Tony Perkins

On CNN today, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins continued his anti-marriage-equality tour of cable news shows and repeated many of his often debunked claims about the dangers same-sex couples pose to religious liberty, public education, and the institution of marriage.

But when pressed by host Brooke Baldwin about real same-sex couples, he struggled to explain away his unjustifiable fears.

BALDWIN: Have you ever been to the home of a married same-sex couple?

PERKINS: I have not been to the home of a same-sex married couple, no.

BALDWIN: If you were ever to do so, and you’re sitting across from them over dinner, how would you convince them that their life together — either two men, two women — hurts straight couples? What do you tell them?

PERKINS: Well first, Brooke, we don’t make public policy based on what’s good for me and my family, or you and your family, or one couple.

BALDWIN: I’m just asking, on a personal level…

PERKINS: We’re engaged here, in a discussion about public policy and what’s best for the nation. Not annecdotes or what one couple likes.

BADLWIN: But this is issue–it is personal. It is personal as well.

PERKINS: But that’s not how we make public policy. Certainly, there are some same-sex couples that are probably great parents. But that’s not what the overwhelming amount of social science shows us.

Watch the video:

It is noteworthy that Perkins — who opposes allowing same-sex couples to adopt at all — acknowledges that some same-sex couples that are probably great parents. Advocates for LGBT equality push for adoption policies that focus on what is in the best interest of the child — only placing children in need of loving homes with qualified parents. Perkins thinks that even same-sex couples who are great parents should be legally prevented from opening their homes to children in need of a family.

Perkins, like other anti-gay activists, misleads viewers on what the “overwhelming amount of social sciences” actually shows. Several studies have shown that children benefit from having a two-parent family, compared to those raised by just one parent. But those studies have not shown that children raised by two same-sex parents are any worse off that those raised by opposite-sex couples.

Perkins is right — this is about social science. And social science makes it clear that children would be far better off in a home with two loving parents, regardless of whether they are two men, two women, or one of each.

Harris, a graduate of Yale Law School, is a transactional attorney at the international law firm Greenberg Traurig. . . . The sources, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter, said Harris’ lack of courtroom experience was indeed a sticking point for committee’s eight Democrats. . . .

State Sen. Raymond Lesniak (D-Union) said he remained opposed to the nomination because Harris has said that if approved, he would recuse himself from cases involving gay rights.

Christie has said Harris planned to recuse himself because in the past he had advocated for gay rights.

But Lesniak and other critics said a blanket recusal was unnecessary, and that most likely was a concession to Christie, who opposes same-sex marriage. A lawsuit brought by seven gay couples seeking the right to marry is pending in a lower court and is expected to make its way to the Supreme Court in a couple years.

Harris’ lack of experience is a legitimate concern. While transactional work can certainly be very challenging, it bears little resemblance to litigation, so it’s not clear how Harris is prepared to decide some of the most important cases that arise in his state.

His promise to recuse from gay rights cases, however, is far more troubling. An openly gay judge is no more required to recuse himself from gay rights cases than Clarence Thomas is required to recuse himself from race cases because he is black or Ruth Bader Ginsburg is required to recuse herself from gender discrimination cases because she is a woman. If Harris becomes a judge on the back of a promise to remove himself from gay issues because he is gay, he will set a dangerous precedent that anti-gay groups will cite every time another LGBT judicial nominee is named. Gay judges are not second class judges, and it is a grave mistake for them to behave like they are.

Gay judicial candidate Tracy Thorne-Begland during his military service

Earlier this week, the Virginia House of Delegates rejected Tracy Thorne-Begland, a former Navy pilot and top Virginia prosecutor, for a seat on Virginia’s lowest ranking trial court because, in the words of Del. Bob Marshall (R-VA), Thorne-Begland’s gay “lifestyle is exactly contrary to” his obligation to uphold the state constitution. On CNN this morning, Marshall doubled-down on this view, explaining that he blocked Thorne-Begland because the judicial candidate had the audacity to serve his country while gay:

MARSHALL: [Thorne-Begland] had to misstate his background in order to be received into the military in the late 1980s. There was a specific question, “are you a homosexual?” He had to say no. He took an oath of office which he had to defy. . . . Dr. Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks never took an oath of office that they broke. Sodomy is not a civil right. It’s not the same as the Civil Rights Movement. You have to look at the past, and, in fact, look, in late 2011 he was critical of the, you know, Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell. He criticized our attorney general simply for explaining what the law of Virginia is with respect to certain protected classes.

