice Club was, but club Co-Chair Susan Christian spoke up and said that in fact, Obama's letter to the club been widely reported, including in the New York Times.

Insane.

The California Supreme Court Hearing

We'll be going through it all some more on the show today, and looking at what a lot of analysts thought of the questions from the Supreme Court justices yesterday. Andy Towle has a lot on the various points of view. Clearly an uphill battle, but I have said from the start of this that we're going to be back at the ballot box and people need to start organizing right away. We have got to be out in the streets too, across the country, and not waiting for the court. Your thoughts?

Bill Clinton's "Regrets"

We had activist Cleve Jones on the show on Friday to talk about activists' anger over Bill Clinton giving a speech over the weekend at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego. The hotel has been boycotted by LGBT activists and union organizers for months because owner Doug Manchester gave $125,000 in seed money for Prop 8 and also has been involved in ongoing labor disputes.

Hundreds of activists protested on Sunday after Clinton refused to pull out, and Clinton sent his "regrets." Andy Towle has the all of the the details.

It's really pathetic that Clinton didn't just pull out or move the speech to another venue. The organizers of the trade group he spoke to would have accommodated him. He's Bill Clinton. This is just another snub in a long line of them. I'm glad to see activists out in full force. The entire Democratic establishment -- from Obama with Warren to Clinton with Manchester -- just doesn't give a damn about us. And that's because our groups have sucked up and accepted crumbs.

How the Mormons Broke the Law

The American News Project reveals new evidence of how the Mormon church crossed the line between church and state in promoting Prop 8 -- evidence which may help prove the case of those who say the LDS church broke California law. This is a revelatory, important video.

Prop 8 Supporters: Nulify Existing Marriages

The Yes on 8 people have now moved to get all of the existing 18,000 to 20,000 marriages between gay men and between lesbians voided, invalidated, completely nullified.

And this coming just as Barack Obama is rewarding Rick Warren for helping to make sure Prop 8 passed. I am just becoming more and more infuriated at Barack Obama for giving him the invocation slot at the inauguration. It was a kick while we were down; now this is another punch in the stomach from the fundies.

In a more positive development, CA Attorney General Jerry Brown filed to have Prop 8 voided:

Brown's argument on Proposition 8, contained in an 111-page brief filed at the last possible moment before the court's deadline, surprised many legal experts. The attorney general has a legal duty to uphold the state's laws as long as there are reasonable grounds to do so. Last month, Brown said he planned to "defend the proposition as enacted by the people of California."

But in his filing, Brown, who personally supports same-sex marriage, offered a novel legal theory to back his argument that the measure should be invalidated.

The California Constitution protects certain rights as "inalienable," Brown wrote. Those include a right to liberty and to privacy, which the courts have said includes a person's right to marry.

Black "Aversion" to Homosexuality

African-Americans apparently have a natural aversion to homosexuality, according to a conclusion that can too easily be drawn from this overdone, overbaked, overblown op-ed piece by Caitlin Flanagan and Benjamin Schwartz in The New York Times over the weekend. "Showdown in the Big Tent," claims that there's a great and threatening divide among blacks and gays in the Democratic Party, and so much tension and hand-wringing over it in white liberal Hollywood. Really, it's one of those classic pieces that covertly swipes at and ridicules white liberals in Hollywood by pointing to imagined or exaggerated conflicts and contradiction over their allegiances to various social causes.

Here's the line that really should have raised eyebrows among editors:

Furthermore — and perhaps even more painfully for those of us who support gay marriage and all that it represents — Christian teaching on marriage is not the only reason so many blacks supported Proposition 8. Although it has come as a shocking realization to many in this community, a host of sociological studies confirm that many blacks feel a significant aversion to homosexuality itself, finding it morally and sexually repugnant.

What the hell does that mean? Christian teaching is indeed the only reason why anyone in the United States would be antigay and voting against gay rights -- unless you believe in some sort of "natural" aversion to homosexuality (the belief of which is itself driven by religion). The only reason why homophobia exists, after all, is because of religious teaching about homosexuality. And this "aversion" they talk about is hardly confined to the black community and is in fact shared by many if not most whites. Otherwise we would have our rights in this country, the vast majority of whose citizens who are keeping us from getting our rights are white. So what is it these two are trying to say here in all their dramatic prose?

