The Merits of Statehood for the District of Columbia

In terms of population, the District of Columbia has a population larger than those of the states of Vermont and Wyoming, the latter of which has a population significantly smaller than those of the combined populations of the cities of Norfolk and Virginia Beach (Alaska and North Dakota have only slightly larger populations).  Yet residents of the District of Columbia have no voting member of in the House of Representatives and no Senators. Worse yet, laws passed by the District's democratic legislative body can be over ruled by Congress.  In short, so much for concepts such as one man one vote or no taxation without representations - concepts that go to the heart of America's democratic principals.  Now, Democrats in Congress seek to end this injustice and embarrassment by pushing for full statehood for the District of Columbia (naturally, anti-democratic Republicans oppose the effort).  A piece in the New Yorker looks at the movement,  Here are highlights:

In the coming days, the House will vote on, and likely pass, H.R. 51, a bill that would make Washington, D.C., the fifty-first state. The bill, which has two hundred co-sponsors, was introduced by Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat who for nearly thirty years has served as the non-voting representative for D.C.’s single at-large district. During her time in Congress, Holmes Norton has introduced more than a dozen statehood bills; this will be the first since 1993 to receive a vote. But because Washington, D.C., is not a state, Holmes Norton cannot vote on her own bill, or on final passage of other legislation on the House floor.

In the Senate, a companion piece of legislation, introduced by Senator Tom Carper, a Democrat from Delaware, has twenty-eight co-sponsors, including all of that chamber’s candidates for President: Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. A few weeks ago, I asked Warren about her interest in statehood and why she thinks the issue should galvanize Democrats. “It matters,” she said. “Here’s an example. In 2017, when Republicans tried to rip away health care from millions of Americans, including tens of thousands of people in D.C., Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton didn’t have a vote. This is not right. The right to vote is at the heart of our democracy.”

Warren noted, too, that Congress has authority to overturn the district’s laws, which Republicans have exercised more boldly in recent years. “A Republican-led Congress has actually overturned laws that the people of the District of Columbia have determined through the democratic process that they want,” she said, noting that Congress has effectively blocked laws on domestic partnerships, providing abortion services, and legalizing medical marijuana.

For Holmes Norton, another clarifying moment had come in 2009, when Democrats were prepared to pass the D.C. Voting Rights Bill, which would have given D.C. a vote in the House. Then the National Rifle Association successfully lobbied to include a provision that would have overturned the city’s gun-control laws. “That was very heartbreaking,” Holmes Norton told me. “Since then, we’ve just gone for full-fledged statehood.”

Most Republicans, predictably, are less open to the idea. When, in 2016, the Washington Post’s editorial board asked the Presidential candidate John Kasich why he was opposed to giving D.C. voting representatives, he said, “What it really gets down to, if you want to be honest, is because they know that’s just more votes in the Democratic Party.”

Republican opposition aside, though, Holmes Norton and statehood advocates are beginning this latest push under favorable conditions. On Friday, the House passed H.R. 1, a large package of pro-democracy reforms—including public campaign financing and automatic voter registration—advanced by Democrats. The bill also contained a nonbinding endorsement of statehood for Washington, D.C. This made H.R. 1’s passage the first time that a house of Congress has backed statehood for the district. Both H.R. 1 and H.R. 51 have arrived at a moment when disenfranchisement, particularly for African-Americans—who make up forty-seven per cent of D.C.’s population—has become a galvanizing issue for Democrats.

H.R. 51 has also arrived at a moment when progressives and other voices on the left are pushing the Democratic Party to adopt structural reforms and strategies that would facilitate the passage of bold left-wing legislation, within a federal government designed to thwart sudden change. One of the more prominent advocates of this strategy is David Faris, a professor of political science at Roosevelt University, who has urged Democrats to support statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico, and even to consider breaking up the state of California. “The Constitution’s unchangeable writ that each state have an equal number of senators means that no matter how many more votes Democrats get nationally, they are going to win the Senate only during wave election years, and then probably only for a relatively brief period of time,” Faris wrote in his book “It’s Time to Fight Dirty,” from 2018. “Therefore, to make any lasting changes to U.S. politics and society, Democrats are going to have to admit more states to the union and create further entities out of the ones that already exist. And they must start with Washington, D.C.”

In Washington’s case, there remains a divide between statehood advocates who believe success will lie in overcoming factional divisions and those open to owning them. Holmes Norton hopes that consensus can be built on the democratic merits of statehood alone. “Somehow or the other,” she told me, “the overriding issue of whether you could deny people paying federal income taxes and do not have equal rights has to rise to the level where people are not intimidated by it and where people don’t think that they will be endangered by it.”

[T]o get to democracy as it should work, Democrats will have to push statehood through democracy as it is. The House vote on H.R. 51 will be an important first step in building the public’s awareness of an issue of real salience to all those troubled by how undemocratic our democracy can be.

