Trump/Pence Regime Ends Diplomatic Visas for UN Same-Sex Partners

Since taking office, Donald Trump, Mike Pence and their minions Jeff Sessions and Betsy DeVos have waged an unceasing war on LGBT Americans, keeping Trump's frightening promises to Christofascist leaders in June, 2016.  If confirmed, Brett Kavanaugh would likely use his position on the Supreme Court to further rescind rights and protections for LGBT Americans.  But Trump/Pence is not limiting its attacks to LGBT Americans.  Now, partners of LGBT diplomats to the United Nations will lose their visas if they are not legally married.  The move is not motivated by a desire to encourage same-sex marriage, but rather to force such partners from the USA since many countries still do not permit same sex marriage.  A piece in the BBC looks at this foul move which will make Christofascist hate merchants happy.  Never under estimate the cruelty and pettiness of Trump/Pence and its Christofascist supporters.   Here are story excerpts:

The US has announced it will deny diplomatic visas to same-sex partners of foreign diplomats and United Nations employees.  The change went into effect on Monday, giving partners currently in the US until 31 December to leave, get married or otherwise change their visa. It is a reversal of rules introduced in 2009.

Currently, 25 countries have recognised same-sex marriage. Homosexuality remains illegal in 71 countries.

The new Trump administration policy update was circulated in a United Nations (UN) memo. The memo states: "As of 1 October 2018, same-sex domestic partners accompanying or seeking to join newly arrived United Nations officials must provide proof of marriage to be eligible for a G-4 visa or to seek a change into such status." G-4 visas are granted to employees of international organisations and their immediate families.

According to the State Department, "only a relationship legally considered to be a marriage in the jurisdiction where it took place establishes eligibility as a spouse for immigration purposes".

[C]ritics have called the move unfair to homosexual partners, given a large number of countries do not recognise same-sex marriage. Former US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power decried the policy, calling it "needlessly cruel and bigoted".

The UN-Globe, advocates for LGBT equality in the UN, said the Trump administration's new policy was "an unfortunate change in rules".

"Couples already inside of the United States could go to city hall and get married. But they could potentially be exposed to prosecution if they return to a country that criminalises homosexuality or same-sex marriages."

After the end of this year, unmarried same-sex partners of diplomats and UN employees will be expected to leave the US within 30 days if they remain unmarried and without a visa status change.

The only exception, however, would be same-sex partners of officials coming from countries that do not recognise same-sex marriage. They will be granted a diplomatic visa if the government which sends them to work in their embassies in the US grants the same privileges to same-sex partners of US officials sent to that country.

The new policy is a reversal of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's 2009 decision to allow same-sex domestic partners of foreign officials diplomatic visas.  State Department officials say there are around 105 families total that could be affected by the policy.

Akshaya Kumar, the Deputy UN Director of Human Rights Watch, wrote that the change "will have an insidious impact on same-sex couples".  "The US government should recognise, as it had for almost nine years until today, that requiring a marriage as proof of bona fide partnership is a bad and cruel policy, one that replicates the terrible discrimination many LGBT people face in their own countries, and should be immediately reversed."

Anti-Gay "Conservatives" Want Marriage Vote Delay in UK

With France well on its way to adopting full same sex marriage, the reactionary Christofascist elements in the Tory Party in the United Kingdom are pitching a fit over Prime Minister David Cameron's planned vote on marriage equality this week in Parliament.  Cameron seems undeterred by the 25 or so knuckle draggers who are demanding the delay and the UK's Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, has authored an op-ed that argues that gay marriage strengthens the institution contrary to the wailing and whining of the religious bigots opposing the legislation.  Given the fine mess that straights have made of the institution of marriage, the argument that civil marriage for same sex couples somehow undermines the institution are ludicrous.  Stripped of all the manufactured smoke screens, opposition to marriage equality boils down to one thing: anti-gay animus and a long standing desire to keep gays stigmatized and second class citizens under the civil law.  First some highlights from Reuters on the efforts of the Christofascists to delay the marriage vote:

Cameron has pledged his personal support for a gay marriage bill but many in his party and among his legislators oppose it on moral grounds and say the government has no mandate to push it through parliament.

As the bill is supported by Britain's two other main parties, opposition Labor and Conservative coalition partners the Liberal Democrats, it is in no danger of being defeated.

But a letter signed by 25 past and present chairmen of local Conservative associations was handed in to Cameron's Downing Street residence on Sunday afternoon by six of the signatories.

