The Democrats have a one-seat majority, so, of course, the bill went down 38-24. Not a single Republican supported it.

Meanwhile, Washington DC's city council embarrassed all of us by overwhelmingly approving gay marriage.

Openly gay Sate Senator Tom Duane sponsored the bill. The State Senate generally doesn't vote on anything until passage is ensured, but, to his credit, Governor Paterson pushed the Senate to actually vote on the marriage bill instead of letting it wither and die in legislative gridlock, as Senate leaders preferred.

Debate quietly began this afternoon, with the bill's supporters generally being more vocal (this speech, from Staten Island Sen. Diane Savino, is particularly moving). And then it went to an up-and-down vote with no one having any idea whether it would pass or not, and then it didn't, because some Democratic senators are cowards, some Democratic senators are bigots, and all the Albany Republicans are both.

Update: these are the Democrats, many of whom have received gay money, who voted Nay on equality: Carl Kruger, Bill Stachowski, Ruben Diaz Sr., Joe Addabbo, Darrel Aubertine, Hiram Monserrate, Shirley Huntley and George Onorato.

About 15% of actual working physicians are members of the AMA, which means they're not terribly representative of doctor opinions, but it's all they got, and it has generally not been a fan of government health care. In the '60s, the AMA warned that Medicare would destroy the fabric of American society and kill all the olds. (Now they oppose any cuts to Medicare of any kind, of course.) But then they endorsed the House health care reform bill! And then, apparently drunk on liberal praise, they went on to endorse gay marriage and the abolition of Don't Ask Don't Tell and medical marijuana.

The AMA noted that bans on gay marriage lead to health coverage disparities. Then, in a counterintuitive bit of logic, they said DADT was also hazardous to the health of the LGBT population (you'd think banning them from the military would, on the whole, do a lot to keep gays and lesbians alive, but there is an issue with doctor-patient confidentiality and military doctors being forced to report the sexual orientation of personnel who go to see them).

Finally, they reversed their 12-year position on the demon weed. The AMA used to say marijuana should remain a Schedule I controlled substance, which is insane what is wrong with this country, but now they say that if it is going to be used medicinally that there should probably be some controlled clinical trials involving it, which is impossible under its current classification as "a substance that will get your daughter raped by a colored jazz musician."

So aside from that whole "arranging a doctor shortage" thing the AMA is looking pretty good these days!

Jennings' real job title is "Assistant Deputy Secretary of Education for the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools." It is, indeed, an unconfirmed position, but it was, of course, created by an act of Congress.

The Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools was created by George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act. It was designed as the successor to the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Program, which was created in 1986, as part of the general Reagan and Congress anti-drug hysteria leading up to the '86 midterms.

In other words, it was the "drug-free school zone" program for a couple years until it got tossed in with some Columbine hysteria in 2002.

Kevin Jennings's book Mama's Boy, Preacher's Son is the story of growing up gay and Southern Baptist in the '60s and early-'70s. He got a lot of grief. And he went on to become an educator himself, and the founder of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network. There is basically not a single bad thing you can say about that organization unless you actually do think gay kids (and even not gay kids) should be taunted by teachers and classmates until they kill themselves. So, obviously, the Family Research Council is leading the charge against Jennings. They want gay kids to die. Sorry! It's the truth!

And guess who is more than happy to play along? Fox News! They officially deemed him a Czar and aired all the out-of-context quotes and read the charges against him running a heretofore completely unknown and relatively powerless little corner of the Department of Education.

The Assistant Deputy Secretary for Safe and Drug-Free Schools is, like most "Czars," responsible for almost nothing. He or she helps decide where anti-violence and anti-drug money goes and recommends how it is to be spent. He or she helps draft school violence policy. He or she goes to conferences.

So. Let's go back in time!