Proposed DC and Virginia Laws Would Mandate Clergy Report Sexual Abuse

In reaction to the ongoing sex abuse scandal embroiling the Roman Catholic Church not to mention sex abuse by athletic coaches and physicians, and other authority figures, bot the District of Columbia and Virginia will take up proposed legislation that will strengthen reporting requirements for clergy.  The proposed DC bill will be the far tougher of the two and, sadly, the Virginia proposal contains a carve out for priest-penitent confessional disclosures.  While understandable from a political perspective, the exemption leaves a huge loop whole for Catholic clergy to circumvent the laws.  Long time friend Senator Janet Howell is the main sponsor of the Virginia bill.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the proposed legislation in each state.  Here are highlights:

In response to recent Catholic Church clergy sex abuse scandals, lawmakers in the District and Virginia say they will soon propose legislation that adds clergy to the list of people mandated by law to report child abuse or neglect.

Both efforts hit at the hot-button intersection of child protection and religious liberty, but lawmakers are expected to give them an open reception at a time when recent sexual abuse scandals in churches and others involving athletes have prompted conversation about broadening legal responsibility to extend beyond positions such as teachers and doctors.

The ideas under consideration by D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine include not exempting confidential conversations for any mandatory reporters, possibly including those that occur in the Catholic Church’s confessional. . . . . Under D.C. law, anyone 18 or over who knows or has reason to believe that a child under 16 is a victim of sexual abuse is required to report it to civil officials. But the requirements of mandated reporters are more extensive, and Racine is considering taking them much further.

It also suggested requiring mandated reporters to tell their own boards of directors so their institutions become responsible as well; increases the penalties for people who fail to report and requests funding for training so mandatory reporters understand what that term obliges.

Virginia’s narrower proposal, which will be considered by the state legislature after the session begins Jan. 9, is sponsored by Sen. Janet D. Howell (Fairfax County) and delegates Karrie K. Delaney (Fairfax County) and Wendy Gooditis (Clarke), all Democrats.

As written, it will simply add clergy to the list of “persons who are required to report suspected” abuse, with an exception for when a faith’s doctrine requires the report “to be kept confidential.” The carve-out, lawmakers said, was added specifically to protect the confessional – a sacrament in Catholic doctrine.

Twenty-eight states make clergy mandatory reporters, according to the Children’s Bureau, an arm of the Department of Health and Human Services that works to combat child abuse. Those measures vary widely on allowances given religious leaders – in particular whether their confidential conversations are protected.

Experts and lawmakers who have followed this issue for years say the climate has changed. Recent child sex abuse scandals, including those involving athletes and Catholic clergy, and the overall decrease in power of and deference towards religious institutions, are making it harder for faith groups who want to limit civil oversight.

Howell has been unsuccessfully proposing similar measures since 2003. She called the issue a “major brawl” in the past, with Catholic and Baptist organizations opposing such measures – for either the protection of the confessional or because, she said in the case of Baptist clergy, they felt it was a secular intrusion and “they answered only to God.”

Howell thinks the new measure has a good chance of passing this upcoming session. “Between the investigations going on [of the Catholic Church] with attorneys general and the outrage of the public about what’s happened, the times have changed a lot,” she said.

Is an Overdue Reckoning Coming for the Catholic Church on Sexual Abuse?

For centuries the Roman Catholic Church has been allowed to be above the law, especially in nationals like Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Germany, but so too in America.  Politicians have deferred to Church prelates and law enforcement officials rarely dared take on the Catholic Church establishment.  This thankfully began to change in 2002 when the Boston Globe blew the lid off of the sex abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston.  Similar stories have since swept the globe, with the Church going into a free-fall in Ireland and major government investigations like that done in Australia that lead to the first criminal convictions against members of the hierarchy for their role in the cover up of crimes against children and youths.  Now, the U.S. Attorney's office in Philadelphia has announced it is launching an investigation of seven of the eight dioceses in Pennsylvania.  Meanwhile the Attorney General of the District of Columbia is launching an investigation of the Washington Archdiocese.  Since the Vatican and bishops and cardinals have failed to date to come clean and clean house, some are hoping that a long overdue reckoning is about to overtake the Church.   I was never abused by priests, but I know those who were.  The hypocrisy of the hierarchy has been stunning as has the indifference towards crimes against children and youth.  A piece in Rewire looks at what may be coming.  Here are excerpts:

I remember the moment when the gravity of the Catholic hierarchy’s long-term cover-up of rampant sexual abuse within the priestly ranks was driven home to me. It was in 2010, and I was conducting an interview for my book Good Catholics with the noted Catholic feminist theologian Mary Hunt. We were discussing her reflections regarding what had, at that point, been a decades-long adversarial relationship with the powers-that-be in the Catholic Church, dating from when Hunt was one of the leaders of an effort in the mid-1980s to assert the validity of a pro-choice position in the face of an increasingly authoritarian Vatican.

