Virginia Votes: What is at Stake on November 5, 2019

It is not an exaggeration to state that tomorrow's state elections in Virginia are the most consequential in a generation or more given that control of the Virginia General Assembly is the ultimate prize.  If Republicans retain control of the Senate and/or House of Delegates (in part due to gerrymandering), it will mean at least two more years of Republicans obstructing and sabotaging policies and programs that a significant majority of Virginians want. If the Democrats win control, Virginia will move significantly forward into the 21st century and finally throw off the remnants of its ugly history as a part of the Confederacy and an architect of the Jim Crow laws.  Democrat control will mean the passage of common sense gun control, laws to address climate change and repair holes in the Paris climate accord being torn open by Trump/Pence, an increase in the minimum wage, stronger health care policies, enhanced non-discrimination laws, and redistricting in 2020 that could end GOP gerrymandering.  In short, so much is at stake and it is critical that voters go to the polls and vote out Republicans who have engaged in a campaign of lies since summer wherein they pretend to be moderates - they are NOT - and lying about their own voting records (Suffolk's Chris Jones has been among the most shameless liars - and one of his ads has an older white woman saying he is "one of us," a not so subtle dog whistle against Jones' black opponent).  Here are highlights from a piece in the Washington Post that looks ate the importance of tomorrow's elections:

Voters go to the polls Tuesday for Virginia’s most consequential legislative elections in a generation, with control of state government at stake and the results marking an early skirmish in next year’s presidential contest.

An unprecedented flood of money has boosted many General Assembly races to the spending level of congressional contests. Virginia is the only state where this fall’s elections will determine the balance of power in the legislature, and both national parties regard it as a proxy war over President Trump and his political future.

All 140 seats in the General Assembly are on the ballot, but much of the battle has focused on suburban districts in Northern Virginia, Richmond and Hampton Roads, where voters can swing left or right.

Trump is deeply unpopular in Virginia, and he made no visits there to boost GOP candidates. When Vice President Pence attended a campaign rally in Virginia Beach on Sunday, the Democratic Party of Virginia promoted the appearance.

Republicans are defending thin majorities of 20 to 19 in the Senate and 51 to 48 in the House of Delegates, with one vacancy in each chamber. If Democrats can take control, they could consolidate power for the first time in 26 years and work with [Governor] Northam to enact legislation long blocked by Republicans.

Those include gun control, protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation, a higher minimum wage and passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. As the only former Confederate state that went for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and with its urban and suburban areas becoming increasingly diverse, Virginia is seen by Democrats as an important place to plant the flag against Trump’s Republican Party.

Whoever controls the General Assembly will oversee redistricting after next year’s census — influencing politics for a decade to come.

GOP candidates warn that new liberal Democrats are out of step with traditional Virginia values and will ruin the state’s business-friendly climate. Many suburban Republican candidates have attempted a difficult balancing act, posing almost like centrist Democrats for much of the summer — including blue campaign signs and literature that emphasized gun safety and health care without mentioning party affiliation — but lashing out against “socialists” and abortionists in the final weeks. . . . Republicans aimed to depict Democrats as chaotic, scandal-ridden baby killers, and themselves as pragmatic centrists.

On May 31, though, tragedy disrupted state politics when a gunman killed 12 in Virginia Beach. Amid a public outcry for action, Democrats rallied around Northam, who summoned the General Assembly to a special legislative session in July to consider gun restrictions.

Republicans who control the legislature accused Democrats of cynical politics and adjourned the session after 90 minutes without debating a single bill. Instead, they referred all legislation to a state crime commission.

That was a risky move for Republicans — a recent Washington Post-Schar School poll found that gun policy is the top issue for a majority of Virginia voters. While those voters split evenly among Democrats and Republicans, even bigger majorities said they favor some form of gun control legislation.

Polls also consistently showed that most Virginians are happy with the job Northam is doing, defusing the scandal issue for Republicans.

Turnout is the most crucial factor Tuesday. . . . . Democrats are hoping that anti-Trump fervor will get their numbers up, as it has done since 2016, and they have cranked up celebrity endorsements for good measure, including visits from actors Alec Baldwin and Kerry Washington.

Republicans, meanwhile, focused on unseating several Prince William delegates swept into office two years ago on an anti-Trump wave, including the state’s first two Latina legislators, Hala Ayala and Elizabeth Guzman, and Danica Roem, Virginia’s first transgender elected official. But fundraising in those races has heavily favored Democrats.

In Hampton Roads, the most-watched race is a rerun: Del. David E. Yancey (R-Newport News) faces Democrat Shelly Simonds (D) two years after their 2017 contest resulted in a tie, which was decided by a random drawing live on national television.

Del. Chris Jones (R-Suffolk), chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, is trying to fend off Clinton Jenkins in a redrawn district that heavily favors Democrats.

Several Virginia Beach races could be pivotal in determining the balance of power and will test the potency of the gun control issue. Freshman Del. Kelly K. Convirs-Fowler (D-Virginia Beach) is in a tight race in a heavily military district against Republican challenger Shannon Kane; Del. Glenn R. Davis Jr. (R-Virginia Beach) faces Democrat Karen Mallard; and Del. Christopher P. Stolle (R-Virginia Beach) is running against Democrat Nancy Guy.

That area’s two Senate seats are also competitive. Del. Cheryl B. Turpin (D-Virginia Beach) faces Republican Jen Kiggins for an open seat vacated by retired senator Frank Wagner (R-Virginia Beach), and Sen. William R. DeSteph Jr. (R-Virginia Beach) is trying to turn back a well-funded challenge by Democrat Missy Cotter Smasal.

Vote Democrat tomorrow to move Virginia forward - and to symbolically give a huge middle finger to Donald Trump and national Republicans such as Moscow Mitch McConnell, Leningrad Lindsey Graham and the white supremacists and religious extremist who support them.

