Hey! While many of you are driveling on ad naseam about who Barack's running-mate will be, I just wanted to take the opportunity to remind you that Election 2008 will be the most important election ever for achieving marriage equality in the United States. California has become ground zero in the debate over gay rights, with rabidly antigay conservatives threatening to nullify the California Supreme Court's courageous decision legalizing marriage equality.

So far, polls about voter attitudes toward Proposition 8 have been favorable for supporters of marriage quality. But now is not the time to get complacent. There have been two major developments in the last twenty-four hours that will be of interest to all progressives and advocates of GLBT rights. More after the jump.

John McNicotine is now for the tobacco lobby after years of working against it.  He not only opposes the cigarette taxes he used to support but also opposes FDA regulation of the tobacco industry after years of supporting it.  McNicotine is an ex-smoker and should understand just how addictive nicotine is, and he even acknowledged the exceptionally high death rate for tobacco users when he joked that cigarette exports to Iran were part of his plot to kill Iranian citizens.  For McNicotine to cave in to the tobacco cartel is the ultimate flip-flop:
http://www.boston.com/...

Why has McNicotine caved in to the interests of the tobacco drug cartel?  It couldn't possibly have anything to do with hiring tobacco lobbyist Charlie Black as his senior adviser.  Move along folks.  There's nothing to see here:
http://firedoglake.com/...

Now let's use the traditional Rethug "moral values" and "sanctity of life" frames against McNicotine!  There's more in the flip.

I answered the door of my home in San Francisco this morning, and a man smiled at me from my porch. "I'm here from Yes on Proposition 8," he said. That's the evil-spirited California proposition to amend our state constitution to strip same sex couples of the right to marry legally in the state, which we currently have.

I smiled back at him, and said, "Oh, well then I hope you go to hell. Now get the fuck off my property." (I really did say that. I have witnesses.) And then I slammed the door.

I was sitting there watching Big Brother and this sixty-second commercial aired. During primetime.

The anti-gay attack machine worked before; will it work again? I'm a contributing writer for queer media cites AfterEllen.com/AfterElton.com, and today they're running my article that asks just that question of a wide variety of media and political figures including Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, Congressman Barney Frank, Joe Scarborough, AmericaBlog.com's John Aravosis, and a number of others -- including Karl Rove himself.

Portions XPosted 8/3/2008 11:23 AM PDT on MyDesert.com

According to one of my activist friends, a former deacon of a religious extremist church in Utah, who attends an evangelical megachurch in the Coachella Valley in order to monitor its adherence to the tax code as it applies to its tax exempt status, churches across America today began '100 Days of Prayer' against Marriage Equality and cajolled their members and attendees to vote in favor of Proposition 8 and defeat gay marriage at the polls in November.

More below the flip...

There's nothing you can do that can't be done.
Nothing you can sing that can't be sung...
All you need is love, all you need is love,
All you need is love, love, love is all you need.

Shortly after 5 PM on June 16, 2008, longtime lesbian activists Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin were wedded by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome. Both women were well up into their eighties and had been together for 55 years. They were founding members of the Daughters of Bilitis which began way back in 1955 and became the nation's first lesbian advocacy group.

Given their history, it was fitting that they were the first gay Californians to get legally hitched. They were followed by hundreds more, joining the many gays who had already married in Massachusetts where it has been legal since 2004.

California voters will be voting on Proposition 8, a Constitutional Amendment to ban marriage equality, in November.  So far, polls have shown more opposition to this ballot initiative than support, indicating that Californians are ready to uphold the right of every loving couple to marry.  Good for us.

But the proponents of discrimination are mad.  They are pissed.  As hell.  And they are taking California's Attorney General, Jerry Brown, to court.  Why?  Because the Attorney General of our state, Jerry Brown, has set the title and summary of the ballot initiative to read that it would:

eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry.

No marriage shall be contracted in this commonwealth by a party residing and intending to continue to reside in another jurisdiction if such marriage would be void if contracted in such other jurisdiction, and every marriage contracted in this commonwealth in violation hereof shall be null and void.

The above law was placed on the books in 1913, due to the fact that many jurisdictions barred interracial marriage - apparently, our legislators of the time wished to prevent a crush of out-of-state couples descending on the Commonwealth to get married and spark legal battles in their home states.  Since the Goodridge v. Department of Public Health decision, which legalized same-sex marriage in MA, this bigoted law was used to keep the same thing from happening here.  Happily, our legislature repealed this stain on our constitution with an overwhelming 77% vote in the Massachusetts State House today!