Hunt told me. “We thought we were dealing with people of good will.” But it’s what she said next that sent a chill down my spine. “What we didn’t know then was that we were up against criminal behavior—people participating in criminal behavior and ignoring criminal behavior.”

As last week’s move by the Justice Department to launch an investigation into the abuse of children and young adults by Catholic clergy (and the subsequent cover-up by bishops) makes clear, Hunt was prescient.

The news that former Washington Cardinal Theodore McCarrick had been serially abusing young men and seminarians for decades was eclipsed by the damning Pennsylvania grand jury report that detailed decades of abuse and cover-up in dioceses throughout the state. This in turn prompted the resignation of Cardinal Donald Wuerl as archbishop of Washington—Wuerl helped formulate the Church’s rules for preventing sexual abuse by priests—for his role in shuffling predator priests around the state when he was the head of the Pittsburgh diocese.

But the recently announced U.S. attorney’s investigation marks a major turning point and a potential moment of reckoning in the long-running and sordid sex abuse scandal that first burst into public view with the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” investigation in early 2002. The Justice Department investigation promises to fundamentally reshape the relationship between the U.S. Catholic Church and civil law enforcement authorities.

To date, no matter how messy the scandal became, civil authorities largely left the Church alone to clean up its own mess. While individual priests have been charged with crimes as the result of abuse, and culpable prelates like Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law were shuffled into retirement, the larger question of criminality on the part of the Church’s leadership has been off the table. It was, admittedly, an odd arrangement, with the U.S. government in effect deferring to the government of the Catholic Church, an arrangement neither codified in the Constitution nor available to any other religion.

But if this federal investigation does go forward—and it should be noted that it’s coming from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia, so it could be impeded by higher-ups in the Justice Department—it would be a landmark moment as the federal government usurps the authority that Vatican has long claimed to police its internal affairs.

And the nature of the investigation reported by the AP, which spans seven of the state’s eight dioceses, suggests just how deep such an inquiry could go. According to the Washington Post:

The subpoenas seek years of internal records, including any evidence of church personnel taking children across state lines for purposes of sexual abuse, any evidence of personnel sending sexual material about children electronically and any evidence that church officials reassigned suspected predators or used church resources to further or conceal such conduct.

[T]he prosecutors could be planning a racketeering case against Church leaders: “Human trafficking, child pornography, the Mann Act—any of these could be the underlying crimes for RICO.”

The leveling of criminal conspiracy charges against members of the Catholic hierarchy would be a stunning denouement for men who, until recently, regularly met with U.S. presidents and influenced public policy on everything from women’s access to contraception to the simmering argument about transgender identity. It would signal that after a century of acquiescence to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church as a separate political structure operating with impunity outside of the U.S. legal system, U.S. civil authorities no longer consider the Church above the law.

As Emma Green notes in The Atlantic, the scope of the investigation “will test the Catholic bishops’ stated resolve to give secular authorities full control and transparency in abuse investigations, as the moral and legal stakes of the crisis continue to grow.” This will be especially important if subpoenas seek the contents of so-called secret archives that may hold previously unreleased information about efforts to cover up the activities of abusive priests.

And despite pledges of transparency, there are indications that the Church will not surrender without a fight. Even as bishops in Pennsylvania promised to cooperate with civil authorities in the wake of the grand jury report, behind the scenes the church fought tooth-and-nail to derail a popular measure that would have created an exemption to the state’s statute of limitations for sexual abuse suits.

Now the question becomes: Will the public—both inside and outside of Pennsylvania—stand any longer for the extraordinary dispensation that has been granted for so long to an organization that has engaged in what may prove to be a decades-long criminal conspiracy?

I continue to urge Catholics sickened by the sex abuse cover ups to vote with their feet and walk away.  The Episcopal Church and Evangelical Lutheran Church offer good alternatives that are free from the thoroughly corrupt Catholic Church hierarchy. 

The People v. the U.S. Senate

Anti-majority Senate Republicans.

The structure of Congress was a pragmatic deal struck by the authors of the U.S. Constitution to induce smaller states to ratify the document and create the United States of America.  The principal carrot for small states was the U.S. Senate which would give small states equal power with large states.  Its very structure was anti-democratic, but it was the sweetener needed to achieve ratification.  Fast forward to today and the imbalance of power in control of legislation and important confirmations is now firmly controlled by a minority of the population that has little acceptance for changing demographics, social norms and/or a fast changing economy.  The recent Kavanaugh confirmation underscored the problem.  The result: some are calling for abolition of the Senate or a major restructuring to end small state obstructionism.  Here are highlights from a piece in The Atlantic:  

Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the United States Supreme Court by a vote of 50–48, with one senator absent and one abstaining. Only one Democrat, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, voted with the solidly Republican majority, which represented just 44 percent of the country’s population. Indeed, when Americans last voted for their senators (over a period of six years), Democrats won the popular vote by more than 8 percent. It’s that disproportionality—and the reality that a majority of the country’s population is represented by just 18 senators—that is driving concerns about the Senate’s ability to function as a representative body in a changing America.

