Northam: Business Reopenings Must Use Science, Data and Testing

Here in Virginia, Governor Ralph Northam - the only governor who is a doctor and who, knowing him as I do, actually cares about Virginians unlike the occupant of the White House and Virginia Republicans - is resisting Der Trumpenführer's calls to rashly "reopen" the economy and gamble with individuals' lives. Recent polling shows that 76% of Virginians believe Northam is doing a good job, with the other 24% likely representing the Christofascists and white supremacists who make up the majority of the Virginia GOP's core base. Infections and deaths in Virginia are still rising with the peak projected to come during the next three to four weeks.  Clearly, this is NOT the time to end social distancing and allow crowded gatherings of people to resume.  A piece in the Virginian Pilot looks at Northam's handling of the crisis despite the irresponsible voices calling to reopen all businesses (note the reference to The Family Foundation, a Christofascist hate group in league with Virginia Republican lawmakers) .  Here are article excepts:

The calls for Virginia’s governor to come up with a plan for reopening the state sooner rather than later are growing louder — from [Republican] elected officials, advocates and residents — and President Donald Trump’s new guidelines to state leaders are likely to cause more voices to join the chorus.

But the pressure to release such a plan comes as Virginia appears to be deep in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic, with the Department of Health reporting the largest increase in cases on Friday, up 602 from the previous day. The state appears not to have yet reached a peak in cases that health officials have projected will come between late April and late May.

At least 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment since the start of the pandemic, with over 410,000 filing in Virginia. Northam on Wednesday extended closures for nonessential businesses such as movie theaters and gyms to May 8, even as his stay-at-home order remains in effect until June 10. In statements, on phone calls and on social media, Republican state lawmakers say it’s time to get back to work and are asking Northam to begin the process of reopening Virginia. But Northam and health officials have warned that reopening anything too soon could overwhelm hospital capacity and do more harm than good.

“I assure you, I want to get back to a place where all businesses can be open, and we will get there, but we have to do it with deliberation, using science, data and testing to make sure we do it safely,” Northam said Friday at a press conference in Richmond. “Otherwise, cases will spike, we’ll be right back where we started, and all the sacrifices people have already made will have been for nothing.”

[T]he number of confirmed cases in Virginia has surpassed 7,000, but less than 1% of Virginians have been tested for COVID-19 as testing kits and personal protective equipment continue to be difficult to come by.

Most Virginians seem to think Northam — a pediatric neurologist who treated wounded soldiers during Desert Storm — is doing a good job managing the coronavirus pandemic. A Virginia Commonwealth University poll released Tuesday showed 76% of respondents approved of his handling the crisis.

On Monday, state officials unveiled a new University of Virginia coronavirus model that projected if social distancing restrictions are lifted on June 10 and the state returns to a “halfway” version of normal, the forecasted peak would come around mid-August, with median projections showing more than 10,000 confirmed cases a day.

The UVA researchers stressed that social distancing has significantly slowed the spread of the coronavirus, avoiding the worst-case scenarios that earlier projections showed. Lifting such restrictions too soon, they warned, could quickly lead to a second wave. Northam said Friday that staffing, testing kits and personal protective equipment remain hard to come by, and that’s partly as a result of a lack of guidance from the federal government.

“Do we have enough (personal protective equipment) to say that if there’s a flare up, or if that curve sharpens, we have the supplies necessary not only for the hospitals, but for the first responders, our nursing homes? We’re not there yet,” he said.

Sen. Steve Newman, R-Bedford, called Northam’s strategy “simple-minded thinking” on a video call with the Family Foundation, a conservative pro-life organization [sadly the media never calls TFF what it is in fact], on Thursday. On a call organized by the Democratic Party of Virginia on Tuesday, Dr. Wendy Klein, an associate professor at VCU’s Department of Internal Medicine, said any attempts to reopen the economy should be done in small steps and only if robust testing and contract tracing is available. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican whose administration has coordinated closely with Northam’s and Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s staff during the coronavirus pandemic, said plans to move into a “recovery” phase would be laid out in greater detail next week, The Baltimore Sun reported.

Hogan said the recovery phase would include four necessary steps: a goal of 10,000 tests a day; increasing hospitals’ capacity to treat COVID-19 patients; boosting the state’s supply of personal protective equipment; and building a 1,000-person operation to trace the contacts of sick people, The Sun reported.

"Unite the Right" Flops - While the Progressives Turn Out in Force

The pathetically small turn out of "Unite the Right" extremists.

