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The 6 Best Arguments For Gay And Lesbian Equality In Obama’s DOMA Brief

By Igor Volsky on Feb 23, 2013 at 1:50 pm

On Friday, President Obama’s Solicitor General, Donald Verrilli, filed a brief in United States v. Windsor, a case urging the Supreme Court to outlaw Section 3 of a 1996 federal law that prohibits the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages.

The Defense of Marriage Act or DOMA, the Obama administration contends, “denies to tens of thousands of same-sex couples who are legally married under state law an array of important federal benefits that are available to legally married opposite-sex couples,” does not substantially further “any important governmental interest” and is thus unconstitutional, violating “the fundamental constitutional guarantee of equal protection.” Here are the six most pro-equality arguments in the administration’s brief:

1. Section 3 “denies to legally married same-sex couples many substantial benefits afforded to legally married opposite-sex couples under federal employment, immigration, public health and welfare, tax, and other laws.” For instance, a same-sex spouse of an “active-duty military servicemember is excluded from certain housing, healthinsurance, and disability benefits that would be afforded to an opposite-sex spouse…. A non-citizen same-sex spouse of a United States citizen cannot qualify as the citizen spouse’s immediate relative for purposes of obtaining lawful permanent residence. ”

2. Gay and lesbian people have been subject to a significant history of discrimination in this country. Until Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003), criminal laws in many states prohibited their private sexual conduct. In addition, gay and lesbian people have long suffered discrimination in employment, immigration, criminal violence, child custody, police enforcement, voter referenda, and other contexts. “That history ranges from colonial laws ordering the death of “any man [that] shall lie with mankind, as he lieth with womankind,”… to state laws that, until very recently, “demean[ed] the[] existence” of gay and lesbian people.”

3. Sexual orientation is such a “distinguishing characteristic,” and that is true even though so many gay and lesbian people have been forced for so long to hide their identities in order to avoid discrimination. As this Court has recognized, sexual orientation is a core aspect of human identity, and its expression is an “integral part of human freedom.”

4. The “broad consensus in the scientific community is that, for the vast majority of people (gay and straight alike), sexual orientation is not a voluntary choice.There is likewise a medical consensus that efforts to change an individual’s sexual orientation are generally futile and potentially dangerous to an individual’s well-being. Accordingly, sexual orientation readily constitutes an “obvious, immutable, or distinguishing characteristic” for purposes of equal-protection law.”

5. “No sound basis exists for concluding that same-sex couples who have committed to marriage are anything other than fully capable of responsible parenting and child-rearing. To the contrary, many leading medical, psychological, and social-welfare organizations have issued policy statements opposing restrictions on gay and lesbian parenting based on their conclusions, supported by numerous scientific studies, that children raised by gay and lesbian parents are as well adjusted as children raised by heterosexual parents.”

6. If anything, “the denial of federal benefits otherwise accorded to married individuals undermines the efforts of same-sex couples to raise their children, hindering rather than advancing any interest in promoting child welfare.”

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Justice

5 Reasons Why Looser Gun Laws Won’t Guarantee Women’s Safety

By Kendall Bills, Guest Blogger on Feb 23, 2013 at 12:30 pm

In the wake of the tragedy at Newtown and the growing bipartisan support for sensible gun safety regulations, the gun manufacturing lobby has advanced a particularly noxious lie: that an unchecked, free-for-all gun market could guarantee women’s safety. In reality, gun violence has a particularly devastating impact for women, who suffer from domestic violence at stunning rates. This week alone, at least 11 people were shot in domestic violence related incidents. Here are the facts about women and gun violence:

1. Women care about gun safety. A recent poll released by the Pew Research Center revealed a stark gender divide when it comes to support for common sense gun violence prevention measures—a 21-point gap between men and women asked about the relative importance of gun violence prevention compared to unfettered access—with women focused on safety. 90 percent of women are concerned about gun violence—and 63% are very concerned.

2. The threat of violence in the home is real. Women are twice as likely to be shot and killed by intimate partners as they are to be murdered by strangers using any type of weapon. American women who are killed by their intimate partners are more likely to be killed with guns than by all other methods combined. Approximately 700 American women are shot and killed by intimate partners each year.

3. Convincing women to buy guns is a marketing strategy, not a public service. Despite gun manufacturer’s rhetoric about protecting women, the reality is that selling women guns is about profit, not protection—as demonstrated above, having a gun in the home is not a guarantee for safety, and actually endangers the 960,000 women who experience domestic violence each year.

