Saturday Morning Male Beauty

Is it Legal to Fire Someone for Being Gay?

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

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

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

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

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

The cases will be argued Tuesday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday Morning Male Beauty

The Growing Trump Created Economic Slump

Troubles for congressional Republicans are growing and not just because of Donald Trump's diarrhea of the mouth and tweet storms as the House of Representatives impeachment inquiry gains speed.  Like Trump, they are lying and obfuscating to avoid admitting Trump has engaged in impeachable offenses, and soon they will being doing the same as signs of Trump's self-created economic slump - trade wars and erratic policies do have consequences - become more evident.  Yes, the 35%  of the public that blindly supports Trump in a cult like manner will likely be unmoved as the economic downturn picks up momentum, but sane and sentient voters are likely to connect the dots and realize there is an additional reason Trump needs to be driven from the White House.  As Newsweek reports, one GOP strategist said to fellow Republicans "Trump is a suicide bomber, and you've strapped yourselves to him so tightly that when he explodes, you're going out to meet the 72 porn stars of the Trumpian afterlife with him."   That remark did not even factor in the looming economic issues. A column in the New York Times by a prominent economist lays out the damage Trump has done and continues to do.  Here are excerpts:

When he isn’t raving about how the deep state is conspiring against him, Donald Trump loves to boast about the economy, claiming to have achieved unprecedented things. As it happens, none of his claims are true. While both G.D.P. and employment have registered solid growth, the Trump economy simply seems to have continued a long expansion that began under Barack Obama.

But now it’s starting to look as if Trump really will achieve something unique: He may well be the first president of modern times to preside over a slump that can be directly attributed to his own policies, rather than bad luck.

There has always been a deep unfairness about the relationship between economics and politics: Presidents get both credit and blame for events that usually have little to do with their actions.

Now the U.S. economy is going through another partial slump. Once again, manufacturing is contracting. Agriculture is also taking a severe hit, as is shipping. Overall output and employment are still growing, but around a fifth of the economy is effectively in recession.

But unlike previous presidents, who were just unlucky to preside over slumps, Trump has done this to himself, largely by choosing to wage a trade war he insisted would be “good, and easy to win.”

The link between the trade war and agriculture’s woes is obvious: America’s farmers are deeply dependent on export markets, China in particular. So they’re hurting badly, despite a huge financial bailout that is already more than twice as big as the Obama administration’s auto bailout.

Shipping may also seem an obvious victim when tariffs reduce international trade, although it’s not just an international issue; domestic trucking is also in recession.

The manufacturing slump is more surprising. After all, America runs a large trade deficit in manufactured goods, so you might expect that tariffs, by forcing buyers to turn to domestic suppliers, would be good for the sector. That’s surely what Trump and his advisers thought would happen.

But that’s not how it has worked out. Instead, the trade war has clearly hurt U.S. manufacturing. Indeed, it has done considerably more damage than even Trump critics like yours truly expected.

The Trumpist trade warriors, it turns out, missed two key points. First, many U.S. manufacturers depend heavily on imported parts and other inputs; the trade war is disrupting their supply chains. Second, Trump’s trade policy isn’t just protectionist, it’s erratic, creating vast uncertainty for businesses both here and abroad. And businesses are responding to that uncertainty by putting plans for investment and job creation on hold.

So the tweeter in chief has bungled his way into a Trump slump, even if it isn’t a full-blown recession, at least so far. . . . Also, the pain in manufacturing seems to be falling especially hard on those swing states Trump took by tiny margins in 2016, giving him the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote. . . . . Trump is, as I said, unique in that he really did this to himself.

So what will come next? Trump being Trump, it’s a good bet that he’ll soon be denouncing troubling economic data as fake news; I wouldn’t be surprised to see political pressure on the statistical agencies to report better numbers.

The scary thing is that around 35 percent of Americans will probably believe whatever excuses Trump comes up with. But that won’t be enough to save him.

Trump is poised to utterly destroy the GOP, yet Republicans refuse to shout out that the emperor has no clothes.

More Thursday Male Beauty

FB friend Andre Brunelli.

Pete Buttigieg - The Underdog to Watch?