The much ballyhooed "Unite the Right" in Washington, DC, was a spectacular flop with only a few dozen (at best) alt-right and neo-Nazis showing up.  The flop was on the scale of the National Organization's last "March for Marriage" that utterly failed to deliver on the hundreds of promised participants, Instead, only a couple of dozen religious extremist showed up.  Already the Unite the Right organizers are making excuses for the pitiful turnout, including whining that "people were too afraid to come."  The obvious take away is that the racists and neo-Nazis prefer to mass only when unsuspecting communities are unprepared and law enforcement is not forewarned and ready/able to stop the extreme right violence.  Meanwhile, peaceful counter protesters showed up en mass and dominated.  The lesson is that the alt-right is a form of vermin that crawled out from under some rock and is not representative of a majority of Americans.  Those of us who are decent and moral must unite to counter the hatred and bigotry that is the stock in trade of  much of the Trump/Pence base.  Here are excerpts from a piece in the Washington Post:

One year after the clashes between white supremacists and counter-protesters in Charlottesville, the two groups were expected to meet again, this time in Washington. The counter-protesters showed up. The racists did not.

Much of the coverage of Sunday’s Unite the Right rally, organized by white nationalist Jason Kessler, will focus on the feeble turnout. And it really was pathetic: Instead of the several hundred the organizers and law enforcement expected, only a couple dozen showed. Even though Metro and local police pulled out all the stops to protect the white supremacists — including a private subway entrance for Kessler and Co. — WUSA reported that Unite the Right members “say people were too afraid to come out today for the rally.” Sure. But we also shouldn’t forget the remarkably large turnout for the counter-protests. Sunday was as much a victory for the left as it was a disappointment for white supremacists.  . . . . The home-field advantage was clear: When a counter-protest speaker asked how many attendees were from Washington, much of the crowd raised their hands. Republicans may hold the power in Washington, but on Sunday the city’s residents sent a very different message.

In the wake of the far right’s flop and the left’s success, it’s worth looking at how both media and law enforcement have treated white nationalists and those protesting them. Police sheltered the Unite the Right attendees from when they arrived at Vienna Metro station in Virginia, through the rally where they were protected by multiple rows of fencing to after the rally when the attendees were loaded into vans and driven away. That law enforcement wanted to avoid violent clashes is understandable. But contrast this with how other protests are often handled both in the District and across the country. As the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer noted, “In Ferguson, black protesters had police snipers trained on them. In DC, the Nazis get a police escort.” If Black Lives Matter is going to be treated as potential troublemakers, white supremacists should at least face the same suspicion.

As for the media, on Friday National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” gave Kessler seven minutes of airtime (during which, among other things, he ranked races by intelligence). That’s 15 or 20 seconds for every rally attendee — certainly not the ratio that the groups protesting Kessler got or will get. This is not to say Kessler and others like him should be ignored — especially while a white nationalists’ favorite occupies the Oval Office. But the next time white supremacists try to grab the media spotlight, news outlets would do well to remember this pitiful turnout before handing them a platform.

It is crucial that the far right not be given a platform from which they can spew hate and lies even if Der  Trumpenführer counts them among the core of his political base.  

Catholic Cardinal Preyed on Men Seeking Priesthood

McCarrick with George W. Bush and John Roberts.

While most of the media's focus is on Trump's open acts of treason in Helsinki, another story revealing the depths of the depravity of the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy is laid out in detail in a piece in the New York Times.  The piece looks at how the behavior of Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, former archbishop of Washington, DC, was ignored by Church officials who received numerous warnings that the cardinal was sexually abusing seminarians.  The Church condemns normal, loving same sex relations, yet covers up the misdeeds of psycho-sexually deformed clerics, damaged by the Church's bizarre dogma on sexuality. Anything rather than discard the warped 12th century beliefs so loved at the Vatican.  Here are article highlights (read the full article and note how the less than saintly John Paul II ignored warnings about McCarrick):  

As a young man studying to be a priest in the 1980s, Robert Ciolek was flattered when his brilliant, charismatic bishop in Metuchen, N.J., Theodore E. McCarrick, told him he was a shining star, cut out to study in Rome and rise high in the church.

Bishop McCarrick began inviting him on overnight trips, sometimes alone and sometimes with other young men training to be priests. There, the bishop would often assign Mr. Ciolek to share his room, which had only one bed. The two men would sometimes say night prayers together, before Bishop McCarrick would make a request — “come over here and rub my shoulders a little”— that extended into unwanted touching in bed.

Mr. Ciolek, who was in his early 20s at the time, said he felt unable to say no, in part because he had been sexually abused by a teacher in his Catholic high school, a trauma he had shared with the bishop.

