At GOP's Urging, Texas Supreme Court to Consider Voiding Gay Spousal Rights

Trump with Texas anti-gay Christofacist extremist Robert Jeffress

And so it begins.  Many in the LGBT community had worried that Trump's election would embolden anti-gay Republicans to begin trying to strip away LGBT rights - something that seemingly meant nothing to "friends" who voted for Trump. Now, the Texas GOP has pressured the Texas Supreme Court to take a case considering whether or not same sex spouses of employees of the City of Houston can have their spousal rights rescinded.  If the Texas GOP prevails, the spouses of gay employees will not receive insurance and other benefits enjoyed by their heterosexual co-workers' spouses.   And, if this happens in Texas, other anti-gay states will surely seek to follow suit.  Here are highlights from the Dallas Morning News:  

The Texas Supreme Court said Friday it will decide whether the husbands and wives of gay city employees in Houston deserve spousal benefits, a surprising and rare about-face spurred by pressure from Gov. Greg Abbott and dozens of other top Republicans.

"No city employee — whether heterosexual or homosexual — has a 'fundamental right' to receive employee benefits for his or her spouse," reads the lawsuit against Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner. "It is perfectly constitutional for the government to offer benefits or subsidies to some married couples while withholding those benefits from others."

Last September, Texas' justices declined to hear the case, just months after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. But Jack Pidgeon and Larry Hicks, a pastor and CPA from Houston, asked the court to reconsider, arguing that legalizing gay marriage does not mean cities must require the spouses of LGBT city employees to get the same benefits extended to heterosexual husbands and wives.

Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Attorney General Ken Paxton agreed, writing a "friend of the court" brief that argued extending spousal benefits is separate from legalizing marriage for same-sex couples.

"[The U.S. Supreme Court's] judgment does not include a command that public employers like the City of Houston take steps beyond recognizing same-sex marriage," Abbott, Patrick and Paxton wrote. "Steps like subsidizing same-sex marriages [through the allocation of employee benefits] on the same terms as traditional marriages."The GOP leaders filed their brief in late October. Earlier that month, dozens of state lawmakers and religious leaders also urged the court to reconsider its decision.
The court will hear oral arguments in the case March 1.

While their ruling will be narrow — it will apply only to city employees in Houston — the decision will either reinforce the rights of gay Americans or chip away at their victory in gaining the right to marry. 

In their last brief, lawyers for Houston argue that denying the same benefits to gay couples that you extend to heterosexual couples is unconstitutional. They added that while Abbott, Patrick and Paxton claim spousal benefits shouldn't be guaranteed to government employees, the state of Texas has extended this right to state employees since the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2015. 

A Lament of a Former Republican

As I have often recounted on this blog, I am a former Republican.  Indeed, my entire extended family was Republican and I served as a City Committee Member for the Republican Party of the City of Virginia Beach for 8 years.  But then the GOP began to change.  Church (i.e., right wing Christian) and state became intertwined; learning, science and objective fact became irrelevant, if not an outright enemy of America; and racism increased, thanks in large part to the Christofascists, most of whom are closet white supremacists.  I left the GOP as a result.  Other family members such as my late mother fled when John McCain tapped the idiot from Wasilla as his VP pick. With the nomination of Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Fuhrer, the descent of the GOP into bigotry and insanity became complete. Expect the exodus to continue despite Trump's electoral vote victory.   A column in The Hill contains the lament of a former Republican.  Here are highlights:

For sixteen years now, I have identified as a classic conservative. I enthusiastically supported Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in his primary fight back in 2000, and was glad to see him make it to the final round eight years later, although I couldn’t ultimately support him in the wake of his running mate selection.

I’m a proud gun owner and concealed carry permit holder. I drive a big, ridiculous V8 Mustang because ‘Murica. I believe in fiscal responsibility, a government that doesn’t intrude into the private lives of its citizens, and largely believe in the power of properly regulated markets and private enterprise to innovate towards solutions to the big problems.