Eric Andell, George W. Bush's first Deputy Secretary of Education for the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools (you can see why the media decided to call everyone with a long title a "Czar" now, right?), was a juvenile court judge, Texas Court of Appeals justice, and a senior adviser to then-Education Secretary Rod Paige. As it was 2002, Endell's job description involved a lot of talk of Homeland Security, terrorism, and school shootings. Also, indoctrination:

Andell will oversee all activities related to safe schools, crisis response, alcohol and drug prevention, health and well being of students, and building strong character and citizenship in the new unit. His office will also take the leadership role in the department's Homeland Security efforts.

Andell left the Education Department when he was charged with a misdemeanor count of using federal money to pay for personal expenses—he pleaded guilty to traveling for "private personal and financial matters" on the government dime 14 times in one year.

He was succeeded by a woman who directed the National Prayer Breakfast and had a series of policy gigs at Bush's DoE.

Now, instead of a conservative policy wonk or a someone whose job it was to lock up children we have a dude who has written extensively on bullying and how to prevent it. Republicans are literally up in arms about him because they are afraid he will make it more difficult to bully children for being gay.

According to "decades of bipartisan tradition," the Justice Department is supposed to defend even stupid and shitty laws. It is the sort of "bipartisan tradition" that doesn't really apply when, like, Bush is running things, but Obama is a return to gentility and constructive bipartisanship, which only gets more obnoxious by the day.

Still, they realized that they maybe took things a bit far. So Obama's DOJ is now willing to admit that maybe gay people can raise "well-adjusted children."

Government lawyers continued to assert that the law passes constitutional muster, but they pointed to narrow grounds in seeking dismissal of the California case, Smelt v. United States. "The Justice Department cannot pick and choose which federal laws it will defend based on any one Administration's policy preferences," department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said.

Yeah, that sort of stuff only flies when it comes to Republican administrations and the EPA and the Department of Labor and the Department of Housing and Urban Development and also yes the Justice Department itself, too!

Equality California announced officially that they will not bother trying to get Proposition 8 repealed until 2012, when they'll push for a constitutional amendment permitting same-sex marriage.

See, it's hard to raise money, when the recession is going on, and also when you are not bothering to do anything because raising money is hard.

And there is all this insane and stupid activist group infighting about the various rich people who forgot to do anything about Prop 8 until the Mormons took control of the issue and pumped their huge Mormon dollars into the anti-gay marriage campaign.

So, yes, brilliant, throw your next gay marriage fight during the next presidential election year! Make sure to add a ballot initiative about immigrants getting abortions in black churches, too, while you are at it. To boost turnout.

Why? Because since last year's vote, in the absence of a campaign of any kind, polling on gay marriage hasn't shifted. So it's not even worth it to try to overturn the ban in 2010, gay marriage inactivists say. After all, they all assumed Prop 8 would just fail, on its own, because it's California, and then it passed, because of the Mormons and the Blacks and the Olds! It passed by a whopping 4 points (less than one million people), so let's just wait until 2012.

Marc Solomon, marriage director for Equality California, said he spent June and early July asking the opinions of nearly two dozen California political consultants and pollsters and had been surprised by the almost unanimous opinion that a 2010 race was a bad idea.

"I expected having watched the protests and the real pain that the L.G.B.T. community had experienced that there would be some real measurable remorse in the electorate," Mr. Solomon said, referring to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. "But if you look at the poll numbers since November, they really haven't moved at all."

So. Obviously you can't fundraise without an organization, and you don't want to build an organization until you think you might win, and you can't win when no one is campaigning to change anyone's mind, and so it's best to just WAIT IT OUT. The olds will die, eventually! Especially once we pass OBAMACARE.

And gee, you may be saying, wasn't one of the problems, last year, that gay marriage advocates waited too long to actually reach out to voters, allowing the issue to be framed by fear-mongering opponents? Yes, which is why they mustn't make that mistake again, by trying to win an election in 2010.

But he promises—promises!—that things will totally get better soon. Or eventually.