The Senate is embedded within the Constitution as few other institutions are, with a special clause that some believe makes it immune to the standard amendment process. Adding more diverse states is one solution — Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia, and other U.S. territories would likely send Democrats to Capitol Hill if they gained representation, somewhat balancing the chamber.

And both Puerto Rico and D.C. seem agreeable: Last month, Puerto Rico’s governor, Ricardo Rosselló, stepped up his campaign for statehood, while the district’s congressional delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, is a passionate advocate of admitting D.C.

[B]oth those who want abolition and those who want more modest, but nonetheless significant, changes agree: The Senate is increasingly unrepresentative of the American populace.

The Republican Party has an inbuilt advantage in Senate races. Since Democratic voters tend to cluster in cities and their inner suburbs, Republicans are more spread out over large geographic areas. While rural strength in a state like New York or California counts for little in Senate races dominated by large coastal cities, the abundance of sparsely populated, geographically vast states in the West and Midwest is a big help for Republican domination in the chamber. Wyoming, for instance, reliably returns GOP senators despite having about as many people as Albuquerque.

There’s also demography: The states Trump won, which tend to be more Republican in general, are also whiter. In the political world of 2018, that makes them harder to win for Democrats, though the party holds numerous safe seats in heavily white northeastern states in which the GOP is not seriously competitive. The most diverse states are also the largest, and, therefore, the most underrepresented on a per capita basis.

Senate critics also contend that smaller states tend to be more conservative, while larger ones are more likely to back Democrats, though this argument is belied by the nine largest states, which are represented by an even number of Democrats and Republicans. Yet even if partisanship is put aside, those nine account for more than half of the country’s population.

While other countries have disproportionately selected legislatures—Norway intentionally allocates extra voting power to rural areas, for instance, and Canada’s provinces have stark differences in parliamentary representation—the Senate’s extreme imbalance is essentially unique in the global pantheon of representative democracy.

On June 11, 1787, Roger Sherman rose in a Philadelphia room filled with other landowning men and recommended a bicameral legislature for America, with one house apportioned by population and the other apportioned equally among the states. This deal—the Connecticut Compromise, as it would later be known—has organized American legislative governance for nearly two and a half centuries. Sherman’s original proposal was not, of course, designed to boost popular representation.

The Senate would express the interests of the states, conceived of as sovereign entities unto themselves rather than as a wholly cohesive nation. Until the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in the spring of 1913, senators were elected by the legislature of their respective state.

Those who want to eliminate the Senate wholesale argue that the ship has sailed on states as sovereign entities. The federalism, they contend, fundamentally undermines basic democratic due process and the voting rights of actual people.

Daniel Lazare, a journalist who specializes in American politics and has written three books on constitutional issues, argued in Jacobin in 2014 that the Senate is “one of the most cockeyed systems of minority rule in history, one that allows tiny coteries to hold the entire country ransom until their demands are met.”

Senate abolition, no matter its support among left-wing groups, remains a remote prospect in the near term. Constitutional and political hurdles are massive, and despite gaining traction among many in the left-wing commentariat, popular support would likely be more elusive. However, stopgap measures—subdividing large states, for instance, or adding U.S. territories and the District of Columbia to the union—may be more viable and could address some Senate critics’ most immediate concerns.

But calls for radical reform can be useful in themselves. Issues of voting rights and disproportionality generally gain traction when attention is turned toward issues like the relative representativeness of the Senate. Electoral change—including measures to combat voter suppression and gerrymandering, or even more fundamental changes like instituting a proportional voting system for House elections—may become more palatable to the electorate at large as massive systemic changes like Senate abolition are discussed. “It’s always good to have a John the Baptist out there, painting a picture of what could be, but people change their minds relatively slowly,” Beyer says.

But in the near term, Democrats may not need John the Baptist—what they need may be Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia, and time. To rearrange electoral geography, American history would suggest that time is the most critical.

Today is the 50th Anniversary of Loving v. Virginia

Fifty years ago, the United States Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Loving v. Virginia which struck anti-miscegenation laws down nationwide that had theretofore barred interracial marriage.   It is critical to remember that not once, but twice the Virginia Supreme Court ruled to uphold Virginia's interracial marriage bans. Among the justifications cited for the ban in the litigation prior to the U.S. Supreme Court decision was the Bible. As has happened time and time again both before and since the Loving ruling - and as recently as Donald Trump's appearance before the Christofascists' Faith and Freedom Coalition - the Bible has been used to justify bigotry and mistreatment of others. The reality is that other than during the early days of the American Revolution, the initial founding of the nation and the last three (3) years, Virginia has been consistently on the wrong side of history.   First through it's defense of slavery, then through it's efforts to destroy Reconstruction policies supporting equality, next by its engagement in "Massive Resistance" to oppose public schools desegregation, and most recently anti-gay bigotry. Things changed under the McAuliffe/Northam/Herring regime when the entire Democratic ticket supported same sex marriage.  Yet the Republican Party and its allies continue to push a reactionary agenda of bigotry.  Indeed, they seek to take Virginia back to its ugliest moments.  Here are highlights from a piece in U.S. News and Reports that looks at the legacy of the Loving decision:

On June 12, 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down as unconstitutional 16 state bans on interracial marriage. The ruling came in a lawsuit brought by Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and black woman who had been jailed for being married to each other.