Know what I want? I want to get back to arguing against my liberal friends. I want to return to really rubbing their noses in it. I want to go back and have a real knock-down, drag-out argument over the best way to tackle healthcare in this country, whether we should go to single-payer, or keep the ACA and tweak it to make our private, for-profit healthcare system work for everyone. 

I want to get back to arguing over how to approach global warming, either with top heavy government regulation, or a free-market, cap-and- trade type system. I want to get back to shooting down dumbass arguments against “assault weapons” (which is redundant) or supporting reasonable alternatives like universal background checks.

But I’m not doing that.  Do you know why I’m not doing that?  Because the party that is supposed to represent my values as a conservative has lost its ever-loving mind.

Instead of arguing over the most cost-effective to deliver affordable healthcare to all Americans, Republicans continue to argue that the plan they spent thirty years fighting for is suddenly socialist because it was signed into law by a black dude, and that twenty million people need to lose their health care without any plan in place to help them. 

I know some of these people personally. They are old clients of mine from back when I was selling health insurance. They are friends and colleagues I’ve met as an author and comic, self-employed people who were finally able to start their own businesses because they didn’t need their old employer’s group insurance anymore.

Instead of looking for market-based solutions to the undeniably real crisis of global warming, the President elect claimed that it’s all a lie invented by the Chinese and that 97 percent of the world’s climatologists are in on the conspiracy for, I don’t know, all that sweet Greenpeace money? 

The economies and infrastructure systems of the future will be green, not because of tree-huggers, but because of bedrock market forces. We can either embrace that reality and start running ahead of the curve in preparation, or we can continue to fall further behind, wasting untold billions propping up an outdated system that only benefits the wealth of extractors at the cost of the health of everyone else.

[H]is campaign rhetoric, coupled with his victory, has given a semblance of credibility to xenophobia, racism, sexism and religious bigotry. 

Since the election, hate crimes have spiked, with over a thousand incidents reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center since Nov. 8.  One of which I witnessed personally not a week later.

Instead of fighting for conservative solutions to our shared problems, I find myself arguing with “conservatives” who, despite all the objective, verifiable evidence, can’t even admit that our shared problems even exist in the first place.

I am a conservative. I have always been a conservative. And I really, really want to go back to arguing for conservative causes. But until the people who have stolen that word from me return it, and return to the evidence-based ideology demanded of them by people like Edmund Burke, and Michael Oakeshott, I have to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with my liberal friends.

Because I have tell you, as it sits, they are far closer to where I have always stood on the political spectrum than anyone who wears an (R) after their name in Congress or pulled the lever for that precancerous orange colon polyp who is about to enter the White House. 

 "Orange colon Polyp"  - I will have to remember that term since it fits perfectly.  I also have to confess that I generally view Charlie Sheen as an idiot, his tweets "Trump next . . . Trump next  . . " after all the recent celebrity deaths would seem to be brilliant.

Trump's First, Alarming week as President Elect

I may hurt the feelings of some, but I don't know how any sane and rational person could think that Donald Trump is fit to occupy the White House.  His first week as president elect is already confirming the idiocy of anyone who voted for the man.   His transition team is marked by chaos, cronyism, and settling for the least qualified since so many reputable individuals fear staining their reputations and perhaps selling their souls should they join a Trump administration.  The head of an alt-right, racist, misogynistic "news" outlet is senior counselor to the president and an open contempt for the free press has been again revealed.   As has been consistently the case, New York based media where Trump is best known has led the way in excoriating the man's dangerous failings and narcissistic egomania.  A piece in the New Yorker looks at Trump's first week of incompetent misrule before he has even taken the oath of office.  Here are excerpts: 

It’s been one week since an unusually subdued Donald Trump gave his victory speech in Manhattan. “For those who have chosen not to support me in the past—of which there were a few people,” Trump said, eliciting laughter from the crowd of ecstatic supporters wearing red Make America Great Again hats, “I’m reaching out to you for your guidance and your help so that we can work together and unify our great country.” After running a campaign defined more by whom and what he opposed, Trump’s remarks were out of character and welcome.