"We feel very strongly that the decision to bring this bill before parliament has been made without adequate debate or consultation with either the membership of the Conservative Party or with the country at large," the letter said.  It added: "Resignations from the party are beginning to multiply and we fear that, if enacted, this bill will lead to significant damage to the Conservative Party in the run-up to the 2015 election."

The issue has sparked heated debate in Britain, particularly among faith groups, but 55 percent of British people support same-sex marriage, according to a YouGov poll in December.

 Meanwhile, the Daily Mail carried the pro-marriage op-ed.  Here are column excerpts:

It’s wrong to say to gay men and women that their love is less legitimate. It’s wrong to say that because of how you love and who you love, you are not entitled to the same rights as others. It’s wrong because inequality is wrong. Some people might think it curious that a Tory politician should be making these arguments. But I want to change the law on marriage because of my Conservative convictions.

I believe that marriage should be defended, supported and promoted in every way. A society which believes in commitment and which seeks to encourage us to think beyond the short term, which encourages people to put the enduring above the convenient, and which asks people to put stability in personal relationships ahead of self-interest, is a healthier society.

As Education Secretary I am responsible for child protection policy and every day I see the consequences of family breakdown. When parents run away from their responsibilities, children suffer. That is why I am so determined to change things so that more children are rescued from abusive homes and adopted by loving families. In all of this work I am constantly reminded of how important it is to support those who make a public commitment to each other – and the best way of doing that is through supporting marriage. Marriage is not undermined by extending it to gay people – it is reinforced by including everyone equally.

The real threat to marriage comes from social forces that encourage selfishness and short-termism. More people making a lifelong commitment to each other helps us turn that tide.

There’s another reason why I support change. I’m a Conservative because I believe in making opportunity more equal. The Conservatives had the first Jewish and female leaders, Conservatives led the fight to abolish slavery, and massively extended property ownership and access to higher education.

Parliament has an opportunity next week to strengthen the institution of marriage, uphold the principle of equality before the law, affirm our belief in commitment, demonstrate that we value all citizens equally and declare our belief in the transformative power of human love. I hope we can vote for those values in decisive terms.

The other irony not addressed is that reality that in America, organizations like Family Research Council and NOM whine incessantly about "children needing a mother and father" yet they don't spend a dime on expanding adoption services to reduce the number of children languishing in foster care some of whom will never know a permanent home.  Instead they pay themselves obscene salaries - e.g., Brian Brown at NOM reportedly pocketed $500,000 in 2012 - focus their efforts on disseminating anti-gay animus and creating racial division.  I suspect if Christ were living today, he would be calling out the Christofascists for the modern day Pharisees that they are and joining the pro-gay marriage effort.

Did Right Wing Funded Gay Parenting Study Unwittingly Support Gay Marriage?

Over the weekend I blogged about the right wing funded study on gay parenting and the flawed group same sex parents with other groups so that the results deliberately came out skewed against gay parenting.  Not surprisingly, NOM and Family Research Council and similar anti-gay groups have joyously jumped on to the report as supportive of the anti-gay jihad.  But as a piece in Slate column suggests - and echo's what I said about the negative impact that DOMA and bans on same sex marriage have on the children of LGBT citizens - the anti-gay study unwittingly makes the case as to why same sex marriage is a necessity if one truly is concerned about children as the Christianists pretend to be concerned  The bottom line is that by banning same sex marriage children are deliberately deprived of financial and family stability that the children of heterosexual couples take for granted.  It's yet another of the rank dishonesty and hypocrisy of the far right that claim to care about children but then do all they can to harm countless children.  As I've noted many times, tawdry whores are more virtuous than most of the "godly Christian" crowd.  Here are highlights from the Slate article:

Is same-sex marriage a good idea? Or is an intact biological family the best environment for raising a child? The answer may turn out to be yes and yes.

That’s the curious implication of a study reported yesterday in Social Science Research and outlined in Slate today by its principal investigator, sociologist Mark Regnerus. The study, which found inferior economic, educational, social, and psychological outcomes among children of gay parents, comes across as evidence that homosexuals are unfit to raise kids. But the study doesn’t document the failure of same-sex marriage. It documents the failure of the closeted, broken, and unstable households that preceded same-sex marriage.

In his journal article, Regnerus says it “clearly reveals that children appear most apt to succeed well as adults—on multiple counts and across a variety of domains—when they spend their entire childhood with their married mother and father.”

These findings shouldn’t surprise us, because this isn’t a study of gay couples who decided to have kids. It’s a study of people who engaged in same-sex relationships—and often broke up their households—decades ago.

