Obama Address to Shadowy Christian Group Draws Notice

Update: Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) urges President Obama to skip rightwing religious fete; group runs infamous C Street House.

"[T]oo bad Muslims, too bad, Jews -- this event is not for you," writer Jeff Sharlet said. It's a private gathering attended by every American president since Dwight D. Eisenhower.

President Obama’s address to the annual National Prayer Breakfast Thursday for the first time in this rite’s history is drawing widespread condemnation in the wake of revelations over the last two years that aggressive political programs by the religious right have targeted the liberties of the American people and entire religions that refuse to be affiliated with religious right groups such as Focus on the Family, the American Family Association and the super-secret The Family.

Though the religious right is scandal-plagued of late, it’s been a long time since the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, Republican nominee for president in 1964, said of Jerry Falwell, "Every good Christian should line up and kick Jerry Falwell's ass." That was in 1981.

No major GOP figure today feels empowered to offer a similar criticism of religious right figures, no matter the depths of inanity to which a Pat Robertson or James Dobson, for example, regularly sink.

Recent groundbreaking works by Jeff Sharlet (The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power); Max Blumenthal (Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party); Tom Krattenmaker (Onward Christain Athletes); and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation have shed light on the scope of the contemporary religious right that exercises veto power over major policy spheres of the Republican Party, seeks to control foreign policy and the American military, and in all seriousness wants to transform American society into an only-through-Christ country under their God. The movement is known as Christian Dominionism.

So the questions remain: What is Pres. Obama doing at this exclusive, private gathering this Thursday? And will he challenge these anti-Semitic, bigoted whacks?

Adele M. Stan reports:

At National Prayer Breakfast, Obama to Address Shadowy Christian Group Tied to Uganda's 'Kill the Gays' Bill

The National Prayer Breakfast, an annual Washington exercise attended by politicians of all stripes who wish to demonstrate their piety, is one of those must-go events for the U.S. president, or so the conventional wisdom has it. Every president since Dwight D. Eisenhower has attended.

But the prayer breakfast, however benign it may seem on the surface, is really a display of power for an underground religious group that often shapes U.S. foreign policy in ways not easy to see, and sometimes at odds the policy goals of the government itself. This Thursday, President Barack Obama is expected to address the gathering, as he did last year. But if there was ever a year for the president to back out, to have a sudden scheduling conflict, it's this one.

The breakfast draws leaders from all sectors of society, including a hefty contingent from the military. It's a coveted invitation.The event is usually the only public sighting of its sponsor,.the shadowy right-wing religious network known as the Family. Around the periphery of the event, the Family does what it does best: bringing together leaders from developing countries of special concern to U.S. business interests with members of Congress and people in government who hold the keys to the foreign aid kingdom.

'This is the bullying tactics of banality,' said Jeff Sharlet, author of the definitive book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, in an interview with AlterNet. 'This is not about a banality of evil, but the evil of banality. The breakfast itself is a very bland event, but it's surrounded by this week-long lobbying festival which isn't visible.'

Introductions are made and meetings arranged for foreign dignitaries through the auspices of a the Family, led for the past 40 years by Washington insider Doug Coe and comprising powerful men from all over the world, including a number of prominent members of Congress.

That group of powerful men also includes two behind a controversial anti-gay law in Uganda, proposed by two politicians with strong ties to the Family. The law carries the death penalty for something called 'aggravated homosexuality.'

The Prayer Breakfast is closed to the media, except for those in the press corps that travels with the president. 'It's a private event,' explained Joe Mitchell of the National Prayer Breakfast Committee via a voice mail left in response to AlterNet's request for access. Invitations to the Prayer Breakfast go out on congressional letterhead, Sharlet said, even though the stated purpose of the gathering is distinctly Christian and not ecumenical -- a violation of the spirit of the First Amendment. 'So, too bad Muslims, too bad, Jews -- this event is not for you,' Sharlet said.

