Trump Is Giving Dems The Edge In Senate Races

Notwithstanding how frightening the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency might be, with Trump doing poorly in the latest polls, he may ultimately be a gift to Democrats and may be the silver bullet Democrats need to retake control of the U.S. Senate.  Yes, the GOP know nothings and Neanderthals in the House of Representatives would still pose a problem, but a Democrat win of the White House and control of the Senate could set the stage for the appointment of up to three Supreme Court justices and perhaps harken in an a new liberal Court that would reverse travesties like Citizens United and set the stage for further advances in LGBT rights rulings.  Talking Points Memo looks at the situation.  Here are highlights:

If Democrats are having a harder time than expected in a few marquee races in 2016, none of it may matter in the time of Donald Trump.

This week, polls showed the Republican presidential candidate's campaign in free fall –high single-digit and sometimes double-digit deficits– that even the strongest senatorial candidates likely won't be able to weather.

In Pennsylvania, a Franklin and Marshall College poll found Clinton had an 11 point lead. In Florida, a Suffolk University poll found Clinton was up 6 points in a head-to-head match-up with Trump. In New Hampshire –where Democrats recruited a popular two-term sitting governor to run for the Senate– Clinton was up 15 points against Trump.

Those are margins that get very difficult for Republican senators to outrun, experts say.

"You cannot just withstand a blowout," said Rob Jesmer, a former executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. "I could see a scenario where we lose the White House and hold the Senate, but if Trump is just getting destroyed even if our guys can outperform the ballot at three to four or even five points, it is very problematic."

Democrats need five states to win the Senate majority back in November and four to tie it. They are most bullish on states like Wisconsin and Illinois, which seem to be trending blue. Their next best hope seems to be in New Hampshire and in Indiana, where the last-minute recruiting of Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) could be enough to bring Democrats to a tie in the Senate. If Clinton wins the White House, four seats will be enough to give them the majority on tie votes.

From there, however, the road to the majority relies heavily on hard races against incumbents in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania where the saving grace for Democrats may be that the presidential campaign will dominate the airwaves.

“Portman has gotten a lot of good press lately, and he’s earned it," said Kyle Kondik, a Senate race expert based at the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. "On a lot of different marks Portman is a superior candidate to Strickland, but Strickland may have the benefit of the top of the ticket.”

Even in Pennsylvania, where Clinton is up 11, but McGinty is just up a single point, Kondik predicts the mere perception of a blowout at the top of the ticket though could hurt Republican turnout in November and favor Democrats.

"If the winds are blowing the Democrats’ way it seems hard to think that all these 50/50 Senate races are going to break the other way," Kondik said.

How LGBT Assimilation Is Hurting The LGBT Community's Most Vulnerable

While the advances in gay rights since I came out in October, 2001, have been amazing, not all in the LGBT community have benefited equally  in the advances, particularly those living in still anti-gay red states and those from minority populations and/or less affluent backgrounds.  I complain at times about life in Virginia - which remains far from the bright center of the LGBT universe in many ways - but overall, the husband and I have it far better than many others, including LGBT individuals stuck living in rural areas of Southwest Virginia or what's called "Southside" to the west of Hampton Roads.   The contrasts are huge and may be growing.  We find ourselves socially acceptable and in professions where our sexual orientation seemingly is less and less of an obstacle to success.  A mere 100 miles to the west, it's a very different world (recently visiting the Farmville, Virginia, area, my comment was that if I had to live there, razor blades might seem like an attractive option).  The same holds for those in minority communities.  Hopefully, this will change in time, but for now the divergence is growing.  A piece in Huffington Post looks at the phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

On the evening of June 28, two very different celebrations took place to mark the most historic New York City Pride week in decades. 

The flashier of these celebrations was the iconic Dance on the Pier. . . . .  Complete with laser lights, multiple jumbotrons, fireworks and a legion of half-naked go-go dancers, the event was a brazen testament to the newfound trendiness of urban gaydom. Admission started at $80, but that didn't stop 10,000 enthusiastic fans from snatching up tickets to what organizers billed as one of the world's top-tier LGBT events.