Pam has a lot to say on this as well. Check it out.

More No on 8 Fallout

Rolling Stone has a piece that's getting a lot of attention, mostly because the criticisms we've seen on the blogs and in the gay press are now getting in the mainstream. We'll tall about some of the issues raised in the piece on the show today:

[E]vidence of entrenched homophobia and religious intolerance obscure a more difficult truth. Prop 8 should have been defeated — two months before the election, it was down 17 points in the polls — but the gay-rights groups that tried to stop it ran a lousy campaign. According to veteran political observers, the No on Prop 8 effort was slow to raise money, ran weak and confusing ads, and failed to put together a grass-roots operation to get out the vote.

"This was political malpractice," says a Democratic consultant who operates at the highest level of California politics. "They fucked this up, and it was painful to watch. They shouldn't be allowed to pawn this off on the Mormons or anyone else. They snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, and now hundreds of thousands of gay couples are going to pay the price."

Your thoughts?

Hate Campaign to Launch Against Gays

And so, Jonah Goldberg was part of the kick off. JoeMyGod reports, as does Andy Towle, that an outfit called the Becket Fund will be taking out full page ads decrying the LGBT community's "campaign of violence" against religious institutions. This is the push back from the fundies on the protests against the Mormon Church, which was thrown completely off balance.This could be very ugly. Get ready.

Wingnuts Casting Mormons as Victims

Jonah Goldberg, in the LA Times, castigates that paper and Hollywood liberals for supporting gay activists who are now, he believes, treating the Mormons the way Jews were treated in Nazi Germany. This is the strategy they'll be taking from here on in, casting Prop 8 as an expression of religious faith and those who criticize supporters as victimizers. Nevermind that this is simply about gays and their allies deciding where to put their money -- a right in a America, I thought -- and focusing on those who took an action (supporting a campaign with dollars) and not just a religious belief:

It's amazing. Hollywood liberals, who shout "McCarthyism!" as a first resort, see nothing wrong with this. If Jews were attacked in this way for giving too much money to a political cause, Barbra Streisand would already have a French passport.

Never mind that Proposition 8 carried nearly every demographic slice of voters. Put aside the fact that the Catholic Church and scores of other Christian churches supported it too. Discount the inconvenient truth that bans on gay marriage have now passed in 30 states. It's all the Mormons' fault.

I could go point for point on this weak and ridiculous comparison to the Jews, but I'll let all of you do that here and I'll take this on during the show today.

Exploding the Myth of the Black Vote and Prop 8

Hendrick Hertzberg gets it right in The New Yorker, exploding the myth that the black vote put Prop 8 over the top (and hopefully ending the scapegoating) and putting the responsibly squarely where a lot of it should be: our own weak campaign:

Some conservative commentators, who didn’t have much else to gloat about, dwelt lingeringly on what they evidently regarded as the upside of the huge, Obama-sparked African-American turnout. “It was the black vote that voted down gay marriage,” Bill O’Reilly, of Fox News, insisted triumphantly—and, it turns out, wrongly. If exit polling is to be believed, seventy per cent of California’s African-American voters did indeed vote yes on Prop. 8, as did upward of eighty per cent of Republicans, conservatives, white evangelicals, and weekly churchgoers. But the initiative would have passed, barely, even if not a single African-American had shown up at the polls.

Still, this was a fight that should have been won, and after the initial shock—which tempted a few gay and lesbian voices to blame blacks for what O’Reilly credited them with—California’s gay activists and their straight allies, judging from their online postmortems, have begun to direct more criticism at themselves than at their opponents. They were complacent.

Of course, even with the myth exploded, there is still enormous work to be done on battling homophobia in the African-American community, which had many blacks voting for Prop 8. Charles M. Blow offers some of his thoughts as to reasons why, and ways to combat it, in his NY Times column. I'm not sure I agree with all of his reasoning, or his strategies, but it's certainly worth a look.