So why does the president feel he must give his props to a group that often works against the national interest, and whose most prominent congressional members -- Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C.; Sen. James Inhofe, R Okla., and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., to name a few -- have acted as his nemeses? Power. It's all about the group's perceived power in the very structure of the U.S. government. 'You don't want to alienate them,' one religious right leader explained to Sharlet.

Obama will seek to keep his own participation in the event low-key, Sharlet told AlterNet when he sat down with us in December. 'He'll give a bland, kind of useless address,' Sharlet predicted. Yet a spate of recent scandals and exposes of the group's coddling of anti-democratic heads of state makes this the perfect time for a U.S. president to step off the Familiy's bandwagon. Indeed, his very presence lends legitimacy to a group that enacts its goals through informal lobbying and back-room deals, all knitted together through 'prayer cells' of people with the power to effect the Family's right-wing, free-market agenda.

In his State of the Union speech, Obama decried the outsized roll of lobbyists in U.S. policy. But while the Family lobbies and lobbies hard, it does so without a license, so to speak. Because its influence is conducted through an underground network of people who hold positions of power in the government, its 'lobbyists' never have to register as such. They're just 'followers of Jesus,' in the group's own parlance, who have big jobs.

'I hope there will be defections at the edges,' Sharlet said -- at least in the private dinner parties and prayer meetings arranged with Congress members for the Family's key men.

Tough Year: Sex Scandals and Uganda's 'Kill the Gays' Bill

It's been a tough year for the Family (also known as the Fellowship). First, there were the very public sex scandals of powerful lawmakers involved in the Family -- South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, Sen. John Ensign of Nevada and Rep. Chip Pickering of Mississippi, all of whom lived, at one time or another, in the Family's infamous C Street house in Washington, DC.

Just as the noise about the sex scandals began to die down came word of Uganda's proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, a proposal introduced in the Ugandan parliament that would criminalize the advocacy of LGBT rights and punish certain acts by gays with death. The foremost advocates for the bill, which is still under consideration, are two politicians that Family members refer to as 'key men.' A key man is believed to occupy a position of worldly power because he was anointed by God to actualize the Family's socially conservative, pro business theology, which hangs on the notion of a supply-side Jesus. It doesn't matter if he's a murderous dictator or known adulterer: what matters is his power.

In the U.S., Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009 has become known as the 'Kill the Gays' bill. Thanks to the persistence of bloggers like Sarah Posner of Religion Dispatches, Jim Burroway of Box Turtle Bulletin and Christian psychologist Warren Throckmorton, and the platform given the issue by MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, leaders of the Family have been forced to distance themselves, at least publicly, from the two Ugandan key men behind the bill: MP David Bahati and James Nsaba Buturo, minister of state for ethics and integrity.

When Bahati told a Ugandan newspaper that he would attend and speak at the U.S. National Prayer Breakfast, the Family's Bob Hunter issued a statement saying that Bahati was not invited to the breakfast, and that he had declined an earlier invitation, issued before he introduced the bill, to attend as a volunteer. In response to a query from AlterNet, Hunter said Buturo 'has never been on any list and has no invitation.' However, Hunter could not confirm whether or not Buturo planned to be in the U.S. for the Family's lobbying fest during the week of the prayer breakfast, saying he'd had no communication with the Ugandan official and had never met him.

'I think if the Family could make that bill go away, they would. It's too extreme,' said Jeff Sharlet, who sat down with AlterNet last month to discuss where the shadowy network, now the focus of more attention than its leaders ever wished it to have, finds itself in the age of Obama.

Indeed, the unwanted light the Uganda bill has cast on the Family has forced the group to respond in the open; Bob Hunter has become a de facto spokesperson for the group on the issue, even appearing on 'TheRachel Maddow Show' (in an appearance Sharlet helped to arrange) to distance the Family from what Sharlet calls 'this genocidal bill.'

