What if Virginia judges were elected?

Posted on July 28, 2006 by David

This is embarrassing…

ChangeServant has posted a link to a 2006 candidate questionnaire for judges (who are elected in Georgia), distributed by the Georgia Christian Coalition.

The survey provides this definition: “Judicial activism occurs when a judge interjects his or her own personal beliefs and policy views to achieve a desired outcome by failing to adhere closely and strictly to the text of a statute or constitutional provision,” then asks candidates to state that this would in all cases be inappropriate.

It then goes on to ask a series of questions about the candidates’ personal beliefs and policy views on a list of controversial social issues, including abortion, same sex marriage, adoption by gay people, domestic partnership rights, and government endorsement of religion.

ChangeServant would like to know: If personal views are not to be interjected to achieve a desired outcome, why do we need to know what a judge’s personal views are?

Good question. If judges were elected in Virginia, do you suppose the Some Families Foundation, et al, would survey them for their qualifications as anti-equality activists, too? And would they have any idea how stupid that would look?

Another example of the rule: When anti-gay activists blather on and on about something they claim their opponents are doing, it’s a fairly reliable indicator of their own behavior.

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New Polling results on Marshall-Newman Amendment

Posted on July 27, 2006 by David

Breaking news from the Commonwealth Coalition…

This does not mean defeating the amendment will be a cakewalk, folks. What it does mean is that if we educate the voters and get them to read the whole thing, we can win. Given the stakes – and it’s now clear we can’t rely on the courts to protect our rights – I’d say it’s worthwhile to do everything in our power to make that happen, wouldn’t you?

New Poll Finds Only a Minority Supports Marshall/Newman Amendment;
54% of Likely Voters Are No or Undecided

(Richmond, VA) Today, The Commonwealth Coalition released findings from a recent statewide poll of likely Virginia voters that shows significant erosion in support for the Marshall/Newman amendment. A 23% lead last summer deteriorated to a “virtual statistical dead heat” when voters were read the actual language that will be on the ballot in the fall. 54% of likely voters now say they will vote NO or are undecided. Support for the amendment is now well below 50%.

“The difference in these results comes simply from voters’ common sense reading of the fine print in this ill-considered proposal,” said Claire Guthrie Gastañaga, Campaign Manager for The Coalition. Gastañaga continued, “Virginians who actually read the whole amendment see that it opens a Pandora’s box of unintended consequences, and they don’t want to do that.”

“Our challenge now is to be sure voters know to read the fine print before they vote,” Gastañaga said. “If they do, we are confident that they will vote NO to this far reaching proposal to write discrimination into Virginia’s bill of rights and intrude the government into our private lives.”

The findings released by The Coalition today were from a survey of 800 likely voters conducted in late June and are set out in the attached confidential memo to the campaign from Schapiro Research Group and Fabrizio McLaughlin & Associates, the bi-partisan polling team that conducted the research for The Coalition.

Fabrizio, McLaughlin and Associates, headed by Tony Fabrizio, is widely recognized as one of the leading GOP polling firms and public opinion experts in the country. Fabrizio, who has polled for successful political campaigns around the globe, has worked for more than a dozen U.S. Senators, numerous Governors and scores of Congressman including serving as chief pollster for Bob Dole’s 1996 Presidential run.

Schapiro Research Group, Inc. is headed by Beth Schapiro, Ph.D, who grew up in Richmond. SRG develops strategies for decision-makers in business, politics, and policy through innovative applied social research. The firm has advised several current and former members of the Virginia Senate and House of Delegates, including Viola O. Baskerville and C. Richard Cranwell.

The Commonwealth Coalition is a diverse group of individuals, businesses, and civic, community and religious organizations that have joined together to oppose the Marshall/Newman amendment to the Virginia bill of rights that will be Ballot Question #1 on November 7, 2006.

The Marshall/Newman amendment would write discriminatory language into Virginia’s Bill of Rights that would have far-reaching, unknown and unintended consequences for all unmarried Virginians, including straight couples, young and old.

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Please, don’t stereotype

Posted on July 23, 2006 by David

Almost everyone I’ve talked to who has worked on a campaign to defeat an anti-gay ballot initiative, or to pass a positive one, has remarked on how their own stereotypes have been challenged in the process. Sometimes the last people we expect to support us, based on appearance, location, or whatever cues cause us to make assumptions about others, turn out to be our greatest allies.