If you live on the Peninsula, vote for Martha Mugler or Shelly Simonds if you are in their respective districts.

Is it Legal to Fire Someone for Being Gay?

As long time readers know, I was forced from a law firm years ago for being gay. It has taken years to rebuild my finances, although I will never be in a position equivalent to where I would have been but for the anti-gay discrimination I experienced first hand. Now, the U.S. Supreme Court is about to begin its term on October 8, 2019 (the first Monday in October) by hearing arguments in three cases in which the Trump/Pence Department of Justice is arguing that it is perfectly fine and legal to fire individuals for being LGBT.  The Christofascists are cheering this disturbing DOJ position that some are above non-discrimination and public accommodation laws, while decent people ought to be wondering who will be next to be targeted by Christofascists after gays. Ultimately, these religious extremists want to be able to discriminate against anyone who threatens their ignorance based Bronze Age beliefs.  Allowing discrimination based on cherry picked bible passages puts many at risk going forward, including blacks.  Countless lives would be harmed based on nothing than what boils down to ignorance and superstition. A lengthy piece in the Washington Post looks at the cases and what is at stake.  Here are highlights:

Aimee Stephens never saw how her colleagues at work would react to her gender transition. The owner of the funeral home where she worked fired her first.

Gerald Bostock claims everything was fine in his job as a social worker in Georgia until he joined a gay softball league. Then came the pink slip.

For skydiving instructor Donald Zarda, the termination came after the routine way he joked with a woman when the two had been strapped together shoulder-to-shoulder and hip-to-hip for a tandem jump. Something along the lines of, “Don’t worry, I’m gay.”

The three present the Supreme Court with a blockbuster question at the start of its new term: Is it legal to fire someone for being gay or transgender?

The cases will be argued Tuesday.

This is one of the most consequential issues of the term, with more than 70 friend-of-the-court briefs dividing states, religious orders and members of Congress. More than 200 of the nation’s largest employers are supporting the workers.

[G]ay rights leaders say “married on Sunday, fired on Monday” is a possibility in more than half of the United States, where there is no specific protection for gay or transgender workers.The states that prohibit discrimination are not uniform — some protect only gender identity or transgender status, and some differentiate between public and private employment.

The issue for the court is the reach of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which, besides protecting against workplace discrimination because of race, also prohibits discrimination “because of sex.”

For 50 years, courts read that to mean only that women could not be treated worse than men, and vice versa, not that discrimination on the basis of sex included LGBTQ individuals. The Trump administration says that is what the Supreme Court should find as well.

That puts the Trump administration at odds with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which decided in 2015 that gay and transgender individuals were federally protected.

Treating a man who is attracted to men differently than a woman who is attracted to men is discrimination, the EEOC reasoned. . . . . Discrimination because of sexual orientation is the same thing, the EEOC said, because it relies on stereotypes about to whom men and women should be attracted.

The full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled for Zarda, and said its contrary past decisions on the issue were wrong.

Chief Judge Robert A. Katzmann wrote that “sexual orientation discrimination is motivated, at least in part, by sex and is thus a subset of sex discrimination.” (Zarda died in 2014, and his case is being advanced by his sister and partner.)

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit came to a similar conclusion in Stephens’s case.

But in Bostock’s case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit went the other way, ruling for Clayton County, a suburb south of Atlanta, that Title VII did not protect on the basis of sexual orientation.

In previous rulings on gay rights, such as striking down a federal law that recognized only marriages between a man and a woman and state statutes that outlawed homosexual conduct, the Supreme Court relied on the Constitution.

These three cases concern the text of Title VII. No one argues that Congress in 1964 intended to protect LGBTQ individuals; homosexual conduct was illegal in the vast majority of the country. The solicitor general said that basic fact should decide the cases.

[T]he lawyers point to an unlikely ally: the late justice Antonin Scalia.  In a 1998 ruling in a case called Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Scalia wrote for the court that male-on-male sexual harassment was covered by Title VII even though it is not mentioned in the statute or envisioned by Congress.

“It is ultimately the provisions of our laws rather than the principal concerns of our legislators by which we are governed,” Scalia wrote, adding that same-sex harassment need not be “the principal evil Congress was concerned with.”

“We’re the textualists here,” said Ria Tabacco Mar, an attorney for the ACLU, which is representing the Zarda estate. “We’re the ones pointing to the words of the statute.”

But for the demands of Christofascists and the abhorrent and deceptively named Alliance Defending Freedom, these cases would never have reached the Supreme Court.  What we see is religion - which has caused so much death, destruction and human misery over the centuries - yet again seeking to inflict harm those who do not hold to Christofascist dogma.  The Court needs to reject their demands and make it clear that real or feigned religious belief does not elevate one above the law. Civil rights outweigh ignorance based religious dogma. 

Virginia and Two Dozen States/Municipalities Suing to Block Trump Licence to Discriminate

Trump and Pence with Christofascist leaders.

As often noted in this blog, evangelical Christians have remained Donald Trump's strongest base of support notwithstanding the fact that Trump is the antithesis to what ought to be Christian behavior and morals.  One way that Trump has retained the loyalty of evangelicals has been through (i) his racist agenda - many evangelical organizations such as The Family Foundation here in Virginia and denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention trace their roots to white supremacy efforts - and (ii) his efforts to exempt them from the restriction  of non-discrimination laws most recently embodied in his regime's "conscience rule" allowing health care providers to use real or feigned religious belief to refuse to treat or care for those their dislike.  Now, Virginia and two dozen states and municipalities have sued to block this insidious and dangerous move to please hate motivated evangelicals and "professional Christians" such as Jerry Falwell, Jr., and James Dobson.  Here are highlights from a piece in the Washington Post:

A group of mostly Democratic states filed lawsuits against the Trump administration on Tuesday, challenging a new federal rule that gives health-care providers, insurers and employers greater latitude to refuse to provide or pay for medical services that they say violate their religious or moral beliefs.

