New York Times: In Houston, Hate Trumped Fairness

Christian extremist celebrate the triumph of hate

In a main editorial, the New York Times voices some of the thoughts that sprang to mind when I heard about the defeat of Houston's nondiscrimination ordinance on Tuesday: how many transgender youth will end their lives as a result of the viscous hate and lies disseminated by the hated-filled "godly folk"? Not that these "godly folk" give a damn for anyone who doesn't look like them and hold to their hate and fear based religious beliefs, proving yet again that the best argument against Christianity are its fundamentalist adherents. As I have noted before, the hate and vitriol - and hypocrisy - these folks exhibit has caused me to immediately have negative thoughts when someone says that  they are a "Christian."  I cannot help but assume they are a horrible, self-centered, bigoted  person until proven otherwise.  All too often, my negative impressions prove accurate.  But I digress.  Here are highlights from the editorial:

Sometime in the near future, a transgender teenager in Texas will attempt suicide — and maybe succeed — because vilifying people for their gender identity remains politically acceptable in America.

The hateful rhetoric of leaders like Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick is the latest, ugliest example. Mr. Patrick was ebullient on Tuesday night after it became clear that Houston voters had decidedly rejected a broad equal rights ordinance that opponents maliciously and misleadingly characterized as a boon for cross-dressing sex offenders.

“It was about protecting our grandmoms and our mothers and our wives and our sisters and our daughters and our granddaughters,” Mr. Patrick said as he thanked a crowd of joyful supporters who nodded and cried “Amen!”

HERO, which the City Council passed 18 months ago, established sensible protections from discrimination for 15 classes of people. It would have given people with disabilities, like Mr. Abbott, a paraplegic, a mechanism to fight employment or housing discrimination. It would have given veterans, pregnant women and senior citizens a valuable layer of protection and prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion and national origin. But it was its inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity that turned a sensible initiative into a nasty national controversy.

Opponents of the law, led by Jared Woodfill, a Houston lawyer and a Texas Republican Party leader, started a well-funded campaign that equated supporting it with allowing men to use women’s public restrooms for deviant purposes. Their fearmongering, blasted on yard signs, bellowed from church pulpits and dramatized in a television ad, suggested that sexual deviants were waiting for the ordinance to kick in to sneak up on unsuspecting women in bathroom stalls.

This is completely unfounded. There are no documented cases of peeping Toms or rapists taking advantage of anti-discrimination ordinances that have extended legal protections to transgender Americans in recent years.

While the defeat of HERO is a painful setback, it is encouraging that the broader quest for equality for gay and transgender Americans is advancing steadily.  . . . . When that movement achieves irreversible momentum — and it is a matter of when, not whether — people like Mr. Woodfill, Mr. Abbott and Mr. Patrick will be remembered as latter-day Jim Crow elders. Their demagogy is egregious because it preys on some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

As opponents of the ordinance celebrate their victory this week, transgender people across the country are understandably reeling. They should take comfort in knowing that history will not be kind to the haters who won on Tuesday. In time, the bigots are destined to lose.

What makes the situation even more disgusting is that many tax-exempt churches fought against HERO.  Thus. all citizens were forced to indirectly support the forces of hate and bigotry.  Tax exempt status for churches needs to end. The First Amendment grants no entitlement to be supported by all citizens.  Indeed, it argues against taxpayer support of religion.

More Wednesday Male Beauty

Salt Lake City Elects Lesbian Mayor and Gay City Councilman

(Tribune file photo) Salt Lake City mayoral candidate Jackie Biskupski.