4. Stalkers can buy guns. There is currently no federal law prohibiting those convicted of stalking from acquiring firearms. This is particularly disturbing given that stalking is usually part of a pattern of escalating, violent behavior. An abuser’s access to a gun is associated with an 8-fold increase in the risk of homicide.

5. Women are listening to those most affected by gun violence. When given a list of people and organizations and asked which groups were most influential on matters of gun violence, women’s top two picks were “a mother trying to keep her kids safe,” and “someone whose family members were killed.” In last place? The NRA.

Where do women go from here? The answer is: we’re already on the move. The Pew poll reveals that women are eager to engage on the topic of gun violence, with political activism at the top of the list. When asked what they were most likely to do to address gun violence, the number one-ranked answer was writing elected officials in support of new laws.

Climate Progress

Dust Bowl Days: Historic U.S. Drought Projected To Persist For Months, Worsened By Thin Western Snowpack

By Climate Guest Blogger on Feb 23, 2013 at 11:33 am

NOAA's latest seasonal drought outlook projects historic drought will persist.

By Lauren Morello and Andrew Freedman via Climate Central. See also the NY Times piece, “Thin Snowpack in West Signals Summer of Drought”

Time is running out to avert a third summer of drought in much of the High Plains, West and Southwest, federal officials warned Thursday.

Without repeated, significant bouts of heavy snow and rain in the remaining days of winter, a large part of the country will face serious water supply shortages this spring and summer, when temperatures are hotter and average precipitation is normally low.

The drought already ranks as the worst, in terms of severity and geographic extent, since the 1950s. Though it’s not over yet, its economic impact appears to be severe, said Brad Rippey, a meteorologist at the Agriculture Department’s Office of the Chief Economist.

It “will probably end up being a top-five disaster event” on the government’s ranking of the costliest weather events of the past three decades, he said at a Capitol Hill briefing Thursday.

There is little relief predicted in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) latest three-month drought outlook, which the agency released Thursday. Federal forecasters predict that drought will persist in the Rocky Mountain and Plains states, expand throughout northern and southern California and return to most of Texas, a state that has been mired in drought since 2011.

NOAA does forecast improvements in drought conditions in the Upper Midwest and Southeast, areas that have received beneficial precipitation in recent weeks.

“The next couple of months will kind of determine how the spring and summer plays out in that part of the country,” said Jake Crouch, a climate scientist at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. Crouch said that continued drought conditions could threaten water supplies in many areas, particularly in the Southwest.

Dwindling Water Supplies

With drought extending into its second or even third year in some areas, the main concerns are shifting from agriculture and recreation to water supplies as rivers run dry and reservoirs shrink.

Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston on Feb. 15, Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon said water managers are especially concerned about the situation in West Texas, where emergency conservation plans have gone into effect as water supplies dwindle.

In the western U.S., low mountain snowpack is once again a concern, especially in portions of Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming that feed the Platte and Arkansas rivers, said Mike Strobel of USDA’s National Resources Conservation Service.

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Justice

13 GOP Pennsylvania Senators Introduce New Plan To Rig The Electoral College For Republicans

By Ian Millhiser on Feb 23, 2013 at 10:30 am

Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader Domini Pileggi (R)

Earlier this year, Republican National Committee Chair urged Republican lawmakers in states “that have been consistently blue that are fully controlled red” — i.e. blue states with Republican legislatures and governors — to enact a plan rigging the Electoral College so that it would be almost impossible for a Democrat to win the White House. Under these plans, a large chunk of blue state electoral votes would be allocated to the Republican candidate even if the Democratic presidential candidate won the state as a whole. Although some state lawmakers in key blue states such as Wisconsin or Michigan endorsed versions of this plan, the election rigging plans were widely derided as exactly what they are — cheating — and soon, even top Republicans like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) or Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell wanted nothing to do with election rigging. The plans to rig the Electoral College appeared dead.

Except, that is, for Pennsylvania.

Gov. Tom Corbett (R-PA) was one of the earliest supporters of rigging the Electoral College, backing a plan to do so as early as 2011. Republican state Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi was one of the leading supporters of election-rigging the and late this week, he — along with a dozen other co-sponsors — introduced a new plan to rig the Electoral College votes in his blue state of Pennsylvania. Under this legislation, a large chunk of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes would be awarded to the Republican candidate even though Pennsylvania is a solid blue state that has supported the Democratic candidate for president in every election since 1992.