It may be tempting to stereotype those who will vote for the Marshall-Newman amendment as uneducated rubes with poor reading comprehension skills, but that’s really not fair. We should resist making these unfounded assumptions, and instead use empirical observation.

Here, from my own empirical observation, is a representative conversation with a “yes” voter:

***

Me: Excuse me Ma’am, do you know about the constitutional amendment that will be on the ballot in November? It’s the one that people are calling the “marriage amendment.”

Voter: Yes, I know about it. I’m going to vote for it.

Me: Ma’am, have you had a chance to read the entire thing?

Voter: No, I haven’t. I don’t need to.

Me: Ok, well, I highly recommend that you read it before you vote on it.

***

In fact, as a general rule, I highly recommend that voters read anything in its entirety before voting on it. It just seems like a good idea.

I offer this tale with the caveat that I don’t have a large enough sample size of people who are willing to say that they are voting yes on the amendment for this to be in any sense scientific.

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The abstract model of gender bipolarity

Posted on July 22, 2006 by David

A version of this article is cross-posted at Bacon’s Rebellion.

Virginia bloggers who are fighting to amend our Bill of Rights to make marriage the exclusive path to creating legal rights within families have recently generated some excellent discussion of the beliefs underlying their position.

Because much of the harm to gay families is done through denying children the security that would come from a legally recognized relationship both with their parents and between their parents, these discussions are often turning to the existence of same sex couple headed families, and to the definition of family itself. The meme “every child deserves a mother AND a father” (or some variant thereof) has emerged as the coordinated message of the campaign to claim that our families are undeserving of protection.

In one of these exchanges with James Atticus Bowden, one of the more active anti-gay bloggers, I pointed out what I thought was the obvious that just because two people are a mother and a father doesn’t mean that they will automatically have a particular set of attributes. I assumed that we could agree on the premise that individual men and women are not interchangeable, like two types of widget, but individuals with a variety of traits.

Apparently, I was wrong about that. I explained that the model he was presenting of men and women doesn’t fit the data very well, and that people in real life aren’t generally exemplars of gender stereotypes, but tend to be more complex. I described his unbending insistence that any given man and woman automatically bring specific, complementary traits to marriage or parenting, simply by virtue of their gender, as an “abstract model of gender bipolarity.”

James has profoundly misunderstood this point, and is doing what people sometimes do when they don’t understand something, which is to make fun of it.

“Homosexual activist bloggers,” he says, “call the idea of men as fathers and women mothers exclusively as ‘get this “an abstract model of gender bipolarity.”‘

As you can see, there is a significant leap of logic from the idea that any given man-woman pair do not necessarily create between them a specific complementarity of traits, and the unsupportable idea that fathers are not necessarily men and mothers are not necessarily women. How did James manage to get there?

Continue reading →

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The Nanny State

Posted on July 20, 2006 by David

Update: Broken WaPo link fixed.

What do Maggie Gallagher of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, Phil Burress of Citizens for Community Values, and Jan LaRue of Concerned Women for America have in common? Besides leading organizations dedicated to maintaining gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people as second-class citizens, they all explain their activism through personal narratives of the self-destructive choices they have made, and have devoted their lives to reordering the society that they feel is responsible for those choices.

Maggie Gallagher told her personal story at the Cato Institute forum in June. It seems that she had premarital sex, was impregnated, and was unable to convince the father to marry her. Her feeling of victimization as a single mother is what drives her mission to return the institution of marriage to its former role as authoritarian regulator of all sexuality. If same sex couples are denied the dignity and security of legal recognition, and GLBT people are demonized in the process, that’s just collateral damage.

Phil Burress is the founder and director of the Ohio group Citizens for Community Values, and “is behind almost every anti-gay effort in Ohio,” according to the Gay People’s Chronicle. He is on his third marriage. He freely admits that his first two marriages were destroyed by his addiction to pornography. According to a profile on Burress in the New York Times:

Mr. Burress was raised on a farm in Hamilton County outside Cincinnati. He attended a small Evangelical church two and sometimes three times a week, and married a fellow parishioner when he was 18.

At 14, he said, he found a pornographic magazine on the roadside and became obsessed with seeing more. Every chance he got, he said, he drove into Cincinnati to buy, and sometimes steal, magazines or videos.