A week later, those words seem hollow. The first sign that our easily distracted President-elect remained unchanged from the campaign came on Thursday. For twenty-four hours, Trump had shown some restraint. His victory speech raised hopes that, despite the evidence of his behavior on the campaign trail, he might be capable of magnanimity.

Just after 9 P.M., back in Trump Tower, the President-elect tweeted about his frustrations with protesters and the news media: “Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!”

Some saw the tweet as self-pitying and pathetic. Others saw it as a frightening attack on the First Amendment by the man who will soon swear to defend the Constitution. Either way, as his first substantive public comment since his election, it was widely rebuked.

On Friday, the purge began, when Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, was fired as chairman of the transition and Mike Pence was installed in his place. During the campaign, Christie, perhaps the most unpopular governor in America and Trump’s most embarrassingly sycophantic supporter, was appointed to head the transition. . . . Then the Trump campaign team, led by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, began a takeover of the team run by Christie, who, when he was a U.S. Attorney, sent Kushner’s father, Charles, to jail for tax evasion and witness tampering.

Christie became a vice-chair of the transition, along with a group of top Trump advisers who seemed to be in line for Cabinet positions: Ben Carson, whose spokesman said he actually did not want to serve in the Trump Administration because Carson believed himself to be unqualified, even though he had run for President; the former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is seventy-three years old and resigned from Congress in late 1998; Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who was “forced out” of the Pentagon in 2014, and, when he’s not dining with Vladimir Putin in Moscow, spends some of his time as an analyst on RT, a TV channel funded by the Russian government; the former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is seventy-two and, since leaving the mayoralty, has spent his time as a foreign lobbyist

The rest of the transition team was stacked with Trump loyalists, donors, and family members. Four of the sixteen spots were filled by three of Trump’s adult children—Eric, Donald, and Ivanka—and Kushner, his son-in-law. These are the same people Trump promised would be running his business empire, which has interests around the world and could benefit enormously by influencing government policy and staff appointments.

The [Wall Street] Journal led with the fact that Trump wanted to retain two of the most popular parts of the Affordable Care Act: the regulations on insurance companies that require them to allow children to remain on their parents’ plans until the age of twenty-six, and a provision that requires insurers to accept new customers without regard to preëxisting medical conditions. This is classic Trump: he is for any policy that is popular, and he made no effort to explain how he would retain these regulations without maintaining the individual mandate, which was the insurance industry’s price for accepting the new regulations when the legislation was negotiated.

In the same interview, Trump articulated a new Syria policy . . . . A careful reading of the logic behind this policy is that President-elect Trump accepts that American foreign policy should be guided by Russia.

That same day, Trump announced his top two White House advisers. I’ve written about the disturbing background of his new chief strategist and senior counselor, Steve Bannon, who ran a Web site, Breitbart, that helped mainstream the neo-white-nationalist movement known as the alt-right. Reince Priebus was named the incoming chief of staff; his lack of an association with a racist movement made him seem palatable by comparison.

On Sunday, Trump woke up and attacked the press: . . . . All three of these tweets were false. The Times said that subscriptions were up by four times more than normal since the election. There was no letter “apologizing” to subscribers. The paper sent an e-mail noting, “After such an erratic and unpredictable election there are inevitable questions: Did Donald Trump’s sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters?” Finally, the Times had written that Trump “suggested” more countries, specifically South Korea and Japan, should acquire nuclear weapons if the United States withdrew from protecting them—and he did say that.

Later that evening, Trump’s interview with “60 Minutes,” recorded on Friday, aired, . . . . There was no appeal to the rule of law. Instead, Trump talked the way an autocrat talks and suggested that the Justice Department was simply a tool to be used against opponents, unless he felt like sparing them based on his mood and if he believes his potential targets are “good people.” This is terrifying.

On Tuesday, the purge of the Christie-ites from the transition team was completed with Rogers’s ouster, and Trump reportedly asked that Kushner, a thirty-five-year-old with no national-security or government experience, be allowed to have a security clearance giving him access to classified information.