With health issues having temporarily sidelined Bernie Sanders - and made many much more worried about his advanced age - and Joe Biden's embroilment in the Ukraine scandal and heating up impeachment inquiry, it is a reminder that one never knows what can happen in long drawn out political campaigns.  Things happen to people and issues can surge to the forefront that no one contemplated just weeks earlier.  A piece in Politico looks at the change in the 2020 election dynamics that would unfold if Donald Trump were to be impeached and Mike Pence not go down with Trump - somewhat of a open question given Pence's apparent deep participation in the shakedown of Ukraine. Suddenly, things that seemed certain would be in great flux.  In this context, a column in the Washington Post suggests that Pete Buttigieg might yet be the candidate to watch.  Here are column highlights (in the interests of full disclosure, yes, I have given to his campaign):

Going into early primaries as the front-runner has its drawbacks. Should the surging Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) fail to win Iowa or New Hampshire, her current success will make later results disappointing. Past success in a state also raises expectations perilously high. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) won more than 49 percent of the vote in the Iowa caucuses in 2016; his RealClearPolitics average in Iowa polls is now 12 percent, less than a point ahead of South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

What should happen, say, if Buttigieg comes in third in Iowa, ahead of one of the current three front-runners? That’s a real possibility, and one reason that a betting person wanting to put money on an underdog might pick Buttigieg.

Buttigieg has a number of factors in his favor.

First, he is a proven fundraiser (taking in more than $19 million in the third quarter).

Second, he attracted big crowds and extremely positive coverage on his Iowa road trip. 

Third, he is doing what every other non-Biden candidate has failed to do: He is standing firm in the center left. He’s not promising single-payer health care nor confiscatory gun policies.

Fourth, he is smart and succinct enough in a debate to make trouble for the far-left candidates, thereby boosting his profile as one of the most adept combatants from the center-left.

Fifth, his military service helps his electability argument. It not only gives him some national security credibility but also helps him to take President Trump down more than a few pegs; he can contrast his own service with Trump’s fortuitous “bone spurs” that got him out of serving in Vietnam.

Finally, he is the most genuinely middle-class candidate among the top contenders. No millions from book sales, speeches, consulting gigs or past Senate fund-raising (to slide over into the presidential campaign fund).
 The conventional wisdom has been that Biden has to collapse before someone can move up in the not-too-far-left category of candidates. However, Biden might not disintegrate, and in fact, the loyalty of African Americans suggests that he will maintain a solid base of support at least until the early primaries. However, it is entirely possible that Buttigieg, without attacking Biden (in fact, he has smartly defended Biden against Trump’s scurrilous attacks), can impress debate-watchers and early state caucus and primary voters to pull him even with better-known candidates who should be able to clobber a mayor of a medium-size Midwestern city.

The wildcard in all of this is impeachment and Trump scandals. The mere possibility that Trump might not be the nominee is arguably enough to prompt primary voters to reexamine what it means to be electable. Moreover, as we trek down a path even more exhausting, terrifying and exasperating than the three years that proceeded it, with the circle of wrongdoers expanding well beyond the president, there is something to be said for someone who does not want to start a revolution, but rather, recover from the Trump ordeal. Someone preternaturally calm, logical and self-effacing might provide a welcome contrast to the Republican carnival.

In sum, as improbable as it might seem, next to Warren (who’s running a near-perfect campaign) Buttigieg might have the most effective campaign operation and message. It has been good enough to lift the mayor of South Bend into the top four candidates in the race.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

Is China Heading for Crisis?

With America's current political crisis sucking up most of the media attention, even as Trump strives to be an authoritarian ruler above the law, it is easy to forget that even dictatorships seem to have a maximum life expectancy and that nations like China, which seeks to hold a hegemony of Asia, have their own perils to face. While the Chinese regime is not as fossilized as that of the Soviet Union on the eve of its collapse, political strains are growing and not just in Hong Kong, a city state that exists as a sharp reminder of a dictatorial regimes limitations. Yes, China's leadership has a vision of where it wants the country to go in terms of economic power and influence, but the very prosperity that this will bring undermines dictatorial rule.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the growing difficulty China is experiencing in holding conflicting goals and desires under control.  How it all ends is anyone's guess.  Here are column excerpts:

China — or, rather, the Chinese regime — is in trouble. Tuesday’s gigantic parade in Beijing to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic looked like something out of the late Brezhnev era: endless military pomp and gray old men. Hong Kong is in its fourth straight month of protests, marked and stained by this week’s shooting of an unarmed teenage demonstrator. The Chinese economy is growing at its slowest rate in 27 years, even when going by the overstated official figures.