After the court's decision, the Lovings lived quietly in their native Virginia with their three children until Richard Loving's death in a 1975 car crash. Mildred Loving, critically injured in that same crash, never remarried and largely shunned publicity. She granted a rare interview to The Associated Press in 2007, the 40th anniversary of her legal victory, and died the following year.

In observance of the 50th anniversary of the landmark Loving decision, The Associated Press is republishing its last interview with Mildred Loving, by reporter Dionne Walker.

Born Mildred Jeter, she's mostly known by the name she took when she — a black woman living in segregated Virginia — dared to break the rules by marrying a white man named Richard Loving.

The union landed the Lovings in jail, and then before the U.S. Supreme Court, and finally in the history books; 40 years ago Tuesday, the court ruled in favor of the couple, overturning laws prohibiting interracial unions and changing the face of America.

Mildred Loving is a matriarch to thousands of mixed couples now sprinkled in every city. But she hardly considers herself a hero — just a girl who once fell in love with a boy.
"It wasn't my doing," Loving told The Associated Press, in a rare interview. "It was God's work."

While the rest of the Jim Crow South struggled to divide the races in the early '50s, blacks and whites in tiny Central Point had long been intertwined. They worked together on farms, raising chickens and tobacco. And often, they were intimate, explained Edward Clarke, who grew up in the town an hour outside Richmond, today little more than vast fields, ragtag homes and weed-choked farm houses.

Standing in the hilly cemetery in which Richard Loving is buried, he swept his hand out over the markers reading Jeter, Byrd and Fortune — black folks, he explained, many so pale they could pass for white.

[T]hey drove some 80 miles to Washington, D.C., in 1958, married and returned to Central Point to start a new life.

"I think he thought (if) we were married, they couldn't bother us," Mildred said.
Within a month, they were in jail.

Now 84, then-Sheriff Garnett Brooks vividly recalls bursting into the Lovings' home at 2 a.m., rousing the couple out of their sleep and hauling them off to face the law. Word of their marriage — nobody's sure who complained — had reached the commonwealth's attorney.

"He told me to go and check on them and if they are (married), arrest them," said Brooks, who insists the case wasn't about race but about illegal cohabitation. "I told him I'd be glad to do it."
A 28-year-old Phil Hirschkop was just a few months out of law school when he overheard a professor discussing the Lovings with another lawyer, Bernard Cohen.

It was 1964, and the Lovings had spent the past few years living in exile in Washington after being convicted on charges of "cohabitating as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth," according to their indictments. Laws banning racially mixed marriages existed in at least 17 states.

Hirschkop was convinced the Supreme Court was ready for change, too — but the right case had to come before the justices, free of any legal loopholes the state could seize upon. The Lovings presented such a case.

Hirschkop argued that the laws must treat each citizen equally, and that "when a law is based on race, it is immediately suspect and the burden is shifted to the state to show there is a compelling interest to have that sort of racial differentiation."
On June 12, 1967, the court agreed.

Each June 12, Loving Day events around the country mark the advances of mixed-race couples. Mildred doesn't pay much attention to the grassroots celebrations.

Mostly she spends time enjoying her family, two dogs, and the countryside she fought so fiercely to again call home. She wishes her husband was there to enjoy it with her.  "He used to take care of me," said Mildred Loving. "He was my support, he was my rock."

Before she died, Mildred Loving endorse same sex marriage which she viewed very similarly to her own situation: individuals should be able to marry the person that they love.   Like the Lovings, the husband and I were married in the District of Columbia since same sex marriage was illegal at the time in Virginia.  No one was harmed by the Lovings' marriage.  No one was harmed by my marriage to my husband.  Yet the same forces of hate and division that made both marriages illegal in Virginia are alive and well.   All three of the Republican candidates for governor are beholden to the Christofascists who support both bans on interracial marriage and same sex marriage.  In Virginia and elsewhere religion has been used to justify so much hared and abuse of others.  Today is a perfect day to remember that religion has no place in America's civil laws. 