[A]cross the Hudson to the north, they may have seen the outline of the Christopher Street Piers, where a celebration of a very different kind was taking place. Here, a motley crowd of queer homeless youths -- who definitely could not afford admission to Dance on the Pier -- decided to throw an impromptu party of their own. With the bass from the Ariana Grande concert pulsing in the background, the youths -- male, female, cisgender, transgender, gay, lesbian, bisexual, black and Latino -- drank, smoked, sang, vogued and played cards under the dim light of the street lamps.

Both parties paid homage to a common past by celebrating Pride and the decades of struggle it commemorates. Both parties acknowledged a common present by sharing space on the Hudson River Piers, the heart of New York's LGBT community. But the extravagant Ariana Grande concert and its upscale audience could not have seemed more out of place among the piers that have served as a safe haven for the queer community's most marginalized -- mostly queer homeless youth of color -- for decades.

While the gay rights movement in the United States has achieved a remarkable string of successes over the past several years, including the invalidation of the Defense of Marriage Act and the legalization of gay marriage, not everyone within the LGBT community is equally positioned to take advantage of these successes. 

After all, although marriage is a declaration of love, in many ways it is also an expression of interpersonal stability, economic security and social respectability -- attributes that many marginalized LGBT people do not have. So while love may have won for middle and upper class gays, many transgender people, queer people of color and queer homeless youths instead find themselves left behind by a community that has become increasingly defined by the interests of its white, cisgender, middle and upper class members.

Marriage is an institution of respectability. The fight for gay marriage suggested that the gay community had grown up, left its radical past behind and was ready to join mainstream society as a reputable partner.  . . . . It was also an assertion that the gay rights movement had reached an important milestone, transcending basic issues of health, safety, economic security and social stability.

But the problem is, it hadn't. Over 20 percent of all LGBT youth are homeless, and 40 percent of all homeless youth are LGBT. 58 percent of queer homeless youth have been sexually assaulted. 64 percent of transgender people make less than $25,000 per year. 41 percent of transgender people and 62 percent of queer homeless youth have attempted suicide. And 10 transgender women have been murdered in the U.S. so far this year. 

Is this to be the brave new gay world?  A world in which the public face of the queer community -- the gay, the white, the cisgender and the wealthy -- take their place among society's elite, leaving the transgender, the non-white, the poor and the homeless to fend for themselves?

A world where queer youths are disowned and thrown out on the street by their families, only to find that they are also considered second-class citizens in the community they reach out to for love and acceptance?

[A]s the gay elite have become increasingly integrated into the power structure of society, many have used their newfound influence not to alleviate the inequalities within the queer community, but instead to cement their position at the pinnacle of an expanding LGBT hierarchy.

Instead of collaborating with queer homeless youth to recreate the old Village's culture of diversity and acceptance, many residents of this new Greenwich Village -- many of them gay and lesbian -- have sought to "clean" their streets

And instead of protecting queer homeless youths from harassment, the Christopher Street Patrol has increasingly hounded them for petty quality of life infractions, a strategy eerily similar to that of the anti-gay vigilantes the patrol was in part founded to combat. As one black transgender youth put it, "The damage comes from our own community. You'd think we'd be safe on our own piers."
But the worst part about this trend is that because the discrimination is perpetrated at least in part by our own community, it is given a sense of legitimacy. After all, it can't be homophobic if it's queers versus queers, right?!

With the stunning advances in gay rights and growing prosperity of America's LGB community over the past decade, it's easy to forget that the very groups we are now marginalizing are the ones who launched the queer rights movement at a time when being gay was still a crime.

If queer homeless youths, black drag queens, transgender women and gay hustlers had not risen up against oppression at Compton's Cafeteria and Stonewall over 45 years ago, we would not have gay marriage today.
So as long as LGBT youths sleep on the street, transgender people fear for their lives, and queer people of color live in poverty, my new right to marry will be diminished.The LGBT movement still has a long way to go . . .