Of course, while the Republican election-rigging plan calls for blue states to give away electoral votes to Republicans, red states like Texas or South Carolina will continue to award 100 percent of their electors to the Republican:

The 13 co-sponsors on Pileggi’s bill amount to exactly half of the 26 votes he needs to pass the bill through the state senate. According to state Rep. Mike Sturla (D-PA), now that Pileggi has introduced his election-rigging plan, Republicans could conceivably ram it through both houses of the state legislature and have it on Corbett’s desk in just four days.

Politics

The 1996 Illinois Senate Campaign And How Candidates Can Win On Gun Safety

By Robert Avruch, Guest Blogger on Feb 23, 2013 at 10:23 am

A look at the 1996 United States Senate campaign between then Democratic U.S. Rep. Dick Durbin and Republican Illinois State Rep. Al Salvi sheds an all-too-familiar light on how the effort to prevent gun violence has become a make-or-break issue for Illinois voters in next Tuesday’s special election to fill former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr’s seat.

After edging out the moderate Republican candidate Lt. Gov. Bob Kustra in the 1996 GOP primary, Al Salvi represented the most appealing, convincing candidate the Republican Party had presented in Illinois and was believed to have a legitimate chance at winning the Senate seat. The young NRA poster boy for Illinois spent his time on the campaign trail asserting the ’94 federal assault weapons ban was “silly,” calling the ’93 Brady Handgun Bill “cosmetic,” and offering to legalize concealed weapons in order to cut crime.

Meanwhile, Salvi’s opponent, then Representative Durbin was actively campaigning for sensible gun violence prevention measures. After co-sponsoring the ’93 Brady Handgun bill and supporting the ’94 assault weapons ban, he told Illinois voters, “We will not be a safer nation, a safer state, if people are carrying guns around shopping malls and restaurants.” Durbin joined forces with President Reagan’s former press secretary and gun-control activist Jim Brady to film a campaign ad that portrayed Salvi as an extremist on gun issues. In a Sunday radio interview just days before the election, Salvi responded by falsely charging that Jim Brady “used to sell” machine guns. Salvi later apologized and conceded, “Turns out that was a different Jim Brady.”

Salvi’s last-minute gaffe and extreme stance on guns proved to fracture the Illinois Republican party and rally Illinois voters around candidates who supported gun violence prevention. In one example, the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police opted to support Democratic House candidate Rod Blagojevich over the Republican incumbent, U.S. Rep Michael Flanagan, who earlier that year had supported an attempt to repeal the federal assault weapons ban. In his endorsement, the union’s president, Bill Nolan, said, “(It’s) almost a one-issue thing, and that is the guns.”

Salvi’s extreme stance on guns cost him the election. Durbin won the race by a landslide, leading Salvi 57 percent to 40 percent. Durbin acknowledged in his victory speech how important gun violence prevention was to Illinois voters: “I hope this victory tonight is a message that no political official in this state should ever, ever be cowered by the gun extremists.”

Salvi learned his lesson and two years later completely reversed his position, coming out in support of commonsense gun violence prevention measures, including the Brady law and the federal assault weapons ban. He wrote a guest editorial in the Chicago Sun Times making the about face in the hopes of positioning himself for another Senate run. Salvi explained: “I’m a solid conservative who recognizes I made a mistake on presenting my position on the gun issue. I lost the big picture. I was wrong.”
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Climate Progress

Open Thread Plus Cartoon Of The Week

By Joe Romm on Feb 23, 2013 at 9:29 am

Opine away!

By David Horsey, “Even deadly meteors and asteroids may not unite the human race“:

In the movies, when humanity is faced with imminent doom, whether from a massive asteroid or an invasion of space monsters, the people of the world forget their differences, band together and save themselves. In the real world, such unanimity of purpose is far more rare. When it came time to help their fellow Americans whose lives were upended by Sandy, quite a few members of Congress balked, delayed and refused to let go of their compulsive quest to scale back government spending. Ideology trumped compassion.

Similarly, many of the same people refuse to accept the settled scientific facts that indicate the changing global climate is bringing more destructive storms, drought and rising seas. They cannot honestly refute the science, so they willfully ignore it. They have a vested interest in the status quo and so choose short-term political and economic gain over the long-term welfare of the human race. It is oh-so-much easier to blame the president, blame a conspiracy of international scientists or talk about God’s wrath than it is to tell the oil and coal companies and the polluting industries that provide large donations at election time that they cannot do business as they have in the past.

Sounds like that classic Onion piece: “Republicans vote to repeal Obama-backed bill that would destroy asteroid headed for Earth.”

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