While the election results in Houston and Kentucky are very disappointing - the finger pointing on the Houston loss has already begun - two total surprises have come out of Salt Lake City, home base of the anti-gay Mormon Church: if the unofficial results hold up, the city will have a lesbian mayor and a gay city council member.  Making it all the sweeter, the new city council man is Derek Kitchen who, with his now-husband Moudi Sbeity, was one half of one of three couples that won their challenge to Utah's gay marriage ban before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit.  Here's what Kitchen posted on Facebook:

Thank you! Thank you to my family for standing next to me through this campaign, for my volunteers for putting in countless hours knocking on doors, making calls, and talking to their friends. Thank you to all my supporters, your enthusiasm, donations, and moral cheers really kept me going. This has been such a positive experience for me as a first time candidate for public office. I’m happy to say that we ran a clean campaign focused on the issues and the residents of this great city.

I feel honored that the residents of District 4 have put their faith in me to represent them and make important decisions on their behalf. I’m energized and excited to get to work on the Salt Lake City council as your next representative!

As for the mayoral race, here are highlights from  the Salt Lake Tribune (let's hope the uncounted ballots confirm Biskupski's win):

There remain several thousand uncounted provisional and mail-in ballots in Salt Lake City's mayor's race, leaving the door open for Mayor Ralph Becker to pull off a come-from-behind win — although such a scenario appears unlikely.

Tuesday's unofficial and incomplete results gave Jackie Biskupski a 52.1 percent to 47.8 percent lead over Becker. They are separated by 1,450 votes out of 33,717 counted — 46.8 percent of registered voters in Salt Lake City.

According to Utah law, the new total will be sealed until the Nov. 17 canvass.

Tuesday night Biskupski said that Becker's 4.3-point deficit was statistically "insurmountable." When she announced at her campaign celebration that Becker would not concede, her crowd of supporters groaned and booed. 

Until Nov. 17, the discussion of Biskupski's possible election as the first openly gay big-city mayor in the deeply conservative, Mormon state are on hold. 

"In a couple weeks," she said, "I'm confident we will have a chance to talk about how historic this is."

Biskupski said she recognized from the beginning that she would lose votes for a number of reasons, not limited to her gender. "There are people who would not vote for me because I'm openly gay," she said. "There are people who would not vote for me because I'm a single mom."

Nonetheless, it's possible to get elected in a conservative state based on your merits, Biskupski told reporters Tuesday night.

"Not my gender, not my sexual orientation," she said. "It matters that we embrace people for their ability to lead and affect change."

Her likely victory says something about Utah, Biskupski said.  "We have a reputation here, right? But ... this community continues to move forward in strides that are mind-blowing," she said. "I'm so proud of our community."

In some ways I am not surprised by Utah.  Jon Huntsman  is one of the few sane Republicans left and he was a popular governor in Utah.  The fact that he is sane is why he failed to gain traction in 2012. That said, what could be more delicious than a lesbian mayor in the Mormon Church's home town. :)

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

A Silver Lining in Virginia's Election Results

While Republicans maintained their hold on the Virginia Senate and thus will likely block Medicaid expansion and other progressive measures proposed by Governor McAuliffe, they did not increase their overall seat count and saw loses in the House of Delegates and in other lower tier elections.  It also must be noted that since 2015 is an off year with low voter turnout, the GOP's ability to largely hold back losses does not mean that things will be rosy in the GOP bubble come next year, especially of the GOP nominates a lunatic as its standard bearer.  Over at Bearing Drift, Brian Schoeneman, one of the few sane Republicans left looks at the dark spots - that Democrats need to capitalize on - in the GOP's election results.  Here are highlights:

One of the reasons why your average voter has a tendency to hate politicians is that we often do our best to bring out the silver lining in even the darkest of storm clouds.  We will find the one or two good outcomes in a sea of bad ones and focus on those rather than on the big picture.  That’s a human tendency, especially when anybody’s job is on the line.

On the other hand, I’ve always been of the opinion that the truth is better than spin, and that as adults we should be willing to accept the bad with the good, because an unwillingness to confront things that didn’t go so well is an inherent obstacle to fixing those things the next time around.  Given that we’ve got a presidential cycle just around the corner, we need to look objectively at what happened last night in Virginia and have a long conversation about what it actually means.  So let’s throw away the posturing and be honest.

