Why Marriage Matters

Imagine being with the same man for fifty years, still happily . . . um, what?  And when the nurse in the emergency room asks what your marital status is, after all those years together, what do you say?  What can you say?

A sampler of wonderful new marriage-equality ads from Lambda Legal in Illinois that make their point oh so clearly (just keep watching to go through the playlist):



The Illinois House of Representatives may - or may not - consider a same-sex marriage bill in a special session called to begin on June 19th. The bill was passed by the Illinois Senate by 34-21 on Valentine's Day this year.

Compare those messages with this one from the gutter-minded Pat Robinson, who laments that teh gayz are destroying everything just for their own selfish sexual desires:

Tired Old Queen at the Movies: Humoresque

Steve Hayes reviews the classic drama:

Sparks fly as Joan Crawford and John Garfield heat up the screen in a forbidden romance set against the world of classical music in Jean Negulesco's HUMORESQUE (1946). Joan plays a wealthy dipsomaniac and patron of the arts who falls head over highballs for a young, struggling violinist played by a very hot John Garfield. Giving able support are Oscar Levant as Garfield's acerbic sidekick, Ruth Nelson as his possessive mother and Paul Cavanaugh as Crawford's debonair, wise and world-weary husband. Crawford never looked more glamorous and Garfield never more magnetic. Filled with pithy, sophisticated dialogue, sumptuous visuals and shot against some of the greatest classical music ever recorded, HUMORESQUE is one of the greatest love stories of classic cinema.

Catch more of Steve's fabulous movie reviews at his YouTube channel.

Marriage News Watch, 6/10/13

Matt Baume of the American Foundation for Equal Rights reports:

Sunday Drive: Have I Told You Lately That I Love You

A favorite of my Mama's, performed here by country-western legend Red Foley, 1946:

Waiting on the Supremes

Lambda Legal has published this quick-and-easy chart to explain the most likely possible rulings in the Prop 8 case, which deals with marriage in California. The chart also covers the separate case of United States v. Windsor, which addresses DOMA. Both rulings are expected to be issued before the Supreme Court takes its summer recess at the end of this month; but the legal and constitutional issues in both cases are complex, so there's really no way of predicting what the Court will say until they say it.



Click to enlarge.

Your Head Trucker has said before, and will say again, that he believes the Court will follow a cautious path and end up, whatever the legal justifications may turn out to be, restoring marriage equality to California only, and telling the federal government it has to recognize same-sex marriages wherever they are legal. And no more. I just don't see the Court legalizing gay marriage nationwide at this time. But we'll have to wait and see.

Waitin' for the Weekend

Change You Can't Believe In

Showtime!  Pay no attention to those little men behind the curtains . . .

In the wake of the Verizon phone-trawling revelations, coming hot on the heels of other privacy and civil-liberties scandals in recent weeks, the New York Times today said in a scathing editorial that Obama "has now lost all credibility."  Do you agree?

Excerpt:

Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive—whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.

The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

Based on an article in The Guardian published Wednesday night, we now know that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency used the Patriot Act to obtain a secret warrant to compel Verizon’s business services division to turn over data on every single call that went through its system. We know that this particular order was a routine extension of surveillance that has been going on for years, and it seems very likely that it extends beyond Verizon’s business division. There is every reason to believe the federal government has been collecting every bit of information about every American’s phone calls except the words actually exchanged in those calls. . . .

Essentially, the administration is saying that without any individual suspicion of wrongdoing, the government is allowed to know whom Americans are calling every time they make a phone call, for how long they talk and from where.

This sort of tracking can reveal a lot of personal and intimate information about an individual. To casually permit this surveillance—with the American public having no idea that the executive branch is now exercising this power—fundamentally shifts power between the individual and the state, and it repudiates constitutional principles governing search, seizure and privacy.

My question is, Who says the feds aren't also listening to every call, with some kind of futuristic, top-secret, voice-recognition software?

But if the Verizon revelation doesn't make you jump out of your socks, maybe this will, as reported by Amy Davidson today in the New Yorker - emphasis mine:

“They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” an unnamed intelligence officer told Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras of the Washington Post. “They” are the National Security Agency, and the Post report reveals that an N.S.A. program called PRISM has, for the past six years, been “tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.”

