Bits & Pieces

It seems that a California state senator with a long history of anti-gay rights statements was arrested for drunk driving after leaving a gay bar. Karma is such a bitch.

Sources tell CBS13 a state senator from Southern California was arrested for allegedly driving drunk after leaving Faces, a gay nightclub in midtown Sacramento, early Wednesday morning.

The California Highway Patrol pulled over Senator Roy Ashburn at 2:00 a.m. Wednesday after an officer noticed a black Chevy Tahoe swerving at 13th and L Streets.

Closeted gay people can cause all kinds of damage, usually to themselves. It is really too bad that they do not feel comfortable in their own skin.

Updated: Today, finally, he admits he is gay. It is tragic that it took an incident like this for him to acknowledge the truth. Tragic for his constituents, and more fundamentally, for him. Closeted gay people are dangerous to themselves. This is why openness is the best option for all involved.

I have always been on the record, in fact, since 2003, with the concept of living our values. And I think that whenever we’ve perhaps taken expedient measures, they’ve turned around and bitten us in the backside. We decided early on, in the 101st airborne division, we just said, we decided to obey the Geneva Conventions…

In the cases where that is not true [where torture takes place or international human rights groups aren't granted access to detention sites] we end up paying a price for it, ultimately,” he added. “Abu Ghraib and other situations like that are non biodegradable. They don’t go away. The enemy continues to beat you with them like a stick…. Beyond that, frankly, we have found that the use of interrogation methods in the army field manual that was given the force of law by Congress, that that works.

– General David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia

New Law Would Ban Marriages Between People Who Don’t Love Each Other

Or should I say Fox News on the repeal:

Click here.  From Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Compare and contrast these two Republican views on ending “don’t ask, don’t tell.” (via Andrew Sullivan)

The reason why I supported the policy to start with is because General Colin Powell, who was then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is the one that strongly recommended we adopt this policy in the Clinton administration. I have not heard General Powell or any of the other military leaders reverse their position.

- John McCain, yesterday.

In the almost 17 years since the “don’t ask, don’t tell” legislation was passed, attitudes and circumstances have changed. I fully support the new approach presented to the Senate Armed Services Committee this week by Secretary of Defense Gates and Admiral Mullen.

- Colin Powell, today.

Issue ads are generally not accepted for the Superbowl. But this year, CBS will televise an ad created by the anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-woman Focus on the Family.  The ad will be anti-abortion.

Yet CBS refuses to run this commercial for a gay online dating service:

So where does the bigotry lie: with CBS or with the NFL or with both? I vote both.

Wonkette’s take:

Eugene Delgaudio is an adult retarded person serving as a supervisor of Loudoun County, a locality he enriches by… going on the radio and the Fox News sometimes to talk about his hatred of the Gays and stuff. Recently in an e-mail, he wrote to supporters that he doesn’t want to give a cross-dresser — “It” — the same rights “as a normal person.”

Cindy McCain, wife of Senator and former presidential candidate John McCain has made a big splash and come out in strong support of the right of same-sex marriage and against California’s Proposition 8. Good for her. If more Republicans actually supported liberty, as opposed to paying lip service to the concept, it would be a better country.

Senator McCain respects the views of members of his family. The senator chaired the effort to successfully pass Arizona Proposition 102, the Marriage Protection Amendment, and his opposition to gay marriage remains the same.

Obama’s coldness toward gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender people upon taking office could have predicted that he wouldn’t get tough on the banks or show any passion for a public option. Gays were the canaries in the coal mine back on Day One of this administration. That was the day when Rick Warren gave the invocation at the inauguration. It signaled how easily this president would insult and sideline a loyal constituency in return for the false promise of bringing in people who will never support him.

Since then he has stepped on his LGBT supporters time and again, including that heinous Defense of Marriage Act brief filed by the Justice Department last June. In addition to pointing to a flowery speech here or there, apologists will tell you about the hate crimes bill or other “pro-gay” actions. But they are no-brainers; Obama has yet to spend any capital on gays.

After years of gays and lesbians hiding the closet, in the trials now going on in California and elsewhere, it appears that those opposed to marriage equality feel the need to hide. Check out this essay by Linda Greenhouse in the New York Times

At its private conference on Friday, the Supreme Court is due to consider whether to hear an appeal brought by an organization called Protect Marriage Washington. Under the slogan of “Preserve Marriage, Protect Children,” the group ran a successful petition drive to place on the state’s November ballot a referendum giving voters a chance to repudiate a new state law that granted enhanced benefits to couples registering as domestic partners. (The voters ended up reaffirming the new law, which took effect last month.)

Under Washington’s Public Records Act, the signatures on referendum petitions are public records, available for inspection and copying. The Public Records Act, itself the product of the public initiative process, provides as its rationale that “the people insist on remaining informed so that they may maintain control over the instruments that they have created.”

Last summer, Protect Marriage Washington filed suit to bar public disclosure of the names of their 138,000 petition signers. It won an initial victory, but the Ninth Circuit ruled on the eve of the election that the names were subject to disclosure. The members of the three-judge panel observed that “referendum petition signers have not merely taken a general stance on a political issue; they have taken action that has direct legislative effect.” The court held that the public interest in disclosure outweighed the “incidental limitations” that disclosure placed on the signers’ exercise of their First Amendment right to political speech and association.