Watch it:

First of all, “sodomy,” as Marshall so quaintly puts it, is a civil right. That was the holding of Lawrence v. Texas, which established that consenting adults have a right to be free from government interference in their “private sexual conduct.”

Additionally, while it may in fact be true that Thorne-Begland once misrepresented his sexuality in order to serve his country in the United States Navy, it is important to understand exactly what he signed up for when he told this potential lie. Tracy Thorne-Begland was a Navy pilot, and his superiors did nothing to hide from him the dangers inherent in this job. When Thorne-Begland was stationed at Virginia Beach, he was informed that 25 percent of pilots are killed in action over the course of a 20 year career. This was the job he might have lied in order to sign up for — to risk his life every day in defense of his county. Bob Marshall, by contrast, never served a day in the United States military.

Nor, apparently, did Marshall familiarize himself with civil rights history during all that time he spent not serving his country. Martin Luther King may not have taken an oath of office, but his entire career was rooted in a campaign to peacefully defy unconstitutional laws. And while there is some dispute over whether Rosa Parks’ famous decision to keep her seat on a Montgomery bus violated a city ordinance or merely a racist custom, her refusal to stand is widely perceived as an act of civil disobedience that triggered a movement of opposition to Jim Crow laws. A judge’s oath is to the Constitution, and Thorne-Begland acted with the greatest respect for our founding document when he fought back against the unconstitutional and now-repealed Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell policy.

Iowa Supreme Court Justice David Wiggins

In 2010, anti-gay groups such as the Mississippi-based hate group the American Family Association spent close to $800,000 to remove three Iowa Supreme Court justices who joined that court’s unanimous decision holding that marriage equality is required by the Iowa constitution. This fall, Justice David Wiggins is also up for a retention election, and Iowa’s GOP Gov. Terry Branstad recently announced that a similar campaign against Wiggins is likely. Wiggins, however, actually plans to fight back:

Iowa Supreme Court Justice David Wiggins vows he won’t stand quietly by if opponents of same-sex marriage launch a potent campaign to oust him from the bench.

“If someone wants to attack me, I’m not going to let them bully me,” Wiggins said in a telephone interview last week with The Des Moines Register. “If asked to, I’ll speak up for myself. The others didn’t do that last time. I will.”

Justice Wiggins’ statement that he actually plans to campaign to keep his job should not seem all that remarkable, if it were not for the fact that his three former colleagues essentially threw their retention races in 2010 by refusing to do the same:

[Former Justice David] Baker, in his speech accepting the Profile in Courage Award, said that he, Streit and Ternus made a deliberate decision not to form campaign committees in 2010.

“Our founding fathers chose wisely to not have judges in a political position,” Baker told the audience, which included Wiggins. “Had we chosen to form campaigns, we would have tacitly admitted that we were what we claimed not to be — politicians. … We strongly believed that the people of Iowa did not want us to be in the position of raising money for a campaign.”

Pretending that you are above the fray may be a lovely way to earn awards, but it is no way to win an election. Moreover, by effectively throwing their elections, Baker, Streit and Ternus did a whole lot more to undermine judicial independence than they did to protect it — their defeats only emboldened their opponents, and encouraged more efforts to apply political pressure to judges.

Virginia Delegate Bob Marshall (R)

Tracy Thorne-Begland served his country for 20 years in the Navy. After his discharge, he then rose to become one of the top prosecutors in the city of Richmond, Virginia. He was sponsored for a low-level trial judgeship by a bipartisan mix of state lawmakers, and seemed a shoo-in for the job. And then this happened:

Delegate Bob Marshall said he will seek to remove the name of Richmond prosecutor Tracy Thorne-Begland from a list of proposed District Court judicial appointments.