A lawsuit by a coalition of nearly two dozen states and cities, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, alleges that the rule illegally favors the personal views of health-care workers over the needs of patients — “at a dangerous price” of hobbling the ability of state-run health-care facilities to provide effective care.

A separate suit, brought by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, alleges that the rule “impedes access to basic care” and “encourages discrimination against vulnerable patients,” including women and LGBTQ individuals.

The suits, . . .  seek to block the rule, announced by President Trump early this month and published Tuesday in the Federal Register. It allows individuals and entities to refrain from delivering or paying for services such as abortion, sterilization or assisted suicide if they have a religious or moral objection to them. The 440-page rule also grants parents rights to refuse several specific types of care for their children.

The lawsuits are part of a spate of federal litigation challenging various ways the Trump administration has been rewriting health-care policies.

The “conscience protections,” as their advocates call them, are among actions taken by the Department of Health and Human Services that appeal to Christian conservatives, a constituency that is part of Trump’s political base. The rule is due to take effect in late July.

The multistate lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges that the rule puts at risk billions of dollars in federal funds if the states participating in the case do not comply.

The 80-page complaint says the rule also will harm teaching hospitals and other health-care facilities run by some of the states and cities, undermining their effectiveness and forcing them to hire extra staff in case some workers refuse care that patients need. The rule also risks “undermining longstanding efforts by those institutions to build trust with the patient communities they serve,” the suit says.

The suit further alleges that the rule violates several federal laws, including those governing Medicare and Medicaid, civil rights statutes, and a statute requiring hospitals to provide emergency care.

In addition to New York, the plaintiffs are Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin, plus the cities of Chicago and New York; Cook County, Ill.; and the District.

Trump and evangelicals are a clear and present evil that threaten the rule of law and constitutional government. 

Mormon Church Relaxes Some Anti-Gay Policies

In what ought to be a lesson to the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, the Mormon Church is relaxing one of its anti-gay policies that victimized the children of LGBT headed families and barred the children from baptism in the Church.  In conjunction with the Mormon Church's decision to not oppose an LGBT non-discrimination law in Utah, it shows some effort to reconcile Church doctrine with modernity and likely also is a reaction to Utah's sky high teen suicide rate.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the development.  Meanwhile, Roman Catholic schools continue to throw out children of gays or refuse them enrollment, punishing children for who their parents are.  Here are article highlights:

Tom Christofferson was in the shower on Thursday morning when he missed a phone call with huge implications for the lives of LGBTQ Mormons and their families.

Christofferson is gay. His brother, Todd Christofferson, is a member of the highest body of authority in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Todd was calling Tom to let him know that the LDS Church was about to roll back a controversial 2015 policy that automatically labeled Mormons in same-sex marriages apostates and barred their minor children from being baptized—a rite required for membership in the LDS Church and seen as necessary for eternal salvation. Under the new policy, same-sex marriages are still considered a “serious transgression,” according to a Church announcement, but not definitively apostasy. The children of LGBTQ couples can now be baptized.

The presence of LGBTQ Mormons is an undeniable reality in the LDS Church. The Church acknowledged the widespread pain caused by the former policy: “While we cannot change the Lord’s doctrine, we want our members and our policies to be considerate of those struggling with the challenges of mortality,” said Dallin Oaks, one of two counselors to the president of the LDS Church, in a statement.  

Married LGBTQ Mormons are no longer automatically labeled apostates, and they are put on slightly more even footing with straight couples: “Immoral conduct in heterosexual or homosexual relationships will be treated in the same way,” Oaks wrote in the announcement. Children living with these couples can be baptized, as long as parents know that they will be taught that LGBTQ relationships are wrong.

For many current and former Mormons, however, the consequences of the 2015 policy cannot be undone. Their relationships—with the Church, with their families, and with God—have been irreparably damaged.

LDS leaders consider both the 2015 policy and Thursday’s new policy to be matters of revelation, even though one effectively reverses the other.

But as this new announcement demonstrates, Church leaders clearly heard the objections from LDS community members. In a living faith tradition like Mormonism, relationships—between neighbors, relatives, or, say, a gay Mormon and his brother in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles—have the power to shape the context of revelation.

Even with this new policy change, LGBTQ Mormons occupy a fraught space in LDS life. Those in same-sex relationships, or who have gone through a gender transition, live with the knowledge that their choices are condemned by Church teachings. And for LGBTQ believers, the theological consequences of their sexuality and identity are serious: Mormons teach that families can be bound together for eternity, and LGBTQ families are not included in that vision.

On a practical level, the 2015 policy cut many LGBTQ families off from participation in LDS communities. Parents couldn’t stay even loosely connected to the Church through their children, and some felt that it was cruel for the Church to ostracize kids because of their parents’ choices and identities.

“There was a lot of suffering caused by the policy, and it’s going to be hard for a lot of hearts to heal from that,” says Gustav-Wrathall. Like others, he draws a connection between the policies of the LDS Church and the high rate of suicide among LGBTQ teens in Utah, while acknowledging that it’s impossible to know the cause of most suicides. “What parents must be feeling,” he said, is: “Would my child still be here with me if this policy hadn’t happened?”