These were not occasional, extraordinary incursions: the Post, in addition to talking to the intelligence officer—who decided to speak out of a concern for civil liberties that seems to have been distinctly lacking at higher levels—obtained PowerPoint slides from an internal N.S.A. briefing. One of the slides explains that “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” for close to one in seven of its intelligence reports, and the program, which began in 2007, is said to be growing rapidly. The history of PRISM, Gellman and Poitras write, “shows how fundamentally surveillance law and practice have shifted away from individual suspicion in favor of systematic, mass collection techniques.”

This is the second story in the past twenty-four hours with deeply troubling constitutional and privacy implications—the first was the news, reported in the Guardian, of a secret court order compelling a Verizon subsidiary to turn over call records to the N.S.A. (It is increasingly clear that the order went well beyond Verizon.) We have gone through the day with Administration spokesmen and friendly senators telling us that we shouldn’t worry so much about the Verizon case because of the supposedly abstract quality of metadata. That was always a hollow defense—metadata reveals a great deal that is properly private—but it is especially meaningless now, in the face of what appears to be a sprawling effort to look over the shoulders of Internet users.

The N.S.A.-briefing slides mix corporate cheer and disturbing revelations. There are the logos of the nine companies involved: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple. That is the order in which they joined PRISM. The Post describes Apple as a holdout (it acquiesced, coincidentally or not, after Steve Jobs’s death).

In other words, boys:  Everything you've ever done online in the last six years or so is recorded and stored in a government database. Everything.  Just stop and sit with that thought awhile.

I don't know about you fellas, but one reason I voted for Obama in 2008 was to prune the rot from the governmental tree that Dubya and Co. introduced, and to try to preserve constitutional government in this country.

Now it appears I was misinformed. Somebody, please tell me it's not so.


Update, 9:45 p.m.: The Guardian reports that chiefs of the Silicon Valley companies named as collaborators in the PRISM program are shocked, shocked! that gambling is going on in this establishment to hear this story and deny they have any connection with it. Of course.

Round up the usual suspects.


Update, 6/7/13, 11:40 p.m.:   Via Daily Kos, Rick Perlstein in The Nation reports that our government has been massively spying on its citizens by the millions since the 1930's - receiving daily bulk data from telephone and telegraph companies in the pre-internet days - as was revealed in the Abzug/Church congressional hearings in 1975, something your Head Trucker doesn't remember hearing about back then. But then, Perlstein says the mainstream media downplayed the story and buried it in the back pages.

Your Tax Dollars at Work.

Rachel reports on a story that originally broke in 2006, but nobody paid much attention: "They're sending the entire Internet to the secret room" - and has more on this week's stories.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

 

But not to worry. The Prez says, "Chill, people. Nobody is listening to your damn phone calls."

 

Anyway, it's all cool because all of your elected Congresspeeps, Democrat and Republican alike, have known all about this shit since like Day 1. So chillax already! And once again, pay no attention to what's going on over there with that funny little man behind the curtains. And call off your damn dog too.

WTF? Church of England Drops Opposition to Same-Sex Marriage Bill

Yesterday, the Most Reverend Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin "Whatajerk" Welby, went out of his way to utterly trash the idea of same-sex marriage, saying it would "abolish" true marriage between men and women and replace it with "a less good option that is neither equal nor effective," thereby handing our homo-hating enemies a wonderful cache of ammo to use against us for years to come. Here's the video of his speech in the House of Lords:



Today, however, a church spokesman declared that after seeing large majorities in both Houses of Parliament vote in favor of the same-sex marriage bill, the Church has no further objections to make, and the 26 bishops who sit in the House of Lords will now work on amendments to refine and "improve" the bill. Which it seems is not so evil after all.

Politics. What a difference a day - or a vote - makes.  What a fucking turnaround.  What sheer, unmitigated hypocrisy.  I'm glad the Church, and presumably the two-faced Archbishop too, is going to stand out of the way now - but I am totally underwhelmed by their transparent, self-serving motives.