As of Wednesday morning, Trump has given two interviews—the ones to the Journal and “60 Minutes”—and has spoken in public twice, at his victory speech, early Wednesday morning, and at his Oval Office meeting with Obama, on Thursday. His transition office has issued half a dozen press releases, and he has made several important personnel and policy decisions. He has tweeted twenty-three times. Seven days may not be enough time to fully assess any new leader, especially in the case of Trump, whose first week was marked by seeming chaos in his efforts to put together an Administration. But what we’ve learned so far about the least-experienced President-elect in history is as troubling and ominous as his critics have feared. The Greeks have a word for the emerging Trump Administration: kakistocracy. The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as a “government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens.” Webster’s is simpler: “government by the worst people.”

As anyone sane who wasn't duped by demagoguery should have know, things likely will not turn out well for America.  Most upsetting is the fact that the injury was self-inflicted and hinged upon the votes of Christofascists and low information, bigoted voters - the last people to be guiding the fate of America.

A Final Repudiation Of Phyllis Schlafly

I noted briefly a few nights ago that long time foe to equality Phyllis Schlafly had died.  As one might expect, many right wing and Republican outlets are praising her and some even stating that she "will be missed."  I for one will not miss her and, while I won't be drinking a champagne toast to her passing, I do think that the world became a slightly better place with her toxic message of division and hate with one less voice.  A piece on the Americans United for Separation of Church and State takes a retrospective on Schlfly and the misogyny she so long peddled.  She is a woman who wanted to re-criminalize homosexuality even though she had a gay child herself.  Not exactly a pillar of loving motherhood.  Here are some highlights from the retrospective:

“Today, Phyllis Schlafly died like she lived – with dignity and a smile,” wrote Ed Martin, president of the Eagle Forum, a group Schlafly founded. “Surrounded by her family, Phyllis passed away and entered her reward with the Lord. Her family, friends and staff will miss her. Her nation will be eternally grateful.”

Schlafly was best known for defeating the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the 1970s, but her larger  mission was one of seeking to deny people their rights – just because those people failed to live up to her religious ideals.

In recent years, Schlafly’s Eagle Forum turned its ire on the LGBT community, with a flood of hysterical op-eds and articles. At one point, Schlafly even proposed impeaching judges who upheld marriage equality and called on Congress to cut off all federal aid to any state that permitted the practice.

Her nation will be eternally grateful? Sorry, but I have to disagree. Schlafly’s vision of America was one where right-wing Christians of her stripe – she was a traditionalist Roman Catholic but often sounded like a fundamentalist, Religious Right-style evangelical – ruled the roost. Others were second-class citizens. Most Americans aren't grateful for her tireless work to roll back women’s reproductive rights or the hate she spread against those Americans she derisively called “the gays.”

 

Firmly grounded in an “Ozzie and Harriet” mythology, Schlafly was clueless about the realities of modern life. In 1981, she told a U.S. Senate committee that women who are sexually harassed have only themselves to blame. Lecherous bosses, said Schlafly, “hardly ever ask sexual favors of women from whom the certain answer is ‘No.’ Virtuous women are seldom accosted by unwelcome sexual propositions or familiarities, obscene talk or profane language.”

She opposed equal pay for women, fought efforts to make child care more affordable and plentiful and opposed programs to give young people sex education in public schools. (Sex ed., she once opined, is “a principal cause of teenage pregnancy.”)

Schlafly’s views belong to an America of the past. They’re anchored in the America she idealized – the fake 1950 vision of a white, Christian nation where school kids prayed on command and God gave us nuclear weapons to scare off the Reds.

Schlafly’s Potemkin Village of 1950s nostalgia collapsed long ago. It collapsed when some Americans had the temerity to point out that the vision didn’t include them – and noted, by the way, the 1950s weren’t so great for lots of people: blacks living in the Jim Crow South, women fighting in court for the right to work in certain professions, Jewish families seeking the right to live in neighborhoods that sought to exclude them and atheists daring to speak against the “God and country” rhetoric of the Eisenhower Era, to name a few.

