Friday, August 13, 2010

via JMG: Ninth Circuit Responds To Stay Motion


Things are moving VERY quickly. Brian Devine reports at Courage Campaign:
The Ninth Circuit just issued an Order stating that the Plaintiffs’ response to the Motion to Stay is due by 11:00 p.m. tonight. The Prop 8 supporters’ reply, not to exceed 15 pages, is due by 9:00 a.m. on Monday, August 16, 2010. This suggests that the Ninth Circuit is preparing to rule on the Motion to Stay before Judge Walker’s temporary stay expires on August 18th at 5:00 p.m. It’s surprising that the Court only gave the Plaintiffs about 9 hours to file their brief, and gave the Appellants until Monday to Reply. But I wouldn’t read too much into this. They know that everyone anticipated the Motion and that everyone’s briefs are essentially written already.
Sounds like everybody wants to get to Hawaii.
reposted from Joe

Via HRC:


Joe's Weekly Message
Dear Daniel, 

Yesterday, we learned that marriage equality could return to California next week. U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, who ruled Proposition 8 unconstitutional in the Perry v. Schwarzenegger case, lifted the stay on his decision as of August 18. If the federal appeals court does not intervene, marriages will resume at that time. Equality is returning to California, and the shameful specter of Proposition 8 is shrinking. That law must never return -- our Constitution says so. 

Increasingly, so do our neighbors. On August 11, CNN released a national poll showing for the first time that a majority of Americans believe in a constitutional right to marriage equality for same-sex couples. As in previous polls, people under age 50 were far more likely to support equality than those over 50.
What a change since 2004, when waves of anti-LGBT marriage amendments swept our nation in the election-year frenzy to enrage a right-wing base. Today, although some insist on fomenting hysteria around the Perry case (more on that in a moment), the issue of marriage equality is not at the top of the right wing’s list. Just look at what Glenn Beck had to say on The O'Reilly Factor

O'REILLY: OK. Is [same-sex marriage] going to harm the country in any way?
BECK: I believe -- I believe what Thomas Jefferson said. If it neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket, what difference is it to me?

Our community and those who support us have done so much to change hearts and minds in recent years. Most powerfully of all, we have been living our lives and raising our families in almost every community across this nation. I doubt that Glenn Beck will ever have particularly charitable thoughts about our families, but he and many others have finally learned that our nation has no business interfering with them.   

Unfortunately, the ruling has generated some of the familiar anti-LGBT hate from certain quarters. The National Organization for Marriage’s summer bus tour -- a sham designed to help NOM challenge the requirements of neutral state campaign finance laws -- has been drawing miniscule crowds, but their supporters are showing the very worst of the anti-LGBT movement. At an Indianapolis event, one supporter carried a sign that read “the solution to gay marriage” with a picture of two nooses. At another event, Alveda King, niece of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said "I don’t know about you, but I'm not ready to be extinct. None of us wants to be, so we don't want genocide." Fortunately, only a few dozen people attended the rally. A note to NOM and their followers: when Glenn Beck is calm about something… well, you figure it out.  

Beck's muse Thomas Jefferson also famously said "Nothing is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man." Our basic right to marry predates any litigation or ballot initiative; we have always had it. In the past few years, California families were all too briefly granted their basic human rights. Next week, if the appeals court does not intervene, California will once again recognize same-sex couples as equal citizens. Congratulations to California families and the Perry plaintiffs. Our nation took a step forward thanks to them.