By any objective measurement, the GOP had a bad night  The only news story that most of America saw last night – the one that was blasted out by Politico, CNN and the non-Virginia news outlets – was that we held the State Senate, which threw a wrench into Governor McAuliffe’s long-term legislative plans.  Medicaid expansion is dead, as are his misguided attempts at turning guns into a political issue in a staunchly pro-gun Commonwealth. 

But what did the wins in the State Senate mean?  We maintained the status quo.  That’s it.

Maintaining the status quo in the Senate was a must win, and we won it.  But we gained no ground, and the millions poured into the Commonwealth by outside groups didn’t have an overall impact on the final outcome.  In the two races they targeted, they went 1-1.  The only people really pleased with that outcome should be the TV stations in Richmond and Northern Virginia.  On the House of Delegates side, we lost ground overall. 

Northern Virginia, however, should be concerned – our power in the House just dropped considerably.  We lost control of the House Transportation Committee and we lost two Republican seats that are now in Democratic hands, and thus marginalized.  And losing GOP incumbents in Northern Virginia before a presidential election is a bad thing – we lose the network, the lists, the activist contact with an incumbent.  All those things matter.  And now they’re gone.  

On the local level, the constant in-fighting and back-biting among different sectors of the Republican Party tore up areas that had previously been considered Republican strongholds.  . . .  Despite the feeling that this was a Republican year on the ground in Fairfax, all of our challenger candidates for Board of Supervisors lost and the open seat race in my home Sully District was a GOP loss, flipping that seat to the Democrats. 

The biggest loser of the night – by far – was the Republican Party of Virginia.  Early this morning, RPV sent out a self-congratulatory email that was long on self-praise but short on facts.  It was, if anything, an obvious attempt (and clearly pre-election results written) at turd polishing by Chairman John Whitbeck, going into this reelection campaign next year.  Despite the fact that we maintained the status quo and our messaging didn’t really work  . . . .

Whatever GOP momentum we may have built up was just released last night with a resounding “meh,” after losing a lot of races that folks thought we would do well in.  Let’s be honest – not flipping a single Senate seat Blue to Red is not momentum. As for RPV’s vaunted “Faces of the GOP” campaign – straight out of 2007’s Corporate Public Relations playbook – it was a disaster.  Of the 20 Republican races profiled, 14 of the candidates lost. 

Last night must be viewed by every Republican in Virginia as a wake up call.  The idea that we can win “base,” low-turnout off-year elections just by turning out Republicans should have died last night.  Wherever we nominated a candidate who didn’t reflect their district, we lost.  We lost two critical seats in Northern Virginia that will make next year’s presidential race harder to run.  And, most important, we saw obvious examples in Loudoun that the constant in-fighting between sections of the GOP has real world implications – and those implications are bad.  Bottom line – we had a bad night and we have a lot of work to do.

Will the Virginia GOP accept this message?  I doubt it since the Party more and more lives in an alternate universe dominated by the Christofascists, white supremacists and ignorance embracing elements  of the party base.

Hate and Ignorance Triumph in Houston and Kentucky

The election results in Houston and Kentucky yesterday demonstrate once again that religious based hate and the embrace of ignorance are stronger motivations to vote than equality and concern for one's neighbors.  The same holds true in Loudoun County, Virginia where Bob Marshall, arguably the most hateful and insane member of the Virginia General Assembly won reelection.  Leading the way in these unfortunate outcomes were so-called "conservative" voters who in fact are religious extremists who hold ISIS like contempt for others who do not embrace their Bronze Age beliefs.   First, the New York Times looks at the results in the defeat of Houston's non-discrimination ordinance which ought to send a message to big businesses that Texas is not a place in which to base any major operations.  Here are excerpts:

A yearlong battle over gay and transgender rights that turned into a costly, ugly war of words between this city’s lesbian mayor and social conservatives ended Tuesday as voters repealed an anti-discrimination ordinance that had attracted attention from the White House, sports figures and Hollywood celebrities.