In essence, Sharlet explained, the situation with Uganda and the anti-gay bill is a case of the Family's own power getting away from it. Uganda has long been a special project of the group, which conducts its own ad hoc foreign policy through the influence of its members.

Uganda's present dictator, Yoweri Museveni, is another of the Family's key men, Sharlet said. Museveni introduced the Family to the formerSomalian dictator Siad Barre, winning him American aid and arms, which he used, according to Sharlet, to 'lay his country to waste.'

'And recently now, I've noticed that Museveni's becoming sort of an American proxy for dealing with Somalia, which is a big problem for us,' Sharlet said. 'Somalia is a haven for al Qaeda; it's a lawless state.'

The Family's presence in Uganda likely helped pave the way for other U.S. conservative Christian evangelical groups, such as Pastor Rick Warren's 'Purpose-Driven' group, and the anti-gay ministries of Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundidge and Don Schmierer, whose anti-gay rhetoric at a Ugandan seminar influenced the authors of the 'Kill the Gays' bill.

'I think the Family opened the doors to Uganda for what they consider [to be] an evangelical revival, and the result was to make this country sort of a guinea pig for experiments in the American culture war,' Sharlet said. 'This is a way foreign policy often works; political experiments happen at the fringes and policies that can't be implemented here at home are tried out there.'

The outrage over Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality bill is affecting official U.S. foreign policy.The State Department issued a statement decrying the bill, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (who, during her Senate term, participated in the Family's Senate prayer group) expressed her concern during a 45-minute telephone call with Ugandan President Museveni, after which he directed parliament to suspend action on the bill -- stopping short of killing it. President Obama has also condemned the legislation.

The Uganda bill, Sharlet said, is just one example of how the Family's off-the-shelf foreign policy impacts the U.S. national interest. 'From what my inside sources tell me, they drive the State Department crazy. This is a constant pain in the neck for the State Department -- you know, you've got a senator just sort of dropping in on a foreign leader without clearing it.'

The Family and the Tea Party Movement

Though the Family itself is non-partisan, its ideology appeals most strongly to conservative Republicans, a handful of whom have emerged as favorites of the Tea Party crowd: Senators Jim DeMint of South Carolina, Tom Coburn and James Inhofe of Oklahoma, and Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, to name a few of the Family's better-known congressional members. (Democrats in the news associated with the Family include Rep. Bart Stupak of Ohio and Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida; for more on the Family's influence on the health care debate, see AlterNet's October report here.)

'That's an interesting overlap. That's an interesting convergence of social movements,' Sharlet told AlterNet. 'The Family represents, as they have put it in the past, the avant-garde of American fundamentalism. They're an elite -- Tea Parties [as in Tea Party protests] are not their style. Doug Coe probably finds this the tackiest, most galling -- you know, just, oh, terrible.' Nonetheless, Sharlet said, 'You've got to look at the way these two movements work together. And when I say work together, I don't mean that they're getting together in a back room and coming up with a plan; I'm talking about a social movement. The left doesn't want to admit that over on the right they have social movements, too.'

Successful social movements find their strength in the 'convergence' of various streams of activism, Sharlet said. 'And those moments of convergence are where you see social movements sometimes making great strides. You go back to the 1960s, civil rights, you have a convergence between radicals, between people who have been in the trenches of civil rights forever, and white, middle-class liberals.' The right-wing elites of the Family, Sharlet explained, 'are going for that convergence.'

As evidence, Sharlet cited the Manhattan Declaration, a sort of right-wing Christian manifesto whose signers range from Roman Catholic bishops and cardinals to such populist Protestant evangelical figures as Harry Jackson, the right's point man on opposing same-sex marriage, and convicted Watergate felon Chuck Colson, founder and leader of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Transparency -- Not Conspiracy -- Is the issue

While it's tempting to view the Family as a conspiracy of master manipulators who direct the every move of those affiliated with the group, Sharlet strongly cautions against taking this view. 'I get so frustrated with people on the left who want to look at the right as one great big Borg. Basically they think Shell Oil is sitting in their back room pulling all the strings, and that it's all related to one scheme. It's not.'