See Obama campaigned against the Defense of Marriage Act and Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and now that he is president he does not talk about those things so much. Obviously he's got a lot of important things to do but on the other hand adding those two things to the list is like picking up milk on your way home from a long weekend hiking down the Appalachian Trail—if you really cared you'd remember!

So Biden answered those who say the President broke implicit and explicit promises by making more (often vaguer) promises:

Biden acknowledged the anger many gays and lesbians have toward the White House, and he pledged to "put some pace on the ball."
[...]
He said that gay and lesbian concerns will not be "delayed, put off or not end up on [Obama's] plate" because he is dealing with so many other issues.

Biden drew repeated standing ovations, according to a pool report, as he pledged the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act and Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the passage of the Lieberman-Baldwin bill on health benefits, a ban on workplace discrimination, adoption rights for all and an end to the HIV travel ban.
[...]
On Thursday, Biden said the administration is committed to "the unfinished business of true equality."

"I promise you with your help we'll get there in this administration," he said, going as far as to add that if the country achieves gender equality, "I will have marked my term as vice president as being truly worthwhile."

Openly gay Representatives Tammy Baldwin, Jared Polis, and Barney Frank all attended the dinner, and because of that the crowd of "about 50 protesters" outside the dinner called them all "Gay Uncle Toms."

There really should be a separate term for Gay traitors! We suggest either "Gay Uncle Bruce" or "Just Jack."

[Photo: AP]

No one has any idea! Obama retained Gates as Defense Secretary, which is bad news for the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, and the president has also thus far been completely unwilling to stop discharging gay servicemen and women, which he could do with one simple executive order. So the news that his new Secretary of the Army is John McHugh, a Republican congressman, is initially disheartening.

One of the problems with appointing token Republicans to semi-important positions in the name of "bipartisanship" is that some of us, when voting for Democrats, wish to then be governed be Democrats. And even a token Republican can cause quite a headache for a Democratic president, because of the fundamentally incompatible ideologies of the major parties. I.e., Republicans believe that Government is Bad and Evil except when it directly, monetarily benefits their friends, and Democrats have a definition of "friends" that includes poor people and minorities. (But not, really, gay people.)

So yes, this upstate Republican, who is the head of the House Armed Services Committee and who represents a district including Fort Drum, is pretty well-respected. The National Security guy from the liberal Center for American Progress says "McHugh has the skills to be a very effective secretary of the Army." But if it turns out that the dude does not support letting gay people serve in the military, a lot of Obama supporters are going to wonder why the President couldn't find a single qualified man or woman for the post who does.

And if McHugh, as he said in response to question from Ana Marie Cox, actually does "agree that DADT policy doesn't work and changing it is a priority," and it turns out he just needed to be freed from the Congressional GOP to come out with it, than we'll all say "kudos, brilliant pick, nice job." But that is a big if!

Maine Governor John Baldacci just signed the gay marriage into law, making it the fifth state on God's Wrath List.

"This new law does not force any religion to recognize a marriage that falls outside of its beliefs. It does not require the church to perform any ceremony with which it disagrees. Instead, it reaffirms the separation of Church and State," Governor Baldacci said.

"It guarantees that Maine citizens will be treated equally under Maine's civil marriage laws, and that is the responsibility of government."

This move will surely upset these two:

The Yankees started playing "God Bless America" over the loudspeakers during the seventh-inning stretch shortly after 9/11. At a game last August, Bradford Campeau-Laurion attempted to use the seventh-inning stretch for the reason God intended it—to take a leak. But two New York City police officers—the NYCLU believes they were off-duty and working security for the stadium—tried to bodily prevent him from leaving his seat because everybody knows that relieving oneself while patriotic music is playing is a grave offense to the freedoms we all hold dear. From the NYCLU press release:

Campeau-Laurion quietly watched the game, ate a bag of peanuts and drank two beers. He decided to use the restroom at the start of the seventh-inning stretch – a period when fans often choose to use the restroom. He got up and made his way down the aisle as "God Bless America" began playing. A police officer blocked his path and indicated that he could not leave during the song. Campeau-Laurion explained that he needed to use the restroom and was not concerned about "God Bless America." Then he attempted to walk past the officer.