Meantime, capital is fleeing China — an estimated $1.2 trillion in the past decade — while foreign investors sour on Chinese markets. Beijing’s loudly touted Belt-and-Road initiative looks increasingly like a swamp of corruption, malinvestment and bad debt. Its retaliatory options in the face of Donald Trump’s trade war are bad and few. And General Secretary Xi Jinping has created a cult-of-personality dictatorship in a style unseen since Mao Zedong, China’s last disastrous emperor.

Remember the “Chinese Dream” — Xi’s vision of China as a modern, powerful, and “moderately well-off” state? Forget it. The current task for Chinese leadership is to avoid a full-blown nightmare of international isolation, economic decline, and domestic revolt.

The question is whether that’s still possible.

China’s presumptive trajectory once seemed clear. In domestic affairs: rapid economic reform; slow political opening. Lather, rinse, repeat. In international affairs: peaceful rise; burgeoning clout. It was to be a model of managed development, a Middle Kingdom fit for the 21st century.

That’s not what happened, for reasons that Chang and others saw coming long ago. Rapid growth is easy when labor and capital are plentiful and cheap. But most developing countries inevitably fall into what’s called the middle-income trap, when they no longer have the cost advantages of poor countries but haven’t yet acquired the legal, educational, or technological advantages of rich ones.

Beijing’s dilemmas go deeper. Economic reforms generate sudden riches that are ripe targets for extravagant graft, particularly by powerful state actors. Graft creates incentives for further self-dealing, which distorts economic decision-making and breeds public cynicism. . . . The result: more corruption, more cynicism, more repression. How long that can keep going is an open question.

[S]cholars such as Larry Diamond and Minxin Pei have noted that dictatorships tend to have a roughly 70-year lifespan. At some point, the revolutionary fervor that sustains the first generation of leaders and the will to power that sustains the second gives way to the policy failures, mounting discontents, outside shocks and inner doubts that prove the undoing of the third.

Especially when the regime experiences some kind of blunt trauma, either in the form of a foreign-policy fiasco, an economic shock, or a moral outrage. In its attempts to respond to Hong Kong’s protests, Beijing risks all three.

Accommodating the protesters’ demands, above all the granting of genuine universal suffrage, is the right thing to do, but introduces a democratic principle fatal to the regime’s self-preservation.

Hence the looming crisis. It could be defused, if Beijing guarantees amnesty for all nonviolent protesters and removes the troops it has brought in from the mainland in exchange for a meaningful process of negotiation. Or it could be “solved” through some form of hyper-aggressive policing that stops short of an outright massacre. But that only puts a lid on discontents that will continue to boil.

A policy of hoping the protesters discredit themselves or simply run out of steam shows no sign of working. A Tiananmen-style crackdown would underscore the regime’s brutishness and incompetence, destroy Hong Kong as a global financial capital, and spur China’s neighbors to arm to the teeth and draw closer to Washington.

But if the regime’s travails prove anything, it’s that China’s current despot is no more enlightened than despots elsewhere, and China’s people are no less eager to have what people have elsewhere: justice, fairness, rights, freedom from fear, freedom itself. In China’s looming crisis, the human condition shines through.

More Wednesday Male Beauty

Trump Implicates Pence in Ukraine Impeachment Scandal.

Pence is lying about his role in the Ukraine scandal.

So far during his term as Donald Trump's sycophant-in-chief, Mike Pence has worked hard to engage in a "Sergeant Schultz" routine of claiming he saw nothing, heard nothing and knew nothing about Trump's various misdeeds and abuses of his office.  Indeed, some have remarked that it defies belief that Pence is as out of the loop and as uninformed as he would have the American public believe. Now, with the House of Representatives impeachment heating up, Trump is not only spouting insane nonsense, but he is also implicating Pence, Pompeo and others as having been on the threat/intimidation call to the president of Ukraine and, it would seem, part of the conspiracy to cover up the details of the call and Trump's call for a quid pro quo from Ukraine in exchange for much needed military aid. A piece in the Washington Post looks at Trump's implication of Pence in the entire effort that now threatens Trump - and by extension, Pence - with impeachment.  The overall take away is that of a criminal operation by a mobster and his lieutenants and henchmen.  Here are article excerpts:

President Trump repeatedly involved Vice President Pence in efforts to exert pressure on the leader of Ukraine at a time when the president was using other channels to solicit information that he hoped would be damaging to a Democratic rival, current and former U.S. officials said.

