The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

It's been another week with a lot going on and I haven't been able to keep up. I think underneath, although I still have a lot of concerns about various issues, my motivation to comment on every event is somewhat less because I still have the feeling that finally, we have someone in the White House who actually knows what's going on and has ideas on how to fix stuff.

Sure, there are things I am not happy about, along with plenty that I am pleased with; but at least I know the president actually uses his brain, unlike the previous inhabitant of the White House.

Today, however, there are events that are too big to ignore. I've titled this post "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" because as always, there are positives and negatives happening at the same time.

First, the "Good" - President Obama has nominated New York's Sonia Sottomayor to the Supreme Court. I heard her speech on the way to work and thought she sounded extremely impressive and yet down to earth. Her background is just what the President was looking for: someone who would have a feel for how decisions affect people in the real world - someone with empathy, but with an unimpeachable background in the law.

Raised alone by her mother after her father died when she was only 9, she was educated at Princeton University (graduating summa cum laude) and got her law degree from Yale (was editor of the Yale Law Review). Her professional experience has been diverse and should give her an excellent perspective on the various cases that would come before her as a Supreme Court Justice. And on top of that, she is Hispanic and a woman, so the President has made good on his wish to make the Supreme Court more diverse and more like the people whose lives it will affect.

So what is "the Bad"? The Republicans, of course. According to the NY Times,

"Many conservatives came out fiercely against Ms. Sotomayor as soon her name was announced, denouncing her as liberal and promising Mr. Obama a tough nomination fight.

'The G.O.P. has to make a stand,' said Scott Reed, manager of the 1996 presidential campaign of Bob Dole. 'This is what the base and social conservatives really care about, and we need to brand her a liberal with some out-of-the-mainstream positions. Forget about cosmetics and ethnic heritage, and focus on her record.'"

But, thanks to the President's political skills, he has put them into an uncomfortable position. Opposing the first Hispanic nominee to the Supreme Court would hurt them dearly with the Hispanic voters whose votes they will need to make any kind of a political comeback in the next elections.

"Matthew Dowd, another one-time adviser to Mr. Bush, said that in 2000, he calculated that Republicans needed to win 35 percent of Hispanics to beat Democrats. He said that given the steady increase in the number of Hispanic voters, he now believed Republicans needed to win a minimum of 40 percent to be competitive with Democrats.

As a result, he said, barring any revelation about Ms. Sotomayor’s background, Republicans could doom themselves to long-term minority status if they are perceived as preventing Ms. Sotomayor from becoming a judge."

Time will tell in which direction the Republicans will go. But be prepared to hear the words "liberal activist judge" a lot in the near future.

And last, "the Ugly."

As everyone already knows, today the California Supreme Court upheld the Proposition 8 ban on gay marriage that had passed last November. However, the Court did say the 18,000 same-sex couples who were married before the ruling are still officially married.

The thing to keep in mind is that this ruling was not on the constitutionality of gay marriage, but on whether the process was appropriate to amend the constitution to ban it. As the linked article states,

"While gay rights advocates accused the court of failing to protect a minority group from the will of the majority, the justices said that the state's governing framework gives voters almost unfettered ability to change the California Constitution."

And therein lies the problem. Unlike other states, California is so dysfunctional that long ago the government gave up trying to decide anything and instead gave the power to the people to make major decisions - such as whether to raise taxes (people usually vote against additional taxes, surprisingly!) and, in this case, whether to allow gay marriages.

Paul Krugman recently wrote about the "state of paralysis" that California represents, in relationship to the economy.

"The seeds of California’s current crisis were planted more than 30 years ago, when voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 13, a ballot measure that placed the state’s budget in a straitjacket. Property tax rates were capped, and homeowners were shielded from increases in their tax assessments even as the value of their homes rose.

The result was a tax system that is both inequitable and unstable. It’s inequitable because older homeowners often pay far less property tax than their younger neighbors. It’s unstable because limits on property taxation have forced California to rely more heavily than other states on income taxes, which fall steeply during recessions.

Even more important, however, Proposition 13 made it extremely hard to raise taxes, even in emergencies: no state tax rate may be increased without a two-thirds majority in both houses of the State Legislature. And this provision has interacted disastrously with state political trends."

Basically, California is leaving way too much up to the voters, who really are not qualified to decide intricate financial issues, and should also not be given the right to decide whether a group that is in the minority in the population deserves civil rights or not. If that were the case everywhere, we would probably still have slavery.