The Family's influence simply doesn't work that way, he said. And there are times when the Family's intervention may actually prevent bad things from happening to people in the nations led by the Family's key men. The real problem is the organization's lack of transparency.

'I think this really goes to the sore spot or the touchy nerve, which is the utilitarianism of American political thought, so that someone like Senator Coburn or Senator Inhofe -- they feel if they're over in Africa or the Middle East and trying to help these people, that one, they should be given tremendous credit for their good intentions,' Sharlet explained. 'And, two, if they do manage to avert a conflict through this kind of backroom dealing and rogue foreign policy, then the ends justify the means.

'Frankly, that's an idea that's seductive to a lot of people in the United States -- and not just on the right,' he continued. 'And we sort of forget about the whole conversation about democracy. We forget, as theFamily goes and works behind the scenes and works through its 'God-chosen elites' and 'anointed leaders' -- every time they do that, they are breaking down the democratic process.

'What if they're not the puppet masters?' he asked. 'What if their intentions really are good? And in fact, they have accomplished, here and there, some good things. They have averted a conflict. Do we then just drop our questions? Or do we say, you know what, good intentions are not enough, democratic process is what we need. And do we dig into the export of American political and economic religion? Because that's what it is. Free-market gospel. And say, look, what are the costs and consequences of that? Those are harder questions for us to deal with -- the more important questions.'

Embodied in the First Amendment are several complementary but competitive concepts: freedom of religion, freedom from government involvement in religion, and freedom of expression. The Family has every right to have its members express their religious views, and to act within the law as their faith informs them to do. But its insidious existence, at a cellular level, in the very muscle of American might infects U.S. policy with a theology shared by only a very few citizens. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, the cliche goes. Until the Family chooses to wield its power in the light of day, no president should grant it the glow of legitimacy.

Adele M. Stan is AlterNet's Washington bureau chief.

Ignorance Lives

Bigotry has no supporting arguments.

Bigotry is the lack of argument and rational thinking. It's ignorance directed by hate.

The sense of entitlement that a bigot possesses to impose his hate onto society is an infantile characteristic, a projection of hate often accompanied by seeking a society-wide entitlement for their self loathing.

Civil rights workers are typically concerned about the rights of blacks and gays, women and Arabs, Jews and defendants.

Bigots are more unpredictable, though often they are big supporters of guns and violence.

Frank Rich discusses the gay civil rights movement 40 years after Stonewall.

Democratic Values Voters

President Obama's election was an inspiring event in American history.

What brought out the passionate outpouring of support for Obama's candidacy is the hope that electing this American president was the elevation of, to put it simply, one of the good guys, a man committed to civil rights, human rights, due process, equal protection, peace, openness, equality, and the firm belief that, to borrow from Justice Robert Jackson, the United States can afford to be just.

To those Americans committed to democratic values - whom the Republicans mocked as defeatocrats and so on - President Obama has not yet demonstrated an abiding commitment to the values voters, those with whom democratic values and human rights remain an abiding concern.

John Aravosis in Salon sums up the sentiment that not just impatience but a sense of betrayal is gripping the civil rights community.

Everyone loves a parade, but we don't like being betrayed. And while gay and lesbian Americans were initially willing to cut our new president some slack, the president's now-clear reticence to follow through on even one of his many campaign promises to the gay community has put the Democratic Party on the precipice of an ugly and very public divorce with this once-solid constituency.

It's only been five months since assuming office, but President Obama needs to understand that seeing bigots, chickenhawks and outright fascists carry the day is intolerable.

Wisconsin Marriage Ban Will Go

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

- Judge's opinion defending state statute banning marriage between difference races, overturned in Loving v. Virginia (1967).

