Virginia's Inreased Blue Hue

With the 2008 elections behind us, Virginia will soon be looking toward the statewide elections in 2009 when a new Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, and most of the General Assembly will be up for election. Given the dramatic loss of Virginia by the McCain/Palin ticket, it will be interesting to see whether or not the GOP can come up with a new game plan and candidates that do not seem like Kool-Aid drinkers who escaped Jonestown in terms of their Christianist fanaticism. Despite claims that the GOP will rethink it's message, personally, I doubt it will happen. Bob "Taliban Bob" McDonnell is the likely GOP candidate for governor and he has thrust his nose so far up the butts of the Pat Robertson/Jerry Falwell crowd that it's a wonder he has not suffocated. Meanwhile, unless a primary is used to select the party candidates, the increasingly unhinged base of the Virginia GOP (the Virginia GOP makes the national GOP look liberal) will do the selecting which almost guaranties extremist candidates will get the nod. If this happens, it will help the Democrats significantly. Here are some highlights from the Washington Post that look at the changing nature of Virginia:

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Virginia Democrats have rapidly expanded their political base over the past eight years, taking nearly full advantage of demographic shifts in the suburbs, and they enter future statewide races with an advantage over the GOP, according to a review of recent election results and census data. After an election in which Virginia was one of the most hotly contested states in the presidential race, the results show Virginia Democrats amassing a formidable coalition as the state's suburban communities grow more diverse, white voters in Northern Virginia shun the GOP, young voters align with Democrats and black voters prove they continue to have clout downstate.

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Obama won Virginia with 52.6 percent of the vote, racking up a higher share than he did in Florida and Ohio, more traditional swing states. Senator-elect Mark R. Warner (D) also won his race with a record number of votes, and Democrats picked up three congressional seats in Virginia.

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Many Virginia Republicans argue that their party's poor showing on Election Day can largely be traced to President Bush's low approval ratings, the economic collapse on Wall Street and Obama's decision to flood the state with paid media and staffers. But an analysis of the results suggests that a more fundamental change is occurring, perhaps accelerated by Obama's success in registering hundred of thousands of new voters this year. "There is no question Republicans cannot run the same type of campaigns they have run in the past and expect to win," said GOP strategist Phil Cox, an adviser to Attorney General Robert F. McDonnell, the likely GOP nominee for governor next year. "It is a different Virginia than it was a decade ago."

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Cox maintains that McDonnell will make an aggressive appeal for minority support next year, saying, "We are not going to cede any vote." Next year "is clearly going to be very different than 2008," Cox said. "You got different candidates, and you are going to have a different political and economic impact."

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But Virginia's electorate has undergone a fundamental demographic shift in recent cycles. In 1996, when Republican Bob Dole carried Virginia, white voters made up 81 percent of the electorate. Those same voters made up 70 percent of the electorate this year, with the decrease mostly coming from people without college degrees, a solidly Republican bloc. Robert Lang, a demographer at the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, said affluent whites in Northern Virginia, like other heavily populated areas in the Northeast and Midwest, "now seem to trust the Democrats with the economy and don't trust the Republicans with civil liberties."

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Downstate counties and cities boasting the largest increases in turnout this year were almost all college towns or home to large black populations. In Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia, voter turnout increased by 49 percent this year compared with eight years ago, even though the city's population declined by 10 percent during the same period. Similar trends played out in Williamsburg (home of the College of William and Mary), Montgomery County (Virginia Tech), Harrisonburg (James Madison University) and Fredericksburg (Mary Washington). Voters younger than 30 comprised 21 percent of voters in 2008, up from 17 percent in 2004. Half of these young voters now identify themselves as Democrats, up from 38 percent in 2000.

Tyranny of the Majority

The San Francisco Guardian has a lengthy and thoughtful article that looks at the horrific precedent posed by Proposition 8 if it is allowed to stand. While a number of states have passed anti-gay marriage amendments, only in California did such an amendment take away a right which had been upheld by the state's highest court. Arguably, if equal protection means anything, all of the anti-gay amendments are unconstitutional and need to be struck down, but Proposition 8 needs to fall the most of any of these hate motivated initiatives. As I have said in prior posts, the "deeply held religious belief" justification for passage of these types of amendments is bullshit and nothing more that phony icing on a poisonous legal precedent. Here are some story highlights:

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[The} basic issue: can a simple majority of voters take away rights from a protected minority group, one the judicial branch has already ruled is entitled to the same marriage rights as heterosexual couples? The implications of that answer are so profound that City Attorney Dennis Herrera, in a City Hall press conference after the court announced its decision, cast the matter as no less than a "constitutional crisis."

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"This measure sought to do something that no other constitutional amendment has ever done here in the state of California, and that is to strip a fundamental right from a protected class of citizens and in doing so, it did not merely undo a narrowly disfavored Supreme Court ruling. Its legal effect is nowhere [near that] simple or elegant. Rather, it upended a separation of powers doctrine deeply rooted in our system of governance. It trounced upon the independence of the state's judicial branch and it eviscerated the most fundamental principle of our state's constitution. And if allowed to stand, Proposition 8 so devastates the principle of equal protection that it would endanger fundamental rights of any potential electoral minority, even for protected classes based on gender, race, or religion. And it would mean a bare majority of voters could enshrine any manner of discrimination against any unpopular group, and our state constitution would be powerless to disallow it," Herrera said.