Over the next two decades, he had four daughters from two marriages. But he says his obsession with the raunchy fantasy world of pornography ruined both marriages and drove him away from religion.

What his chance encounter with a pornographic magazine, and subsequent choice to obtain more (and more, and more), have to do with equality for GLBT people is never made clear. “By age 16, I was driving to downtown Cincinnati, where you could find adult bookstores on every corner and strip bars,” Burress tells Focus on the Family. “If I didn’t have the money, I’d steal it. I was totally obsessed.”

Jan LaRue, chief legal counsel for CWA, tells the strangest story of all. You can read the whole thing in a profile by the Washington Post.

Apparently, Mrs. LaRue had an abortion when she was a young woman. She made this choice because, although she was engaged to be married to the father, she was embarrassed and worried that if she carried the pregnancy to term, “people [would] be able to count back and know the truth about her: She had sex before marriage.”

Because she made the arguably stupid and immoral decision to terminate her pregnancy, just to erase the evidence that she had premarital sex with the man she was going to marry, she has made it her life’s work to deny other women any reproductive autonomy at all.

Like Burress and Gallagher, LaRue holds society responsible for her bad decision. She made a choice that she now regrets. One way of dealing with such regret might be to take responsibility for one’s actions, learn, accept the scars, and move on. These three authoritarians, however, encourage a different path. They don’t feel responsible for their mistakes. If the Nanny State had regulated their choices better, Gallagher and LaRue wouldn’t have gotten pregnant out of wedlock, and Burress wouldn’t have chosen pornography over his first two marriages. They couldn’t control their own sexual behavior, and feel it was the responsibility of the Nanny State to do it for them. They believe they can somehow put things right in their own lives by making sure the Nanny State is rigidly regulating all sexuality.

The disturbed relationship of these three individuals with the concept of “choice” helps to explain some of the Anti-Gay Industry’s rhetoric in that area.

Doug Mataconis has another example of the Nanny State in action at Below the Beltway.

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Get your anti-gay laws off our children

Posted on July 14, 2006 by David

So says Lambda Legal, who report that they have “been fighting to stem the tide of antigay litigation unleashed by Proposition One, Ohio’s constitutional amendment banning marriage for same-sex couples, ever since the law passed.”

For proof that the real intent behind the proposed Marshall-Newman amendment in Virginia is to undermine and ultimately eliminate the ability of GLBT people to live freely in society, build a life with the person we love, and establish and care for our families, you need look no farther than Ohio and Michigan, where very similar amendments have been in effect since 2004.

In Michigan, a national anti-gay organization is suing the University of Michigan for offering domestic partner benefits to employees. A similar lawsuit has been filed against Miami University in Ohio.

The Ohio amendment was also used as the basis of a custody suit involving two mothers and their son. The women had received joint custody from an Ohio court, but the biological mother later sought to invalidate the agreement on the basis of Ohio’s amendment. The domestic relations court defended the nonbiological mother’s custody rights and stated that the marriage-related amendment has no bearing on the parent-child relationship. The court’s ruling in the case, according to Lambda Legal attorney Camilla Taylor, shows that “you can’t use a constitutional amendment as a weapon to attack a cherished relationship between a child and an adult that that child considers a parent.”

“As well you shouldn’t,” adds Charles at Two Conservatives.

While we certainly agree, Charles then goes on to argue that the ruling in this Ohio case proves that concerns about the consequences of the Marshall-Newman amendment are misplaced, or even fabricated:

These two people were in love, and wanted to raise a family. They received protection to make medical decisions that was legally binding, and the Ohio amendment, which is essentially the same as Virginia’s amendment, had no effect on that agreement to provide for medical decisions.

It’s very interesting that he says this. In an almost identical case heard in Virginia, with the additional complication that the complaining parent kidnapped the couple’s daughter, fled to Virginia, and then filed for sole custody in violation of the federal law designed to prevent this sort of jurisdiction shopping, the Virginia court came to exactly the opposite conclusion.

The Winchester judge openly affirmed the argument of the attorney for Lisa Miller-Jenkins: That Virginia’s “Affirmation of Marriage Act” was intended to be used precisely as the means to attack a cherished relationship between a child and an adult that that child considers a parent. “This is clearly what the law was intended to do,” said the judge in rendering his opinion that Lisa was not obligated to honor the custody decision of a Vermont court that awarded visitation rights to her former partner.