“I don’t even think it’s proper to put his name forward because of his behavior,” said Marshall, who called Thorne-Begland “a homosexual activist,” in a press release.

Thorne-Begland has been nominated to serve as a judge for Richmond’s General District Court, but, Marshall challenges the nomination on the grounds of the prosecutor’s sexual orientation.

“We have a constitution which says marriage is between one man and one woman and if he’s taking an oath, he has to uphold and defend that as a judge,” said Marshall.

“If his lifestyle is exactly contrary to that… I don’t see how he could do that,” he said.

Last night, the Virginia House of Delegates fell 18 votes short of the 51 needed to appoint Thorne-Begland to the state bench, effectively killing his opportunity to become a judge. Had he been appointed, Thorne-Begland would have been the only openly gay judge on the Virginia bench.

Moreover, its worth noting that the General District Court is the very lowest court in Virginia, hearing little more than misdemeanors and small dollar civil suits. So it’s unlikely that a gay rights issue could even come before Thorne-Begland if he joined this court.

Attorney General Jon Bruning (R-NE)

In an advisory opinion issued last week, Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning (R) said that he believes under the state’s constitution, local governments have no authority to enact non-discrimination ordinances. This opinion came at the request of State Senator Beau McCoy, who had proposed legislation earlier this year to strip localities of that power, arguing that uniform state laws for businesses are better than piecemeal local regulations.

Omaha, the largest city in the state, recently enacted an ordinance protecting LGBT citizens from discrimination in employment and public accommodations. Lincoln, the state’s capital, says it will continue its previous plans to consider a non-discrimination ordinance — a public hearing on the measure is scheduled for this afternoon. Lincoln’s city attorney has taken a different interpretation of the state’s constitution, arguing that the city has the authority to pass the measure.

In their non-binding opinion, Bruning and his assistant attorney general write:

[I]t is our opinion that while political subdivisions may pass ordinances or other laws on the same subject matter which are not inconsistent with the state’s civil rights classifications, political subdivisions are not authorized to expand protected classes beyond the scope of the civil rights provided for in the state statute.

Their reasoning? Nebraska is generally a “Dillon Rule” state. Based on the reasoning of 19th century Iowa Chief Justice John Dillon, several states take the view that localities may only enact laws when given explicit permission from the state government. Other states, known as “Home Rule” states, let localities make any decisions not specifically prohibited by the state government. The opinion argues that, while Nebraska laws give some Home Rule authority to local governments, this falls out of their scope. Only voters, amending their city charters by referendum — or the state legislature — could grant protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

This is not the first time localities have been big-footed by their state governments, undermining attempts to protect LGBT constituents. In Virginia, for example, a Republican Attorney General used the same principles to dissuade Fairfax County’s school board from enacting a non-discrimination rule. Last year, Tennessee enacted a law stripping localities of the right to enact non-discrimination protections beyond the state’s protected catagories. And a 1992 Colorado referendum — later ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court — sought to nullify all local protections based on sexual orientation.

In Nebraska too, the question may eventually be decided by the judicial system. Omaha’s city attorney has said that Bruning’s ruling will change nothing without a court order, telling the press “If someone sues us, we’ll deal with it in court.”

Just 16 states and the District of Columbia provide legal employment protections for LGBT citizens (another 5 protect based on sexual orientation, but not gender identity or expression). That means that in most U.S. states, someone who is — or even seems to be — to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered may legally be fired or not hired purely on that basis.

In a sense McCoy is right — this is not an issue that should be dealt with by piecemeal regulations. It is time for Congress to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act to ensure that no American is fired just for being LGBT.

1994's Moderate Mitt told Bay Windows He's Support Equality

Yesterday, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Michael Guest, an openly gay diplomat who was appointed U.S. Ambassador to Romania by Republican President George W. Bush. Guest laments in the piece that the Republican Party’s leadership allows “principles of fairness and equality” to be “hollowed out.” While he dismisses the idea that Romney himself is to blame for the way Grenell was treated, he writes:

Romney’s slowness to comment amid the noise since Grenell’s resignation raises questions about his principles, as well as the quality and depth of his leadership. That’s what should concern us most in this sad affair. We should expect Romney to go further in making clear that issues of sexual orientation will have no bearing on any personnel decisions he makes, whether in his campaign or, should he be elected, in the administration he would lead.