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Beyond the historical and precedent-setting nature of the case, the council's executive director Rick Schlosser told the Guardian that Prop. 8 discriminates against Episcopal, Unitarian, and other churches that believe all people have the right to marry. "We work on a lot of religious freedom issues and there's a huge number of churches that support the right of people to marry," Schlosser said. "There are a lot of churches that think it's their religious duty to perform same-sex marriages."

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"Equal protection under the law is what separates constitutional democracy from mob rule tyranny and it is a principle that reaches back eight centuries to the Magna Carta and it has guided the founding of our nation and our state," he said. "So I understand that on same-sex marriage, the emotions on both sides run high, but it's important to understand the legal stakes are even higher. The cases before the high court today are no longer about marriage rights alone. They are about the foundations of our constitution. And as citizens we share the blessing of a common jurisprudence, and I refuse to accept that it is beyond us to find common ground in its enduring and deeply American principles: equality under the law, separation of powers, and an independent judiciary." . . . . Essentially, this is no longer a case about same-sex marriage.

More Monday Male Beauty

Confession of a Gay Catholic

The Boston Globe has an article on a new book titled "Since My Last Confession" which looks at the Roman Catholic Church's hypocrisy towards gay Catholics. While the author of the article shows his ignorance/bias by using the term "lifestyle choice," I hope the article nonetheless helps draw attention to the book and the larger issue of how the Church mistreats gays - even though all the while it continues to coddle and protect those bishops and cardinals who enabled and/or covered up sexual abuse of minors by priests. Hopefully, the book's author, Scott Pomfret, will find a new church home outside the Roman Catholic Church which I believe is beyond saving in terms of its official attitudes towards gays anytime within the next 50-100 years. Only when enough of the laity has "voted with its feet" and revenues drop significantly will the Vatican suddenly find a new revelation that alters the Church's official line. Here are some story highlights:

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Blocks from his former church in Downtown Crossing, Scott Pomfret takes a deep breath and confesses his literary sins. "My real sin was not having the proper amount of discretion," says Pomfret, a Boston attorney who recently wrote a gay Catholic memoir called "Since My Last Confession," which has ruffled some frocks at St. Anthony Shrine. Pomfret served as a lector at the church for eight years before officials there let him go in September because of his other role as an erotica fiction writer.

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The church's executive director, the Rev. David Convertino, told the Globe and other local media that some people had concerns about Pomfret's role at the church. Weeks later, Pomfret still reels from the ouster. He's searching for a new church but doesn't regret writing his book, which took him three years to finish. After Massachusetts legalized gay marriage in 2004, Pomfret decided to chronicle how he balances his spiritual life with his gay one.

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Much of the book centers on St. Anthony's Shrine, where Pomfret read Scriptures for Friday night Mass and led a gay and lesbian spiritual support group. In the book, Pomfret also pokes fun at local clergy - suggesting that some were sexually active - and criticizes Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley, the archbishop of Boston.

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"I want people to understand that at the grassroots church level, there is room at the table for gay people," he says. "I don't want people to throw spirituality away with bath water. I'd like to see them feel that faith can be part of their lives."

Forgiving the Unforgivable

This cartoon says it all in my view - both about the lawless Bush/Cheney regime which fomented the use of torture and also about clerics both past and present who likewise urge followers to do heinous and unforgivable acts all in the name of God. (Note: click on image for larger view)

Monday Male Beauty

Obama Cabinet Forgoes the Kool-Aid

In contrast to the many horrendous selections of the Chimperator's administration, Barack Obama's picks to date for his cabinet indicate that competence and intellect are once again important rather than merely a blind allegiance to a particular dogma or agenda. Obviously, if the Chimperator had not surrounded himself with so many "yes men," perhaps many of the disasters of the last eight years might have been avoided or handled much more competently. Likewise, we will soon see scientific truth and research trumping Christianist views in a number of government agencies. Here are some analysis highlights from Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post:

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The way President-elect Barack Obama is assembling his brain trust doesn't just indicate a dramatic turn away from President Bush's policies. It also suggests the return of spirited policy debates to a White House that has been largely devoid of them for the last eight years.

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Rather than simply hire a new brand of loyalists -- or replace one gut player with another -- Obama is making it clear that he wants his thinking challenged and wants to hear opposing views before he reaches his decisions. That would be a dramatic contrast to the intellectually incurious Bush, who so rarely ventured beyond his bubble of flatterers and yes-men.

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Obama said. "One of the dangers in a White House, based on my reading of history, is that you get wrapped up in group-think and everybody agrees with everything and there's no discussion and there are no dissenting views. So I am going to be welcoming a vigorous debate inside the White House.