Phyllis Schlafly does not represent the future. Her vision is firmly grounded in the past, and, with luck, the nation will continue speeding past it so rapidly that soon none of us will even be able to see its vague outlines.

If you doubt that, simply look at the world around you. You will see that Schlafly’s vision has been repudiated. It was repudiated this morning when millions of women suited up for work in a myriad of professions. It was repudiated all over the nation by same-sex couples, now legally married, who woke up and started another routine day.

You can see the repudiation in the eyes of immigrant families working hard to make the American Dream real for them. It’s reflected in the faces of Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist and Wiccan public school students who long ago decided they won’t accept second-class status.

Schlafly dreamed of an America based on rejection and exclusion. That is not our America. Our America is better than Phyllis Schlafly.  . . . The story of America is not the story of Phyllis Schlafly. We have repudiated her narrow and mean-spirited vision. We know that it’s a relic of a nastier, more unpleasant time.  We won't go back there.

Yes, Phyllis Schlafly helped defeat the ERA. But she lost the larger cultural war. And for that, we can be truly grateful.

As one reader noted in an e-mail to me, Bette Davis is reported to have said about Joan Crawford: Joan Crawford's death "you're only supposed to speak good of the dead... so she's dead ~ good! Phyllis Schlafly is dead. Good!  It is far past time that Schlafly be recognized for the toxic individuals that they are and for good and decent people to call them out for what they are.  Schlafly damaged many lives and enriched herself in the process. 

Same-Sex Marriage Not About Sex

The white Christofascists and other detractors of LGBT individuals like to always define us in terms of sex acts - sex acts which many of us may not even engage in at all or perhaps in frequently at best.  Heterosexuals do not define themselves solely in terms of who they are attracted to or the who they love.  Its all part of the effort of the "godly folk" to make LGBT persons somehow less than human and, therefore, worthy of abuse and discrimination.  As noted before, the real issue for these horrible people (that's how I see Christofascists) is that they cannot countenance anything or anyone who differs from their sick, neurotic fantasy world  belief system.  Hence, all too typically, they similarly hate blacks, Hispanics, non-Christians.  The list, indeed, is almost endless.  A column at DanRiver.com (the Danville, Virginia newspaper) of all places has an op-ed column that looks at the toxicity of homophobia and also makes the case that gay marriage isnot about sex.  Here are excerpts:

I was proud to see the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals overturn Virginia’s ban on same sex marriages.

Contrary to the motto, Virginia has not always been “for lovers.” Growing up in Danville, I can remember a time when interracial dating was against the law. It was the case of Loving v. Virginia in which the Supreme Court held Virginia’s ban on interracial marriages was unconstitutional and the government could no longer engage in racial discrimination.

For many young gays who have no support from their families, endure ridicule from their peers and receive condemnation from their church, death becomes a better choice than life. There is no form of oppression greater than the young gay man who sits in his church every Sunday and hears his pastor exclaim God hates things about him he cannot change. I would ask all the perfect people in the congregation to please stand.

Same-sex marriage is not about sex. It is about control, power and receiving the full protection of the law to the same degree as heterosexuals. I am not demanding anyone becomes a proponent of homosexuality or same-sex marriage. While I disagree with their theology, I respect the right of churches who oppose granting same-sex marriages from their altars.

Still, such a position should not translate into opposition to legalization of same-gender loving outside of their churches. In America, it is the state, not any church, that legitimizes the legal license of marriage. The church may choose, or not choose, to add its blessing to such a legal union. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. concluded, what makes America great is even when a person is deprived of a right, he or she always has the right to fight for that right. This is the very reason why I chose a career in politics, so I could fight for the rights of all persons (he, she, or “undecided”).

With the legalization of same sex marriage in 19 states and the president recently issuing an executive order that prohibits federal contractors from discriminating against workers based on their sexual orientation, we are moving closer to an America that lives “out the true meaning of its creed” and respects the humanity and dignity of all persons. Go Virginia!