Jimmy LaSalvia, executive director of GOProud — a group more focused on encouraging LGBT voters to back Republicans than on encouraging Republicans to back LGBT equality — echoed these criticisms. In a break from the group’s usual GOP unity message, he told the Post’s Greg Sargent on Thursday:

The Romney campaign should have spoken up publicly in defense of Rick against the attacks over the past two weeks… This was an opportunity to send an important message that Mitt Romney wants everybody to get behind him and to support his campaign. They let that opportunity pass.

Log Cabin Republican Executive Director R. Clarke Duncan and former Bush adviser Mark McKinnon have also called out the Romney campaign for not standing up for Grenell and have encouraged the apparent GOP nominee to take steps to stop employment discrimination based on sexual orientation.

In 1994, Moderate Mitt Romney promised to co-sponsor a federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act — and claimed he’d be a better advocate for gay and lesbian citizens than Sen. Ted Kennedy. But by 2007, Severe Conservative Mitt Romney etch a sketched his position and no longer saw a need for a federal employment non-discrimination law.

Now, Guest, LaSalvia, Duncan, and McKinnon are left lamenting that 2012 General Election Mitt Romney and his campaign’s cowardly handling of the Grenell situation is much more 2007 Mitt than 1994 Mitt.

Eric Fehrnstrom (L) and Ric Grenell

When a CNN anchor asked campaign spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom about Grenell, the top aide prefaced his remarks by saying: “First let me correct you. He wasn’t two weeks on the job. He was scheduled to start on May 1.” Other Romney-friendly media, vaguely sourcing the campaign, addressed Grenell’s departure the same way, implying that he left the job before he’d started it. When the Washington Post reported that Grenell was “kept under wraps,” Washington Examiner’s Byron York pushed back:

But Romney campaign officials say strongly that they did not keep Grenell under wraps or in any other way discourage him from taking the job. First, they point out that at the time (last week) in which Grenell was supposedly being held back, he was not yet an employee of the Romney campaign. Like a number of other new hires, officials say, Grenell was getting ready to move to Boston to begin work May 1. Romney officials fully anticipated he would begin his public role as spokesman then.

The only problem? Grenell could well have been set to officially become an employee of the Romney campaign on May 1, but he’d already started working for the team.

As Andrew Sullivan reported last night and the New York Times later confirmed, Grenell helped organize a Romney campaign conference call to pre-empt Vice President Joe Biden’s foreign policy speech last week. Sullivan reported that after Grenell’s voice was not heard on the April 26 call, which he’d helped set up, people started to ask questions:

Some even called and questioned him afterwards as to why he was absent. He wasn’t absent. He was simply muzzled. For a job where you are supposed to maintain good relations with reporters, being silenced on a key conference call on your area of expertise is pretty damaging. Especially when you helped set it up.

Sources close to Grenell say that he was specifically told by those high up in the Romney campaign to stay silent on the call, even while he was on it. And this was not the only time he had been instructed to shut up.

The Times added information to Sullivan’s story, also noting that the call was the “biggest moment yet for Mitt Romney’s foreign policy team”:

It turned out [Grenell] was at home in Los Angeles, listening in, but stone silent and seething. A few minutes earlier, a senior Romney aide had delivered an unexpected directive, according to several people involved in the call.

“Ric,” said Alex Wong, a policy aide, “the campaign has requested that you not speak on this call.” Mr. Wong added, “It’s best to lay low for now.”

It’s no wonder Grenell felt the need to resign from the campaign. The newly revealed information only bolsters his reasons: the campaign was clearly seeking to mislead the media to downplay Grenell’s departure. “It’s not that the campaign cared whether Ric Grenell was gay,” an anonymous Republican told the Times. “They believed this was a nonissue. But they didn’t want to confront the religious right.” If Romney campaign can’t stand up to a bigoted special interest on personnel issues — for what they clearly thought was the best man for the job — how could a Romney administration be expected to make the politically tough decisions needed to successfully govern the country?

