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African-American Lawyers To SCOTUS: We’ve Heard These Anti-Marriage Equality Arguments Before

By Zack Ford on Mar 7, 2013 at 3:30 pm

Howard University School of Law

The Howard University School of Law is one of the oldest law schools in the country and the oldest law school at any historically black college or university (HBCU). Its Civil Rights Clinic has filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn Proposition 8 by highlighting how all of the arguments against same-sex marriage equality are simply recycled variations on arguments that were used to justify prohibitions of interracial marriage until Loving v. Virginia was decided in 1967 (citations omitted):

In the Jim Crow era, the denial of marriage rights to interracial couples served as one of the most potent symbols of the less-than-equal status of  African-Americans. As recently as 1967, sixteen states still had anti-miscegenation statutes on their books; the last such statute was not officially repealed until 2000. Opponents of interracial marriage justified criminal prohibitions against such unions by pointing to the purported detrimental effect of interracial births and parentage, the supposed destruction of society if people marry between the races, and the so-called natural law rationale for keeping the races separate.

While public debate over interracial unions has generally died since Loving v. Virginia, today the opposition to marriage for same-sex couples relies on arguments strikingly similar to those raised in opposition to interracial marriage. Without acknowledging the racial provenance of these discredited arguments, opponents of marriage equality have attacked same-sex couples as a threat to American society, American families and heterosexual marriage, as an affront to the laws of God and nature, and as a menace to their children.

The brief goes on to highlight five distinct arguments that transcend the debates between marriage equality for interracial couples and marriage equality for same-sex couples:

  • SOCIAL ORDER: Marriage equality is a threat to the social order and would “introduce a form of pollution to marriage.”
  • SEXUALIZATION: The people who want to get married have relationships that are purely sexual, promiscuous, and “deviant.”
  • PSEUDOSCIENCE: Researchers have distorted research to raise fears about supposed consequences of marriage equality.
  • JUDEO-CHRISTIAN VALUES: The Bible forbids recognizing these relationships.
  • CHILDREN: These relationships will cause physical and psychological damage to the children they raise.

The similarities are jarring, and Howard provides plenty of examples for each to demonstrate just how unoriginal the arguments against same-sex marriage truly are. The brief concludes with this stirring rebuke of equality’s opponents, including a quote from gay black poet James Baldwin:

But the certainty and monotony with which some will always sound the death knell for society, morality, and faith, just because two adults choose to marry, cannot obscure the reality that we heard virtually the same arguments for almost three hundred years to justify preventing two black people from marrying and then a black man from marrying a white woman. Nor, when all is said and done, can these jeremiads about how marriage equality for same-sex couples will lead to our final slouching toward Gomorrah obscure the reality that it is “an inexorable law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own.”

(HT: Kathleen Perrin.)

Economy

The Gender Wage Gap Is Getting Worse

By Pat Garofalo on Mar 7, 2013 at 3:05 pm

A new report from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research shows that the pay gap between men and women increased between 2011 and 2012, leaving women making $163 less per week:

In 2012, the ratio of women’s to men’s median weekly full-time earnings was 80.9 percent, a decline of more than one percentage point since 2011 when the ratio was 82.2 percent. This corresponds to a weekly gender wage gap of 19.1 percent for 2012. Women’s median weekly earnings in 2012 were $691, a marginal decline compared to 2011; men’s median weekly earnings were $854, a marginal increase compared to 2011.

Another measure of the earnings gap, the ratio of women’s and men’s median annual earnings for full-time year-round workers, was 77.0 in 2011 (data for 2012 are not yet available), less than half of a percentage point lower than in 2010 and equal to the gap in 2009. (This means the annual gender wage gap for full-time year-round workers is 23 percent.)

As Bryce Covert noted at Forbes, “What’s particularly strange about this is that the wage gap typically narrows during a recession.” But women have been hammered by the hemorrhaging of public sector jobs that has occurred in the last few years, as states and the federal governments cut back significantly due to conservative insistence on austerity.

The wage gap between women and men persists even for high-paying jobs, and women are significantly more likely to work for the minimum wage. A woman’s total lifetime earnings lost to the pay gap could feed a family of four for 37 years.

Justice

Why Chief Justice Roberts’ Voting Rights Act Math Doesn’t Add Up

By Aviva Shen on Mar 7, 2013 at 3:00 pm

The US Supreme Court seems poised to invalidate a key section of the Voting Rights Act after last week’s hostile oral argument. Conservative justices insisted that special protections for minority voters in historically discriminatory districts are now obsolete. While Justice Antonin Scalia brashly attacked the law as “a perpetuation of racial entitlement,” Chief Justice John Roberts attempted a more measured statistical argument. Roberts claimed that Section 5′s focus on southern states was outdated because Mississippi has the highest black voter turnout, while Massachusetts has the lowest.