Loving the Gays around the World - Who Does, Who Doesn't

The Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C., a nonpartisan outfit, has released the results of surveys taken in various countries, answering the question, "Should homosexuality be accepted by society?" And here you go - click to enlarge:

Note:  this map omits the twenty or so countries that do offer same-sex civil unions, domestic partnerships, civil partnerships, etc., which may or may not provide substantial marriage-like rights and protections to same-sex couples.

Marriage News Watch, 6/3/13

Matt Baume of the American Foundation for Equal Rights reports on marriage progress in this country:



And over in Britain, the House of Lords continues its debate on the same-sex marriage bill for a second day, beginning at 2:35 p.m. London time, or 8:30 a.m. Texas time.

Your Head Trucker watched most of the live coverage yesterday, and it was fascinating to hear the arguments coming from both sides: both the prehistoric objections we've already heard a-plenty from the uglies on this side of the water, as well as breathtakingly beautiful endorsements of our full human worth and dignity from enlightened straight men and women, as well as a few gay peers. It's the apparent multitude of straights who now are on our side that makes your Head Trucker's head spin; I don't trust straight people in general, for reasons well known to all of you who are of my generation, and I'm not sure I ever can trust them unreservedly as a group - but their support is very welcome to my ears.

Watch a replay of today's debate in the House of Lords by clicking here.

The first half-hour is taken up with other business; the debate itself runs about four hours after that.


Update, 12:50 p.m., Texas time:  The Lords have concluded their debate on the second reading of the bill, and defeated by a vote of 390-148 a "wrecking amendment" proposed by Lord Dear, which would have rejected the bill entirely. So it seems very likely from this vote of nearly three to one that the bill will eventually pass the House of Lords and come into law this year, if I am understanding things correctly. 

The Lords will next spend two days scrutinizing the various parts of the bill in committee, but I'm not sure when that will happen.

Bill stages in Parliament; click to enlarge.

Further thoughts: The more I think about the Archbishop of Canterbury's ringing denunciation of same-sex marriage, dripping with homophobia, during yesterday's debate, the more upset and disgusted I feel with him and the whole prevaricating, temporizing, canting Bench of Bishops.   Justin "Whatajerk" Welby is no friend of the gays, no matter what sweet, poisonous, honeyed words drip from his lips.  His action and his words of condemnation and disdain for human dignity are well-nigh unforgiveable in my book.  This consummate corporation man and CYA-er has no business being head of a diocese, let alone of a worldwide communion, and he has played smut with your Head Trucker.  I will never believe another word he says, nor will I ever trust him as far as I can throw him.   My fellow Southerners will recognize the gravity of what I just said, even if the rest of you don't.

In contrast, consider the alternative view of the the Right Reverend Nick Holtam, Bishop of Salisbury, who just last week wrote this in a letter to Lord Alli, the first openly gay peer in the House of Lords, and a Muslim, who spoke in favor of the marriage bill earlier today:

At the co-educational North London Grammar School I attended from 1965-72, there were 2 effeminate gay lads in my year who were no threat to the rest of us but who were regularly beaten up just for being different. At times school for them must have been a brutal experience. What they went through was unkind and unjust but I don’t remember a teacher intervening on their behalf. I am thankful things have changed and we now have a greater sense of equality and fairness. In the current debates it is striking that within the Anglican Communion one of the strongest supporters of same sex marriage is Archbishop Desmond Tutu. From his experience of the racism of Apartheid he sees same sex marriage as primarily a matter of justice.

When the proposal for civil partnerships was debated in 2004 the Church of England was largely hostile. I am grateful that in the Archbishops’ opposition to equal marriage they have expressed their support for civil partnerships and I hope this will help the Church of England towards affirming these relationships liturgically. Like the Archbishops now, I used to think that it was helpful to distinguish between same sex civil partnerships and heterosexual marriage. Many in the churches think the commonly used description of civil partnerships as ‘gay marriage’ is a category error. However, the relationships I know in civil partnerships seem to be either of the same nature as some marriages or so similar as to be indistinguishable. Indeed, the legal protection and public proclamation which civil partnership has afforded gay relationships appears to have strengthened their likeness to marriage in terms of increasing commitment to working on the relationship itself, to contributing to the wellbeing of both families of origin, and to acting as responsible and open members of society. Open recognition and public support have increased in civil partnerships those very qualities of life for which marriage itself is so highly celebrated. It is not surprising this now needs recognition in law.

The possibility of ‘gay marriage’ does not detract from heterosexual marriage unless we think that homosexuality is a choice rather than the given identity of a minority of people. Indeed the development of marriage for same sex couples is a very strong endorsement of the institution of marriage.

Read the entire letter here.

Would that the worthy Bishop had been named to the Primate's see instead of Whatajerk Welby.


Further reading:

Baroness Stowell's introduction and summary of the main points of the bill, which she calls "a force for good."

House of Commons Library Research Paper on the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill, a comprehensive review of the background and provisions of the bill: PDF, 63 pages, 818 Kb.

Particularly nice: The comments of 86-year-old Lord Jenkin of Rodin, who began his parliamentary career in 1964, half a century ago, were recognized as outstanding by several of his fellow peers during the debate, and are worth repeating here in the Blue Truck.

Like all of us, I have had a very large amount of correspondence on this subject, much of it by e-mail. Thanks to the Whitsun Recess, I have been able to reply to a great many of these—not all, but most.

My own starting point is something that I learnt many years ago as an undergraduate faced with what was, for me, a new involvement with people who were not heterosexual. I asked my grandfather, who was an extremely wise lecturer at the Edinburgh medical school, all about it. He said, “My dear boy, it is as foolish to condemn those who have homosexual proclivities as it is to condemn them for having red hair”. I have lived with that all my life and I have always opposed discrimination against homosexuals.

- Continued after the jump -

UK Parliament to Abolish Marriage

Watch a replay of the all-day debate in the House of Lords by clicking here.

So says the Most Reverend Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, in a speech during the House of Lords debate on a same-sex marriage bill today, as the Telegraph reports - emphasis mine:

In his first major intervention in the debate, the Most Rev Justin Welby said he could not support David Cameron’s same-sex marriage Bill in its current form.

He warned that the reform “weakened” the concept of the “normal” family as the basis for a strong community and replaced traditional marriage with something “less good”. . . .

Speaking on the first day of debate on the Bill in the House of Lords, the Archbishop warned that legalising same sex marriages would be a social problem, not a faith issue.

“We think that traditional marriage is a cornerstone of society,” he told peers.

“Rather than adding a new and valued institution alongside it for same gender relationships, which I would personally strongly support to strengthen us all, this Bill weakens what exists and replaces it with a less good option that is neither equal nor effective," he said.

“The concept of marriage as a normative place for procreation is lost; the idea as marriage as covenant is diminished; the family in its normal sense, predating the state, and as our base community of society, as we have already heard, is weakened.

“It is not at heart a faith issue,” he said. “It is about the general social good. So with much regret but entire conviction I cannot support the Bill as it stands.”

The Archbishop criticised the Bill for mistakenly treating marriages and weddings as the same thing. Gay couples can have equality without needing to be able to marry, he said. “Two things may be equal but different."

The Bill also fails to deliver equal rights for homosexuals because it distinguishes clearly between same-sex and opposite-sex marriage, “thus not achieving true equality”.

“The result is confusion. Marriage is abolished, redefined, and recreated, being different and unequal for different categories.”

The new definition of marriage is “an awkward shape” with same-sex and opposite sex marriages “scrunched into it” but not fitting well, the Archbishop said.

The Lords debate follows an overwhelming vote [366-161] in favour of the Marriage (same sex couples) Bill in the Commons last month.

Full text here, thanks to Grandmere Mimi who tracked it down and shared it with me.

I will post more on the debate, with some fine contributions from noble lords in support of the bill, when news video is available.

Meanwhile, your Head Trucker would like to direct your attention to the selfish, sex-crazed breeders notorious people, politely called heterosexuals, who are actually destroying the institution and have no respect at all for traditional family values:

The boarding school headmistress, her husband and the teenage pupil

Man who set up camera to catch a ghost instead catches girlfriend's affair with his 16-year-old son

Almost no couples with children who stay unmarried stay together, study claims