This morning, the anti-marriage equality movement announced plans to file a lawsuit against Attorney General Jerry Brown for the changes made to the summary and title of their precious hate initiative, also known as Proposition 8.

I find this both laughable and, in a way, a great exposure of the lengths these people will go to in order to get their way. It's laughable, because they got their panties in a twist when the pro-equality side filed a lawsuit to keep it off the ballot, saying that we were trying to take away the right of the people to vote on the issue. And it's a great exposure because their argument boils down to, essentially, that this wording change will make it more likely that people will vote no on Proposition 8. And they really don't like that. They don't like that at all. They want their pristine, pre-May-15th wording back.

I doubt they'll get it. Let's jump to talk about why.

(Correction added in bold; thanks to kaleidoscope for the correction) The title and summary of Proposition 8, which I've heard referred to as "Proposition Hate," has been edited by the California State Attorney General's office to more accurately reflect the effects it would have if approved by the voters.

I'm pretty sure this is going to make it even harder for it to pass, which is great. I can see lawsuits going on either way, though, so we're not out of the woods yet. Come with me after the jump for the former and current wording, and a bit of analysis.

The Librarian of Congress has chosen Kay Ryan of Marin County, California, to be the next US Poet Laureate.

From SFGate:

Ryan learned about the honor Monday, when she and her partner of 30 years, Carol Adair, arrived home from the Aspen Ideas Festival  ...

The next day was a busy one, because she and Adair were scheduled to be remarried, having married the first time in 2004 at City Hall in San Francisco. "We'll have to get the rings re-engraved with the new date," she said.

That's a great thing to wake up to after Wednesday's disappointment. A new Field Poll (not the one taken in May, but one performed just this past week, from July 8 to July 14) shows that the majority of Californians still oppose Proposition 8, to the tune of 51% against to 42% in favor.

That, friends and neighbors, is great news. To me, it says that the pendulum really is swinging the other way, and that the tide has finally turned. (Gotta love repeatable results!)

Come with me after the jump for a short discussion of the results.

Well, I'd like to say that my husband and I are going into our second month of wedded bliss (tomorrow it will be a month!) without a care in the world. However, that would be a lie.

Today's California Supreme Court refusal to even hear the petition which gave very good and legal reasons to strip Proposition 8 off the ballot may be one of the reasons why we're both in a bit of a bad mood. Just perhaps.

Come with me after the fold to hear about the first month of our marriage, our honeymoon, and some tentative analysis of today's (misguided, in my opinion) decision by the California Supreme Court.

Unfortunately, it looks like  a majority vote on the legality of my marriage and thousands of others like it will be happening this November in California.

A post on the QueerLaw mailing list has just informed me that the California Supreme Court has issued a response to the motion requesting a stay in preventing Proposition 8 from appearing on the November 4, 2008 statewide ballot.

It is happening again.  Those who remember the tumultuous weeks and months after the Goodridge decision in Massachusetts will know exactly what I mean by "1913 law".  Our homophobic governor, Mitt Romney  decided to suddenly start enforcing an obscure law that had been forgotten for decades and was likely passed to limit interacial marriage.  That law prohibits out-of-state couples from marrying in MA when it is illegal for them to do so in their own states.  Bigots in the MA legislature could not ban interracial marriage here, so they blocked desperate couples from less tolerant states from doing so.

Now a similarly obscure law from 1915 is being invoked in WI to threaten loving same-sex couples with huge fines and jail time just for getting married out of state.  

Cross posted from http://www.21stcenturydems.org/....

Yesterday, as I reflected on the 44th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, I thought about how far we have come in the fight for equality and how much work we still have ahead of us. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence of the progress we have made as a nation all around us – none more visible than the Democratic Presidential Primary race between Senators Clinton and Obama. But even as we celebrate these victories we must keep in mind those who have been left behind in the struggle for equality.

As the recent California Supreme Court decision allowing gay marriage demonstrated, there are people and places in this country that are ready to correct the injustice being visited on gay Americans and support marriage equality.  Many of the most ardent opponents of gay unions claim to be "defending marriage" as though allowing two people of the same gender who love each other to get married somehow weakens the institution of marriage.

On June 20, Equality California, NCLR, and a whole host of groups filed suit in the Supreme Court of California against our Secretary of State, Debra Bowen. (Note that Debra Bowen is an amazing SoS; she's getting sued in her SoS capacity.) To grossly oversimplify, EQCA alleges that the signature gathering process was flawed for a few reasons:

Ultimately, this is a long shot. For a number of reasons, the Supreme Court is unlikely to pull the measure off the ballot in November. Let's go over those over the flip.