Statistics guru Nate Silver dismantled Roberts’ argument in his New York Times column today, pointing out that Roberts cherry-picked two states outside the norm:

In fact, it would be dangerous to infer very much from Massachusetts and Mississippi. In 2004, for instance, while Mississippi was reported to have strong black turnout, black turnout was poor in Arizona and Virginia, which are also covered by Section 5.

Silver examined data in states covered by Section 5 versus states not covered by Section 5, finding little difference in black voter turnout:

However, Silver argues, Roberts’ reasoning that the improved minority turnout in covered states means the Voting Rights Act is no longer necessary is flawed. It may well be that the Voting Rights Act is responsible for correcting the huge regional disparity in voter turnout in 1964. Therefore, Roberts’ examples of Massachusetts and Mississippi turnout say little about the actual effects of the VRA.

Meanwhile, several covered states have vote-suppressing legislation waiting in the wings for the invalidation of Section 5. Arizona Republicans are pushing legislation to ban anyone working on behalf of a political organization from bringing sealed mailed ballots to a polling place — a hugely successful get out the vote initiative used in 2012 for Latinos in Phoenix. Virginia just passed a restrictive voter ID law nearly identical to the Texas voter ID law struck down last year for harming minority voting rights. Texas is also waiting to enact a redistricting plan tossed out by federal judges for the map’s “substantial surgery” to dilute predominantly black districts. Without Section 5, all these laws would be allowed to go into effect, with clear implications for minority turnout.

Health

New Jersey Lawmakers: Don’t Kick Medical Marijuana Users Off Organ Transplant Lists

By Sy Mukherjee on Mar 7, 2013 at 3:00 pm

Medical marijuana’s hazy legal status is a well-known flash point for tension between state and federal law. While those discrepancies tend to manifest themselves in the form of raids on suppliers and dispensaries, the conflict over medical marijuana laws doesn’t just affect business owners — it can also take a toll on Americans who use the drug for painful, chronic medical conditions such as cancer.

But New Jersey’s Senate Health, Human Services and Senior Citizens Committee is taking action to prevent some of those unforeseen consequences from affecting medical marijuana-using Garden State residents — specifically, to protect them from getting kicked off transplant lists due to their physician-prescribed marijuana use. On Tuesday, the panel passed S-1220, legislation that “would provide that a registered, qualifying patient’s authorized use of medical marijuana would be considered equivalent to using other prescribed medication rather than an illicit substance and therefore would not disqualify the person from needed medical care, such as an organ transplant.”

According to a press release from the bill’s co-sponsors, state Sens. Joseph Vitale (D) and Nicholas Scutari (D), the bill is a precautionary measure to prevent cases like that of a California cancer patient who was kicked off of a liver transplant list due to his medical marijuana use:

“We are hearing of cases in other states of sick and dying patients being kicked off organ transplant waiting lists for their legal use of medical marijuana,” said Senator Vitale, D-Middlesex, and Chairman of the Senate Health Committee. “This practice is unconscionable as the patients have followed their doctors’ orders and have taken a legal medication to reduce the pain and suffering associated with their illness. Transplant centers should not be able to discriminate against people for using this prescription pain killer.”

“Medical marijuana is a compassionate and humane way to manage pain and provide relief from side effects that often accompany chronic and terminal ailments,” said Senator Scutari, D-Union and Middlesex. “Our medical marijuana law is already the most restrictive in the nation with built in protections to ensure that people are using the prescribed drug as a treatment for prolonged and chronic medical conditions rather than for recreational use. The thought that someone would be denied treatment that could help cure their condition or greatly reduce their suffering because of their legal use of this prescribed drug is abhorrent. We must address this issue.”

New Jersey’s medical marijuana law is indeed the most stringent in the nation, with potency caps, restrictions limiting medical marijuana purchases to state-approved “Alternative Treatment Centers,” and the country’s first — and only — public registry of state-approved physicians who can prescribe the drug.

S-1220 may be a preventative measure, but it underlies the complexities of an issue that rests at the awkward intersection of controlled substance policy and real-world public health concerns. For instance, many medical marijuana users have to dole out hundreds of dollars per month on treatment costs since they don’t receive prescription drug benefits for their medication through health insurance. That financial toll is particularly burdensome for the most common medical cannabis users — cancer patients — who already pay exorbitant bills for chemotherapy, despite the pain relief and other medical benefits that many users have reported.

