San Francisco Sues to Block Trump/Pence Health Care 'Conscience Rule'

San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera with Deputy City Attorney Sara Eisenberg.

As noted many times on this blog, Donald Trump's - a/k/a Der Trumpenführer - most loyal supporters are evangelical Christians.  Why?  Because he has promised to support their desire to harm and discriminate against those who do not subscribe to their Bronze Age beliefs and general hatred of others who are different from themselves. Among those they hate the most are gays, although the list of targeted individuals includes racial minorities, non-Christians, women seeking to control their own bodies, and anyone who challenges the Christofascists' perceived right to be above the law when it comes to non-discrimination laws.  Freedom of religion which the Founding Fathers viewed as (i) freedom to worship as one chose, and (ii) freedom from having to pay taxes to support an official state church has now become a smoke screen for hate and bigotry as long as one bases their cruelty on "sincerely held religious belief."  The Trump/Pence regime's "conscience rule" announced this week would put right wing Christians completely above the law while endangering the health and lives of other citizens.  Thankfully, the city of San Francisco has sued to block this vile license to discriminate and hopefully other cities and states will join in opposing this dangerous special right for Christian extremists (Mark Herring, are you paying attention?).  The Advocate looks at why San Francisco has taken action.  Here are highlights:

San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera has filed a lawsuit seeking to block the Trump administration’s new “conscience rule” that allows health care providers to opt out of procedures to which they have religious or moral objections.

The final version of the rule, announced by the administration Thursday, stands to jeopardize care for LGBTQ people, women seeking reproductive health care, and many others, according to Herrera and others who oppose it.

“At its core, this rule is about denying people medical care,” Herrera said in a press release. “This administration is willing to sacrifice patients’ health and lives — particularly those of women, members of the LGBTQ community, and low-income families — to score right-wing political points. It’s reprehensible." "People’s health should not be a political football," he continued.  

Herrera filed the suit Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, within hours of the final rule’s release. It appears to be the first lawsuit challenging the measure.

The Department of Health and Human Services says the rule simply assures the implementation of existing conscience protections for health care workers. But the San Francisco suit contends it goes much farther.

“The rule is so broad it applies not just to doctors and nurses, but anyone even tangentially related to health care, like receptionists,” Herrera’s press release notes. “Schedulers, for example, could refuse to schedule appointments for LGBTQ patients or a woman seeking information about an abortion, with potentially devastating impacts on the patients’ health or lives."

Herrera notes that this new regulation could potentially have employers facing a discrimination lawsuit if they do not agree with a health care worker's beliefs. 

"If San Francisco sought to address the situation by transferring the staff person to another assignment so their professional role did not conflict with their personal beliefs, that could be considered ‘discrimination’ against the staffer under the new federal rule," he adds.  

Noncompliance with the rule will result in loss of federal funding. San Francisco, for instance, risks losing nearly $1 billion a year in funding from Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal programs, according to the city attorney.

Herrera’s lawsuit seeks to not only have the rule declared unconstitutional but also seeks a court order preventing the new rule from taking effect, which is set to happen within 60 days.

Economic Winners and Losers Among America's Cities - The Cost of Intolerance

Click image to enlarge

Since the economic crash of 2008, economic winners and losers have been shaking out among America's cities.  Not surprisingly, cities in more liberal states and/or which are liberal islands in their own states are leading the pack among the winners while conservative (perhaps anti-knowledge is a better term) cities with low wages are filling the ranks of the losers as evidenced by the map above.  In Virginia, outside of the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., and Charlottesville - perhaps the most liberal city in Virginia outside the D.C. area - the loser category predominates.  So what is a city to do to prosper?  As a lengthy piece in The Atlantic suggests, welcoming diversity, innovation and knowledge are perhaps the key.  Sadly, outside of less than a dozen or so cities in Republican dominated states, diversity, innovation and modern knowledge are not welcome.  Low taxes are not the panacea that the GOP claims to be the cure for economic backwardness.  Here are highlights from the article authored by Richard Florida:

Back in the spring of 2009, I wrote in these pages that the financial crisis would “permanently and profoundly alter the country’s economic landscape.” Some cities and regions “will eventually spring back stronger than before,” I predicted. “Others may never come back at all.”

It might have sounded apocalyptic, but tectonic shifts of this kind are not unprecedented. They are the geographic counterpart to what the economist Joseph Schumpeter dubbed “creative destruction”—the great gales of change that level some companies and industries, and give rise to others. As powerful as they might seem in the moment, it is only when we look back through the lens of history that the full extent of economic and geographic changes becomes clear.