Sooner we hope but Wisconsin's ban on gay marriage will go the way of the state bans against blacks marrying whites.

Battles over banning gay marriage will mark the political culture this Summer-Fall with predictably dumbed-down news coverage carefully crafted not to offend bigots.

Several legal cases are proceeding.

In Wisconsin William C. McConkey v. J. B. Van Hollen challenges the gay marriage ban on a question of ambiguity of the GOP referendum that brought this ban into the Wisconsin constitution.

And make no mistake the gay marriage ban is a Republican project, supported by the religious right advancing their god-given "Judeo Christian principles and values."

Evaluating the arguments for banning gay marriage, honest observers agree the 'it's what I believe' statement doesn't count as a serious defense of a position, though that's the justification most often heard.

The plain truth is bigotry is behind the effort to ban gay marriage.

Many people and especially the Republican Party [at least those Republicans not yet out] simply do not like LGBT people, explaining their belief that raging hell fires await gays who will be punished by god.

Ignorance and delusion, that's the staple of the Republican Party.

In one federal case, to once and for all rid America of the lawful unequal treatment of gays under the law, the Perry, Stier, Katami and Zarrillo v. Schwarzenegger suit seeks a ruling guaranteeing gay Americans equal protection, due process and privacy rights just like every other American.

So, it's worth noting the God-wants-it-that-way argument was also advanced by bigots 42 years ago in the landmark Loving v. Virginia case overturning state statutes banning marriage between people of different races.

The same Equal Protection and Due Process argument in Loving v. Virginia are made in the Perry, Stier, Katami and Zarrillo v. Schwarzenegger brief.

And Wisconsin GOP's gay marriage ban efforts reflect the same ludicrous sentiments against gay marriage held by the bigots in defense of anti-miscegenation statutes.

In Loving v. Virginia, the opinion notes that the Virginia trial judge stated in accepting a guilty plea of a couple marrying in defiance of the ban of blacks and whites that:

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

Anyone want to defend that nonsense?

Christian, Mormon, or just plain stupid, opposing gay marriage is a political exercise in bigotry and ignorance that ultimately will fail through the courts upholding civil rights or the legislatures upholding civil rights.

LGBT Community Needs to Fracking Chill on Obama and Warren

Update: Percentage of Americans who believe that God created man pretty much in his present form in one instance within the last 10,000 years: 47 percent. ... Rick Warren is one of these people.

Most here have heard the indictment that Barack Obama's inauguration will include a "humiliating" (Maddow) slap at the LGBT community for the incoming administration's political benefit.

Rick Warren, pastor and author (at right), will deliver the invocation at Obama's swearing-in ceremony on the Capitol steps.

Warren possesses a bright mind, and happens to hold benighted and bigoted views on gays perforce making the man an ignoramus popular in rightwing circles.

Warren's delivery of the Obama invocation has brought down a shower of condemnation from the civil rights community summed up by Rachel Maddow and John Aravosis of AmericaBlog [wouldn't bother reading Andrew Sullivan ...—"[It's] shrewd politics, but if anyone is under any illusion that Obama is interested in advancing gay equality, they should probably sober up now... ."—Sullivan is of the couldn't-make-of-his-mind-to-support-Bush-or-Kerry fame in 2004; and Sullivan's a disingenuous showboat anyway].

Include Warren

Before arguing here for Obama's choice of Warren's inclusion in the inauguration, let's add that Aravosis found this gem at TNR by Alan Wolfe in which "Rick Warren outright told a Jewish woman, in front of a large gasping crowd, that she was going to hell because she hasn't converted to Christianity." Hey, Happy Hanukkah.

But such idiocies that Warren professes as consigning world Jewry to eternal damnation [or whatever fate in hell awaits our functionally fellow heathens, that's going to be some party] is a good place to begin.