Marriage Boom Back East

In addition to reinvigorating LGBT activism across the country, Prop 8 is apparently creating a boom for Connecticut and Massachusetts:

As same-sex marriage stalls in California and a U.S. recession looms, Massachusetts and Connecticut are carving out an economic niche for gay and lesbian weddings -- and the spending that comes with them.

Mormon "P.R. Fiasco"

Since the Mormon church was instrumental in getting Prop 8 passed I think Californians are right to strike while the iron is hot -- and while we have the Mormons on the defensive, with the leadership beside itself over the protests -- and get another ballot measure up as soon as possible. Equality California is in fact getting the petitions ready to put this on the ballot in 2010, not relying on the California Supreme Court to overturn Prop 8. That is a very smart move.

Not only have the protests helped to create a big enough shift among those who voted for Prop 8 which shows we might win even if there were a vote right now, but it seems highly unlikely that the Mormon church would get as involved as before -- if at all -- in another referendum any time soon.

This article in the Salt Lake Tribune underscores what several guests on the show have said over the past few weeks. On Monday, in fact, I interviewed the preeminent scholar and historian on Mormonism on the show, Jan Shipps, emeritus professor at The Polis Center at Indiana University/Purdue University, Indianapolis.

Shipps said the LDS church, according to her sources inside, was definitely in a crisis over this, not having expected the backlash, and the leadership, according to her sources, is quite astonished. She wasn't certain if the church would get involved again any time soon. The article in the Tribune quotes another scholar who seems even more definitive:

"The Olympics had this nice afterglow for Mormons and, boy, is that gone," said Sarah Barringer Gordon of the University of Pennsylvania, who studies LDS history and culture...

...It is not clear, however, whether the LDS Church will soon jump into another political fray."Politics is a tough game, especially at this visceral level where one side is talking about religion and the other about rights, " said Gordon, the Penn scholar. "I would be surprised to see them do this again. They really need to heal some wounds."

We're on the right side of this, and they, in the long run, are on the losing side, and they know it. Getting out front has cost the LDS church big time on something they're going to lose in the end anyway, enough that the leaders are probably re-thinking their strategy. We can win this at the ballot the next time around.

L.A. Film Festival Director Resigns

Yet another robot who says he gave money to Prop 8 simply because the church told him to do so. He's sorry now, he says, didn't mean to hurt anyone -- I guess including himself -- but is resigning. And well he should. Again, Bill Condon is completely wrong on this: This man gave his money to take away people's rights, and I'm sorry you can't hide behind religion. He made a decision of his own free will to be a robot for the Mormon church. Stand up and accept the consequences of your actions. From the article:

In a statement, Raddon said, "I have always held the belief that all people, no matter race, religion or sexual orientation, are entitled to equal rights. As many know, I consider myself a devout and faithful Mormon. I prefer to keep the details around my contribution through my church a private matter. But I am profoundly sorry for the negative attention that my actions have drawn to Film Independent and for the hurt and pain that is being experienced in the GLBT [gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender] community."

Raddon's support for Proposition 8 has sparked debate within both the gay community and Hollywood, as many publicly worry about punishing people for free speech, even speech they deemed hateful, and his departure has already provoked ambivalence.

"I'm personally saddened by the outcome," said Film Independent board member Bill Condon, the writer-director of "Dreamgirls." "Someone has lost his job and possibly his livelihood because of privately held religious beliefs. I think the organization was ready to tough this out, but Rich ultimately decided it wasn't worth the cost. I'm not sure he was right."

Condon just doesn't get it: People were opposed to interracial marriage on religious grounds. People are opposed to treating Jews equally on religious grounds. You can't excuse bigotry with religion, end of discussion.

My "Blacklist?"

Ok, here is the transcript of The O'Reilly Factor where Laura Ingraham spoke with conservative Andrew Breitbart (close friend of closet case Matt Drudge) who pretty much claimed I am the ringleader of a supposed "blacklisting" campaign in Hollywood of Prop 8 supporters and then said he actually spoke with me about protesting a mosque -- all of which is just a flat out lie. Honestly, this whole thing is just plain nutty.