Faux Christian Jack Phillips Again Proves He's A Bigot

Likely emboldened by the Supreme Court's refusal to squarely address the issue of whether claimed or feigned religious belief allows ones to be exempt from non-discrimination laws and public accommodation laws - and encouraged by the hate group, Alliance Defending Freedom ("ADF") - Jack Phillips, the owner of the infamous Masterpiece Cakeshop is back in federal court.  This time he is suing the State of Colorado and defending his refusal to create a cake to celebrate a milestone in the life of a sexual minority.   Let's be blunt.  Phillips is a self-centered bigot who sadly now feels he has a platform from which to encourage similar modern day Pharisees to insult and reject those they don't like. Meanwhile, his legal counsel at ADF won't be happy until homosexuality is re-criminalized.  Anything and anyone who challenges the Christofascists' Bronze Age myth based beliefs must be attacked and crushed. A piece in Politico looks at the new round of bigotry and pretense of martyrdom on display from Phillips.   Here are highlights:

Difficult decisions can be deferred, but not ultimately avoided. So it is that Jack Phillips, the owner of the famous Masterpiece Cakeshop is back in federal court, again defending his refusal to create a cake to celebrate a milestone in the life of a sexual minority.

This time, it’s a birthday cake celebrating a gender transition he’s declining to bake, and it’s not clear how the courts will balance the parties’ competing interests. That’s because of the Supreme Court’s dithering on the issue earlier this summer.

Just two months ago, the Supreme Court confounded expectations on all sides with its side-stepping decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. It looked like the case had nicely teed up the question of how to accommodate two competing interests. On the one side stood a gay couple that wanted to buy a wedding cake from a business that had an obligation under Colorado state law not to discriminate against them on the basis of sexual orientation. On the other stood the owner of the cake shop, Jack Phillips, who claimed that requiring him to create a cake in celebration of a same-sex wedding would violate his constitutionally protected rights of religion and free expression. How would the court resolve these competing claims?

It didn’t. . . . . The case didn’t even provide useful guidance for another case that was then before the court. A florist had refused to create an arrangement for the gay wedding of a couple she’d known for years, citing her religious belief. After sitting on the case for many months, the court finally decided not to hear it, vacated the judgment in favor of the couple, and directed the lower courts to resolve the matter in accordance with its Masterpiece Cakeshop decision. But that is no help at all, unless the case is also found to have involved anti-religious animus.

Now comes Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Elenis. Phillips, represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian [hate] group that represents clients in lawsuits that involve challenges to religious freedom, contests a finding by Aubrey Elenis, the director of the Colorado Civil Rights Division, that there is “sufficient evidence” to support a claim of discrimination in the case.

Sardina revealed that she wanted the cake to have a pink interior and a blue exterior. Then she added that the colors were to celebrate her coming out as transgender on her birthday, some years earlier. At that point, Debi Phillips (Jack’s wife, and the co-owner of the cake shop) declined to create the cake because of the Phillipses’ belief that gender was biological, and immutable.

If that’s all there is to the case, it’s not hard: Sardina should win under the Colorado anti-discrimination law, which protects customers in certain enumerated classes—including sexual orientation and transgender status—from the denial of service in places of public accommodation (like a bakery). . . . . If she had told Debi Phillips that she wanted the blue/pink cake for a gender-reveal party, as a clever way of announcing that she was going to deliver boy/girl twins, we can safely assume the request would have been honored. The complaint admits that the “problem” with the cake is its association with a message the owners don’t agree with. But a pink/blue cake, without more, doesn’t send a “message” about gender transition.

It would be a different story if Sardina had also requested that Jack Phillips write “Happy Gender Transition Day!” because the government can’t compel a business owner to engage in speech he finds objectionable. But the simple act of creating a blue-pink cake doesn’t send any message at all—unless that message is that Phillips refuses to create a given cake for one class of people (those hosting gender-reveal parties) but not for others.

In short, Phillips’ refusal here is the very essence of discrimination, and the court should have no part of endorsing it. In the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, there was a lively exchange in concurring opinions between Justices Neil Gorsuch and Elena Kagan about this very question—whether Phillips’s right to freedom of expression would allow him to refuse to create a cake he knew would be used for a gay wedding, even if that cake were identical to a cake he might make for a “traditional” wedding.

Kagan’s position is that a business owner can’t refuse to bake a cake for one customer, but not another. That doesn’t mean Phillips would have to create a cake reading “I love gay marriage!”, but, as she noted, in the case before the court the couple “requested a wedding cake that Phillips would have made for an opposite-sex couple.” She properly rejected Gorsuch’s view that the controversial confection would have been “a cake celebrating same-sex marriage” because of its significance to the couple and Phillips alike. As Kagan noted: “It was simply a wedding cake – one … suitable for use at [all] weddings.” That’s the only interpretation of the law that can keep it from collapsing into a free-for-all, in which the mere invocation of free expression is enough to defeat any claim of discrimination.

If a business owner can refuse to serve one customer the exact same product that he’d willingly sell another based on an objection to the use to which the product would be put, we might just as well admit that anti-discrimination laws are toothless.

That doesn’t mean Sardina will win the case if it does get to the Supreme Court, though. With Kennedy out of the picture—and Brett Kavanaugh his likely replacement—the conservative justices will be more apt to grant review of close cases, knowing they have the five votes they need to roll back the court’s more progressive decisions.

[I]t’s easy to forget that the discrimination laws are in place for a reason, and that the same logic that would allow religious objectors to deny service to the LGBT community would also permit turning away a couple that wanted to celebrate an interracial wedding.

Personally, I wish decent people would simple boycott Phillips' bakery and allow it to wither away or limp along with only a bigoted Christofascist client base.  I'd prefer to have no cake than have one baked by a foul, self-centered, grandstanding bigot.

Supreme Court Wrongly Hands Victory to Christian Extremist

Jack Phillips - the face of bigotry and hate hiding behind the smoke screen of "religious freedom".