Trump instructed Pence not to attend the inauguration of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in May — an event White House officials had pushed to put on the vice president’s calendar — when Ukraine’s new leader was seeking recognition and support from Washington, the officials said.

Months later, [Trump] the president used Pence to tell Zelensky that U.S. aid was still being withheld while demanding more aggressive action on corruption, officials said. At that time — following Trump’s July 25 phone call with Zelenksy — the Ukrainians probably understood action on corruption to include the investigation of former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.

Officials close to Pence insist that he was unaware of Trump’s efforts to press Zelensky for damaging information about Biden and his son

Pence’s activities occurred amid several indications of the president’s hidden agenda. Among them were the abrupt removal of the U.S. ambassador to Kiev; the visible efforts by the president’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to insert himself in the U.S.-Ukraine relationship; as well as alarms being raised inside the White House even before the emergence of an extraordinary whistleblower complaint about Trump’s conduct.

Perhaps most significantly, one of Pence’s top advisers was on the July 25 call and the vice president should have had access to the transcript within hours, officials said.

Trump’s deployment of Pence is part of a broader pattern of using both executive authority and high-ranking officials in his administration to advance his personal or political interests — even in cases when those subordinates appear not to know that another agenda is in play.

White House officials said that Pence likely would have received the detailed notes of the president’s call in his briefing book on July 26.The five-page document also should have been part of the briefing materials he took with him to Warsaw to prepare for the meeting, according to the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

In his meeting with Zelensky, Pence conveyed the news that hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid to Ukraine was not going to be released amid concerns about the country’s lagging efforts to combat corruption. He also emphasized Trump’s frustration that he thought the European Union was not doing a sufficient job in helping to provide aid.

[F]ormer officials said that Pence’s emphasis on corruption probably would have been interpreted by Zelensky as “code” for that issue [i.e. finding dirt on Biden], whether the vice president intended it or not. . . . A top Pence staffer rejected the charge that the vice president was conveying an inappropriate — or coded — message from the president.  

A piece in New York Magazine looks further into Pence's extensive role that suggests that either his Sergeant Schultz routine is a big lie or that he is so stupid and incompetent that he needs to resign his office.  Here are highlights:

Vice-President Mike Pence is knee-deep in the Ukraine scandal. He is floating the absurd defense that, while he did participate in Trump’s plan to extort Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden, he was completely ignorant of what he was doing.

Although President Trump “used Pence to tell [Ukrainian president Volodymyr] Zelensky that U.S. aid was still being withheld,” the Washington Post reports, Pence’s aides insist he had no idea what he was actually being used for.

Pence’s involvement in the plot was extensive. White House officials had him cancel a planned trip to Zelensky’s inauguration. One of Pence’s top advisers was on the July 25 call when Trump made clear his demand that Zelensky open investigations into various Democratic officials, including Biden, whom Trump named on the call. Pence was given the transcript of the call before his September 1 meeting with Zelensky, when he reiterated Trump’s threat.

Pence’s defense is that, even though the readout of Trump’s call with Zelensky was in his briefing materials on his trip to Europe, he did not bother to read it before the meeting.

So Pence didn’t read or understand the vital background information he needed before this important national-security meeting. He didn’t hear the widespread alarm rippling through the administration that Trump was acting improperly. He somehow failed to pick up on Rudy Giuliani’s repeated public boasts — in the New York Times, on Fox News, on Twitter, and in any media he could find — that he was pressuring Ukraine to investigate the Bidens in his personal capacity as Trump’s lawyer. Most amazing, Pence’s defense is that when he delivered Trump’s threat in the meeting with Zelensky, Pence had no idea that “corruption” was code for ordering up investigations of Trump’s domestic enemies. If Pence is so ignorant that he could be pulled into an extortion plot without having any idea what he was doing, while missing numerous public and private signs that would have spelled it out, he is too dumb to serve as vice-president or even to be allowed to use metal cutlery. There is no way Pence is quite that stupid.

Pence was asked whether the aid was being held up over the Biden probes, and he answered by reciting the “corruption” party line. Pence knew exactly what he was doing.

If one needs further proof that Pence is lying, consider this: in all my years in politics - and life in general - absolutely no one lies more than evangelical Christians, a group that Pence claims to belong to.