If the bill does eventually pass both New Jersey state chambers, it’s still an open question whether or not Gov. Chris Christie (R) will sign it. Christie has publicly opposed any efforts to decriminalize marijuana in his state, but has also assured cannabis advocates that he does not wish to hamstring sick and suffering Americans’ access to treatments under New Jersey’s medical marijuana law.

Economy

Pelosi Backs Bill That Would Raise Minimum Wage To $10 An Hour

By Travis Waldron on Mar 7, 2013 at 1:55 pm

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday called on Republican House leadership to take up legislation recently introduced by Rep. George Miller (D-CA) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) that would raise the federal minimum wage above $10 an hour. Miller and Harkin announced the bill, which would set the minimum wage at $10.10 per hour and index it to inflation so it raised automatically thereafter, this week.

Pelosi cited recent stock gains that pushed markets to record highs even as worker incomes remain stagnant as her reason for backing the legislation, The Hill reports:

“This week, we saw something quite remarkable, the stock market soaring to record heights. At the same time, we see productivity keeping pace,” Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol. “But we don’t see income for America’s middle class rising. In fact, it’s been about the same as since the end of the Clinton years.” [...]

“If we are going to honor our commitment to the middle class,” she said, “we have to reflect that intention in our public policy.”

Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would bring it in line with its historical borrowing power, which peaked in 1968, and indexing it to inflation would prevent Congress from having to repeatedly raise it to keep up with rising costs. The current wage would be $10.40 had it been indexed to inflation in 1968.

Top Republicans have already signaled their opposition to any increase in the minimum wage, even though 65 Republicans currently serving in Congress voted for the last increase, which was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2007.

Security

Attorney General Responds to Paul On Drone Strikes

By Hayes Brown on Mar 7, 2013 at 1:46 pm

Attorney General Eric Holder has responded to questions on the President’s authority to use drone strikes on U.S. soil in response to concerns about an overreach against civil liberties.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on Thursday announced that Holder had written to Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) to clarify the administration’s stance on the use of armed drones to kill U.S. citizens on American soil. In the letter, Holder acceded to Paul’s request that he place in writing of what he told the Senate Judiciary Committee in a meeting before the panel on Wednesday, that a drone strike against an American citizen who is not an imminent threat would be unconstitutional:

CARNEY: Does the president have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil? The answer is no. The answer to that question is no.

Paul spent the majority of Wednesday filibustering John Brennan’s nomination as CIA Director to obtain Holder’s answer. A previous letter sent from Holder to Paul had not done enough to clarify the administration’s stance in Paul’s eyes.

Holder’s response to Paul was direct and to the point:

Dear Senator Paul:

It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: “Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?” The answer to that question is no.

Sincerely,

Eric H. Holder, Jr.

Fox News’ Megyn Kelly read Holder’s letter to Sen. Paul on-air, as the Senator had yet to receive it. “Hooray,” Paul responded. “For 13 hours yesterday we asked him that question and so there is a result and a victory under duress, and under public humiliation, the White House will respond and do the right thing.” He then told CNN’s Dana Bash that he was “happy” with the answer and would be dropping his hold on Brennan’s nomination.

Alyssa

‘The Americans’ Open Thread: Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Mar 7, 2013 at 1:37 pm

This post discusses plot elements from the March 6 episode of The Americans.

Since its very first episode, The Americans has used its baroque scenario, which takes two KGB spies in an arranged marriage that serves as their cover as an ordinary American couple and plants them across the street from an FBI agent coming out of deep cover with white supremacists, as a way to blow out the biggest issues that face even ordinary marriages. This week’s episode took the idea that your spouse knows you better than anyone else—or as Curtis Sittenfeld would put it, ““Was this what marriage was, the slow process of getting to know another individual far better than was advisable?”—and reframed it a different way: what does it do to people to share profound secrets? What does it mean to betray them? And what happens if you share those secrets, as Elizabeth does with Gregory and Stan now does with Nina, with someone other than the person you’re married to?

Stan may have been drawn to Nina from the beginning because she’s an attractive woman who is apparently more independent than her fellow Soviets in Washington. But increasingly, the two of them are pulled together because Nina, unlike Stan’s wife, though in a situation of Stan’s own making, understands what he went through when he was undercover with the white supremacist groups he was investigating in a way Stan’s wife does not. “Listen to me, Nina,” he told her when they met in the museum. “I’ve been where you are. I’ve lived it. I know what it is to feel fear in every fiber of your being and not be able to show it. I can get you out. But you have to stay with me, okay?” When he tries to quell her fears about being caught, shot, put on a plain to the Soviet Union and being found inevitably guilty, Stan tells her “You won’t be. You can do this, Nina. We can do this,” with a conviction that’s born out of doing it himself. When Stan and Nina pull off the caper that plants the diamonds in Vasili’s tea and the camera with pictures of documents on it in his radio, Stan is simultaneously proving to himself that, despite his boss’s belief that he’s not a good liar, he still has the wit and skills to protect himself should he need to, demonstrating to Nina that he can protect her, and freeing her from having to sleep with Vasili—which potentially makes her sexually available to him. As awful a thing as it’s been for Stan to put Nina under this kind of pressure, The Americans has done a subtle, careful job of demonstrating how tied up Stan is in the idea that she can survive. Giving her a new life is a proxy for returning to his own: the success of each enterprise seems to depend on the other, and if Nina were to be caught or killed, I can imagine Stan withdrawing deep into himself.