Lead Plaintiffs in Virginia Marriage Case Plan Wedding

Attending friends' weddings is always moving.  Particularly the weddings of gay friends whose relationship has been challenged by anti-gay bigotry still prevalent in America and, up until recently, non-recognition under the civil laws - even when the relationship has endured for longer than many, many heterosexual relationships.  But on May, 2, 2015, the husband and I will attend a wedding that has special meaning to us.  Because the efforts of couple getting married, our own marriage in the District of Columbia became legally recognized in Virginia.  The couple I am referring to are Tim Bostic and Tony London, a couple who have been together for over two decades. The wedding will be something amazing from the ceremony in a gorgeous church to a reception that will have a stunning venue.  The Washington Blade looks at Tim and Tony's wedding planning (the article is written by Tim).  Here are highlights:

As a gay man who never thought getting married was possible, I tuned out when people started talking about weddings. We were so concerned about being able to get married it never occurred to me to think about the wedding itself. The one thing I would advise anyone is make sure you have people you can rely on. Our caterer, Cathy Carter with East Beach Catering, and our wedding planner, Ivory Morgan-Burton with Storybook Events, have helped me as I slowly came to understand all of the ins and outs of planning a wedding. The number of things that have to be done meant we had to choose between our wedding or our honeymoon. We had hoped to go on a safari after the wedding. The wedding won.

When we started our fight for marriage equality in Virginia, we were cautioned that it would not be a fast process. The attorneys told us it would probably take five years, so I wasn’t thinking about the wedding because I was focused on obtaining the right to marry the man I love. Thus, when the Supreme Court decided in October not to hear our case and uphold the 4th Circuit Court’s decision, I found myself with no more fight on my hands but a wedding to plan instead. The day after the decision, we met with the rector of our church and picked the first Saturday available, May 2. When I sat down with my caterer Friday of the same week, she knew I had a date set and she asked where the reception was going to be. I told her that I didn’t know, and that was why I was there.

Blanching, she looked at me and said, “You are getting married May 2nd, and you don’t have a venue?” I told her, “Cathy, I didn’t know we could get married until this week!” Bless her heart, she got on the phone, made about 10 phone calls in as many minutes, and found us a venue. The problem was it only held 200 people, so our hope of being able to invite all of the people in the community who supported us was shot. Of course, as I begin to understand the costs involved in a wedding, I guess it worked out.

While much of the planning has been stressful, there have also been some amazing moments. Once we had the church and our venue, I started to reach out to my friends to ask them to be attendants. It felt awkward calling people and asking them to spend money on clothes, airline tickets and hotel rooms. As I asked them to stand up with us, I apologized about them having to spend so much money. All of my straight friends laughed and said they’ve done this numerous times and they know what’s involved. They told me this is one time they were truly happy to do it.

Having a wedding provides a unique opportunity to bring the people in one’s life together. The female attendants, who are spread around the country, came in for the dress fitting and we had an amazing time. Our best men had everyone over for a dinner party. As we were getting ready to leave, I stood on the front porch looking in at these people who mean the world to me and realized there’s never been a reason to have all of these people, who represent my support structure from birth until today, together in one place.

Waiting for everyone to say their goodbyes, I felt an overwhelming sense of joy, illustrating another reason to be grateful that Tony and I can get married. About three weeks after the decision, we went to a dinner party with three other couples from our neighborhood. As we sat down at the table, the hostess told us our next-door neighbor Jim brought champagne to toast our engagement. It seemed a little strange since we have been together for 25 years, but it also felt good. As he raised his glass to toast us, he said if 20 years ago someone had told him that this conservative, Virginia Military Institute graduate would support marriage equality, he would have told them they were out of their mind. However, he was so grateful that Tony and I moved in next door to him and opened his mind and heart. He thanked us for making him a better person. I think straight people understand just how important marriage is and these experiences illustrate how important it is that LGBT folks have the opportunity to partake in this major societal rite.

So on May 2, Tony and I will stand in front of our friends, family and community and pledge ourselves to each other for life, and while I know a piece of paper doesn’t make a difference in terms of our love for one another, it validates us a couple in the eyes of the law and our community. When we wake up on May 3, I don’t know if we will feel any different. But, I do know that on May 3, 2015 Tony and I will finally be married, just like everyone else.

We are looking forward to the event!  From my own experience, in some ways being married after being together for six years was anti-climatic.  But in other ways just knowing that we were finally recognized as a couple - we are going through the throes of having our accountant determine if we should file a joint return or not - makes a huge difference.  As does the ability to have the husband on my health coverage.   

DC Repeals Anti-LGBT Exemption That Allowed Religious Schools To Discriminate

Brace yourself for shrieks and spittle flecked rants about Christians being persecuted now that the District of Columbia has repealed an exemption that has been used to allow religious schools to engage in discrimination.  It is part of the move to ban so-called "reparative therapy" which has been used by the "godly folk" and charlatans to torment LGBT individuals and keep the myth alive that sexual orientation is a "choice" or something that is changeable.  The big issue now is whether Congress - read the Christofascists' political whores in the GOP - will act to void the legislation.  Here are highlights from The New Civil Rights Movement:

While many were heralding the Washington, D.C. City Council earlier this week for passing an ordinance that bans the practice of anti-LGBT "reparative therapy," also known as "ex-gay therapy," on minors, few noticed that the body also passed another important piece of legislation. The city council repealed a 1989 amendment forced on D.C. by Congress, to the city's Human Rights Act, known as the Armstrong Amendment. That law allowed religious educational institutions, which were loosely defined, to discriminate against LGBT people.