To understand the study, you have to read the questionnaire that defined the sample. It began by asking each respondent, as the child of this or that kind of family arrangement, his age. If the respondent was younger than 18 or older than 39, the survey was terminated. This means the entire sample was born between 1971 and 1994, when same-sex marriage was illegal throughout the United States, and millions of homosexuals were trying to pass or function as straight spouses.

[B]roken families were excluded from the IBF [intact biological family] category but included in the GF and LM categories. This loaded classification system produced predictable results. In his journal article, Regnerus says respondents who were labeled GF or LM originated most commonly from a “failed heterosexual union.”

In short, these people aren’t the products of same-sex households. They’re the products of broken homes. And the closer you look, the weirder the sample gets.

What the study shows, then, is that kids from broken homes headed by gay people develop the same problems as kids from broken homes headed by straight people. But that finding isn’t meaningless. It tells us something important: We need fewer broken homes among gays, just as we do among straights. We need to study Regnerus’ sample and fix the mistakes we made 20 or 40 years ago. No more sham heterosexual marriages. No more post-parenthood self-discoveries. No more deceptions. No more affairs. And no more polarization between homosexuality and marriage. Gay parents owe their kids the same stability as straight parents. That means less talk about marriage as a right, and more about marriage as an expectation.

[T]he methodology and findings, coupled with previous research, point to deeper differences that transcend orientation. Kids do better when they have two committed parents, a biological connection, and a stable home. If that’s good advice for straights, it’s good advice for gays, too.

Not surprisingly, the wingnuts do not want same sex couples to have the same legal rights, legal protections, and stability of their heterosexual counterparts be cause, God forbid from the Kool-Aid drinking crowd perspective - the same sex couples might just do a better job parenting children and expose the anti-gay Christianist lies.

State Should Uphold Equal Protection

An op-ed piece in today's Sun-Sentinel makes a good case as to why the Florida Supreme Court should strike down the recently passed anti-gay marriage amendment to the Florida Constitution. The piece uses the recent Iowa Supreme Court decision upholding same-sex marriage as a keystone to the argument. The piece also looks at Iowa's history of being ahead of the curve and on the right side of equality under the law in contrast to Florida's shameful past track record. I truly believe that someday the opponents of gay marriage will be viewed in the same light as brutal slave owners and rabid segregationists. In truth, we are all one human family - like in Key West's motto - and the sooner all people are treated with equal dignity and equality under the civil laws, the better we will be as a nation. Here are some column highlights:

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Far to the north, in a rural state known for long, cold winters and with barely one fifth as many residents as Florida, on April 3 the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously struck down the state legislature's effort to ban gay marriage as unconstitutional, upholding the most important constitutional principle underlying the American way of life — equal protection. Our Florida Supreme Court justices should take note of the challenge presented by the Iowa Supreme Court as they consider whether to set aside or let stand our state's constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. If the Florida high court chooses the latter course, it will render toothless our guarantee of equality.

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Why should the Florida Supreme Court attach any particular consequence to what happens in a sparsely populated Midwestern state? History provides the best answer to that question, with Iowa at the forefront of anti-discrimination rulings since the fight for equal protection began.

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In 1839, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled a human being could not be treated as property to enforce a contract for slavery — 17 years before the U.S. Supreme Court elected to uphold the rights of a slave owner in Dred Scott v. Sanford. In 1868 and 1873, the Iowa court denounced segregation in a stand that the U.S. Supreme Court would not take until 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education.

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In contrast, Florida's disappointing records on slavery and desegregation are well known, and the state only granted women the right to practice law in 1898. In each of its historic decisions, Iowa's highest court ignored public outcry. . . . The Iowa Supreme Court found in its ruling that "the right of a gay or lesbian person under the marriage statute to enter into a civil marriage only with a person of the opposite sex is no right at all. Under such a law, gay or lesbian individuals cannot simultaneously fulfill their deeply felt need for a committed personal relationship, as influenced by their sexual orientation."

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The Iowa court's analysis and explanation are thorough, thoughtful and learned. The decision should help the Florida Supreme Court to recognize the prejudice embedded in efforts to preserve "traditional" marriage through persecution of same-sex couples.

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In Iowa, the Supreme Court justices wrote that "we give respect to the views of all on the issue of same-sex marriage-religious or otherwise-by giving respect to our constitutional principles."In Florida, our Supreme Court should similarly seek to uphold this profoundly American principal of equal protection that is enshrined in our state Constitution.

Merriam-Webster Changes Definition of Marriage.