Five years after the crash, with the national economy just beginning to return to something resembling normalcy, we can begin to trace the outlines of America’s emerging economic map—and take inventory of the places that are thriving, those that are declining, and those that are trying, in novel ways, to come back.

A variety of measures can be used to divine the health and prospects of these different places—population growth, job growth, housing prices, and the unemployment rate are among the more common. Each of these measures has its uses, but some of them can conceal as much as they reveal. Population growth, for instance, tells you nothing about the skills and education of the people arriving; job growth says nothing about whether the new jobs are good or bad.

Throughout this article, I will draw on some of these measures. But I’ll lean most heavily on three measures less commonly seen in the popular press, but perhaps more telling: the composition of job growth (high-wage, mid-wage, or low-wage); productivity growth (which is the basis for improvements in the standard of living); and venture-capital funding (a proxy for the sort of entrepreneurial innovation that can power future growth).

The economic landscape is being reshaped around two kinds of hubs—centers of knowledge and ideas, and clusters of energy production. Overwhelmingly, these are the places driving the economic recovery. Outside them, the economy remains troubled and weak.

New York City was widely expected to be devastated by the financial crisis. Wall Street’s collapse, the conventional wisdom went, would bring the whole city down with it. In 2009, I predicted that New York would in fact prove to be one of the country’s most resilient places. Even so, the speed and strength of its rebound has surprised me—its explosive growth as a start-up center especially so.

New York’s rise as a tech center signals a major shift in the locus of venture-capital-fueled innovation. For a long time, high-tech start-ups have clustered in suburban office parks along freeways, places that are sometimes called “nerdistans.” But since the crisis, start-ups have taken an urban turn. San Francisco, which has fared extremely well since the crash, is a striking case in point. Over the past several years, Twitter has established its headquarters downtown, Pinterest has moved from Silicon Valley to San Francisco, and even Yahoo has created a new facility in the old San Francisco Chronicle building in the South of Market neighborhood.

America’s “knowledge metros,” large and small, make up perhaps the biggest group of winners, overall, since the crash. Data provided by Economic Modeling Specialists International show that a handful of knowledge metros have an overwhelming lead in generating the high-wage jobs (those paying more than $21 an hour) that America needs. Nearly two-thirds of San Jose’s new jobs have been high-wage, as have nearly half of the new jobs in nearby San Francisco. San Jose also leads the nation in productivity growth . . . .  Portland, Oregon, posted the second-highest level of productivity growth among large metros, nearly 7 percent, belying its Portlandia caricature as a place for slackers. Austin’s tech-fueled economy combined the fastest job growth of all large metros (10.5 percent between 2009 and 2013) with well-above-average growth in productivity and in high-wage jobs.

Knowledge, it turns out, is what allows metros to generate good high-wage jobs. Across America’s metro regions, I have found that high-wage jobs are closely related to several key markers of regional knowledge economies: the share of adults who are college grads; the share of the workforce in professional, technical, and creative jobs; the levels of innovation and venture-capital investment.

The Sun Belt features two kinds of regional economies: declining real-estate economies and booming energy economies. Energy stands alongside knowledge as the second pillar of America’s recovery.

Houston’s high-wage-job growth stems from two main sources—the fossil-fuel industry and information technology. The city is home to more than a third of the country’s petroleum engineers and by far the highest concentration of geoscientists. From 2009 to 2012, Houston added 30,000 jobs in a mix of industries related to oil and gas extraction and scientific and technical consulting services. These pay an average salary of $124,000. Houston has also seen rapid growth in software-development jobs (16 percent) and information-technology jobs (12 percent), along with consistent growth in its medicine-and-health-care sector.

Back in 2009, I predicted that the crisis would exact its steepest toll in “the interior of the country—in older, manufacturing regions whose heydays are long past,” and “in newer, shallow-rooted Sun Belt communities whose recent booms have been fueled in part by real-estate speculation, overdevelopment, and fictitious housing wealth.”

Sadly, the data bear me out. Just before the crisis, greater Las Vegas was one of the nation’s leaders in population growth; today it has the highest concentration of fast-food jobs in the nation. Palm Coast, Florida, the metro with the fastest population growth since 2001, has seen the nation’s worst rate of growth in economic output per person since that same year (negative 3.2 percent through 2011).