Congress has 30 days to void the repeal of the anti-LGBT provision.

“The time has come for us to get rid of that obnoxious provision,” Rick Rosendall, president of the D.C. Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance, said, according to the Washington Blade.

The anti-gay legal group Liberty Counsel registered extreme opposition to the move.  "The Act's repeal of the religious exemption for religious schools and church schools from D.C. Code provisions regarding homosexual acts, lifestyle, orientation, or belief is of grave concern," Liberty Counsel wrote to the city council. "The First Amendment directly prohibits government from prohibiting the Free Exercise of religion," it reminded them.

“Sexual Orientation” and “Gender Identity or Expression" or "Transgender” are subjective, changeable, behavior-based categories subject to moral choice, and are not immutable characteristics such as race, sex, skin color or ethnicity, nor are they in the category of fundamental rights, such as religious belief.

Of course, that's an opinion being purveyed by Liberty Counsel, an anti-LGBT hate group.

Liberty Counsel did not detail how a religious educational institution would be penalized by the repeal of the ordinance, but claimed, "attempting to impose employment regulations on church schools and religious schools whose doctrines and sincere religious convictions forbid homosexual or cross-dressing affiliation and employment is flatly unconstitutional."  The letter also referred to transgender women as "a man claiming he is a woman on a given day," . . .

For the "godly folk," religious freedom means having a license to mistreat others and to disseminate hate and bigotry towards others.  Just like ISIS in the Middle East.

District of Columbia Bans "Ex-Gay" Therapy

The Christofascists have lost another battle in their war to perpetuate the myth that sexual orientation is a "choice" and that gays can "change" their sexuality - claims that are condemned by every legitimate medical and mental health association in America.  The truth and the findings of medical/mental health experts mean nothing, of course, to the "godly folk.  If you want some insights on just how bogus "ex-gay" therapy is, check out this piece at Queerty that looks at an undercover effort to expose "ex-gay" charlatans.   But back to the developments in the District of Columbia.  Here are excerpts from a press release from the National Center for Lesbian Rights:

Today, the District of Columbia Council unanimously approved a bill that will protect lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth from the dangerous and discredited practice of conversion therapy.

When signed into law, Washington, D.C. will become the third jurisdiction—behind California and New Jersey—to pass legislation protecting LGBT youth from practices that are known to cause severe depression and even suicide.

“Today, the DC Council sent a powerful message to LGBT youth and their families that they are accepted, supported, and loved,” said Samantha Ames, NCLR staff attorney and coordinator of the #BornPerfect campaign at the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR). “The Council has used its authority to protect our most vulnerable youth from dangerous and discredited pseudoscience that tells them who they are is wrong, and reaffirmed the consensus of every major medical and mental health organization that all children are born perfect, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity.”

NCLR, in conjunction with other organizations, including the Human Rights Campaign, played a key role in organizing the coalition behind the bill, which was authored by Councilmember Mary M. Cheh. A broad range of groups supported the Youth Mental Health Protection Act, including national LGBT organizations, mental health organizations, faith leaders, youth advocates, reproductive justice groups, and civil rights organizations.

The reality is that "ex-gay" therapy needs to be banned nationwide with no exemption for religious "ministries."  At the same time, we need more victims of these programs to come forward and file lawsuits against these therapists and organizations on the basis of the intentional infliction of emotional harm, negligence and fraudulent advertising.  With a fee successful lawsuits, insurance carriers would drop coverage of "Christian counseling" clinics (Think "Ladybird" Bachmann), churches and other organizations   that peddle these fraudulent "therapies."

