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Stories tagged with “Cory Booker”

LGBT

Cory Booker Overcame His Homophobia By Making A Gay Friend

By Zack Beauchamp on Jan 10, 2013 at 12:25 pm

Newark Mayor and likely Senate candidate Cory Booker held virulently anti-gay prejudice before conversations with a gay friend changed his mind.

Booker, now an outspoken champion of LGBT equality, narrated his transformation in a 1992 op-ed for the Stanford Daily unearthed by Buzzfeed. In the piece, Booker admits that he “was disgusted by gays,” that the “disgust and latent hostility I felt toward gays were subcategories of hatred, plain and simple.” But the now-Mayor was won over by a gay student who worked at Stanford’s peer counseling group The Bridge, Daniel Bao. In Booker’s words:

I still remember our first real conversation about homosexuality. I had no intention of listening to him; I only sought to argue and debate. Daniel, however, quickly disarmed me with his personal testimony.

Oh, if only I could recount to you the entire conversation. He told me of people who religiously prayed to God to help them become straight. He told me of the years of denial and the pain of always feeling different.

And he told me of the violence – violence from strangers and family, horrible images of beatings, destruction of property and the daily verbal condemnations.

It was chilling to find that so much of the testimony he shared with me was almost identical to stories my grandparents told me about growing up Black. People found it revolting to share a meal with them and often felt it to be their duty to beat them so that they would learn proper living.

Well, it didn’t take me long to realize that the root of my hatred did not lie with gays but with myself. It was my problem. A problem I dealt with by ceasing to tolerate gays and instead seeking to embrace them.

Bao and Booker’s story reinforces one of the fundamental truths underpinning America’s move towards full equality for its LGBT citizens: that meeting and knowing openly gay individuals is the most powerful antidote to prejudice. As a CAP report in June of last year put it, “Reports suggest that as more gay individuals live openly and tell their friends and family that they are gay, support for marriage equality will continue to rise. Those who know someone who identifies as gay are 20 points likelier to back marriage equality.”

NEWS FLASH

Cory Booker ‘Wants To Go Beyond’ Medical Marijuana | Newark Mayor Cory Booker reiterated his staunch support for marijuana legalization and attacked the war on drugs on Tuesday. On a segment with HuffPost Live, Booker enthusiastically endorsed medical marijuana but noted he “wants to go beyond that.” The mayor, a longtime advocate of drug policy reform, laid out why legalization and criminal justice reforms could help the government save millions of wasted dollars and lives, calling the drug war a “trap” for communities and taxpayers. California, which decriminalized marijuana in 2010, saw juvenile arrests drop 20 percent to the lowest level on record. Booker is reportedly weighing a run for governor or the Senate.

NEWS FLASH

Cory Booker ‘Seriously Considering’ Governor And Senate Bids | Newark Mayor Cory Booker (D) said Sunday morning that he is weighing runs for both the New Jersey Governorship in 2013 and U.S. Senate seat in 2014. Speaking to Bob Schieffer on CBS’ Face the Nation, Booker said he’d decide “in the next two weeks” if he was running for Governor. Booker is “the biggest player” in New Jersey Democratic politics, as he is “the only Democrat in the state who can match Christie’s star power and fundraising prowess.”

LGBT

Sally Field, Ben Jealous, And Cory Booker Headline HRC’s Annual National Dinner

By Zack Ford on Oct 9, 2012 at 8:59 am

Sally Field and her son, Sam Greisman.

The Human Rights Campaign held its annual National Dinner Saturday night in Washington, DC, and many prominent speakers were on hand to champion the progress of LGBT equality and reinforce hope for the journey forward.

Actress Sally Field accepted HRC’s Ally for Equality Award, and after her gay son Sam Greisman introduced her, she spoke to the importance of family acceptance:

FIELD: There are so many children who struggle to understand and embrace their sexuality, and families who do not welcome them — with parents who somehow find it acceptable to shut them out of their hearts and their homes. And that I find unacceptable. There comes a time when parents must listen and learn from these people they brought into the world, their children, and these children have something important to teach their parents. I urge them to listen.

HRC’s National Equality Award went to the NAACP, a prominent civil rights organization that endorsed marriage equality. The group’s president, Ben Jealous, emphasized the importance of turning “liberty and justice for all” into a reality:

JEALOUS: As an American people, we celebrate the many times that our nation has led this world away from hate and ever toward hope. In this precipitous moment, when we as a movement are on the brink of massive change and tremendous progress…let us stand up for marriage equality from coast-to-coast and border-to-border!