While the majority ruled in Masterpiece Cakeshop on a narrow basis for Christian extremists Jack Phillips - and, in my view, court manufactured finding that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission’s ruling against Phillips had been "infected by religious animus" - virulently anti-gay Christofascists are nonetheless celebrating the ruling as a wide ranging victory.  Individuals like Family Research Council ("FRC") president Tony Perkins, a man with a well documented ties to white supremacists groups, who parades around as a "godly Christian" while fleecing the bigoted and gullible, a crowing about the "victory" and no doubt looking for the next hand picked plaintiff to continue the assault on LGBT rights.  The irony, of course, is that the Court found the Civil Rights Commission's supposed "religious animus" to be improper, yet Phillips' religious based anti-gay animus was given a pass.   The even large issue is who else will now be subject to targeting by white Christofascists?  Non-Christians? Interracial couples?  Muslims?   A piece in the New York Times looks at this wrong-headed ruling The full opinion is here).  Here are article excerpts:

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled in favor of a Colorado baker who had refused to create a wedding cake for a gay couple. The court’s decision was narrow, and it left open the larger question of whether a business can discriminate against gay men and lesbians based on rights protected by the First Amendment.

The court passed on an opportunity to either bolster the right to same-sex marriage or explain how far the government can go in regulating businesses run on religious principles. Instead, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s majority opinion turned on the argument that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which originally ruled against the baker, had been shown to be hostile to religion because of the remarks of one of its members.

At the same time, Justice Kennedy strongly reaffirmed protections for gay rights. “The outcome of cases like this in other circumstances must await further elaboration in the courts,” he wrote, “all in the context of recognizing that these disputes must be resolved with tolerance, without undue disrespect to sincere religious beliefs, and without subjecting gay persons to indignities when they seek goods and services in an open market.”

On the one hand, Justice Kennedy has written every major Supreme Court decision protecting gay men and lesbians. On the other, he is the court’s most ardent defender of free speech.  On Monday, Justice Kennedy chose a third path, one that seemed to apply only to the case before the court.

Writing for the majority in the 7-to-2 decision, he said the Civil Rights Commission’s ruling against the baker, Jack Phillips, had been infected by religious animus. He cited what he said were “inappropriate and dismissive comments” from one commissioner in saying that the panel had acted inappropriately and that its decision should be overturned.

“The neutral and respectful consideration to which Phillips was entitled was compromised here,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “The Civil Rights Commission’s treatment of his case has some elements of a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs that motivated his objection.”

That passage echoed his plea for tolerance in his majority opinion in 2015 in Obergefell v. Hodges, which recognized a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. In that decision, he called for “an open and searching debate” between those who opposed same-sex marriage on religious grounds and those who considered such unions “proper or indeed essential.”

The breadth of the court’s majority was a testament to the narrowness of the decision’s reasoning. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Elena Kagan and Neil M. Gorsuch joined Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion. Justice Clarence Thomas voted with the majority but would have adopted broader reasons.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissented.

Some gay rights groups took a darker view of the decision. “The court today has offered dangerous encouragement to those who would deny civil rights to L.G.B.T. people,” said Rachel B. Tiven, the chief executive of Lambda Legal. “We will fiercely resist the coming effort that will seek to turn this ruling into a broad license to discriminate.”

Rest assured, a broader attack on LGBT rights will be coming. The ultimate irony is that when one looks at non-discrimination and public accommodation laws, all of the protected categories - age, race, sexual orientation, national origin, age,  - are things that one cannot control.  Only one category - religion - is something that is changeable and relies on a conscious decision - an option, if you will - to embrace a particular dogma and form of ignorance and/or bigotry.  If anything should be forced to yield to immutable characteristics, it should be religious belief which all to often is based on myths and legends.   

GOP Education Bill Would License Virtually Any Form of Discrimination

A common theme on this blog is the quest by Christofascists to make themselves above the non-discrimination laws that govern the rest of us.  The smoke screen they disingenuously use is that of "religious freedom" that utterly perverts the concept of religious freedom contemplated by the Founding Fathers who viewed religion with suspicion and wanted it completely separate from civil government.  Aiding in the Christofascist's quest are Republican elected officials at both the state and federal level who seem to have no limit on the extent they will prostitute themselves to Christofascist while throwing the majority of citizens under the bus. A piece in Religion Dispatches looks at a frightening Republican bill pending in Congress which would allow Christofascists to engage in unlimited discrimination against other taxpaying citizens.  Call your members of Congress and demand that they vote against this bill.  Here are highlights that look at this sinister effort:

Consider for a moment this chilling hypothetical. Imagine that the day after last summer’s white nationalist rally at the University of Virginia, the leaders of the group that marched through the Charlottesville campus shouting racist and anti-Semitic slogans take themselves instead to the university’s student activities office. There, they seek to register themselves as a recognized student club, the White Christian Alliance.

If this happened today, university authorities would undoubtedly respond by citing Virginia’s “Contracted Independent Organizations” policy, which makes ineligible for official recognition any student group that “restricts its membership, programs, or activities” on the basis of any of a wide range of protected identities, including race and religion.

But now imagine that a bill that Congress is currently considering to reauthorize the Higher Education Act has become law. Under the terms of the bill, Virginia would no longer be able to bar the White Christian Alliance from campus. That’s because the bill prohibits public institutions of higher education that receive federal funding—which is to say, all (or nearly all) public two- and four-year colleges and universities—from denying “to a religious student organization any right, benefit, or privilege… because of the religious beliefs, practices, speech, membership standards, or standards of conduct of the religious student organization.”

[T]he bill, which goes under the name of the “Promoting Real Opportunity, Success, and Prosperity through Education Reform Act,” or “PROSPER Act,” seeks to enact a particular, and historically peculiar, conception of religious freedom that has in recent decades become a staple of conservative Christian political activism.