“I trusted him, I confided in him, I admired him,” Mr. Ciolek said in an interview this month, the first time he has spoken publicly about the abuse, which lasted for several years while Mr. Ciolek was a seminarian and later a priest. “I couldn’t imagine that he would have anything other than my best interests in mind.”

Bishop McCarrick went on to climb the ranks of the Roman Catholic hierarchy — from head of the small Diocese of Metuchen to archbishop of Newark and then archbishop of Washington, where he was made a cardinal. He remained into his 80s one of the most recognized American cardinals on the global stage, a Washington power broker who participated in funeral masses for political luminaries like Edward M. Kennedy, the longtime Massachusetts senator, and Beau Biden, the son of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Suddenly, last month, Cardinal McCarrick was removed from ministry, after the Archdiocese of New York deemed credible an accusation that he had molested a 16-year-old altar boy nearly 50 years ago.

He is the highest-ranking Catholic official in the United States to be removed for sexual abuse of a minor.

But while the church responded quickly to the allegation that Cardinal McCarrick had abused a child, some church officials knew for decades that the cardinal had been accused of sexually harassing and inappropriately touching adults, according to interviews and documents obtained by The New York Times.

Between 1994 and 2008, multiple reports about the cardinal’s transgressions with adult seminary students were made to American bishops, the pope’s representative in Washington and, finally, Pope Benedict XVI. Two New Jersey dioceses secretly paid settlements, in 2005 and 2007, to two men, one of whom was Mr. Ciolek,

[W]hile the church has made strides in dealing with sexual abuse of children, it has largely avoided a reckoning over sexual harassment and abuse suffered by adult seminarians and young priests at the hands of their superiors, including bishops.

Because bishops have control over priests’ assignments and complete loyalty is expected by the church’s clerical culture, seminarians and priests can be especially vulnerable to sexual harassment by their superiors.

Now, after the fall of Cardinal McCarrick, some Catholics are saying that the church is on the verge of confronting its own #MeToo moment, akin to the wave of painful truth-telling that has swept through other workplaces, schools and Hollywood. In 2000, Pope John Paul II promoted Archbishop McCarrick to lead the Archdiocese of Washington D.C., one of the most prestigious posts in the Catholic Church in America. He was elevated to cardinal three months later.

At least one priest warned the Vatican against the appointment. The Rev. Boniface Ramsey said that when he was on the faculty at the Immaculate Conception Seminary at Seton Hall University in New Jersey from 1986 to 1996, he was told by seminarians about Archbishop McCarrick’s sexual abuse at the beach house. When Archbishop McCarrick was appointed to Washington, Father Ramsey spoke by phone with the pope’s representative in the nation’s capital, Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo, the papal nuncio, and at his encouragement sent a letter to the Vatican about Archbishop McCarrick’s history.

Do not hold your breath waiting for the Vatican to clean house of individuals like McCarrick as it needs to do so badly. 

National Pride March Coming to Washington, DC, in June

In the wake of the Women's March in Washington, D.C., there has been a great deal of talk of the need to have regular protests and demonstrations against the regime of Der Fuhrer and his Republican henchmen who seemingly view much of the citizenry in the same manner the Nazi concentration camp guards viewed the death camp inmates.  With this in mind - and in view of the anti-LGBT jihad likely to soon to be unleashed by the Trump/Pence regime - plans are underway for a National Pride March that will coincide with D.C. Pride the weekend of June 11, 2017.  The Washington Blade looks at the developing plan.  More details are on the March's Facebook page here. Here are highlights from the Blade:

A gay activist in New York City has set in motion plans for a “mass” LGBT march on Washington on June 11, which he hopes will be similar to last week’s Women’s March on Washington that drew hundreds of thousands of people.

David Bruinooge, 42, a Brooklyn, N.Y., resident who has friends and relatives in the D.C. area, said he was inspired to create a Facebook page announcing the march on Jan. 21 while he was watching the Women’s March on Washington at home on television.

He said he intentionally chose June 11 for the march because it’s the same day that D.C.’s Capital Pride Festival is scheduled to be held on Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. near the U.S. Capitol. Bruinooge said his thought was the march would start in the morning and end at the site of the Pride festival.

Ryan Bos, executive director of the Capital Pride Alliance, which organizes the D.C. Pride events, including the Pride Parade set to take place on June 10, said he has spoken with Bruinooge and expects that Capital Pride officials will collaborate with the march organizers so the march and the D.C. Pride events will complement each other.