Population growth alone has never proved a sufficient foundation for future prosperity—not when many of the new arrivals are retirees or modestly educated people looking to get in on a real-estate boom. But since the crash, even that imperfect engine has failed many Sun Belt cities.

The metros where low-wage jobs make up the largest share of job growth since 2009 are in the Rust Belt and the Sun Belt: St. Louis (where 90 percent of new jobs are low-wage); California’s so-called Inland Empire of Riverside–San Bernardino (where nearly three-quarters of new jobs are low-wage) . . .

The main threats to America’s growth model don’t come from other countries, but from domestic contradictions. The more talented people cluster, the greater the economic returns they produce.

The cultural, political, and economic gulfs that separate advantaged and disadvantaged people and places go well beyond the wage gap. Knowledge workers benefit from living in neighborhoods with better schools, better amenities, and lower crime rates, while less advantaged groups are sometimes stuck in place, with limited prospects for climbing even one rung up the economic ladder, and insufficient resources to move out of stagnant areas. Americans have seen a dramatic decline in economic mobility, overall. But a poor person from a knowledge center like San Jose or San Francisco has twice the chance of becoming wealthy as a poor person from some Rust Belt or Sun Belt centers like Cleveland or Atlanta.

On November 5, 2013, here in Virginia voters will select a new Governor, Lt. Governor and Attorney General as well as a new House of Delegates.  Sadly, the Republican ticket is a case study on those who reject knowledge, reject diversity, and reject innovative thinking as they seek to drag Virginia and society backwards in time.  For future economic reasons alone, they need to be defeated.  Meanwhile, localities need to stop trying to do things the way they have always been done and make themselves more welcoming for diverse and innovative individuals.  Hampton Roads has a long, long way to go on this front. 

Drunk Anti-Gay Archbishop Had Male College Student In Car at Arrest

Things seem to be getting a bit curious about what exactly was really going in the early morning hours when new appointed Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone (pictured at right) - called by some the "father of Proposition 8" was arrested for DUI in San Diego.  Cordileone had said that he had been at dinner with friends and was driving his elderly mother home before he was to head home himself.  As Fr. Geoff Fallows (who got booted from his parish for refusing to support Prop 8) has picked up, that may not be the entire story: Cordileone had a young male in the car as well -something not mentioned if Cordileone's story line.  Obviously, a number of questions become relevant, including why Cordileone not mention this other passenger.  Here are some details from Fr. Geoff's blog:

Listen very carefully to the announcer of a local San Diego news station:

“According to police, 56 year old bishop Salvatore Cordileone was driving along the edge of SDSU when he entered a sobriety checkpoint he appeared drunk and was arrested shortly after midnight. He was in the car with his elderly mother and a foreign exchange student, a young male adult.”

If San Francisco Archbishop-elect Cordileone were just the simple priest that he claimed to be to at his arrest, his superior would have demanded explanations.

What were you doing driving drunk?

What was a college student doing in your passenger seat at that time of night?

After you dropped off your mother, where did you intend to go, and what were you going to do when you arrived?

Have you ever spent time with, or socialized, with this young man prior to your arrest? If so in what context and what is the nature of your relationship?

The matter would be brought to the attention of the bishop, and it would most probably affect his career and, of course, it would be handled discreetly.

The fact that Cordileone’s mother was present in the car with Cordileone and the young student would not clear the concerns or suspicions from the mind of a superior. Consider the statements of the police:

“Cordileone's mother, who was a passenger, was allowed to drive the mid-size black car home following her son's arrest after officers made sure she had not been drinking and had a valid license, McCullough [the arresting police officer] said.”

and:

"He was a driver that was obviously impaired,” Officer Mark McCullough also stated.

These two statements from police clearly indicate that Cordileone’s mother was sober and capable of driving the car that night. The second statement by officer McCullogugh that “he [Cordileone] was…obviously impaired” raises some serious questions about both the judgment and the laxity of Cordileone’s mother, with respect to her son. She can’t tell, or is unwilling to protest, that he is obviously drunk and poses a threat to human life behind the wheel of an automobile. How objective and outspoken would she be about a possible inappropriate relationship with a young student?

A superior/pastor/bishop would ask all of these questions of Salvatore Cordileone and so, it surprises me that the press does not. Then again, the Catholic hierarchy has much experience in managing the press. This is not a story they want pursued, it would be highly inconvenient in an election year. Especially on the same week that the head of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), New York Archbishop cardinal Dolan blesses the Republican National Convention and Mitt Romney’s bid to replace Obama as President. If Romney wins, the USCCB’s social conservativism will become national policy and this increases both USCCB [Vatican] power and prestige. 