Newark, New Jersey Mayor Cory Booker was the dinner’s headline speaker, and he spoke passionately about the future of civil rights:

BOOKER: I get in weird conversations with my friends. “Why you always talking about gay rights”‘ I said, “I’m not talking about gay rights. I’m talking about human rights. I’m talking about my rights. I’m talking about your rights.” When people were fighting to expand the promise of this country, it took everybody involved, ’cause we knew we were all in it together. That deep and real African proverb was clearly true in our history that says, “If you want to go fast, you go alone. If you want to go far, you go together.” And so now, it’s time we go together.

Also on hand were playwright Dustin Lance Black and actor Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who sang a special song he “learned from Johnny Cash.” Watch videos of all the speeches:

Justice

NAACP Backs Marijuana Legalization In CO, Citing Drug War’s Toll On People Of Color

By Tara Culp-Ressler on Aug 24, 2012 at 2:10 pm

Colorado voters will decide whether to legalize marijuana in their state this fall after supporters turned in twice the number of required signatures to get the issue on the November ballot. That state-level push for marijuana legalization picked up an endorsement from the NAACP yesterday when the local chapter of the organization endorsed Amendment 64 — not because the NAACP necessarily endorses drug use, but because its leaders are concerned about the Drug War’s disproportionately negative impact on the African-American community.

In a press statement on the issue, the NAACP reported that even though African-Americans made up just about 4 percent of the state’s population in 2010, they accounted for 9 percent of marijuana possession arrests and 22 percent of arrests for marijuana distribution. And those numbers jump even further in the Denver area, according to a report from the city’s police department. African-Americans made up more than 31.5 percent of all arrests for adult marijuana possession, even though they represent less than 11 percent of Denver’s overall population.

Rosemary Harris Lytle, the president of the NAACP-Colorado-Montana-Wyoming State Conference, explained:

Marijuana prohibition policy does more harm to our communities than good. That is why we have endorsed Amendment 64, which presents a more effective and socially responsible approach to how Colorado addresses the adult use of marijuana.

At a press conference announcing the endorsement, Harris Lytle pointed out that decriminalizing the adult use of marijuana could help to reduce the unjust mass incarceration of the black community.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker (D-NJ) — whose home state of New Jersey has legalized cannabis for medical purposes — has made similar statements about the Drug War’s disproportionate impact on African-Americans and the U.S.’s failed drug policies. Booker has pointed to the same kind of statistics about swelling rates of African-American incarceration in New Jersey, saying the situation “anguishes” him.

LGBT

Anti-Gay Chick-fil-A Attracts Losers, Repels Prominent Leaders, Universities, And The Public

By Zack Ford on Jul 30, 2012 at 11:30 am

It seems telling that the political conservatives attracting media attention for coming to the defense of Chick-fil-A and its anti-gay crusades — Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty — are all most recently known for having lost elections. Indeed, the anti-gay vitriol that Chick-fil-A’s president Dan Cathy has repeatedly dispensed has been a loser with the public: YouGov BrandIndex polling shows that the public’s approval of Chick-fil-A has taken a nosedive since Cathy’s interview from 65 to 39:

Meanwhile, a number of prominent leaders have continued to show their displeasure with Chick-fil-A. Here’s a sampling:

  • House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA): “For the record, I prefer Kentucky Fried Chick. #ChickFilA” (Twitter)
  • Washington, DC Mayor Vince Gray (D): “Given my longstanding strong support for LGBT rights & marriage equality, I would not support #hatechicken” (Twitter)
  • Newark, New Jersey Mayor Cory Booker (D): “Wouldn’t deny a biz a permit on those grounds BUT I’d join my residents in taking my $’s elsewhere” (Twitter)
  • Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA): “I disagree with what the CEO from Chick-fil-A said. I was glad he spoke further and said that his company does not discriminate.” (Boston.com)

To clarify Brown’s remarks, Chick-fil-A said it will “treat every person with honor, dignity and respect,” regardless of sexual orientation, but the company still has no employment protections in its official corporate policies. According to Forbes.com, there have been at least 12 lawsuits against the company since 1988 on various charges of employment discrimination.

New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D) wrote to the president of New York University, home to the city’s only Chick-fil-A, urging him to end the university’s relationship with the anti-gay restaurant:

NYC is a place where we celebrate diversity. We do not believe in denigrating others…As you know from recent press coverage, the President of Chick-fil-A continues to make statements and support causes that are clear messages of extreme intolerance and homophobia and a belief that LGBT Americans are less than others and deserve to be treated as such.[...]

I urge you to sever your relationship with the Chick-fil-A establishment that exists on your campus. This establishment should be replaced with an establishment where the ownership does not denigrate a portion of our population.

Another university’s leadership has already taken action against a Chick-fil-A on its campus. The president and provost at the University of Louisville released a statement saying that they “will not be eating at Chick-fil-A anytime soon.” Responding to a growing student petition, U of L administrators are currently assessing the contractual arrangements with the franchise on campus to evaluate further courses of action. At least seven other universities also have petitions underway challenging the existence of a Chick-fil-A on their campuses.