Bruinooge said that at Bos’s suggestion, he has changed the name of the march from Gays on the Mall, which he initially announced on Facebook, to the National Pride March.

He acknowledges he and others working on the march will have a significant amount of work to do logistically, including obtaining permits for street closings. He said he’s hopeful that Capital Pride officials will provide support and consider the march to be a joint Capital Pride project.

And, yes, the husband and I will make plans to attend.

Same Sex Weddings: Spend Less and More Innovative

As same sex couples marry in growing numbers - our friends are getting married in droves it seems and we attended a wedding last weekend and have another one this weekend - one phenomenon that is appearing is that we gays spend less but have more innovative weddings. I like to think a case in point is the husband and my own wedding in Washington, DC, which used the Kennedy Center roof terrace for the site of the actual ceremony.  In a few weeks we will be having a family reception and then likely two more receptions for  differing groups of friends rather than one massive event.  Like many same sex couples, we wrote our own vows.   The Advocate looks at the findings of a survey on innovative aspects of same sex weddings.  Here are highlights:

A new survey conducted by The Knot in partnership with The Advocate finds that one year after the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling and marriage equality's spread across the country, same-sex couples are starting new traditions.

With a wave of new U.S. states with marriage equality in the past year, most same-sex couples (82 percent, up from 70 percent in 2013) are making it very clear to attendees that their ceremony is a wedding, by calling it this term in invitations. A minority of same-sex couples label their event a celebration (7 percent), a commitment ceremony (4 percent), or a civil union (2 percent).

Among engaged same-sex couples, 58 percent indicated there was a formal proposal (and for 38 percent of this pool, it was a surprise occasion), compared to straight couples, who had a much higher proposal rate of 94 percent. A sizable portion of same-sex couples (38 percent) mutually decided to wed.
77 percent of respondents in same-sex couples did not ask the family’s permission before getting engaged. . . . . Conversely, 71 percent of straight fiancés did ask the family's permission. And 26 percent of same-sex couples said that, of all the possible surprises that were involved with wedding planning, they were most pleased to learn that their families were accepting and willing to help them throughout the process.

In planning their matrimonies, same-sex couples are spending less on average ($15,849) than straight couples ($29,858). However, same-sex couples tend to invite fewer guests, meaning the amount spent per person is only slightly less ($205) than in a straight couple’s wedding ($220).  . . . .only 13 percent of straight couples are paying for their weddings out of their own pockets, compared to 85 percent of same-sex couples.

Some 81 percent of same-sex couples indicated that they would not hire a wedding planner. So they're being very hands-on when deciding how to adopt traditions.

Same-sex couples are far less likely than straight couples to have a religious service or officiant. Only 38 percent of those who responded to the survey said they would include a religious element to their wedding, favoring either a justice of the peace (23 percent) or a family member or friend (21 percent) to conduct the proceedings. By contrast, 63 percent of straight couples favored a religious service. In this vein, more same-sex couples (49 percent) are writing their own vows, although 29 percent said they did or would incorporate a religious component to the speech.

The practice of having one partner change a last name after marriage is not being adopted by most same-sex couples. Only 23 percent of gay couples and 41 percent of lesbian couples are going with this practice, with 54 percent keeping their own names and 15 percent creating a hyphenated surname. In contrast, 79 percent of straight brides-to-be marked “I'm changing my name to his.”

Wedding Weekend in Washington, D.C.

Posting will be reduced this weekend.  Tomorrow morning Barry and I are headed to Washington, D.C., for our wedding.   It's an event that not too many years ago neither of us would ever have dreamed would be possible.  For me, after a coming out process that at times verged on a living Hell, its the culmination of the image in my mind of what I sought at the end of the journey: a legally recognized, committed relationship to a wonderful man.  All the plans are in place and family members who cannot attend will be staying at the house and other family members will be dog sitting the "furry children" as Barry calls the two Chihuahuas.

A wedding commissioner for the District of Columbia will be officiating the ceremony,but Barry's dad - a retired Southern Baptist pastor - will be participating in the ceremony.  The actual ceremony will be conducted on the southeast corner of the top terrace of the John F. Kennedy Center for the performing Arts (pictured above).  With a forecast of good weather, the image below shows the view that will be the back drop for the ceremony (in the background is Virginia where our marriage still will not be recognized).

 Following the ceremony, we will dine in the Terrace Restaurant on the top level of the complex which is pictured below.

 

The group in Washington will be small and intimate and later in the year when my oldest daughter and my grandson have returned from Washington State we will have the first of several receptions for family and friends.  Tonight we had dinner at the Hampton Yacht Club where we received congratulations and hugs from other members and the staff.  Living one's life openly and honestly does change hearts and minds.  We will take plenty of photos and there will be some updates as the weekend progresses.