The case, Doe #1 v. Reed, No. 09-559, obviously got the Supreme Court’s attention. In October, with only Justice Stevens dissenting,the court issued a stay of the Ninth Circuit’s decision in order to permit Protect Marriage Washington to prepare a Supreme Court appeal.

Update: And there is a terrific profile of the current trial and the risk it entails in the current issue of The New Yorker.

Yesterday, in a Federal courtroom in California, a trial began. It is a challenge to the ban on same-sex marriage in California that was added to the California state constitution when Proposition 8 was narrowly approved by the voters. The basic argument of those seeking to overturn the ban is that marriage is a fundamental human right that cannot be denied to gay people under the US Constitution and that any ban is therefore unconstitutional. They are right. Merely because a (small) majority of voters desire to block equal treatment under civil law to a subset of the people cannot justify disparate treatment

One of the attorneys making the case is Ted Olsen, a well-known conservative attorney. His prepared opening statement is available here. He also penned this recent op-ed piece in Newsweek that is worth a read.

Opening statement excerpt:

The State of California has offered no justification for its decision to eliminate the fundamental right to marry for a segment of its citizens.  And its chief legal officer, the Attorney General, admits that none exists.  And the evidence will show that each of the rationalizations for Proposition 8 invented by its Proponents is wholly without merit.

“Procreation” cannot be a justification inasmuch as Proposition 8 permits marriage by persons who are unable or have no intention of producing children.   Indeed, the institution of civil marriage in this country has never been tied to the procreative capacity of those seeking to marry.

Proposition 8 has no rational relation to the parenting of children because same-sex couples and opposite sex couples are equally permitted to have and raise children in California.  The evidence in this case will demonstrate that gay and lesbian individuals are every bit as capable of being loving, caring and effective parents as heterosexuals.  The quality of a parent is not measured by gender but the content of the heart.

And, as for protecting “traditional marriage,” our opponents “don’t know” how permitting gay and lesbian couples to marry would harm the marriages of opposite-sex couples.  Needless to say, guesswork and speculation is not an adequate justification for discrimination.  In fact, the evidence will demonstrate affirmatively that permitting loving, deeply committed, couples like the plaintiffs to marry has no impact whatsoever upon the marital relationships of others.

***

At the end of the day, whatever the motives of its Proponents, Proposition 8 enacted an utterly irrational regime to govern entitlement to the fundamental right to marry, consisting now of at least four separate and distinct classes of citizens:  (1) heterosexuals, including convicted criminals, substance abusers and sex offenders, who are permitted to marry; (2) 18,000 same-sex couples married between June and November of 2008,  who are allowed to remain married but may not remarry if they divorce or are widowed; (3) thousands of same-sex couples who were married in certain other states prior to November of 2008, whose marriages are now valid and recognized in California; and, finally (4) all other same-sex couples in California who, like the Plaintiffs, are prohibited from marrying by Proposition 8.

There is no rational justification for this unique pattern of discrimination.  Proposition 8, and the irrational pattern of California’s regulation of marriage which it promulgates, advances no legitimate state interest.  All it does is label gay and lesbian persons as different, inferior, unequal, and disfavored.  And it brands their relationships as not the same, and less-approved than those enjoyed by opposite sex couples.  It stigmatizes gays and lesbians, classifies them as outcasts, and causes needless pain, isolation and humiliation.

It is unconstitutional.

The case of Maher Arar, a Candadian citizen, is appalling. David Cole, writing in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, outlines the terrible injustice done by the United States to this man, and the shameful failure of our court system to provide justice for violations of national and international prohibitions on torture.  Here are the opening paragraphs, but read the entire story for yourself if you care about the duties of the United States that have been destroyed in the name of the war on terror

In the fall of 2002, Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen on his way home from Tunisia, was pulled out of line by US officials while changing planes at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport. He was locked up for twelve days, much of that time incommunicado, and harshly interrogated. When he was finally allowed to make a phone call, after a week in captivity, he called his mother in Canada, who found him a lawyer.

The lawyer saw Arar on Saturday. The very next night—a Sunday evening—immigration officials held an extraordinary six-hour hearing starting at 9 PM, orchestrated from Washington, D.C. When Arar asked to have his lawyer present, they told him that she had chosen not to participate in the hearing. In fact, the only “notice” they had provided was to leave a message on the lawyer’s office voice mail that Sunday night. She got the message Monday morning, and immediately called the immigration service. They told her, falsely, that Arar was being transferred to New Jersey, and she could contact him the next day. In fact, that night federal agents took him on a federally chartered jet to Jordan, and from there to Syria.

In Syria, Arar was handed over to intelligence officials who imprisoned him in a cell the size of a grave, three feet by six feet by seven feet. Syrian security agents tortured him, including beating him with an electric cable, while asking the same questions that FBI interrogators had been asking at JFK—was he a terrorist, was he linked to al-Qaeda, did he know various other persons thought to be associated with al-Qaeda? (The Syrian security forces are widely known for their use of torture, as the US State Department reports every year in its annual Human Rights Country Reports.) After a year, the Syrians released Arar, concluding that he had done nothing wrong.

Higher resolution version here.

Thirty-eight people in Dallas were given tickets for not speaking English while driving. It is now being investigated. Oh, by the way, the Texas state drivers license examination is offered in Spanish.