Let me first say that this "blacklist" term is pretty hilarious coming from people who send out lists of abortion providers as well as names of retail businesses to boycott that don't use the word "Christmas" in their decorations. What they are referring to by "blacklisting" of course is the decision by some LGBT people not to support companies that gave money to Prop 8 or whose executives gave to Prop 8. Ingraham actually did a piece later on during the same show in which she hails the Grucci fireworks family for pulling out of a parade in Long Island because it changed its name from the "Christmas Parade" to the "Holiday Parade," and she defended the family's right not to do business with people with whom they don't agree. Somehow that's fine but what gay activists are doing is "blacklisting."

But anyway, whatever you want to call it I honestly have not been involved in these efforts. Sure, I know a few of the businesses being boycotted because we've discussed them on the show -- and I certainly support efforts to spend gay dollars wisely -- but I could not recite to you anything amounting to a list because I've just been too busy with a lot of other things, let alone involved in any "blacklisting." Here's Breitbart on The O'Reilly Factor:

"Well, this is a more conspicuous form of blacklisting. It happens for conservatives every single day in Hollywood...But this is the same group of people back in the 1980s, Michelangelo Signorile, who started OutWeek magazine, who started to out people who were actually gay who didn't agree with the activist left agenda for the gay community. So what's happening right now is those schoolyard bullies are back, playing a bigger game on a bigger playground."

It's pretty hilarious to be called a "bully" by someone on Bill O'Reilly's show. Of course, Breitbart offers no evidence of any "blacklist" or my involvement -- basically he just uses my name and says I'm on a "bigger playground," whatever that means.

And you've just got to get a load of this exchange (bold is mine):

BREITBART: Well, what's so important about this issue right now is that George Clooney is silent, and secondly, President-elect Barack Obama is against gay marriage. Joe Biden, Vice President-elect Joe Biden is against gay marriage. So were Bill and Hillary Clinton when they implemented don't ask, don't tell and the Defense of Marriage Act.

What they have done specifically is isolate conservative groups, the Mormon Church, which is safe. I asked Michelangelo Signorile to go down to a local mosque with a group of angry activist left people and to protest the Islamic position on gay marriage. He won't do that.

INGRAHAM: Yes.

BREITBART: And he won't go after President-elect Barack Obama. President-elect Barack Obama has an aggressive attitude towards gay rights in this country, and they allow for him to get away with it.

Not surprising that he forgets the part where the Clintons, Obama and Biden are opposed to marriage amendments, including Prop 8, even as they aren't in favor of same-sex marriage. But what is most outrageous here is I have never met this man, nor ever spoken with him. That claim that he asked me to protest a mosque is just a fabrication, unless there is some article somewhere in which he publicly asked me to so -- but I cannot find anything like that anywhere on the web.

And it's a silly point he's trying to make anyway: Of course I would protest a mosque if Muslims had poured 20 million dollars into Prop 8 at the behest of their leaders, just as Mormons did. Also, I have been very critical of Barack Obama and his position on marriage -- just read through the past year on this blog. I'm not at all shocked by that kind of distortion, but Breitbart's claiming he spoke to me when he did not is just crackpot stuff.

The clip of the segment is here if you care to watch it.

The Delusion Factor

Last night on The O'Reilly Factor the noxious Laura Ingraham sat if for the pompous Bill and brought on the delusional Andrew Breitbart (pictured here), a good, good, good buddy of the very sexually circumspect Matt Drudge.

Breitbart went into a rant about me and "outing" and tried to connect it to the supposed "blacklisting" of Prop 8 supporters and then claimed he challenged me to protest at a mosque rather than a Mormon temple but I refused so it showed my cowardice, or some such thing. Now, I don't know what he's drinking, smoking or inhaling, because I have never met with or communicated with this man as far as I know!

Jeremy at Good as You has the whole clip up, with his thoughts. I'm going to play some of the piece on the show today and later I'll put some clips up as well, including one that exposes's Ingraham's hypocrisy, speaking out against "blacklisting" of Prop 8 supporters but later applauding the fact that companies are being boycotted because of their alleged "war on Christmas." If it all seems to make so sense, well, yes, that's the point!