Opponents said the measure would allow men claiming to be women to enter women’s bathrooms and inflict harm, and that simple message — “No Men in Women’s Bathrooms” — was plastered on signs and emphasized in television and radio ads, turning the debate from one about equal rights to one about protecting women and girls from sexual predators.

“It was about protecting our grandmoms, and our mothers and our wives and our sisters and our daughters and our granddaughters,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican, told cheering opponents who gathered at an election night party at a Houston hotel. “I’m glad Houston led tonight to end this constant political-correctness attack on what we know in our heart and our gut as Americans is not right.”

Opponents of the measure — including Mr. Patrick, pastors of conservative megachurches and the former Houston Astros baseball star Lance Berkman — said the ordinance had nothing to do with discrimination and was about the mayor’s gay agenda being forced on the city. They denied that they had any bias against gay people, and said the ordinance was so vague that it would make anyone who tried to keep any man from entering a women’s bathroom the subject of a city investigation and fine.

Ms. Parker and her supporters said Houston would lose tourism and convention business if the city had to repeal the ordinance and became known for intolerance, just as a backlash in Indiana over a religious-objections law led to convention cancellations and boycotts before that law was changed. Supporters worried that a repeal of the Houston ordinance could also jeopardize its selection as host city for the Super Bowl in 2017.

I hope the NFL decides to boycott Houston - perhaps a petition addressed to the NFL needs be started.  I for one will not be visiting Houston or Texas anytime soon.  

In Kentucky, similar batshitery and misogyny prevailed as Republican Matt Bevin, who backed Kim Davis to rally haters evangelicals, was elected Governor of Kentucky thereby putting health care coverage for several hundred thousand state residents at risk.  Here are excerpts from the New York Times on this disturbing election outcome:

Matt Bevin, a Republican political novice, wealthy Louisville businessman and Tea Party favorite, was elected Kentucky’s next governor on Tuesday and swept fellow Republicans into statewide office with him. The stunning victory heralds a new era in a state where Democrats have held the governor’s mansion for all but four of the last 44 years.

Mr. Obama’s health care law was an especially contentious issue in the race, and some see the Bevin victory as a rebuke to Gov. Steve Beshear, a Democrat, who expanded Medicaid under the measure. An estimated 420,000 Kentuckians, nearly 10 percent of the state’s population, now have coverage as a result. Mr. Bevin, a fierce opponent of the health care law, at first said he would reverse it, but has since softened his position and said he would stop enrolling new people but would not take coverage from those who had it.

He [Bevin] held strong appeal to both fiscal and Christian conservatives; when Kim Davis, the Rowan County clerk, who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, was jailed, Mr. Bevin made a show of visiting her. 

Mr. Conway hews mostly to traditional Democratic positions. He favors increasing the minimum wage (Mr. Bevin is opposed); is a strong backer of unions (Mr. Bevin favored “right-to-work” laws that would limit union organizing); and made early childhood education a centerpiece of his election campaign. (Mr. Bevin emphasized school vouchers.) 

I try to be optimistic about the future of America, but in these off year elections - i.e., non-presidential elections - the hatred and greed of the Christofascists and those seeking a new Gilded Age outweigh those who oppose their agenda.  The irony is that many of those who stayed home and failed to vote will be the ones most targeted by the foul policies of today's GOP.

More Tuesday Male Beauty

Benghazi Committe Backfires: Support for Hillary Grows

Many have argued - and some Republicans have slipped up and admitted - that the GOP lead House Benghazi Committee was a political witch hunting from the very beginning with only one goal: to damage Hillary Clinton.  A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal Survey seems to indicate that more Americans now see the Committee's hearings for what they really have always been.  The result? Hillary Clinton has seen a rise in support even as more view the Benghazi Committee as nakedly partisan and seeking to to impact the likely Democrat presidential nominee.  Here are highlights from Politicususa.com: 

The new NBC News/Wall Street Journal Survey contains some great news for Hillary Clinton. Since her appearance in front of the Benghazi Select Committee, there has been a nine-point swing in her favor on the issue of her emails.