Attacking gay people as purveyors of society’s destruction is harmful to many people, and as public condemnation grows, it’s proving to be a losing philosophy for Chick-fil-A.

Health

Cory Booker Lashes Out Against Drug War In Online Forum

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Jul 16, 2012 at 3:35 pm

Newark, New Jersey Mayor Cory Booker has previously taken to Twitter to call the War on Drugs a “failure,” but he used a different social media platform this weekend to further criticize America’s approach to drug control.

In a question-and-answer session on the site Reddit, one user asked Booker to respond to the fact that “blacks make up just 14% of all drug users but half of those in prison for drug offenses,” Booker gave a long and thought-out reaction on the reasons the American approach to drug policy has failed so many people.

The so-called war, Booker argued, keeps in place a system of racial bias that negatively impacts communities of color. “I can’t accept that facts like this one do anything but demonstrate the historic and current biases in our criminal justice system,” he said:

Blacks make up less than 15% of our New Jersey’s population but make up more than 60% of our prison population. I can’t accept that facts like this one do anything but demonstrate the historic and current biases in our criminal justice system. …People should not see these facts and this discussion as an indictment of any one race, sector, or occupation, it should be seen as a call to all of us to do the difficult things to make a change because this isn’t a “black” problem this is an American problem.

The so called War on Drugs has not succeeded in making significant reductions in drug use, drug arrests or violence. We are pouring huge amounts of our public resources into this current effort that are bleeding our public treasury and unnecessarily undermining human potential. I see the BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of dollars being poured into the criminal justice system here in New Jersey and it represents big overgrown government at its worst. We should be investing dollars in programs and strategies that work not just to lower crime but work to empower lives.

It anguishes me how we seem to be so content with national and state recidivism rates of around 60% and how a staggering number of young black men are involved in the criminal justice system.

After offering his criticism, Booker went on to outline solutions he’s pushed in Newark, and others he’d like to see continue. The first program he mentioned focuses on fatherhood and tries to coach men into being responsible parents. That involves stopping drug use. But Booker explained he has had trouble securing funding for the program. “I work to raise money for it every year,” he said. “Shouldn’t we be investing in programs like these instead of pouring more and more dollars into programs that fail to achieve societal goals, perpetuate racial disparities and bleed countless tax dollars?”

The mayor also suggested court reform, as well job programs, drug treatment, and legal assistance for drug offenders as a method of helping people stay out of jail. Lastly, Booker pushed for mentor programs — of which he has always been a strong advocate — to help kids never start drugs in the first place. “It takes 4 hours a month to mentor a child,” Booker wrote, “the amount of time most watch TV in a day.”

Politics

Newark Mayor Cory Booker Declares Drug War ‘A Failure,’ Endorses Medical Marijuana

By Judd Legum on May 24, 2012 at 12:52 pm

Newark Mayor Cory Booker delivered a harsh critique of America’s war on drugs in a series of tweets last night. Booker described the war on drugs as a multi-billion dollar failure. Booker highlighted the disproportionate impact the drug war has on African-Americans and suggested the need to move away from incarceration as our policy response. Booker stopped short of endorsing full legalization of any drug. He did, however, call on New Jersey to legalize medical marijuana:



This isn’t the first time that Booker has had harsh words regarding the nation’s drug policy. In 2007, he told the Star-Leger that “The drug war is causing crime. It is just chewing up young black men. And it’s killing Newark.” In 2001, Booker told CNN, “you have incarceration rates in this country now that are outrageous…you aren’t really solving the problem by just throwing people in jail.” New Jersey spends over $1 billion per year on prisons and about one-third of the beds are filled with non-violent drug offenders.

Booker’s comments come at a time when Americans attitudes toward drugs, particularly marijuana, are rapidly changing. A poll released yesterday found that 56% of Americans favor legalization of marijuana, with just 36% in opposition.

NEWS FLASH

Romney Surrogate: Romney’s Experience At Bain Is ‘Fair Game’ | This morning, Mitt Romney surrogate and former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu (R) said on a conference call organized by the Massachusetts governor’s presidential campaign that Romney’s “entire” business record at Bain Capital should be “fair game,” but accused President Obama of cherry picking the company’s failed investments. The comments come as Newark Mayor Cory Booker (D) fends off criticism for claiming that attacking Romney’s tenure at Bain is “ridiculous” and “nauseating” and the Romney campaign continues to suggest that to examine his business record is to condemn the whole of private enterprise. On Monday, Obama himself explained that while private equity firms are “set up to maximize profits” for shareholders, the president is responsible for the health of the economy as a whole and fostering job creation.

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