The author is correct - there is a huge amount of work still to be done and anti-gay discrimination (much of it generated by foul religious denominations) needs to be fought and crushed at all levels of society and across America from the big cities to small rural towns.  Never ending activism is exhausting, but there is still so much to be done.  The fight must continue.

The Single Most Important Word In the Marriage Equality Opinion

Justice Anthony Kennedy who authored yesterday's historic ruling

Tucked into yesterday's historic marriage ruling is a single word that may in time auger the ultimate total legal defeat of the Christofascists' war on LGBT Americans.  The word?   Immutable.  Why is this so single word so important?  Because it is the basis for non-discrimination protections based on other immutable characteristics such as race, gender, age, and national origin (unfortunately, religion is included in such statutory protections even though religion is totally voluntary and a choice).  If sexual orientation or gender identity is immutable, it sets the stage for the expansion of non-discrimination laws and the Christofascist claims that sexual orientation is a "choice" or strictly voluntary "conduct."   Think Progress looks at how this single word may have huge impact in the years to come.  Here are excerpts:

[W]hile Friday’s decision is not a perfect victory for gay rights, it is still a massive one. And it likely clears the path for a follow up decision establishing that the rights of gay men, lesbians and bisexuals extend far beyond the marital context.

The single most important word in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion for the Court is “immutable.” He uses this word twice, once in an off-hand statement that sexual orientation is an “immutable nature,” and again in a more pointed statement that “psychiatrists and others recognized that sexual orientation is both a normal expression of human sexuality and immutable.”

Kennedy’s declaration that sexual orientation is immutable has obvious political significance. It puts to bed, at least for legal purposes, what remains of the debate over whether people can choose not to be gay. But this word also carries particular significance in a case such as this one, where a discrete group of Americans allege that they are victims of discrimination. Though the Court’s cases have, at times, been murky on this point, they often refer to immutably as one of several factors that, when combined, can trigger heightened scrutiny. Kennedy’s decision to use this loaded word is a sign that he — and a majority of the Supreme Court — is willing to hold that all anti-gay discrimination by government should be treated skeptically.

Obergefell drops other hints that such a holding is coming. The primary factor in determining whether discrimination against a particular group should be subject to heightened scrutiny is whether that group has historically faced discrimination that bears “no relation to ability to perform or contribute to society.” Kennedy leaves little doubt that gay people meet this standard.

A close runner-up in the competition for the single most important word in Kennedy’s opinion is “fundamental.” Obergefell holds that marriage is a fundamental right, and that this right extends to same sex couples.

This holding is significant for two reasons. For one, it normalizes the Supreme Court’s gay rights jurisprudence. . . . . When a right is recognized as fundamental, any law that abridges it must be treated as preemptively unconstitutional.

Another noteworthy aspect of the ruling is recognized:

Justice Anthony Kennedy is a conservative Republican. The irony of Obergefell v. Hodges is that it is also a socially conservative opinion. The men and women behind this lawsuit, Kennedy writes, seek admission into one of the most profound and most conservative institutions in our society. According to Kennedy’s opinion, “marriage is a keystone of our social order.” It is “the foundation of the family and of society, without which there would be neither civilization nor progress.” It gives “character to our whole civil polity.” And it “remains a building block of our national community.”

And when Kennedy looks at men and women such as DeKoe, Kostura, Obergefell, Arthur, DeBoer and Rowse, and he does not see people trying to disrupt the social order. He sees people who served their country, who take in children that others cast aside. He sees the life he has enjoyed with his own wife, and he understands how soul-crushing it would be if the state treated his wife as if she were a stranger to him.

Yesterday was a huge victory for LGBT Americans.  It may prove to be an even bigger defeat for the Christofascists and the hate dispensing "family values" groups who as a further aside may have just lost one of their biggest fundraising schemes.