[B]uried deep within the bill’s more than five hundred pages are provisions that carve out broad exceptions for religious actors within the higher education landscape. Beyond the requirement that public institutions recognize religious student organizations notwithstanding the content of their beliefs or practices, the bill grants exceptionally wide latitude to religious colleges and universities as well. The bill prohibits any “government entity,” whether the Department of Education or an accrediting body that receives federal funds, from taking action against a religious institution of higher education if that action “has the effect of prohibiting or penalizing the institution for acts or omissions by the institution that are in furtherance of its religious mission or are related to the religious affiliation of the institution.”

What sorts of “acts or omissions” might the bill’s drafters have in mind? To take one of history’s more extreme examples, in 1970 the Internal Revenue Service revoked the tax-exempt status of South Carolina’s Bob Jones University because it had barred from admission first black applicants and, later, anyone who supported interracial marriage. . . . . But under the PROSPER Act, so long as Bob Jones could explain how its admissions policies reflect its Christian identity, the IRS could not have penalized it in the first place.

[T]he PROSPER Act would likewise shield a religious institution from federal penalties if, in the face of some statutory requirement, it barred students from engaging in same-sex relationships, or if it violated Department of Education regulations about the handling of sexual assault allegations, so long as the institution could justify its actions in terms of its religious mission. The bill defines “religious mission” very broadly . . .

The drafters of the PROSPER Act appear to be embracing a theory of religious freedom that seeks to exempt religious individuals and institutions from generally applicable laws and regulations.

In recent years, the Supreme Court has tended to hold that religious convictions, however sincere, cannot be used as a shield against reasonable actions by government that are not specifically targeted at believers. 

In 2010, the Court upheld a policy at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law that barred from official recognition a religious student group, the Christian Legal Society, because the society excluded from membership anyone who would not sign a statement of faith and live in accordance with moral guidelines that included a prohibition on “unrepentant homosexual conduct.” Under the proposed PROSPER Act, of course, Hastings could not require a religious student organization like the Christian Legal Society to meet its “all comers” standard for achieving official recognition, even though it could continue to enforce that standard with regard to non-religious groups.

[S]uch sweeping religious exemptions are reckless. They disregard the potentially disastrous consequences of forcing public institutions to accept all religious organizations and of permitting religious institutions to avoid government scrutiny merely by invoking their mission. And by casting such a wide net, the bill forecloses in a thoughtless way one of the most important debates that a religiously pluralistic society can have.

If the PROSPER Act were to become law and the University of Virginia forced to recognized the White Christian Alliance as a student group, how could there still be room for legitimate and nuanced disagreement about the rights of religious believers and their institutions when they come into conflict with our constitutional guarantee of equal treatment under law?

The Christofascists are a clear and present danger to the rights of all Americans and seek to subvert the freedom of religion of all other citizens. They must be stopped.

Texas Republicans Seek to Nullify All LGBT Non-discrimination Ordinances

Proving once again that no LGBT individual with a sound mind should ever vote for a Republican, a powerful GOP controlled committee in the Texas legislature that would rescind every LGBT non-discrimination ordinance passed by local municipalities and bar localities from adding LGBT protections to current non-discrimination laws and ordinances.  Given the 1996 Supreme Court ruling in Romer v. Evans, it is questionable whether the state law, if enacted, would survive appellate court scrutiny.  In the interim, of course, years of litigation would be required to undo the damage to LGBT individuals during the lengthy court process.  All so that Republicans can prostitute themselves to their Christofascist masters.  Here are highlights from the Houston Chronicle on this anti-LGBT effort:

Entering the fray over where transgender Texans can use public bathrooms, a far-reaching bill that a powerful House committee is scheduled to hear next week would rescind several local ordinances aimed at protecting LGBT people from discrimination.

The one-page proposal, House Bill 2899, would prohibit cities and counties from passing non-discrimination ordinances and would not allow them to add or subtract to the classes of people already protected under state law. Authored by Republican Rep. Ron Simmons of Carrollton, the bill also would nullify all local non-discrimination measures across Texas that do not conform to the state's standards.

Current Texas law includes only race, color, disability, religion, sex, national origin and age as protected classes.

Simmons' chief of staff said Thursday that the lawmaker was not available to discuss his bill because he had already left Austin for the Easter holiday. His legislation is scheduled for a hearing Wednesday in the House State Affairs Committee.

 

While Simmons' bill does not mention bathrooms, it would replace non-discrimination criteria approved by city officials with those approved by state lawmakers. In effect, localities no longer could allow transgender people to use public bathrooms that match their gender identity in government-owned buildings because they would not be considered a protected class under state statute.

The initial bill, which Simmons told The Dallas Morning News he intended to amend before Wednesday's hearing, drew sharp rebukes from big-city officials, LGBT rights organizations and the state's largest business group. They have staunchly opposed attempts by some Republican lawmakers to restrict local elected officials' authority to pass their own measures against discrimination, which often include provisions to protect members of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender communities.

Jeff Coyle, San Antonio's director of government and public affairs, said the bill, as written currently, would gut the non-discrimination ordinance that city council members approved in 2013.

 

Dallas City Councilman Lee Kleinman said  . . . . "We're against it because we have a non-discrimination ordinance, and we certainly don't want it preempted by the state," he said. "This is yet another one of these legislative sessions where they're just so adverse to municipalities; it's unfortunate, and I don't understand it."

 

Chris Wallace, president of the Texas Association of Business, also hinted at the group's opposition.  "We remain focused on stopping discriminatory legislation and keeping Texas open for business and inviting for all," he told the Morning News, adding that the association was still looking at Simmons' bill.

 Seemingly, Texas Republicans have learned nothing from the experience of North Carolina. 

Trump to Reverse LGBT Protections for Federal Workers This Week?