Cordileone is not a simple priest. He is:  “Known as "the architect of Proposition 8," the 56-year-old played a pivotal role in convincing many Catholic organizations in California to help bankroll the 2008 campaign to overturn the state's same-sex marriage law. With his help, Prop 8 supporters raised some $1.5 million, which went a long way toward helping get the measure passed.”

It all may be an innocent situation.  However, the fact that Cordileone apparently deliberately never mentioned the young man raises the old question of "if you have nothing to hide, then why hide something."  People deserve an answer to the questions Fr. Geoff raises and I hope the full story comes out.  Obviously, it would be deliciously ironic if Cordileone is exposed as a closet case who got caught. It would be in keeping with the pattern of loudest homophobes actually being gay themselves. :) 

Benedict XVI Names Architect of Prop 8 Architect Archbishop of San Francisco

With his appointment of Bishop Salvatore Cordileone as the new Archbishop of San Francisco Pope Benedict XVI has signaled that the persecution of out and well adjusted gays remains a high priority for the bitter old queens in dresses at the Vatican.  Corfileone was one of the central strategists in the campaign to pass Proposition 8 in California and seems consumed with a level of homophobia that suggests he must secretly be dying to enjoy some hot gay sex.  Time and time again, those who are the most stridently anti-gay are the ones you can expect to be caught in a gay tryst or, in the case of Catholic clergy, named in a lawsuit brought by a former child or teenage victim od sexual abuse.  I can only assume that men like Cordileone are driven by a desire to make everyone else as miserable as they are themselves.  The San Diego Gay and Lesbian News has coverage.  Here are highlights:

Oakland Bishop Salvatore Cordileone, one of the leading architects in the campaign to pass the discriminatory Proposition 8 in California, has been named the new Archbishop of San Francisco by Pope Benedict XVI.

Cordileone played a central role in founding and executing the Protect Marriage campaign, and under his influence, Catholic organizations in California played a leading role in financing the Prop 8 campaign. His partners included the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) and Focus on the Family. In fact, it was Cordileone who personally phoned NOM co-founder Maggie Gallagher and asked her to get NOM involved in the Prop 8 fight.

Now, as Archbishop of San Francisco, Cordileone will oversee more than 400,000 Catholic parishioners across 90 parishes. As a metropolitan archbishop, Cordileone will have bishops in dioceses including Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Honolulu, Sacramento and Reno under his supervision.

“Catholic teaching calls on us to love our neighbors and to treat others with the same respect we wish for ourselves. Unfortunately, Bishop Cordileone’s crusade against LGBT people indicates he doesn’t take these particular teachings to heart. While LGBT Catholics and their allies have worked relentlessly to create welcoming environments, the appointment of Bishop Cordileone sends a chilling message that, in the eyes of the hierarchy, same-sex relationships are not worthy of equal dignity and respect,” [HRC president Chad] Griffin said.

Bishop Cordileone’s extremist views are out of step with the majority of Catholics. A May 2012 Gallup poll found support for marriage equality among Catholic at more than 50%, as did a recent poll from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

A Gay Marine Who Saved a President

(Image above provided by a reader)