One of the biggest structural problems with Glee has always been its attention deficit disorder. Major life events and hugely consequential actions pop up without warning to provide drama in episodes and then vanish whether they’re resolved or not, never to be mentioned again. Most of the time, that gets dismissed as laziness, the result of a fragmented writing room, an inevitable consequence of Ryan Murphy’s style. Murphy gets a lot of credit for sensitively portraying the lives of sexual minorities in particular. But it’s time to start calling him what he is: a cynical exploiter of oppressed people who has very little actual interest in actually exploring their experiences in rich, complex, compassionate ways.

Last night’s episode of Glee was a disgustingly egregious example of this trend. In this hour, we learn that McKinley High’s football coach Shannon Beiste has been hit by her husband, a football scout whose initial appearance served mostly to escalate the rivalry between Coach Beiste and Jane Lynch’s cheerleading Coach Sylvester and has rarely been mentioned again. We know that Coach Beiste fell so hard for her husband in part because she’s often felt unlovable, but their relationship plays essentially no role in the show, and Coach Beiste is not a character whose inner life the show consistently explores. So when we found out that he was hitting her because “He had been bugging me all weekend to do the dishes, but I forgot,” and that, “As soon as it happened, right away he was so sorry, and started crying and begging me to forgive him,” after a bad, and horrendously inappropriate rendition of “Cell Block Tango,” the development came out of nowhere. Glee wouldn’t do something this bad to a character the show actually has something invested in—God forbid we explore teen partner violence, a subject that after Yeardley Love’s killing at the hands of her ex-boyfriend George Hughley at the University of Virginia might be worth discussing with these kids. No, instead Glee inflicts something dreadful on a character who’s there solely to elicit reactions from the main cast, the show beats up on the masculine woman who fears she’s unloveable.

And then, having made her a victim, the show can’t even handle it in a genuinely serious way. The plot became the B story to Kurt and Rachel’s NYADA auditions. There’s no question that those scenes are an important moment and one the show has been moving to for more than a year. And it definitely reflects teenaged myopia to privilege that event over a subject as serious as domestic violence. But there should be a distinction between the show’s priorities and its characters, a test the show failed miserably last night.

When the episode was dealing with Coach Beiste’s struggle to decide if she would leave her husband, it did so in a decidedly ugly manner. Coach Sylvester offered up her home as a refuge, and when Coach Beiste didn’t show up, she slagged on her, complaining “I ruined my tent making a neck-hole in it and what am I supposed to go with the nine whole chickens in my fridge.” Then, when Coach Beiste said she’d gone to stay with her sister, Sylvester snarked “I hope whatever bridge Denise Bieste lives under is nice and cozy.” Only after these slings and arrows does Coach Sylvester have anything kind or encouraging to say. Now, there’s no question that a more deft show could be staging a scene like this to show us Coach Sylvester’s insensitivity. But Glee is too clumsily enamored of Sue Sylvester’s snark to either set it aside for a moment, or for her to suffer real consequences for her viciousness. The show did slightly better when Coach Beiste came clean to the students, telling them they may have saved her life, even as scenes intercut with their self-congratulatory cuddle pile revealed that she hadn’t left her husband at all, that like most women who are victims of domestic violence, she was giving him another chance. Yes, the scene revealed a gap between the students’ self-centeredness and reality, but why give them credit at all? Why not treat this as the serious long-arc story it deserves to be? If Glee ever revisits this conflict again, I’ll be utterly shocked.