Over the 2008 campaign, I wrote 10,000s of words on Barack Obama since I first heard about the man's candidacy, in any length anyway, from my Georgia-bred-and-raised Irish mother—[a greater foe of racism and bigotry I have not met than she, and I have been fortunate to meet many incredible people].

It's difficult to apprehend the American mind when, for instance, in knocking on 100s of doors on the south side of Milwaukee this summer and engaging charming people, a nice elderly house-bound woman proceeds to tell me that yeah, she's voting Democratic this year, things need changing, but it's just too damn bad the Mexicans and Blacks have "taken over" what in the past were largely Polish-white neighborhoods. [A joke among some political circles in Wisconsin is that the 27th street viaduct crossing I-94 in Milwaukee is the "longest bridge in the world" because it connects Africa (a very Black area) with Mexico (a mixed but quite Mexican and other Hispanic-populated area on the south side). The joke used to be Africa to Poland.] By the way, check out Gare-Bear's bar just on the Africa side: Cool people.

The 2008 race was historic. I felt more personally involved this year than in any race that I have worked in, in any manner. But I knew all through this Fall that some 41 percent (in a best-case scenario) of the vote would still go to the John McCain-Palin ticket and the self-conscious ignorance and bigotry this ugly reality of our political culture represents in the modern Republican Party.

Casting Jews to hell. The state controlling a woman's body. Disenfranchising LGBT folks by denying them equal protection under the law. Massive lies and mass murder (aka war). Jailing millions. Starving millions. Preventing the dreams and happiness of millions. An industrial policy that seemingly aims at restoring feudalism.

This is the reality of contemporary American society sustained by ignorance, isolation and depolicalization consonant with broadcast networks dedicating an untold number of hours on the personal lives of hot, blond woman [nothing wrong with hot, blond women mind you] vis a vis discussions of the continuing wars America is waging over the world to catastrophic results.

If one were to exclude from the inauguration and other official functions the imbecilic Americans who fervently believe that those unperfected Christians, aka Jews, are headed for damnation, then many mainline Christians would find themselves thinking, well, who knows what they think. But 10s of millions of Americans (many of them wonderful human beings not withstanding their array of anti-human sentiments) would be told in a message to get lost: All that Obama unity talk was crap.

But the 43 percent of voting Americans who did vote for McCain, or think that dinosaurs frolicked with early man and that biological evolution is a liberal plot are as American as we are.

So, does Obama who campaigned on unity and a presidency representing all American exclude these American among us who hold idiotic views?

And I don't know about you, but I'm into public policy and not the substance of an inaugural invocation. [My sister Joan, Brucie and my crazy nieces are going to the inauguration, but I doubt seriously that the invocation will stay etched into their minds.]

What is an invocation anyway other a banal, insipid address to an imaginary friend? Warren will intend well and I doubt that he'll use the occasion to cast down spells (prayers, whatever) on gays, Jews, and the rational among us.

Warren's just a guy, a fool to be sure, talking. So, lighten up.

Personally, I do without religion and its artifacts remaining in political ceremony, and the other foolish fare to ill-formulated questions from which the religious-minded among us run without apparently caring what precisely so frightens then.

But hey, people believe what they want to believe and they are our fellow citizens, finally being called by a president to engage in a common effort.

Our president is their president.

So to all of my fellow LGBT civil rights workers and political analysts outraged by the soon-to-be-forgotten address by Rick Warren: Forget about this silly exercise of the invocation, enjoy Obama's address, party down, and then get your asses back to work on public policy

All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
- H.L. Mencken, Damn! A Book of Calumny, (1918)

Fla Court Rules Gays Get Equal Protection, Adoption Ban Unconstitutional

Has Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Cindy S. Lederman been getting too much sun or is she seeing the light?

Judge Lederman ruled on a legal case challenging a Florida law that bans lesbians and gays from adopting, finding the statute unconstitutional.