Main floor atrium - Kennedy Center

For those who would like to do something in honor of our wedding, we will be setting up a page at the Hampton Roads Community Foundation where tax deductible donations can be made to the Hamar/HRBOR Scholarship that the Foundation manages for HRBOR.  Details will follow.

Washington, DC Wedding Reconnaissance Trip

Yesterday my partner and I drove up to Washington, DC, on a reconnaissance mission to Washington, DC, to confirm the venue for our wedding ceremony in late April as well as confirming a restaurant venue for dinner the evening before.  We plan to have our ceremony on the top terrace level of the John F. Kennedy Center followed by brunch at the Terrace Restaurant at the Center.  Weather permitting, we will have the ceremony at the corner of the terrace that overlooks the Lincoln Memorial with the Potomac River in the background and Virginia in the further background beyond the river.  The image above shows the view with my partner in the photo (yes, it was quite cold with occasional flurries in the air).  We've also picked out a great restaurant for the dinner festivity the evening before.  One thing that struck me is the reality that we will be spending a good bit of money that will help the Washington, DC, economy rather Virginia's.  And we are only one of the many couples from Hampton Roads making the trip to either Washington, DC, Maryland, New York or Delaware to marry.  Financially, Virginia and Virginia businesses are losing a great deal of money.  All because the Christofascists are trying to hold Virginia back in the 19th century.  Bigotry does indeed carry a financial price.

We stayed at our friend's townhouse in Old Town Alexandria.  After completing the fact finding mission, we had dinner in the DuPont Circle gayborhood followed by a visit to Freddie's Beach Bar and Restaurant on the Virginia side of the Potomac near Crystal City.  The place was rocking an Freddie, the owner was great as were the drinks and wait staff.  We are told that the Sunday Brunch is awesome. The bartenders were all most attractive.  As for the crowd, there were younger and older, gay and lesbian, and even a number of straight couples there to enjoy the music and fun atmosphere.  If readers are going to be in Northern Virginia and don't want to have to drive back after partying in the District, Freddie's offers a wonderful alternative.  It was great for us since we could be back in Old Town in just minutes.  We will definitely be return patrons whenever we are in Northern Virginia.

The last things that struck me from the visit were (i) how rapidly Northern Virginia is growing and how ethnically diverse it has become - all bad news for the Republican Party of Virginia and its Christofascist puppet masters.  As Virginia's urban areas grow and Northern Virginia grows, it will become harder and harder for the Virginia GOP races.   The toxic policies that the Virginia GOP is peddling are simply becoming anathema to educated and urban voters.

Justice Ginsburg To Officiate At Same-Sex Wedding

Expect the far right and the Christofascists to foam at the mouth at this news: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will become the first Supreme Court justice to officiate at a same-sex marriage today. Kudos for Ginsburg who truly understands that religious based bigotry of all kinds - be it anti-gay or anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim - has no place in the nation's civil laws.  It is always ironic to me that those on the far right who scream the loudest about religious liberty are always the ones leading the charge to deprive others of their Constitutional right to freedom of  - and from - religion.   As always, the hypocrisy is mind numbing.  Here are highlights from The New Civil Rights Movement on the nuptials that Ginsburg will preside over:

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will become the first Supreme Court justice to officiate at a same-sex marriage on Saturday. The 80-year old jurist who is considered the head of the progressive wing of the Court will marry Michael M. Kaiser and John Roberts (ironically, no relation to the Chief Justice). Roberts is an economist, and Kaiser is the president of Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where the ceremony will be held.

Calling it a “gala wedding” that “brings together the nation’s highest court and the capital’s high society,” the Washington Post reports the wedding “will mark a new milepost in recognition of same-sex unions.”

Ginsburg seemed excited during a recent interview about being the first member of the court to conduct such a ceremony and said it was only a logical next step.

“I think it will be one more statement that people who love each other and want to live together should be able to enjoy the blessings and the strife in the marriage relationship,” Ginsburg said.

She added: “It won’t be long before there will be another” performed by a justice. Indeed, she has another planned for September.

Ginsburg and Kaiser are close friends. She is perhaps the Supreme Court’s most ardent supporter of the fine arts, especially opera. Kaiser has been at the helm of the Kennedy Center since 2001 and is an internationally recognized expert in arts management and one of Washington’s most civic influential leaders.

“I can’t imagine someone I’d rather be married by” than Ginsburg, Kaiser said in an interview.