Trump with anti-gay "Christian" extremists in June, 2016

Those Republicans with LGBT friends and family members will prove themselves to be true backstabbing enemies if Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Fuhrer follows through on the promises he made to a veritable who's who of anti-LGBT hate merchants last June in New York City.  These foul individuals and their organizations, a number of which have been certified by SPLC to be hate groups, will not rest until every LGBT American be fired and discriminated against at will.  Some even what us criminalized if not executed in a few instances.  Yet these are the folks that Der Fuhrer sold his soul to - assuming, of course, that he even has one - and promised to appease by reversing President Obama's LGBT-friendly executive orders and signing the falsely "First Amendment Defense Act" which will allow open anti-LGBT discrimination by private citizens, business, government workers, and even medical providers.  The Washington Post looks at Trump's likely negation of Obama's executive order protecting LGBT federal workers.   Here are highlights:

The White House is embroiled in a debate over whether to reverse some key protections that the Obama administration extended to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender workers, according to several people briefed on the process.

A draft of a potential executive order began circulating in Washington over the weekend that would overturn President Barack Obama’s directive barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in the federal workforce and by federal contractors.

That top officials are debating whether to wade into the issue of gay and transgender rights highlights the tension the new administration faces when it comes to social issues. Trump campaigned on an economic message, but he is under pressure from the social conservatives who propelled him into office to implement their top priorities.

The issue of gay rights is particularly fraught for Vice President Pence, who as governor of Indiana signed a controversial measure expanding religious liberties in a way that gay rights groups said opened the door to legalized discrimination. A national outcry over the bill led Pence and the state legislature to weaken the measure.

Speaking to reporters Monday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer declined to comment on whether an executive order affecting gay and transgender people was under consideration.

The executive order Obama signed in 2014 had two parts. It expanded protections in federal hiring, which already barred discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, to also include gender identity. And it required all companies doing business with the federal government to have explicit policies barring discrimination against gay and transgender workers. 

Any attempt by the Trump administration to rescind or weaken Obama’s order would essentially be an effort to “authorize discrimination” against gay and transgender people, said James Esseks, director of the LGBT program at the American Civil Liberties Union.

“The Trump administration has shown that it’s willing to go against core American values of freedom and equality, and it’s troubling to hear they may target LGBT people as well,” he said.

White heterosexuals should also know that these same religious zealots if allowed to do so would outlaw most forms of contraception.   They want to the police the bedrooms of everyone, not just LGBT individuals.  Oh, and the federal legislation Der Fuhrer promised to sign could also impact cohabiting heterosexual couples too. 

Mark Herring Releases Major Opinion on LGBT Rights

Herring with me in our home in October 2013

Just last Friday at a fundraiser in Norfolk I was again thinking how glad I was that Mark Herring had been elected Virginia Attorney General rather than his ultra-right wing opponent, Mark Obenshain.  Now, with Herring's release of a nineteen page Attorney General Opinion  in response to inquiries by three members of the Virginia General Assembly, I find myself even more glad and happy to be able to call Herring  a friend (we plan to host one or more events for Herring next year as he runs for re-election).  Equality Virginia sums up the opinion as follows:

AG Herring's opinion (which can be read here) had two major conclusions:

1. As long as the federal courts and agencies consider sex discrimination to include sexual orientation and gender identity, then so does our own Virginia Human Rights Act.
2. For other anti-discrimination measures in Virginia, then the federal courts and agency opinions could potentially allow a Virginia court to expand sex discrimination protections to include sexual orientation and gender identity for the same reason.

Again. this opinion was in response to questions raised by three few members of the Virginia House of Delegates and Senate that wished to clarify the impact of recent federal decisions.  As noted when I saw the news, heads must be exploding at The Family Foundation ("TFF") where stigmatizing and discrimination against LGBT Virginians and forcing hate and fear filled right wing Christian beliefs on all citizens are top priorities.  A piece in the Washington Post also looks at the release of the opinion.  Here are highlights (note the sour grapes voiced by TFF's Victoria Cobb, one of the most vicious and insincere individuals in Virginia, in my view): 

Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring said Tuesday that courts would probably rule that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity violates state law.

The opinion, which came in response to a request by a conservative lawmaker and not as a reaction to a specific case, follows the increasing recognition by courts and federal agencies that sex discrimination laws protect gay and transgender people, LGBT advocates say.

Herring (D) said several times in his 19-page opinion that it would be “premature” for him to “categorically” say whether sex discrimination includes bias on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

But, he wrote, “the unmistakable trend in federal courts is towards construing anti-discrimination statues to prohibit discrimination against LGBT individuals in many circumstances.”

That uncertainty “amounts to an invitation” to test state law in the courts, said Claire Guthrie Gastañaga, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia. “And it’s an invitation we’d certainly like to accept,” she said, although she did not specify a particular case.

Herring’s opinion comes as the issue of transgender rights is debated around the country. The U.S. Justice Department and North Carolina have filed dueling lawsuits over the state’s “bathroom bill,” which has sparked protests and boycotts.

Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in Richmond backed high school junior Gavin Grimm of Gloucester, Va., in deferring to the U.S. Education Department’s position that transgender students should have access to the bathrooms of the gender with which they identify.

Now Herring is weighing in with an opinion that some conservative lawmakers and groups have criticized as an attempt to interpret state law to fit his politics. Herring, who is seeking re-election in 2017, has built a national profile on left-leaning causes, from gay marriage and immigration to environmental policy and gun control.

“The Attorney General is basing his opinion on the opinion of the Obama administration, the opinion of his friends at the ACLU, and his political aspirations,” Victoria Cobb, president of the Family Foundation of Virginia, said in a statement. “What the law actually says clearly doesn’t matter to him.”

The debate illustrates the culture wars playing out in Virginia and around the country. Earlier this year, Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) vetoed a Republican-backed bill that would have prohibited state agencies from punishing religious organizations that discriminate against same-sex couples.

Del. Kenneth R. Plum (D-Fairfax), who also requested Herring’s advice on “sex discrimination” and the law, praised the opinion as a historic first that separates Virginia from North Carolina and Mississippi, which recently passed a law allowing businesses to refuse service to gay people.