The case raises the big question Republicans are pondering as they decide which way forward for their battered Party: Embracing ignorance and authoritarianism or some manner of qualified libertarianism.

[Pictured above-right is Martin Gill with the two brothers he hopes to adopt in Florida.] From the ACLU:

Judge Lederman "struck down a Florida law that bars lesbians and gay men from adopting. The court granted adoptions to a gay man, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, who has been raising two foster children since 2004," reads a ACLU press release.

"The court ruled that the ban violated the equal protection guarantees of the state constitution because it singles out for different treatment gay people and the children they raise for no rational reason. The court also found that the ban denies children the right to permanency provided by federal and state law under the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997."

In 2005, the US Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to the Florida law. So, the US Supreme Court that ruled an equal protection violation in Bush v. Gore did not get to rule on a violation in this case.

The case will likely end up in the Florida Supreme Court where four of the seven members were appointed by the late Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles.

We'll get there.

Times are changing, ultimately, such discriminatory laws as Florida's adoption law and the many anti-gay marriage statutes and state constitutional amendments will go the way of laws banning inter-"racial" marriage that were struck down in Loving v. Virginia, (1967) on equal protection grounds by the the US Supreme Court.

Change is gonna come, and likely the GOP will be left behind.

See - Trial Court Decision and Order (11/25/2008) RE: [Frank Martin Gill] John Doe and James Doe for the language of the decision by Judge Lederman.

- via mal contends

Equal Protection Will Come

One day, the Equal Protection Clause will be sensibly applied to LGBT persons' right to marry.

The Equal Protection clause will be read to mean that denying a citizen the right to marry, in defiance of equal protection under the law, is about as sensible as the reasoning in Plessy.

Sounds like the California Constitution is ahead of the game in judicial policymaking on the national front and proposition 8 will be overturned.

Nationally the US Supreme Court will catch up one day.

The inequality is staring us in the face.

If we had to throw Brown v. Board of Education to a series of state referenda, who knows in how many states it would have passed.

Many today would still refuse to knock down the separate-but-equal pillar of American racism.

Trying to fathom the seemingly incomprehensible, protesters Saturday asked of gay marriage opponents: "What will they take from you?"

What they will take from the bigoted in the projection of hate and dehumanization that all bigots and ignoramuses share and lean on for meaning in their lives.

OUR LIVES Acclaims LGBTQA People

Madison has a fresh addition to its media that Bill O’Reilly famously scorned for its “communing with Satan.”

And this magazine's writers are heading straight into the searing hellfire, with a unique mix of empathy, pride and love.

Madison’s new Our Lives celebrates the humanity of LGBTQA individuals, and applauds the community’s pioneering work in civil rights by helping individuals' quality of life and expanding and integrating the LGBTQA community.

Patrick Farabaugh, the editor and publisher of Our Lives magazine, explains on Our Lives’ website that its mission is “… to clearly, candidly and openly reflect the diversity and optimism in our community. We are dedicated to improving our readers’ quality of life by celebrating the people, establishments and events that encourage us to embrace our identities as individuals and as a LGBTQA community.”

The Our Lives journal can be found in establishments throughout Madison, Milwaukee, Eau Claire, La Crosse and Green Bay.

Though non-partisan and even apolitical, Our Lives publishes in today’s political culture where the prerequisite to securing the Republican nomination to the U.S. presidency is either to declare hostility to the LGBTQA community or repudiate one’s past commitments to civil rights and equality, like Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani.

Our Lives vows that hate and exclusion will not stand and that the journal will affirm LGBTQA individuals by explaining and acquainting readers with each “… story, identity and person regardless of notoriety or lack thereof.”

Though blatant bigotry against LGBTQA persons is anathema in Madison and many areas of Wisconsin, garden-variety and de jure discrimination survives and presents challenges that Our Lives aims to overcome by establishing an oasis of inclusion and citizenship to which America aspires.
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