Given the efforts of organizations like Concerned Women - Bitches in my view is more appropriate - for America who want American history sanitized to omit any references to the contributions of LGBT Americans, it's important that our true contributions be highlighted. Fortunately, a opinion column in the Sacramento Bee does just this in its look at Marine veteran of Vietnam, Billy Sipple, who tackled a woman named Sara Jane Moore as she pulled a revolver from her purse to fire at President Gerald Ford back in 1975. Despite what our enemies and religious zealots would have others believe about us, LGBT Americans are just as patriotic and have contributed at least as much to the nation as have heterosexuals. Here are highlights from the Bee's column:
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Sipple, the son of a Detroit autoworker, had been discharged from the Marines in 1970 and made his way to San Francisco in search of acceptance, like so many others. On Sept. 22, 1975, Sipple was on the sidewalk outside the St. Francis Hotel hoping to catch a glimpse of another Michigan native, Gerald Ford. Sipple looked up as a woman named Sara Jane Moore pulled a revolver from her purse. Without a second thought, Sipple lunged at her.
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Feinstein, then the president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, didn't see the assassination attempt but had been Ford's host at the St. Francis. "It was a gay man who grabbed her gun, which deflected the shot aimed at our president," Feinstein said on Saturday, the day that the Senate voted to end the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that had forced countless military men and women to remain closeted.
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Perhaps the prejudice and fears that led to the policy fed the demons that haunted Sipple. Sipple surely suffered. Sipple's brother, George, told me that the Marines at one point denied Sipple was ever in the service. There were, after all, no gay Marines.
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Two days after the assassination attempt, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen disclosed Sipple's sexual orientation, and quoted Milk and another gay man "who claim to be among Sipple's close friends described themselves as 'proud – maybe this will help break the stereotype.' Sipple had been out of the closet in San Francisco. But like so many others who sought freedom by settling in the city, Sipple had not told his family back in Michigan. His parents were shocked at the news. His father never got over it, he later said.
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Wayne Friday, then an investigator for the San Francisco District Attorney's Office, stopped by one of Sipple's Polk Street hangouts in February 1989. The bartender asked that Friday check in on Sipple, who hadn't been around.
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Friday found Sipple dead on his bed, half-gallon bottles of bourbon and 7-Up nearby. He had been there two weeks. The framed note was on a wall.
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"Dear Mr. Sipple,
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"I want you to know how much I appreciated your selfless actions last Monday. The events were a shock to us all, but you acted quickly and without fear for your own safety. By doing so, you helped to avert danger to me and to others in the crowd. You have my heartfelt appreciation."
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Gerald Ford signed it.

Google Maps Highlights Prop 8 Donors

UPDATED: Andrew Sullivan had this comment with which I very much agree:

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I don't get the fear. If Prop 8 supporters truly feel that barring equality for gay couples is vital for saving civilization, shouldn't they be proud of their financial support? Why don't they actually have posters advertizing their support for discriminating against gay people - as a matter of pride?

I noted the other day how Proposition 8 supporters have their panties in wad over the California campaign finance disclosure laws which have exposed anti-equality supporters and their bigotry. Now Interactive Google maps have taken the matter to a new level showing the amounts, names and locations of Prop 8 donors online for three locations so far, including Salt Lake City. It's interesting how these folks want to deprive others of civil legal rights but at the same time want to remain safely anonymous. I can think of few things more dangerous than allowing individuals and/or companies and organizations to seek to influence the civil laws and yet remain anonymous. I have always had the courage to stand openly behind my beliefs and be counted. Thus, if these bigots do not have the courage to publicly stand behind their convictions, then perhaps they ought to rethink their positions. I have no sympathy for these cry babies whatsoever.

Nuns In Drag Leave Egg On Archbishop's Face

Somehow I suspect that the Nazi Pope will not be happy about the Archbishop of San Francisco giving communion to members of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Personally, as a former Roman Catholic driven from the Church by its anti-gay hate campaign, I find the situation rather humorous. One can be gay, in drag, and still be honest in their faith. Compare these sisters to the Cardinals and Bishops (and Popes) who covered up the sexual abuse of thousands of children. Unlike the Church hierarchy, the good sisters do not take themselves too seriously or think they have an exclusive line of communication to God. Here are highlights from 365gay.com:

(San Francisco, California) With their outlandish nuns' habits, gaudy makeup, and irreverent showmanship the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are a San Francisco institution. They've raised tens of thousands of dollars for LGBT and AIDS charities in the Bay Area all the while poking a finger in the eye of the establishment - especially the Catholic Church and its position on homosexuality.

To the Archbishop of San Francisco the sisters became a personal embarrassment when the "nuns" showed up this month for Sunday mass at Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in the Castro district. As Archbishop George H. Niederauer was celebrating mass the sisters lined up for communion. And received the Eucharist wafer from Niederauer. The event might have gone unnoticed had it not been videotaped. And if the tape hadn't made its way to conservative Bill O'Reilly of Fox News. O'Reilly called the stunt an "unbelievable outrage". Hundreds of angry letters and e-mails poured into the Archdiocese offices and Niederauer was forced into "damage control".

Neiderauer: "I noticed no protest, no demonstration, no disruption of the Sunday Eucharist. The congregation was devout and the liturgy was celebrated with reverence. Toward the end of the Communion line two strangely dressed persons came to receive Communion. I did not see any mock religious garb. As I recall, one of them wore a large flowered hat or garland," the 71 year old archbishop said.

Personally, I think Bill O'Reilly is an unbelievable outrage.