This was a constitutional matter, and the California Supreme Court had previously correctly used the state constitution to decide that gay marriage was a civil right. Unfortunately, the people of California, influenced unfairly by lots of advertising by the Mormon Church and others, decided otherwise.

William Bradley at the Huffington Post talks about the various factors that led up to the Proposition 8 debacle. In his article, he cites a previous proposition that upheld bigotry in California:

"Bringing it back to the example at hand, Californians in 1964 passed an initiative to block landmark "fair housing" legislation to end discrimination by landlords and property owners who refused to rent or sell to African Americans. The initiative, which amended the state constitution to empower discrimination, passed with a whopping 65% of the vote. But it was overturned three years later by the U.S. Supreme Court."

So there you have it - when it comes down to it, the only way we can finally ensure that the civil rights of our gay citizens are upheld is with a U.S. Supreme Court decision. A Supreme Court decision would render moot the whole question of Proposition 8, and would nullify the laws and amendments against same-sex marriage in other states.

The approval of President Obama's pick for the Supreme Court, and any subsequent choices he may make for the Court, will be extremely important in ensuring that ultimately, the civil rights of all of our citizens are protected.

Right now there is not enough of a groundswell of public pressure to bring a case to the Supreme Court for a ruling on the subject of gay marriage. But the trend is growing daily in support of gay marriage, especially as younger voters become active.

As Frank Rich wrote in the Times on Sunday, despite his campaign rhetoric, President Obama has not yet fulfilled his promises to gay Americans, including the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act. According to Rich,

"Obama has long been, as he says, a fierce advocate for gay equality. The Windy City Times has reported that he initially endorsed legalizing same-sex marriage when running for the Illinois State Senate in 1996. The most common rationale for his current passivity is that his plate is too full. But the president has so far shown an impressive inclination both to multitask and to argue passionately for bedrock American principles when he wants to. Relegating fundamental constitutional rights to the bottom of the pile until some to-be-determined future seems like a shell game.

As Wolfson reminds us in his book 'Why Marriage Matters,' Dr. King addressed such dawdling in 1963. 'For years now I have heard the word "Wait," ' King wrote. 'It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." '

The gay civil rights movement has fewer obstacles in its path than did Dr. King’s Herculean mission to overthrow the singular legacy of slavery. That makes it all the more shameful that it has fewer courageous allies in Washington than King did."

Perhaps what is needed is a march on Washington in support of gay civil rights, as Dr. King led back in 1963 for African-American rights. Maybe then the parallels would be clearer to the President and to everyone else.

We are at a crossroads in America, just as we were in the 1960s. There is political division, wars, and unrest -- and civil rights are once again an important issue.

President Obama has the opportunity to remake America and ensure that it lives up to the lofty ideals on which it was founded. Let's hope he has the courage to support what he must know should be done.

Friday Meme - The Picture Meme

Thanks go to Deb at Drivin' 55 for inspiring me to do the same meme she did today.

It's the Picture Meme, and the object is to go to your 4th photo file, then to your 4th photo inside that file, and then post it.

Because it is Friday night, and I was just burned out from the week, I was really having trouble coming up with the energy to write anything lucid tonight. Everyone was already talking about President-Elect Obama possibly having asked Hillary Clinton to be his Secretary of State (which I think could work out very well - in reality, they do have very similar positions on most major issues and after all, her job would be to carry out his policies, not her own, anyway). Sue J had already written about Judith Warner's column in the NY Times talking about the feelings of those whose marriage rights had been ripped away by the passage of Proposition 8, which I thought really brought the human side of this tragedy to the forefront - how it made people feel, how it affects their children.

So that left me with nothing! Then I came upon this meme. So I am hijacking the meme and thereby saving my daily posting record for NaBloPoMo (and yes, I am going to cheat and turn back the clock on the post since it is actually after midnight and it would look as if I posted it tomorrow!).

Without further ado, here is the 4th picture in the 4th picture folder on my computer:

This is a mural in the interior of the beautifully restored Essex County Courthouse in Newark, NJ, which had a grand re-opening ceremony three years ago. DH attended the opening, along with some of our other friends, and took some pictures.

Below are some more of his pictures of the building, which was designed in 1902 by Cass Gilbert, the reknowned architect who designed the Supreme Court and the Woolworth Building, among others.