Hopefully, (though he is still expressing support for the amendment) Charles will be kind enough to share with us his views on the outcome of this case. Considering his strongly stated opinion that the Ohio domestic relations court ruled correctly in affirming the parent-child relationship, and his (erroneous) assumption that a Virginia court would do the same, will he advocate for a humane ruling to reunite Isabella Miller-Jenkins with both of her parents?

Furthermore, since the language of the amendment extends the restrictions imposed by the “Affirmation of Marriage Act” to ALL unmarried couples, not only same sex couples, the opportunity for this sort of mischief increases exponentially. It’s time for advocates of the amendment to stop making the erroneous statement that it “only adds to the constitution what already exists in law.” It does not.

It’s obvious from this already existing opinion from a Virginia court that the pro-family victory in Ohio cannot be relied upon as evidence of what the Virginia amendment will and won’t be used for. We’ve already seen what it will be used for.

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Is this a breakthrough?

Posted on July 13, 2006 by David

There was a small kerfuffle a few days ago over some remarks by Democratic Party Chair Howard Dean about the New York Court of Appeals ruling that the prohibition of same sex marriage doesn’t violate the state’s Constitution. According to Dean:

“As Democrats, we believe that every American has a right to equal protection under the law and to live in dignity. And we must respect the right of every family to live in dignity with equal rights, responsibilities, and protections under the law.

Today’s decision by the New York Court of Appeals, which relies on outdated and bigoted notions about families, is deeply disappointing, but it does not end the effort to achieve this goal.”

This was the title of a post by Virginia blogger Shaun Kenney (who, as it turns out, is the campaign manager for Colorado Congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave, sponsor of the Federal “Marriage Amendment;” hat tip to Michael):

“Your Marriage is Outdated and Bigoted”

In plain English, what Mr. Dean said was “outdated and bigoted” are “notions about families,” and not anyone’s marriage, or even any particular kind of marriage. But that is not the interesting part, so I will set it aside.

I have said on numerous occasions on this blog that labeling the view that marriage is the union of a man and a woman as “bigoted” is unhelpful and unfair. There are many people who experience a genuine conflict between their strongly held definition of marriage as this specific relationship, and their equally strong desire to not hurt their gay relatives, friends and neighbors. They are searching for a resolution to this very real conflict, and assuming that they are motivated by bigotry is neither accurate nor productive.

In our conversation on his blog, Shaun Kenney tried repeatedly to get me to condemn Dean’s remarks as hateful. What I was, and am, willing to say is that I would not use the term “bigoted.” What I would say about the notions to which he refers is that they are “narrow and exclusionary.”

This is not, as Shaun would have it, because I think that narrow and exclusionary is a nicer way of saying bigoted. There certainly are bigoted notions (and people) in this debate, and I will use that term to describe them when it is clearly appropriate. Narrow and exclusionary are merely descriptive, and are to the best of my ability an articulation of what Shaun himself has said about the family, here.

What I am finding interesting is this: Shaun and others on the blog who share his views about family are both defending their own definition of the family as narrow and exclusionary:

Mike: Personally, I have no problem with having my views of marriage described as narrow and exclusionary (the only difference between saying “narrow and exclusionary” and saying “bigoted” is that the word “bigot” implies blind acceptance of some belief, whereas “narrow and exclusionary” merely implies shortsightedness). I will freely admit that my views of marriage are narrow and exclusionary the same way that mathematical principles are narrow and exclusionary. If 2+2=4, then it does NOT equal any other number narrow and exclusionary).

And insisting that this has essentially the same meaning as bigoted:

David: That’s why I said I would use different language. You expended a great deal of energy a few threads back explaining and defending your definition of family as narrow (limited to a very specific form) and exclusionary (excluding families that don’t meet that standard). I can’t, therefore, understand why you would take exception to my saying so, as if I’ve insulted you.

Shaun: So you agree with Dean’s sentiment, but disagree with how he said it?

If those who feel driven to enshrine their exclusionary definition of family in our Constitution are admitting, even insisting, that their own words are the semantic equivalent of bigotry, what can this mean?

A little help, anyone?

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