According to the survey, before her Benghazi committee testimony, 47% of those polled said that Clinton’s emails were an important factor in deciding whether or not to support her, and 44% said the emails were not an important factor. After Clinton’s testimony, 48% believed that the emails were not an important factor, and 42% said they were. There was also a five point increase in the number of respondents who thought the Benghazi investigation is unfair and partisan. 

The NBC News poll reveals that having Hillary Clinton testify in front of the House Benghazi Select Committee was a major mistake by the Republican Party The hearing gave Clinton a platform and allowed her to turn public opinion on her emails in her favor. Republicans thought they would use the high-profile hearing to stop Hillary Clinton. Instead, they shot themselves in the feet.

According to all the recent polling, Clinton is a stronger presidential candidate today than she was before she testified in front of the Benghazi Committee. She now leads in every early state and nationally. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) gave Clinton a surge in momentum when he admitted that the Benghazi Select Committee was a partisan political stunt.

A hearing that was supposed to yield talking points and thirty-second campaign ads for the Republican side has rallied Democrats around their frontrunner and put her on a steady march towards the White House. 

Pew Survey: Fewer Americans Are Religious, More Are Gay Accepting

Pew Research Center released the results of a new survey of Americans which provides more bad news for Christofascists and their tawdry political whores in the Republican Party.  According to to Pew, the lowest number of Americans ever report themselves as "religious" and the percentage of Americans who now consider themselves to be "Nones" is the highest ever.  Even worse for the Christofascists/GOP is the fact that even among the "religious," support for gays and gay rights is surging.  Think Progress looks at the Pew findings (the full report is here).  Here are highlights:

In a study released on Tuesday, Pew researchers reported that an increasing number of Americans aren’t claiming a religious affiliation, and that the percentage of people who say they believe in God, pray daily, or regularly attend worship services has declined in recent years. Researchers say this is partially due to the rise of the religiously unaffiliated, a group of mostly young people who are sometimes called “nones” because of how they answer questions about religious identification; they now account for 23 percent of the adult population, a seven-point increase since 2007, according to the study.

According to the survey, nonreligious Americans are overwhelmingly progressive, most aligning themselves with the Democratic Party. Yet among the three-quarters of U.S. adults that still claim a religion, virtually every major faith group is moving to embrace progressive values — especially acceptance of homosexuality and LGBT rights.

“Nearly all major religious groups have become significantly more accepting of homosexuality in recent years — even groups, such as evangelicals and Mormons, that traditionally have expressed strong opposition to same-sex relationships,” the report reads.

This can be seen in the wave of Christian groups that have voted to embrace same-sex marriage in over the past few years, such as Presbyterian Church (USA) and the Episcopal Church. . . . . And while the Catholic Church officially condemns same-sex relationships, the average Catholic is actually more progressive on marriage equality than the average American. 

Indeed, the next generation of theological conservatives has already shifted on the issue: half of millennials who identify as evangelical Protestants now say homosexuality should be accepted by society.

Although religious Americans still make up nearly three-quarters of Democrats and “Democratic-leaning” adults, there are now more “nones” in the group than Catholics, mainline Protestants, evangelical Protestants, or members of the historically black Protestant tradition. In total, three-in-ten Democrats now say they have no religion — a nine-point spike in seven years.

While the proportion of liberal people of faith is projected to grow over time, this shift among progressives doesn’t necessarily translate into an immediate windfall for Democrats, however. Although growing numbers of religious Americans are aligned with “nones” in the pursuit of some progressive policies, religiously unaffiliated people are notably less involved in the political process than their spiritual counterparts. According to the study, 71 percent of adults who claim a religion are registered to vote, compared to just 62 percent of “nones.” 

Obviously, I view the decline of religion to be be a positive.  However, we have much to do to motivate the "Nones" to get out and vote so that the Christofascists cannot force their beliefs on others via the ballot box. 

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty