Justin's Political Corner

Last Friday’s decision to postpone a vote on marriage equality in the Illinois House came as a huge disappointment to supporters of LGBT equality. But Prairie State voters can take heart from legislative battles in other states where marriage equality was similarly delayed or defeated — but where the same chambers went on to pass bills soon after.

Like Illinois, legislative efforts to pass marriage equality stumbled in Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and New York — either failing to obtain a majority or by through postponed consideration. Future attempts to enact legislation later succeeded in three of those states, while the New Jersey legislature’s passage of a bill was met with a Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) veto. As Illinois supporters work to win passage of the bill later this year, ThinkProgress reached out to key players in each of those states and asked them about their experiences.

Three common themes emerged in their responses. Several said Illinois supporters need to make sure they have an accurate target list and focus on the lawmakers who need persuading. Constituents, they suggested, must respectfully tell their personal stories to their legislators and make their representatives understand why this issue matters to their families. Finally, the openly LGBT caucus within the legislature must appeal personally and emotionally to their colleagues, especially those who may not be as attuned to the topic.

Maryland

Perhaps the most analogous case was Maryland’s unsuccessful 2011 attempt to pass a civil marriage bill through the state House of Representatives. Though advocates believed they had the needed votes to pass the bill, they were forced to postpone the vote after some pledged supporters wavered. Unlike Illinois, supporters went through with the debate — hoping their compelling personal stories might sway the handful of votes needed for a majority — before sending the bill back to committee after it became apparent the votes would not be there. Advocates, including Gov. Martin O’Malley (D), the state’s seven openly LGBT legislators, and LGBT groups, organized a new campaign and successfully pushed the bill through less than a year later. When opponents forced the question onto the November ballot, a majority voted for marriage equality.

Openly lesbian Maryland Del. Heather Mizeur (D) noted that about 10 supporters were willing to be a part of a 71-vote majority but would have voted against the bill if it appeared likely to lose. “It would not have been okay to lose by 12 votes and try to come back the next year to win those back. We wanted to hold onto their willingness to be yes on a winning vote, instead of locking them into a no vote because they saw it was going down,” she recalled. To turn around the vote in Illinois, she suggested, “it could be helpful for them to try to wage an effort to get their supporters to sign some sort of pledge, start getting a vote count, and get a campaign around securing public commitments.” Maryland’s success came, she explained, from working with allies at national organizations, state groups, and really putting together a campaign. “Leave no stone unturned until we’re able to claim victory.”

Carrie Evans, executive director of Equality Maryland, said that it made little sense to demand a vote in 2011 because there was not going to be an election before the next (2012) session. She noted that while grassroots activists were vital to the successful effort to win the second attempt, so was having a robust LGBT caucus inside the legisature who could remind colleagues, “you know my husband, you know my kids.” Issues like marriage equality, she observed, must be personal. “They’re so close — you really just have to build on that and get those last few votes.”

New Hampshire

In 2009, openly gay then-Rep. Jim Splaine (D) brought a marriage equality bill to the floor without even a favorable committee recommendation. Despite having only about 130 firm commitments in the 400-member House, the bill narrowly lost by a 182-183 vote — a positive surprise even to the sponsor. “I had been in the legislature for 30 years off and on at that point, my first term being in 1969, and I knew that one or two votes can be found SOMEWHERE,” he recalled. After obtaining the printout of the initial roll call, “those of us for the bill lobbied those few members who we thought might switch their votes. Within 20 minutes, a re-vote was held and the bill passed 186 to 179.

For Splaine, having an accurate breakdown of where people stood proved hugely important: “The fact that we knew who our 182 supporters were and who were left on the other side certainly allowed us to switch those votes to our side on the second vote. On follow-up votes in the next few weeks, our supporters were able to hold strong, but at times they weren’t all there for votes and that’s when we almost lost the bill. But knowing who we could still appeal to gave us a chance to do ‘at-home’ lobbying, and get a few more supporters. We eventually got to over 200 supporters as the weeks went by, and since then efforts to repeal the bill fell flat.”

He echoed the importance of LGBT legislators and constituents winning votes with their personal tales: “Our mantra was ‘Let’s show our faces and tell our stories.’” To win, Illinois and everywhere, LGBT folks must look at legislators “in their eyes, face-to-face, and talk with — not “to” or “at” them, but with them — about our story.”

New Jersey

A 2009 vote on marriage equality in the New Jersey Senate fell seven votes short (losing 14 to 20). Last year, the same body endorsed a similar bill by a 24-16 margin. While Governor Christieswiftly vetoed the bill — suggesting that LGBT civil rights should be put up for a popular referendum — activists are mulling a possible override attempt.

Steven Goldstein, founder of Garden State Equality, told ThinkProgress that he is optimistic that both Illinois and New Jersey will soon see marriage equality: “I would be surprised if marriage equality did not come to Illinois later this year, because of the skill of the extraordinary legislators who have spearheaded the effort, as well as then U.S. Supreme Court decision on the Defense of Marriage Act coming down later this month, which many people believe will make marriages in states that already have them forced to recognized federal benefits.” Noting that both states have civil unions, he observed that same-sex couples in those states would be denied federal recognition, rendering their civil unions “even more unequal than they already are.” Such a ruling could be the final push for many legislators: “I hear from legislators all the time, who are on the fence or are pro-equality but haven’t voted that way in the past, who are looking for a new external reason. They’re proactively mentioning DOMA.”

Goldstein advised against disappointed activists being “armchair quarterbacks” on the Illinois process. “Every state is different and the path to marriage equality varies,” he explained.

New York

The 2009 attempt to pass marriage equality vote in the New York State Senate was in many ways the “worst case scenario.” Though supporters thought they had the votes, several Senators bolted when it became clear that the bill would fall short of a majority — and the bill was defeated 38-24. Activists defeated some opponents in the 2010 elections, organized a major campaign to win over others, and prevailed 33-29 in 2011.

Brian Ellner, a senior strategist for the New York campaign, said legislators were not harder to convince just because they had voted against it once: “A lot of people have been evolving on this issue over time. Some of that takes place quickly and dramatically… from the President to the Vice President to Republican Senator Rob Portman (OH), and others. Legislators had the same story line, they become convinced by changing times and fundamental fairness.” While some activists were demoralized by the 2009 disappointment, he added, “many people were committed to working that much harder, energized and angered.”

Ellner’s key to winning over the needed votes is knowing where legislators stand. “The more intelligence you have,” he explained, “the more you’re able to target specifically which legislatures you need to move, the more helpful it is for anyone running this kind of campaign. If you don’t know which of 25-30 legislators to go after, to persuade, you’re really diluting your resources.”

Illinois

In light of these observations, ThinkProgress also spoke with two key players in Illinois about the next steps.

Openly gay Rep. Greg Harris (D), the chief House sponsor of the stalled marriage bill, noted that the successes in other state are instructive. “Often people don’t see things in the lens of even recent history, must less the history of equality struggles of all kinds,” he said, “You have steps forwards, you have setbacks, you move ahead, and you finally win.”

Harris said that he and the advocacy groups “have a fairly good sense of who is a hard no, a hard yes, who’s leaning which way.” As the opponents in Illinois are rabid, “we need to be sure that the moms, dads, grandpas, and grandmas from PFLAG are also getting out there,” and that they and LGBT constituents convey to their legislators that marriage equality is important to them and their families. “Our state has plenty of other issues… huge issues – our bond ratings were downgraded the other day, we have a monumental unfunded pension crisis, just went through a state budget where people were fighting to maintain education and human services, and gun control. Some people looking at this are saying “didn’t we just do civil unions?” But since Friday, Harris senses a turning tide. “The fact that it has become such a huge issue in the news here, the dialogue around it… I’ve talked to some, it’s caused them to search long and hard about this. [The Friday floor speech by openly lesbian Rep.] Deborah Mell — what she said really cast this issue in a way that forced colleagues to think about family and what they stand for.”

Bernard Cherkasov, CEO of Equality Illinois, said that his group did not have a clear sense of which representatives had been unwilling to pass the bill at this juncture, but expressed optimism that the legislative sponsors would share that information going forward. He said activists are mobilizing to win the needed votes later this year. “Almost instantly after the non-vote happened, we’ve been in touch with the chief sponsors to understand what we have to do. The next morning, Equality Illinois was already in Rockford and Quad Cities, fair-minded parts of IL without lawmakers in support of [civil marriage].” While he is hopeful that a favorable DOMA ruling could add to the momentum for the bill, Cherkasov said, “There’s clear momentum already and that’s hopefully them doing the right thing and passing the marriage bill.”

The anti-abortion rights group Live Action released today an undercover video claiming to reveal “illegal and inhuman practices” at an abortion clinic in New York City, and accused a doctor at the clinic of committing murder. The video reveals nothing of the sort, and actually undermines Live Action’s baseless allegations that the clinic is performing illegal procedures and endangering the lives of patients.

Live Action and its founder, Lila Rose, have a long, disreputable history of perpetrating hoaxes and concocting false allegations against abortion rights supporters, Planned Parenthood in particular. This latest “undercover video” project is timed to coincide with the trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, a Philadelphia abortion provider facing multiple murder charges resulting from the monstrous and horrific procedures he is alleged to have carried out under the guise of women’s reproductive health.

The Live Action video depicts a woman at Dr. Emily Woman’s Health Center in the Bronx inquiring after an abortion in the 23rd week of her pregnancy — a procedure that is legal in New York State. The woman speaks to both a clinician and a counselor at the facility, and the video is edited down to make it appear as though the clinician describes a procedure in which a baby that survives an abortion is killed using a toxic solution.

Based solely on this exchange, Live Action claimed that the doctor who performs abortions at the clinic “has violated” the state’s law against murder in the first degree and called on the state’s attorney general to launch a homicide investigation. But Live Action edited out from the video the portion in which the clinician makes clear that the situation they’re talking about has never happened in her experience and the discussion is hypothetical, and the video shows the counselor explaining to the woman that the doctor would have to resuscitate the baby if that situation did occur.

Despite these flaws, the Live Action video has already been written up by the the New York Post, the Daily Caller, and Michelle Malkin’s Hot Air. The story has spread to Fox News and will likely offer grist for other conservative outlets that have been using the Gosnell trial to attack legal abortion. 

While Live Action claims that clinic workers seek to “separate [the woman] from the humanity of her child” in order to “ensure the mother has an expensive abortion,” the full transcript reveals that the counselor urged the woman to be sure that she is comfortable having the abortion and told her to talk it over with a friend before making a final decision.

So despite the inflammatory claims in Live Action’s press release, what the video depicts is two employees at the same clinic reacting to a situation they both say doesn’t actually happen, and one of them accurately describing what would have to happen according to the law. What the video does not depict is any evidence whatsoever that the doctor at the clinic stands in violation of the New York murder statute or the federal Born Alive Infants Protection Act, as Live Action claims.

H/T: MMFA

Suggesting his relationship with Congress — and members of his own party — has been irrevocably damaged, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) on Friday once again blasted Republicans such as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) for voting against disaster relief for victims of Superstorm Sandy.

“My relationship with Congress will never be the same again. They made us wait 90 to 100 days to give the most basic human aid that is required. It’s absolutely disgraceful,” King said during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “And when I see these Republicans, we slap each other on the back, all the camaraderie, ‘hey, we’re great friends.’ All I know is there were people who were close to dying in my district and no one gave a damn.”

King told host Joe Scarborough that he’ll never forgive and forget the Republicans who opposed the relief bill.

“And by the way, guys like Marco Rubio in Florida. All the money that your people have gotten in Florida over the years from every hurricane that came along,” King said. “And this guy has the nerve to vote against money for New York and then come up here and try to raise money. You know, he can forget it.”

h/t: Talking Points Memo

While New York State Sen. Rubén Díaz (D) was leading the anti-marriage equality march on the National Mall yesterday, his son, Bronx Borough President Rubén Díaz Jr. (D), was probably penning the final words for his statement endorsing marriage equality.

On Wednesday, the junior Díaz released a long and personal statement announcing his support for same-sex marriage, which has been the national focus this week as the Supreme Court debates the constitutionality of both the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8:

“My decision, which comes after years of thought and reflection on the issue, is informed by the experiences I have had with close friends, family and loved ones.

“For example, my chief-of-staff, Paul Del Duca, has for decades worked to help the people of this City. He has helped people find housing and jobs, he has dedicated his professional life to assisting those in need. Why, then, should he and his partner Damion—whose wedding I stood witness to—be denied the same rights of any other loving and committed couple? Moreover, why should my niece, Erica Diaz, be denied the ability to get married when her time comes?

“When marriage equality was made legal in 2011, many opponents predicted that it would have negative consequences. That has certainly not been the case. It is my contention that our city and our state are better off than they were before marriage equality became the law. Not only has our city seen an incredible financial impact from marriage equality, the quality of life for myself, my family and my friends has not suffered one bit.”

Díaz, Jr.’s statement stands in stark contrast to the comments from his father, who has vowed to lead a “war” on same-sex marriages, and has embraced the support of a woman who declared homosexuality more threatening than terrorism and a minister who said gays are worthy of death.

H/T: Think Progress LGBT

Rep. José Enrique Serrano (D-NY) released a statement today praising former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, despite the latter’s record of harsh crackdowns on his political opponents and state-sanctioned persecution against Venezuela’s Jewish population. Serrano tweeted a statement praising Chavez as an a champion of the oppressed, writing that “Hugo Chávez was a leader that understood the needs of the poor. He was committed to empowering the powerless. R.I.P. Mr. President.” Serrano’s office later released a statement expanding on the tweet:

President Chávez was a controversial leader. But at his core he was a man who came from very little and used his unique talents and gifts to try to lift up the people and the communities that reflected his impoverished roots. He believed that the government of the country should be used to empower the masses, not the few. He understood democracy and basic human desires for a dignified life. His legacy in his nation, and in the hemisphere, will be assured as the people he inspired continue to strive for a better life for the poor and downtrodden.”

While even Chávez’s critics admit that he did attempt to address the plight of Venezuela’s poorest, the decline in economic inequality in Venezuela reflected a broader egalitarian trend in Latin America, and can’t be fully credited to Chávez’s policies. However, Chávez’s policies harmed Venezuela’s poorest in other ways: the value of the Venezuelan currency dropped while prices soared, making it harder for people to buy basic necessities, and crime skyrocketed.

Moreover, Chávez hurt the vulnerable in Venezuela in other ways. Chávez’s state-run media hounded Venezuela’s small, beleaguered Jewish population — he himself once said “Don’t let yourselves be poisoned by those wandering Jews.”

Chávez also attacked Venezuela’s democratic political system. Human Rights Watch reported in 2012 that “the accumulation of power in the executive and the erosion of human rights protections have allowed the Chávez government to intimidate, censor, and prosecute critics and perceived opponents in a wide range of cases involving the judiciary, the media, and civil society.” Contra Serrano, Venezuela’s elections were not certified as “free and fair” by international monitors of late: Chávez had not allowed international election monitors to observe Venezuelan elections since 2006.

h/t: Zack Beauchamp at Think Progress Security

NEW YORK, NY — Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers navigated a still powerless reality on Wednesday, the second day after Superstorm Sandy flooded and crippled much of the city.

The powerlessness was felt especially in Manhattan below 39th street, where electricity had been partially shut off preemptively on Monday by local utility ConEdison to avoid more extensive flooding damage from the storm surge. (The location where TPM’s own New York offices are located, also without power at the time of this article’s publication).

So it shouldn’t have been a surprise that Manhattanites descended upon the city like an army of zombies, not in search of brains but rather power for their dead devices: cell phones, tablets, laptops, mp3 players and the rest of the gadgets that run on rechargeable — not easily replaceable — lithium ion batteries.

“If you plan on coming into Manhattan, bring cash, a phone charger, and cigarettes,” tweeted one resident. “You will automatically be Mayor. #NYC #Sandy”

“It’s like there’s two cities, everybody above 39th street is going along like nothing’s happened while everybody below is staggering around without power,” said David Walke, CEO of goCharge, a New York City-based startup that provides mobile device charging kiosks in bars and restaurants, and bills itself as the “world leader in mobile device charging,” in a phone interview with TPM.

Since early 2011, goCharge has 50 free to use electronics charging stations throughout bars in Manhattan, but only 17 of those were active as of Wednesday, all of them above 39th street, Walke told TPM.

“Backup diesel generators are designed to provide emergency response for critical functions, such as access lighting around doors and stairways, and power for escalators and elevators so passengers aren’t trapped,” said Allen Schaeffer, executive director of the nonprofit Diesel Technology Forum, which advocates for and educates about diesel fuel use, in an interview with TPM, “So the fact that folks can’t find outlets that are adequately charged even in buildings that may have lights, that explains why.”

However, Schaeffer said that as smartphones and tablets become more integral to the functioning of critical services like health care and safety going forward, operators of backup generator systems should consider expanding their capacity to power personal devices.

“When you see images of a swarm of people around one power strip, cords everywhere like a bunch of spaghetti lying there, those are important images to think about going forward,” Schaeffer told TPM.

The desperate search for places to recharge in New York came despite earlier articles warning residents to keep their devices powered up and use them scarcely to conserve energy during an outage.

Of course, even once mobile devices owners recharged, there were still other gadget-related problems with which to contend: Dropped calls were a recurring issue into Wednesday, as up to 25 percent of all transmission sites in the Northeast were still offline, as The New York Times reported. Again, Lower Manhattan seemed to be the epicenter of that outage, as well, according to The Wall Street Journal.

H/T: Carl Franzen at TPM

With Election Day just one week away, state officials along the eastern seaboard are assessing the devastation done by Hurricane Sandy, which swept through the Northeast corridor and hit New Jersey and New York hardest.

For the second day, early voting was canceled in Maryland, while some in-person absentee voting locations in northern Virginia were closed, and early voting was suspended in six counties in West Virginia, a state hit by high winds and heavy snow.

But the looming challenge was for counties in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut where the storm surge flooded schools and other locations designated as voting sites next Tuesday. Election officials in coastal counties were struggling to assess whether power outages might force changes in some of next Tuesday’s polling locations.

The potential for disruptions to voting on Nov. 6 could depress voter turnout in storm-affected areas of New York and New Jersey, for example, but President Barack Obama is still likely to carry those two states with no difficulty.

In Nassau County, N.Y., where the south shore was inundated by the storm surge and where there are more than 900,000 registered voters, towns such as Oceanside and Long Beach are now under a foot or more of water.

Nassau County Board of Elections Commissioner William Biamonte said Tuesday that he and other officials were still trying to reach the emergency contact people at each of the polling locations in the flooded areas, but they’d been unsuccessful, as cell phone service was out in parts of the county.

Before the storm hit, officials mapped polling locations in what FEMA designates as Category 1 storm areas: 68 of Nassau County’s 400 polling locations are in that flood-prone zone.

“The real issue is power,” Biamonte said. “If we still have massive power outages a week from today, there are few options.”

One of them: when voters come to a polling location, they would be asked to fill out the ballot used in the county’s optical scan machines and instead of scanning them at the polling location (which is the normal procedure), those ballots could be taken to the county board’s office and scanned there. This option, he said, would delay the tallying of results by a day.

Biamonte said he expects voter turnout of about 670,000 in the county next Tuesday but is concerned that about 300,000 of those voters, who vote only in presidential elections, will be unfamiliar with the optical scan machines the county has adopted since 2008. That unfamiliarity might add another element of confusion on Election Day.

But “come hell or high water – which is what we just had – were going to be voting next week,” Biamonte said.

As in New York, and in New Jersey too, power outages, massive flooding, and impassable streets are making it difficult for officials along the coast to assess polling locations.

h/t: NBCPolitics.com

After a marathon meeting to decide his fate, the board of trustees of The King’s College, a small evangelical school based in Manhattan, announced Thursday that conservative author Dinesh D’Souza had resigned as president. Former president and current chairman Andy Mills, who made the announcement to faculty and staff, will return as interim president for a third time.

D’Souza came under fire Tuesday when World magazine revealed that he was engaged to a 29-year-old woman while still married to his wife of 20 years. D’Souza and Denise Odie Joseph allegedly shared a hotel room at a Christian conference in September, and D’Souza introduced her as his fiancee.

It was not immediately clear whether the board’s decision was driven by the allegations of the affair, or by dissatisfaction with D’Souza’s leadership that had been building at the college for months. At the meeting Thursday, Mills did not give details of the board’s conversation about D’Souza or give reasons for his departure. Representatives for the college did not respond to requests for comment.

According to several sources at the college, members of the King’s faculty and board alike had grown hostile to D’Souza’s presidency over what they saw as a failure to earn his reported million-dollar salary. D’Souza has spent much of the past few months promoting his documentary, 2016: Obama’s America, and his high profile in the media was seen as rarely benefitting the college. 

h/t: The Daily Beast

Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs is a very conservative judge. He joined a court decision effectively declaring corporations immune to international human rights law — even when they “trade in or exploit slaves, employ mercenary armies to do dirty work for despots, perform genocides or operate torture prisons for a despot’s political opponents, or engage in piracy.” And he once gave a speech to the conservative Federalist Society decrying the “anti-social effects” of attorneys providing free legal services to the less fortunate.

And yet, this severely conservative judge is also the author of an opinion striking down the unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act.

Even more significantly, Chief Judge Jacobs’ opinion concludes that any law which discriminates against gay men and lesbians should be treated very skeptically under our Constitution:

[W]e conclude that review of Section 3 of DOMA requires heightened scrutiny.The Supreme Court uses certain factors to decide whether a new classification qualifies as a quasi-suspect class. They include: A) whether the class has been historically “subjected to discrimination,”; B) whether the class has a defining characteristic that “frequently bears [a] relation to ability to perform or contribute to society,” C) whether the class exhibits “obvious, immutable, or distinguishing characteristics that define them as a discrete group;” and D) whether the class is “a minority or politically powerless.” Immutability and lack of political power are not strictly necessary factors to identify a suspect class. Nevertheless, immutability and political power are indicative, and we consider them here. In this case, all four factors justify heightened scrutiny: A) homosexuals as a group have historically endured persecution and discrimination; B) homosexuality has no relation to aptitude or ability to contribute to society; C) homosexuals are a discernible group with non-obvious distinguishing characteristics, especially in the subset of those who enter same-sex marriages; and D) the class remains a politically weakened minority.

This is a Really. Big. Deal. Jacobs is not simply saying that DOMA imposes unique and unconstitutional burdens on gay couples, he is saying that any attempt by government to discriminate against gay people must have an “exceedingly persuasive” justification. This is the same very skeptical standard afforded to laws that discriminate against women. If Jacobs’ reasoning is adopted by the Supreme Court, it will be a sweeping victory for gay rights, likely causing state discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation to be virtually eliminated. And the fact that this decision came from such a conservative judge makes it all the more likely that DOMA will ultimately be struck down by the Supreme Court.

H/T: Ian Millhiser at Think Progress Justice

A New York Priest publicly suggested on Monday that child victims of sexual abuse seduced their abusers, using the remarks as a launching pad to defend convicted child predator and Penn State football Coach Jerry Sandusky.

Father Benedict Groeschel, the director of the Office for Spiritual Development for the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, wrote an opinion piece for the National Catholic Register (which has since been taken down and replaced with several apologies) calling Sandusky a “poor guy” and blaming the victims of sexual abuse. Andrew Sullivan has the remarks:

People have this picture in their minds of a person planning to — a psychopath. But that’s not the case. Suppose you have a man having a nervous breakdown, and a youngster comes after him. A lot of the cases, the youngster — 14, 16, 18 — is the seducer … It’s not so hard to see — a kid looking for a father and didn’t have his own — and they won’t be planning to get into heavy-duty sex, but almost romantic, embracing, kissing, perhaps sleeping but not having intercourse or anything like that.

It’s an understandable thing …

Here’s this poor guy — [Penn State football coach Jerry] Sandusky — it went on for years. Interesting: Why didn’t anyone say anything? Apparently, a number of kids knew about it and didn’t break the ice.

Groeschel was one of the founders of a Catholic ex-gay group named “Courage” and wrote a book titled “The Courage To Be Chaste” that urges gay men to lead a life of celibacy to avoid temptation.

It has been reported that Groeschel was in a debilitating car accident and that “in recent months his health, memory and cognitive ability have been failing.” 

H/T: Annie-Rose Strasser at Think Progress