Sadly, when people think of Newark, New Jersey, they are more apt to think of urban blight rather than beautiful historic buildings. But Newark actually has a number of lovely buildings and some great architecture. It even has a Gothic cathedral, The Cathedral-Basilica of the Sacred Heart, that rivals Notre Dame (although of course it's not as old). If Newark were somewhere else, people would be coming for miles just to see this cathedral. Here is a view of it, overlooking Branch Brook Park during cherry blossom season:
Photo source: Jersey JJ

Proposition 8's Passage Due to Older People

There has been speculation that the large African-American turnout that helped elect Barack Obama may have had something to do with the passage of Proposition 8 in California. I am sorry to say I thought that may have been a factor myself, perhaps due to religious reasons.

However, Nate Silver, creator of FiveThirtyEight.com, he who forecast Obama's election so accurately, says that this is not the case.

His assessment, based on exit polls, is:

"Certainly, the No on 8 folks might have done a better job of outreach to California's black and Latino communities. But the notion that Prop 8 passed because of the Obama turnout surge is silly. Exit polls suggest that first-time voters -- the vast majority of whom were driven to turn out by Obama (he won 83 percent [!] of their votes) -- voted against Prop 8 by a 62-38 margin. More experienced voters voted for the measure 56-44, however, providing for its passage.

...At the end of the day, Prop 8's passage was more a generational matter than a racial one. If nobody over the age of 65 had voted, Prop 8 would have failed by a point or two."

Silver expects that because it is the older voters who ensured the passage of Proposition 8, that eventually their influence will decline and same-sex marriage will be the law of the land.

"The good news for supporters of marriage equity is that -- and there's no polite way to put this -- the older voters aren't going to be around for all that much longer, and they'll gradually be cycled out and replaced by younger voters who grew up in a more tolerant era. Everyone knew going in that Prop 8 was going to be a photo finish -- California might be just progressive enough and 2008 might be just soon enough for the voters to affirm marriage equity. Or, it might fall just short, which is what happened. But two or four or six or eight years from now, it will get across the finish line."

Let's hope Proposition 8 is reversed a lot sooner than that, however. The lawsuits that have already been filed to invalidate the proposition may do the trick.

In the meantime, Connecticut began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples today, a month after the state Supreme Court had ruled that gay couples could marry.

We must work to ensure that everyone has an equal right to marry the person of their choice and make sure that this issue becomes a priority in the Obama administration.

And if anyone missed Keith Olbermann's excellent and moving "Special Comment" on this issue, here it is:

Better Late Than Never - Write to Marry Day

I was in the city for a conference yesterday. It started at 8 a.m. Yes, 8 a.m. In the morning. I usually meander (hence my blog name) in to work at more like 10:15. To get into the heart of New York City by 8 a.m., I left my house at 6:45 a.m. Without breakfast or coffee. I drove halfway to New York in the early morning darkness without my car lights on, wondering why on earth the car behind me kept flashing its lights at me, and getting annoyed about it. That's how out of it I am that early in the morning without coffee.

I did recover enough (after 3 cups of coffee) to participate properly in this conference. But it was a long day. The afternoon didn't end until 5 p.m. and then I walked all the way back to the bus station, a total of 19 short blocks and 3 long ones. Then we had dinner at my aunt's and didn't get home until almost 11 p.m.

At that point I looked at some blogs and realized I'd missed the Write to Marry Day Blogswarm. I was too tired to write last night but can't let this opportunity pass without a post in support of the movement against Proposition 8 in California.

I have always felt very strongly about the issue of same-sex marriage. It is absurd to me that two people who love each other shouldn't be allowed to marry. Love is love, it doesn't matter whether it's a man and a woman, a man and a man, or a woman and a woman.

I predict one day people will look back on these days and marvel at how ignorant and bigoted our country was, when so many states still forbade same-sex marriage -- much the way we do now when thinking back to the old laws against marriage between different races.

I could go into a whole bunch of great reasons that same-sex marriage is good for society, good for marriage in general, and best of all, good for those who choose to marry. But that's not the point. The point is that marriage should be for everyone who wants it. Period. We're talking about justice and equality, and those are the only reasons that matter.

So, those of you in California - Vote "No" on Proposition 8, which would change the state constitution to eliminate the rights of same-sex couples to marry and define marriage as only between a man and a woman. We cannot allow a step backward in the march for equal rights.