“We haven’t reached the period at the end of the sentence yet,” Plum said. “But this puts Virginia on the right side of the definition of human rights.”

Mark Herring is proof that elections matter and that those who support equality and modern progress cannot stay home and allow retrograde  Republicans and Christofascist extremists like Cobb and her fellow hate merchants s drag Virginia backwards in time.

Marco Rubio Whines Over Being Rightly Called a Bigot

Marco Rubio has been shamelessly prostituting himself to Christofascists in the Republican Party based and making promises to assist in rolling back LGBT rights, including marriage equality, if elected president.  Now, the disingenuous crybaby is whining over the fact that he is rightly being called out as a bigot due to his pledge to aid in discrimination against LGBT citizens and rolling back our rights. The tawdriest whore has more integrity than Mr. Rubio.  Pink News looks at Rubio's protestations over being called out as the bigot that he is in fact.  Here are excerpts

US Senator and Presidential hopeful Marco Rubio  was once considered a moderate in his party, but has tacked right hard in recent weeks on LGBT issues, claiming that God’s law “trumps” the Supreme Court on equal marriage. 

Rubio – still trailing Donald Trump for his party’s nomination – recently outlined plans to demand a Supreme Court ‘do-over’ on same-sex marriage after rigging the court with new right-leaning justices, potentially voiding thousands of existing marriages.

He has also pledged to repeal Barack Obama’s landmark Executive Order outlawing homophobic and transphobic discrimination among federal contractors – the only federal law that currently protects workers from being sacked for being gay or trans.
However, Rubio is very upset that just because he plans to systematically dismantle gay people’s right to marry and work without being discriminated against, people think he’s some kind of bigot.

He told CBS Face the Nation: “People who hold traditional values are often described as bigots and haters. Everybody on the left [calls them that] if you do not support their definition of marriage.

“Certainly the President has on occasion said that people who don’t support same-sex marriage are wrong… but I’ve been called a bigot for not supporting the definition of marriage.

Rubio is both a douche bag and a bigot.

The Unending War Against the Transgendered

After the Supreme Court ruling legalizing same sex marriage I predicted in a column in VEER magazine that the likely losers were transgender Americans who would see the wrath of the Christofascists who could no longer deny civil marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples.  The successful anti-transgender campaign in Houston was in part a symptom of this phenomenon.  The simple truth is that the godly folk want those who are transgender (and gays as well) to simply disappear or, if one belongs to groups like those visited by Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and Bobby Jindal, die.  We are an affront to their fairy tale religious beliefs and, just like members of ISIS, these knuckle draggers want to eliminate anyone who does not subscribe to their ignorance embracing misogyny.  Another piece in the New York Times looks at the far rightrs increased war against transgender Americans and ties their tactics to those of the Jim Crow era.  Here are highlights:

The social conservatives, local pastors and church groups who opposed HERO were not discouraged by the fact that the law never mentions bathrooms, except to guarantee that they have accommodations for people with disabilities. HERO opponents argued that by allowing transgender people to use the bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity, the ordinance would give men license to dress as women for the purpose of committing sexual assault in women’s restrooms. That transgender women and men have never once attacked anyone in the restroom of their gender identity didn’t matter. That men do commit such attacks without dressing in drag didn’t dissuade them either.

It’s significant that now, as in the Jim Crow South, the battlefield is the public bathroom. Rules around bathroom access have long been used to enforce boundaries of race, physical ability or gender. Bathrooms are a place where discrimination becomes socially acceptable under the guise of public health.

In America, to “pass” for white has meant to move through public spaces, like bathrooms or lunch counters, with the freedoms and privileges that accompany the social markers of whiteness. In gay culture, to “pass” means to fit into the heterosexual world without “detection” of your sexual orientation, and thus to avoid homophobic harassment or abuse.

Telling people which bathroom they’re allowed to enter privileges those transgender people who can pass as cisgender. Short of a medical examination outside each restroom, how can anyone know for sure what someone’s biological sex is? Worse, the campaign against HERO reiterates that all women must match certain socially-constructed standards of appearance.

And by focusing the campaign on children, HERO opponents inculcate kids with the message that they cannot be perceived by their peers (and the broader world) the way they perceive themselves.

For children and teens struggling with gender dysphoria (a disconnect between a person’s sex at birth and their gender identity), high school can be even more hellish than it is for the general public. And the torment and stigma transgender people in America experience can be deadly. More than 40 percent of transgender adults have attempted suicide.

HERO’s opponents were so successful in their faux-feminist campaign that they’re now taking it to other cities, like Dallas. This month, the Dallas City Council unanimously approved an addition to their 2002 equal rights ordinance to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression. Several of the same Republican officials who led the anti-HERO campaign Houston have been quick to pounce on the amendment as a “new sneak-attack LGBT ordinance,” that was not “thoughtfully considered by the public.” A petition to repeal the entire ordinance, and a drive to move the 2016 Texas Republican Party convention out of Dallas, are underway.

As the laws of segregation reinforced the binary of black and white, the anti-HERO warriors are attempting to reinforce a particular definition of gender and sexuality, framing it in terms of women’s need for protection. Perhaps they should be working to stop men from committing rape, or addressing women’s actual health concerns, rather than deciding who is allowed to pee in the next stall.

What we all need is protection from is the bigotry and ignorance of the "godly folk."  They are free to do whatever demented bull shit they want when gathered in the churches (all of which need to lose tax-exempt status), but when they venture out in public, their beliefs and the myths they cling to in order to feel better about themselves, have no place in the public square.  Americans are focused on the danger of Islamic extremism.  They need to be equally concerned with Christian extremism here at home.  They also need to shed the myth that conservative Christians are kind and decent people - they are not.