D. C. United States Court of Appeals Upholds DC Marriage

While paling in comparison to the huge victory in today in Argentina, the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has upheld a District Court ruling that rejected the efforts of gay marriage foes to put the Washington, C. C., gay marriage ordinance up for popular vote. It is pathetic that these supposed Christians and defenders of "family values" always want to play to mob bigotry as a means to deprive LGBT citizens of equality under the civil laws. One can only hope that history will view them as they deserve and that their legacy will be viewed as akin to that of the segregationists and KKK. The photo above shows a couple that met 60 years ago, have remained together since that time, and only recently were able to marry in the District under the law that the gay-haters would rescind. Both men are now well into their 80's. If this couple can make it together for 60 years, it seems to me that these supposed supporters of "marriage" might do far better to see what these men have done right as opposed to seeking to void the legal recognition of their relationship. Here are highlights from the Washington Post:
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The D.C. Court of Appeals narrowly sustained same-sex marriage in the District in a 5 to 4 vote Thursday. The nine judges were asked to determine whether the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics acted lawfully when it rejected an initiative by opponents of gay marriage to have the matter voted upon in a referendum.
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In an 81-page decision released Thursday, the five affirming judges -- Phyllis D. Thompson, Vanessa Ruiz, Inez Smith Reid, Noel Anketell Kramer and Anna Blackburne-Rigsby -- disagreed with that argument, saying that the board was within the law in making such a decision.
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The judges said they were convinced that the council would not have authorized "any initiative" that would have discriminated against residents and violated the Human Rights Act. The judges also wrote that the board "correctly determined that the proposed initiative would have the effect of authorizing such discrimination." . . . Based on that conclusion, the judges ruled that the board acted lawfully in refusing to accept the Jackson initiative.
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Peter D. Rosenstein, a gay and lesbian rights activist, hailed the ruling as a "victory for decency and civil and human rights."
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Because all nine judges heard the case, Jackson's attorneys have no further course of appeal unless they take their case to the U.S. Supreme Court and the justices choose to hear it. After the ruling, Jackson said he and his attorneys are planning such an appeal.
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The four judges who sided with Jackson's attorneys said they primarily questioned the board's interpretation of the law that allowed them to reject the referendum and specifically indicated that they were not ruling against same-sex marriage.
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Can you imagine how many poor, unemployed, hungry and/or homeless individuals could receive needed care if the Christianists used their moneys to follow Christ's directives rather than persecute other citizens? WWJD?

Marriage Advances in Vermont and D.C.

To the delight of LGBT Americans the Vermont Legislature this morning voted to override Governor Jim Douglas' veto and made Vermont the first state to legislatively grant gays and lesbians full marriage rights equal to those of heterosexual couples. I applaud the action although I confess I was more than a bit worried that the 100 required votes in the Vermont House might fall short. With modern medical and mental health experts affirming that one's sexual orientation is immutable and not a choice, nothing less than full marriage affords LGBT couples equality under the CIVIL marriage laws. The reality is that there is no reason to bar same sex marriage other than religious based bigotry - something that has no place in the civil laws as noted by the Iowa Supreme Court this past Friday. Here are some highlights from the Burlington Free Press:

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Vermont has become the fourth state to legalize gay marriage — and the first to do so with a legislature’s vote. The Legislature voted Tuesday to override Gov. Jim Douglas’ veto of a bill allowing gays and lesbians to marry. The vote was 23-5 to override in the state Senate and 100-49 to override in the House. Under Vermont law, two-thirds of each chamber had to vote for override.

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Tuesday morning's legislative action came less than a day after Douglas issued a veto message saying the bill would not improve the lot of gay and lesbian couples because it still would not provide them rights under federal and other states' laws.Gov. Jim Douglas, who vetoed legislation, said, "I prepared myself for this outcome and predicted it. The outcome was not unexpected."He had called the issue of gay marriage a distraction during a time when economic and budget issues were more important.

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House Speaker Shap Smith's announcement of the vote brought an outburst of jubilation from some of the hundreds packed into the gallery and the lobby outside the House chamber, despite the speaker's admonishment against such displays. The true jubilation didn't start until everyone gathered downstairs where they congratulated legislative leaders who championed the cause.

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Adding to the day's amazing results was the vote of the Washington, D.C., Council to recognize marriages that are legitimate in the states in which they were performed. The District already provides domestic partnerships for its LGBT couples, but today's vote will now cause relocated gay married couples as married. With Congress having the final say - since D.C. does not afford its citizens full self rule as would be the case in any of the 50 states - the vote will likely cause Republicans and Christianists to exert efforts to override the Council vote. Here are some highlights from the Washington Post:

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The D.C. Council voted today to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states, on the same day that Vermont became the fourth state to legalize same-sex unions. Domestic partnerships are already legal in the nation's capital. But today's vote, billed as an important milestone in gay rights, explicitly recognizes relocated gay married couples as married.

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The initial vote was 12-0. The unanimous vote sets the stage for future debate on legalizing same-sex marriage in the District and a clash with Congress, which approves the city's laws under Home Rule. The council is expected to take a final vote on the legislation next month.

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Council member David A. Catania (I-At Large), who is also gay, predicted it was only a matter of time before the council also takes up a bill to legalize same-sex marriage in the District. "It's no secret that I have been working on legislation that would take us further," he said. "This is the march toward human rights and equality. This is not the march toward special rights. This is the equality march and that march is coming here."

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Council member Phil Mendelson (D-At Large), who has been chipping away at barriers for same-sex couples for years, said he saw the legislation as one that is in keeping with the city's laws. "Some are saying it's an important step. I am saying it's a simple step," said Mendelson, who authored the legislation.