Glee does this so frequently it’s become a joke, but it’s really worth looking at who Murphy tortures and then ignores. Naya Rivera has acted the hell out of Santana Lopez, the Latina cheerleader with a killer alto who was outed this season, and her performance makes it easy to forget how far she’s exceeded the material she’s been given. When Finn outs Santana, it’s a betrayal that’s essentially dealt with in a single slap. When her grandmother throws her out of her home, it’s never dealt with again in any substantive way, unlike Kurt and Burt Hummel’s long journey towards a reconfigured solid and loving relationship. And a few weeks ago, Santana’s girlfriend leaked a sex tape of the two of them, an act that ought to have been shattering and was potentially illegal. There was no fallout. It’s reduced to a single conversation, and the couple stays together without a blip.

Similarly, Dave Karofsky, the closeted football player who bullied Kurt before kissing him, is essentially a repository for pain that can be withdrawn when Murphy wants to stage a moving sequence. His suicide attempt was tremendously movingly framed, as was his profession of affection to Kurt, but he hasn’t been seen since that latter rejection. It’s one thing to put a character you want to flesh out fully through a lot of difficult things. It’s another to use trauma as a sparkly toy to distract and manipulate your viewers in the absence of your ability to tell a coherent story, or to give a character you are invested in an emotional experience.

What’s infuriating about the exploitation of these characters and that makes it seem intentionally manipulative is Glee‘s ability to carry a through line on Kurt Hummel. But even as the show’s sensitively chronicled his coming out, his relationship with his family, his first big love, and his growth as an artist, Glee also has a frustrating reluctance to assign Kurt moral responsibility, whether he’s harassing Finn, his new step-brother, or cheating on his boyfriend Blaine. In that sense, he’s the perfect analogue for Glee, a show that claims credit for seeing clearly and portraying teenagers’ lives honestly, but that can’t acknowledge its own cruelty and manipulation of other people. It’s one thing for bringing the underexamined lives of gay teenagers, of abused women, of gay people of color into the mainstream of popular culture. But spotlighting them only to use their pain to accrue credit to yourself isn’t admirable. And it’s not entertaining.

So I’ll be particularly interested to see in which direction Herndon Graddick, the new president of GLAAD, takes the organization. As Deadline points out, he’s worked on campaigns both to defend gay entertainers from boycotts, and to call commentators to account for things they say about gay people. And I wonder if the first half of that equation might actually hold the key to GLAAD’s future.

It’s absolutely true that we’ve got a lot more gay characters, and gay entertainers in pop culture than we did even a decade ago. But there are serious limitations to those portrayals. We can have settled gay couples like Mitch and Cam on Modern Family, but we don’t exactly have a lot in the way of romantic comedies between gay men (though Happy Endings is making some strides in this regard), much less serious sexual chemistry between gay men on network on television. There are very, very few lesbian characters anywhere in popular culture. There are almost no queer people of color—something like Pariah is still rare, and reserved for indie release. And gay love stories get marketed as gay stories first and broadly appealing love stories second, the kind of thing general audiences are supposed to feel good for watching rather than watching primarily because they’ll enjoy it.

This is an area where GLAAD could focus on getting more portrayals of gay people, and gay issues in the media, rather than simply shutting down negative remarks and negative characterizations. If straight writers and directors don’t feel confident in their ability to create credible gay characters and tell credible gay stories, GLAAD could provide a gut and details check. If folks want to work those characters and those issues into their work but don’t know where to start, GLAAD could provide ideas and fact-checks down the road. Shutting down negative portrayals at best gets us to neutral. And it’s much harder to create new things than to protest existing ones, but that’s actually much more essential work.

I understand this as a personal preference, but coming out of your chrysalis has always more interesting to me than retreating to your fort. And I’ve joked that I’d be happy with Mad Men if Sally Draper grew up and joined the Weather Underground, broke Don’s heart, and turned the whole thing into American Pastoral. Alternatively, I’d accept Peggy saying the hell with all this, leaving New York, joining the Boston Women’s Health Collective, and helping shepherd through the first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves.

This year may be the one when I finally get what I find most personally satisfying out of Mad Men: a more direct confrontation between generations and over values. I’ve seen the pilot, which is excellent, but which I won’t discuss until Monday (when I will discuss it at length) for fear of angering a very spoiler-sensitive Matt Weiner. But I will ask: what are you hoping to get out of Mad Men this season?

*Seriously. Somebody please make this show.