That’s a risky equation for the health of Stan’s marriage. And the impact on his wife of not knowing about his life undercover and his work at present is clear, even though she’d likely be even more wounded if she knew how much he was sharing with Nina. “I get that you can’t tell me things, the secrets and stuff. But there has to be something you can share with me from work. Your boss gets on your nerves, your partner thinks he’s funny,” Stan’s wife asks him a little wistfully. And in return, he relaxes a little, but only enough to tell her the safe version of the story. “Sometimes what I do get scary. Not for me,” he says, avoiding revealing the emotional connection between himself and Nina. “You don’t have to worry about that anymore. But I have to worry about people. And today, it got pretty scary. But it worked out. It was a tough day, but it was a good day.” Stan may be in bed with his wife, but the relationship he’s putting work and emotional investment into is the one with Nina.

Elizabeth and Phillip, by contrast, find themselves torn from their homes by forces who first appear to be American agents, because while Phillip thought he and Elizabeth were functioning like a real couple, she was doing her duty and reporting her doubts about him to their superiors. “You told them. You told them I considered defecting. That’s why this is happening,” Phillip realizes, horrified, after finding out that Elizabeth wasn’t tortured, simply pressured with pictures of Paige and Henry, while Phillip, by contrast, was beaten and waterboarded. Elizabeth tries to convince him otherwise, but given what we’ve seen that Phillip hasn’t, we know she’s being partially untruthful when she insists “If I said anything that made them think, if I said anything, it would have been so long ago….I told them that you liked it here too much.” Elizabeth may have convinced herself that she wasn’t indicting Phillip by acknowledging that she had had doubts about him. But in reality, telling their superiors that she was no longer experiencing doubts about Phillip’s loyalties likely made Soviet higher-ups more suspicious of her than secure of him.
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Justice

In Wake Of Newtown Massacre, Gun Manufacturers Are Raking In Profits

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Mar 7, 2013 at 1:30 pm

Two major gun manufacturers revealed their quarterly sales this week, and both reported huge earnings, due in large part, it seems, to the slaughter of 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary and the subsequent conversation about changing gun laws.

The Atlantic Wire analyzed the profits of both Ruger and Smith & Wesson’ over the course of time, and noticed a dip in sales immediately after Newtown, followed by a spike that kept both companies on an upward trend that began in 2010:

The Atlantic Wire also points out that the number of total background checks conducted over the last few months has similarly spiked:

The gun manufacturers’ reports corroborate an anecdotal trend noticed by many gun shops in the weeks after Newtown; that people were buying up a huge number of weapons and ammunition.

It’s worth noting, however, that the number of gun owners in the US has been on the decline. Rather, those people who own guns are stocking up on more firearms.

Health

Department of Education Opens Investigation Into UNC’s Handling Of Sexual Assault

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Mar 7, 2013 at 1:20 pm


The U.S. Department of Education will begin investigating the way the University of North Carolina handles sexual assault cases, the News & Observer reported on Wednesday.

The investigation comes after a group of women filed a complaint to the Department in which they alleged that the University had inappropriately handled reports of rape, thus violating federal law and creating “a hostile environment” that would make students feel unable to report future sexual assault:

In a letter to Chancellor Holden Thorp dated March 1, Robin Murphy, a team leader on the Washington Office for Civil Rights, wrote that the office would open an investigation into the women’s complaint. She added that the office also found that there were individual allegations of disability discrimination. Those would be handled separately, she wrote.

“Please note that opening the allegation for investigation in no way implies that OCR has made a determination with regard to the merits of the complaint,” Murphy wrote. “During the investigation, OCR is a neutral fact-finder, collecting and analyzing relevant evidence from the complainant, the recipient, and other sources, as appropriate.”

The allegations against the University have sparked outrage among the student body, leading to rallies on campus. Anger over the accusations intensified this past week when one of the complainants, sophomore Landen Gambill, received a threat of expulsion from the University’s honor board for “intimidating” her alleged rapist by speaking publicly about her case. Gambill has not publicly named her assailant.

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