Joe Solmonese
Joe Solmonese
President, Human Rights Campaign

Via JMG: Karate Lessons Will Butch Up Your Nellie Son, Says Florida Martial Arts Academy


Above is one of the images from an ad campaign for the Academy Of Martial Arts in Key Biscayne, Florida. Via Copyranter:
Yeah, Pops. Nip that gaiety in the ass, and get junior kicking some ass and karate-chopping some wood, all while listening to Eye of the motherfucking Tiger. That'll knock those show tunes out of his head and some sense into him. Other tips: Make him change the oil in your pickup, naked. And take him deer hunting, naked. Better yet, queer hunting. You and your drinking buds can go to a local Miami gay bar and show him how to pound the dust out of some fairies, who hopefully haven't taken martial arts classes at Key Biscayne's RDCA.
And if karate doesn't work, you can always beat him to death for acting like a girl.r
eposted from Joe

Via JMG: Might Mean Something, Might Not


If Protect Marriage's emergency motion to stay the overturn of Prop 8 is denied by the Ninth Circuit Court, they are expected to immediately appeal to the Supreme Court. The justice assigned to hear cases from the Ninth is swing voter Anthony Kennedy.

Interestingly, as the clock ticks down on Judge Walker's stay extension, Justice Kennedy will be in Hawaii to appear at the annual Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference, which runs Monday through Thursday next week. Kennedy is the scheduled speaker at 10:45am the day after Walker's stay expires. The three judge panel that will hear Protect Marriage's motion has not yet been assigned (I don't think), but at least some of the Ninth Circuit judges will also be at the conference.

I don't what, if anything, this could mean for the case.
reposted from Joe

Via Huffington: William K. Black: Algebra for Dummies: Mathematical 'Proof' of the Inferiority of Homosexuals


Most forms of open revulsion for despised minorities have been banished from academic literature. But the academic campaign against rights for gays is proud about its descent into ever more virulent attacks on gay people and homosexuality.

One stream of the attacks seeks to prove that gays and homosexual are inferior. The effort has been lead primarily by ultra-traditional Catholic scholars that have attempted to create a "new natural law" that would support the traditional Catholic positions on sex -- that masturbation, all gay sex, contraception, all sex between unmarried adult straights, and oral and digital sex by straight married couples are all grievous sins. However, George W. Dent, Jr., a law professor at Case Western Reserve University who believes that gay marriage is a threat to heterosexual marriage, points out what he views as disabling difficulties in these efforts by Catholic scholars.

The premise of natural law is that it is "natural." That implies that thoughtful people, regardless of cultural or ethnic background, will form a consensus in support of the natural law principles. The concept of natural law is that it arises from humans' intrinsic moral principles. But humans overwhelmingly reject many of the principles of the purported natural law. Dent explains:


Although this doctrine is not overtly religious, all its leading proponents are Roman Catholics, and it contains elements that most Protestants and Jews reject, such as treating sex with contraception or any sexual act other than vaginal intercourse within marriage as immoral.

Catholics' actual sexual practices overwhelmingly reject many of the principles of the purported new natural law. Most Catholics masturbate, use contraceptives before and during marriage, engage in heterosexual sex prior to marriage, and engage in oral and digital sex before and during marriage. Virtually all Catholics engage in forbidden heterosexual sexual practices during their lives. They do not, as a group, display disabling guilt despite violating Church doctrine. Gay Catholics virtually all engage in homosexual sex. Dent concludes that the "new natural law" is "arbitrary" (its convoluted structure arises from the imperative of accommodating a Catholic doctrine that Dent finds incoherent). Dent finds that the new natural law is not new, natural, or a sound basis for law.

jump here to read the rest of the article 

Get EQUAL Get NOM

Via JMG: And The Next Seven Too


reposted from Joe

Via JMG: George Takei On Proposition 8 Being Overturned

Via JMG: an Ellen Surprize

This play loud! via JMG:

Scissor Sisters - Any Which Way


Dancing on the speakers, are you peaking with the tweakers, the bigots and the breeders on the scene? The night don't last forever, so get your shit together. Open arms are never what they seem.



reposted from Joe

Via JMG: Hot Topix With Michele Bachmann


"I like to be close to the word of God, whereas whores need hide themselves from the Lord's Holy Eyeball."



posted by Joe

via JMG: Gay couples ready to wed if higher courts halt Prop. 8


By David Siders and Peter Hecht
Every day this week, Nicola Simmersbach, 47, a licensed marriage and family therapist, donned her white gown in anticipation that she be married that day.
- Read More