Before Campeau-Laurion could take a step, the police officer grabbed his right arm and twisted it behind his back. A second officer twisted Campeau-Laurion's left arm behind his back, and the two officers then marched him down several ramps to the stadium's exit with his arms pinned behind his back. The officers refused to ease their grip, even though Campeau-Laurion was not resisting them.

The encounter ended with one of the officers telling Campeau-Laurion to leave the country if he didn't like it.

If you ever go to the bathroom on the Fourth of July in New York City, expect a beatdown from the NYPD.

Campeau-Laurion, who works for Forbes.com (according to his Plaxo profile), is suing the NYPD, the Yankees, and the City of New York.

Vermont was the first state to offer civil unions to gay couples as an alternative to marriage. Now Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Vermont let gay people marry, and Maine and New Hampshire are considering gay marriage bills, which means even more gay people will be buying B&Bs in cute little New England towns. And Iowa's Supreme Court ruled last week that a law defining marriage as a union between and man and a woman was unconstitutional. New York and California are still not ready to go there.

And, honestly, those people are not even Iowa residents, they can go back home to Connecticut to get gay married when they are done with their theses. Still! The Iowa Supreme Court says the state's pointless gay-marriage ban is "unconstitutional." It was unanimous!

The suit had been winding its way through Iowa courts since 2005, and "observers" speculated that it'd be another year before the godless liberals of the Iowa Supreme Court actually came to a decision, but no, in three weeks you can go to Iowa and get gay married. It is a scenic, picturesque place, if you like vast boring expanses of nothing.

And now that gay marriage is legal in fucking Iowa everyone in Albany should go fucking leap in front of a train. It would be an enlightening first experience with public transit for most of them.

Let's all go marry some federal government-subsidized ethanol!

Here's the old content, via AmericaBlog, via Dave Winer, where Warren explains why gays can't join his church:

This was from a website section called "Small Group Questions About Saddleback Church." The above is part of an answer to the question "What does the Bible say about homosexuality?" Also part of the answer, in the original, was a description of homosexuality as "an enormous sin" and a comparison of being gay to being alcoholic.

Another question encouraged people to tithe to the church even while paying off credit card debts. 10 percent! "The Bible is very clear about believers giving the first 10 percent to the Lord."

Now that Warren has become an embarrassment to the president-elect, everything, the whole stupid section, is gone. Trying to visit the page will either get you a database error or redirected here. Because Warren now realizes his gay-bashing is a manifestation of the vile sin of bigotry and intolerance.

Ha ha, just kidding, he's temporarily shunning his true beliefs to be on television in front of the whole world and gain popularity, sort of like an instrument of the devil, or maybe in this case it's God, or just Rahm Emanuel dressed as an angry, demanding, freak-fingered demon, haunting his bedroom.

“Giving that kind of mark of approval and honor to someone who has frankly spoken in ways I and many others have found personally very offensive, I thought that was a mistake for the president-elect to do,” said Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, today on CNN’s “Late Edition.”

Of course no one needs to please Barney Frank and his constituency, because you can pretty much take them for granted (liberal Massachusetts residents, not all the gays). Hooray for politics! Of course it's only symbolic and we can all have disagreements as proud loyal Americans but still get along, right? Whatever, fuck that.