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"'Open and serious debate versus ideological certitude will be a great relief to the military leaders,' said retired Maj. Gen. William L. Nash of the Council on Foreign Relations. Senior officers are aware that few in their ranks voiced misgivings over the Iraq war, but they counter that they were not encouraged to do so by the Bush White House or the Pentagon under Donald H. Rumsfeld. "'The joke was that when you leave a meeting, everybody is supposed to drink the Kool-Aid,' Nash said. 'In the Bush administration, you had to drink the Kool-Aid before you got to go to the meeting.'"

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And here's another way the Obama White House will be a far sight different than Bush's: There will be no Cheney figure, squelching opposing views. Here's Vice President Cheney watcher and New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer yesterday on CBS's Face the Nation: "You're seeing very strong players divvying up this national security portfolio. So that won't -- it takes a president like Bush to have a vice president like Cheney. Obama so far seems to be so much more involved in the details and in kind of wanting to command the policies all the way up and down.

Still More Catholic Lunacy

I have posted previously about Roman Catholic priests who have been after church members who voted for Barack Obama. Yet another case of fusing fetus worship over all else and voting for the GOP has cropped up in California where a pastor is telling Democrat voters that they need to go to confession since they are guilty of a "mortal sin" if they voted for Obama. I'm sure the good pastor has been totally silent in terms of demanding resignations in the Church hierarchy by those who enabled or covered up the sexual abuse of minors. After all, increasingly, the Catholic Church only cares about children BEFORE they are born. Screw them - often literally - after they are born and still minors and it's OK. Here are some highlights from the San Francisco Chronicle:

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A Roman Catholic priest has told parishioners they should confess if they voted for Barack Obama because the president-elect supports abortion. The Rev. Joseph Illo says his parishioners at St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Modesto shouldn't risk losing their "state of grace" by receiving communion sacrilegiously. He delivered the message in a Nov. 21 letter and during mass. In an interview this week with the Modesto Bee, Illo says he sent the letter because Catholic teaching requires that people go to confession when they commit a mortal sin.

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The Modesto Bee has more on this story. Here are some highlights:

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That letter, dated Nov. 21 and first mentioned in The Bee on Saturday, led to stories picked up by news media around the world. In the letter, Illo told the parish's estimated 15,000 members that they risked their "state of grace" if they received communion without having attended confession - but only if they voted for Obama knowing his position on abortion. The letter read, in part, "If you are one of the 54 percent of Catholics who voted for a pro-abortion candidate, you were clear on his position, and you knew the gravity of the question, I urge you to go to confession before receiving communion."

Sunday Male Beauty

Fundamentalist Parallels

A column in today's New York Times written by a native of India got me to thinking about the similarities in mind set between the apparent Islam fundamentalist terrorists who wreaked death and destruction in Mumbai and the Christianist and Mormon fundamentalists in this country who always lead the charge in anti-gay efforts. They hate the same sorts of things and they equally despise those who reject their intolerant and unloving religious beliefs. The sole difference is that the Christianists and Mormons have not resorted to violence and murder (at least not yet), although their words do often insite hate and division just as in the Islamic world. In the final analysis both groups hate freedom and seek censorship and a stiffling religious theocracy. Such forces need to be defeated both in India and in the USA. Here are some column highlights:

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MY bleeding city. My poor great bleeding heart of a city. Why do they go after Mumbai? There’s something about this island-state that appalls religious extremists, Hindus and Muslims alike. Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness.

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Just as cinema is a mass dream of the audience, Mumbai is a mass dream of the peoples of South Asia. Bollywood movies are the most popular form of entertainment across the subcontinent. Through them, every Pakistani and Bangladeshi is familiar with the wedding-cake architecture of the Taj and the arc of the Gateway of India, symbols of the city that gives the industry its name. It is no wonder that one of the first things the Taliban did upon entering Kabul was to shut down the Bollywood video rental stores.

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In the Bombay I grew up in, your religion was a personal eccentricity, like a hairstyle. In my school, you were denominated by which cricketer or Bollywood star you worshiped, not which prophet. In today’s Mumbai, things have changed. Hindu and Muslim demagogues want the mobs to come out again in the streets, and slaughter one another in the name of God. They want India and Pakistan to go to war. They want Indian Muslims to be expelled. They want India to get out of Kashmir. They want mosques torn down. They want temples bombed.

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And now it looks as if the latest terrorists were our neighbors, young men dressed not in Afghan tunics but in blue jeans and designer T-shirts. Being South Asian, they would have grown up watching the painted lady that is Mumbai in the movies: a city of flashy cars and flashier women. A pleasure-loving city, a sensual city. Everything that preachers of every religion thunder against.

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[T]hese young Muslim men murdered people in front of their families — for the crime of visiting Mumbai. They attacked the luxury businessmen’s hotels. They attacked the open-air Cafe Leopold, where backpackers of the world refresh themselves with cheap beer out of three-foot-high towers before heading out into India. Their drunken revelry, their shameless flirting, must have offended the righteous believers in the jihad.

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But the best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever. Dream of making a good home for all Mumbaikars . . . . If the rest of the world wants to help, it should run toward the explosion. It should fly to Mumbai, and spend money. Where else are you going to be safe? New York? London? Madrid?