Can you imagine the foaming at the mouth that will occur when the wingnuts get wind of this? The spittle will be flying everywhere. No doubt loony Don Wildmon and American Family Association will launch a boycott of Merriam-Webster dictionaries.

Hallmark to Sell Gay Marriage Cards

No doubt the virulently anti-gay American Family Association will be announcing a boycott against Hallmark as soon as Don Wildmon ceases his convulsions on the floor over the news being reported by Yahoo News that Hallmark will be releasing gay marriage cards among its offerings. As I have noted many times before, the true agenda of the Christianists is to try to force gays to disappear from sight and slink back into the closet. Meanwhile, big business recognizes that the clock is not going to be turned back to the 1950's and companies are taking steps to secure a slice of the huge LGBT consumer market. Here are some story highlights:

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PORTLAND, Ore. – Most states don't recognize gay marriage — but now Hallmark does. The nation's largest greeting card company is rolling out same-sex wedding cards — featuring two tuxedos, overlapping hearts or intertwined flowers, with best wishes inside. "Two hearts. One promise," one says.

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Hallmark added the cards after California joined Massachusetts as the only U.S. states with legal gay marriage. A handful of other states have recognized same-sex civil unions. The language inside the cards is neutral, with no mention of wedding or marriage, making them also suitable for a commitment ceremony. Hallmark says the move is a response to consumer demand, not any political pressure.

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Hallmark's largest competitor, American Greetings Corp., has no plans to enter the market, saying its current offerings are general enough to speak to a lot of different relationships.

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Hallmark started offering "coming out" cards last year, and the four designs of same-sex marriage cards are being gradually released this summer and will be widely available by next year. No sales figures were available yet.

Through Sickness, Health and Sex Change

The law really does not contemplate what happens when one member of a married heterosexual couple has sex reassignment surgery and legally becomes a member of the opposite sex, thereby suddenly making the marriage a same sex marriage. Virginia certainly does not - even though there are couples that find themselves in that situation as is the case with one of my clients. Does the law ignore the sex change? Does the marriage between what are now a same sex couple violate state constitutional provisions banning same sex marriages? Because Virginia does recognize sex reassignment surgery and will grant amended birth certificates, there truly is no definitive answer since the marriage was legal when the parties entered into it. No doubt in some state somewhere a court decision will be handed down in the future that squarely addresses the situation. Until then, the issue remains clouded and, depending on differing state laws, will probably remain clouded in many states. Of course, situations involving such couples make Christianist hate merchants like Matt Staver of Liberty Counsel, a wingnut "public interest law firm," nearly foam at the mouth. Because of all of this, I found this New York Times story on one such couple interesting. Here are some highlights:
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THERE are ways in which the Brunners are like many other middle-aged married couples. Former high school and college sweethearts, they finish each other’s sentences and order the same food at restaurants. They shuttle their three children to sports practices, and laugh when their 90-pound Labrador retriever jumps onto the sofa to lick guests.

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“We’re one of the few of our friends who are still in our original marriage,” Denise Brunner said. But it is not exactly the same union, as evidenced by their marriage certificate, which they have enlarged to poster size to make the point. The original, from 1980, listed Donald Brunner as the bridegroom and Frances Gottschalk as the bride. But a sex-change operation in 2005 turned Donald into Denise. Fran stood by her spouse, and the couple secured an amended certificate, putting “Denise” next to “bridegroom” for lack of other options.

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Massachusetts is the only state to have legalized same-sex marriage, and the Brunners are two women married to each other in New Jersey. As this state (along with Connecticut, Vermont and New Hampshire) confronts challenges over whether its civil unions fulfill the mandate of providing same-sex couples equal rights and benefits, the Brunners offer themselves as Exhibit A on how the nation’s dizzying patchwork of marriage laws, which include the domestic partnerships of California and other states, may be out of step with people’s lives. The Brunners say they have no interest in obtaining a civil union — they consider it a downgrading of their relationship — but they do worry about their status.

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Julie A. Greenberg, a professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, said marriages like that of the Brunners are rarely challenged by government agencies because more conservative states do not recognize sex changes, and more liberal ones (like New Jersey) are loath to seem hostile to transsexuals.

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Legal groups that have fought to preserve traditional marriage are less concerned with couples like the Brunners than those like the Littletons, who seek a heterosexual union after surgery. “What you’re born with is what you are,” said Mathew Staver, the founder of the Liberty Counsel, a nonprofit organization in Florida, who successfully argued the final stages of the 2004 Florida case. “It’s the same as if you go through plastic surgery to look like Marilyn Monroe, but you’re still not Marilyn Monroe.”