In "symbolically" "reaching out" to someone you "don't necessarily agree with on everything" you are actually legitimizing his bigotry as acceptable. Which it isn't. Furthermore however "purely symbolic" this little invocation is, Warren has done tangible, actual, real-life non-symbolic work fighting against gay rights, and this sort of shit just increases his political capital and ability to do more actual non-symbolic work fighting against gay rights. It sucks. It's also not too surprising, because Obama doesn't support gay marriage, which is a stupid and wrong position, but he's an incrementalist, so it's understandable, even if we all wish he was a big hippie utopian radical free-love socialist. But the Warren pick is an incremental step back, when there are a thousand gay-friendly pastors and ministers out there who could use the publicity more.

If "no red or blue America" post-partisanship means the explicit endorsement of a bigot pastor, a useless pork-happy Republican heading the DoT as we embark on the biggest infrastructure program of a generation, and an economic team full of the guys who found common ground with the Reaganites back in the day only to then scorch and salt that common ground, the ground we were all trying to grow money in, then we'll take the divisive and damaging politics of bitter partisanship, Mr. President-elect!

Charles Steele, Jr., president of the SCLC, wrote an editorial which ran in several southern newspapers. The editorial was against upcoming legislation that would limit credit card fees—a bill favored by retailers (which would save money) but not by credit card companies (which would lose money in fees).

Here's the problem: Steele didn't write the editorial. A PR firm working for the credit card companies contracted a third party to write it, and it somehow got submitted to the papers without getting approved by Steele.

Fucked up, right? It's obviously a huge mistake by the PR firm. It makes the papers look foolish for running an editorial that the "author" hadn't even seen. And, of course, nobody wants to wake up one day and read something in the paper with their name on it that they've never seen.

But Steele and the SCLC aren't heroic in this. Check out their main complaint:

The [editorial that ran] reads: "The proposed law would boost the profits of Wal-Mart, J.C. Penney and Home Depot, but it would take money out of the pockets of the small businesses and consumers it's supposed to help."

Wal-Mart is listed on the SCLC's Web site as a sponsor of the organization. No one at the SCLC would want to insult a large benefactor.

It's not that the SCLC is too preoccupied with real civil rights issues; they're obviously known as a group-for-hire that various lobbies can sign on to support their various causes, in order to give them a sheen of support from the civil rights community. It's just that they didn't want to piss off Wal-Mart.

Let freedom ring.

[WP]

Because he had some awesome gay uncles as a kid! Or "Uncles." Little David occasionally stayed with Uncle Stanley and Uncle Ronald up in Harlem, and the couple never even tried to turn him gay or anything! Now, of course, New York's richest and most coupled gays will venture to California to have appallingly expensive and garish weddings, just like their straight brothers and sisters. Just in time for Sex and the City day! Equality! [NYT]

A spokeswoman for the force said today: "City of London police had received complaints about demonstrators using the words 'cult' and 'Scientology kills' during protests against the Church of Scientology.

"Following advice from the Crown Prosecution Service some demonstrators were warned verbally and in writing that their signs breached section five of the Public Order Act.

Civil rights groups are justifiably outraged. But it turns out the London police have a history of supporting the wacky church:

The City of London police came under fire two years ago when it emerged that more than 20 officers, ranging from constable to chief superintendent, had accepted gifts worth thousands of pounds from the Church of Scientology.

The City of London Chief Superintendent, Kevin Hurley, praised Scientology for "raising the spiritual wealth of society" during the opening
of its headquarters in 2006.

Last year a video praising Scientology emerged featuring Ken Stewart, another of the City of London's chief superintendents, although he is not a member of the group.

[Guardian UK]

Formerly in the Anonymous vs. Scientology battle: Protests, Video attacks, and the church's counterattack.

According to a report in The Washington Post, he also had posted on his blog a list of what he termed his 10 least favorite Saudi leaders in early December, shortly before his arrest. The list included a prince, a cabinet minister, a religious cleric, a mayor, and the head of the judiciary.

Jailed for Digg-bait! Look out, Cracked!

A fellow freedom-loving Saudi blogger says, "I hope it's the last time any blogger will be in any jail." Man. We'd love to get behind that sentiment but seriously, you guys don't know Perez. [CSM]