Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Sunday Thoughts:

The question of the right to legally discriminate against LGBTQ citizens at the workplace (and, no doubt everywhere else in time) has been driven to the highest court in the land by the likes of the evangelical "Christian" right, self-haters such as Gay Conversion Therapy advocate Mike Pence, and, yes, legions of typical republican bigots. It boils down to republicans and the Neo-Nazi brethren they identify with wanting to be able to exert their hate and fear by firing LGBTQ employees simply because they are who they are. That is what the pertinent cases the "Supreme" Court are hearing center around. One of the cases even specifically deals with the questions of who is allowed to wear what attire in the workplace when it comes to self identity! You can read some of the gory details at the link I have provided and I urge you to do so. It really cuts to the chase. As you will see, even the "Supreme" Court's own dress code is bizarro world stuff.

The "Supreme" Court will decide whether or not an LGBTQ person is protected by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Given that conservatives despise the very concept of civil rights for anyone other than straight white males, and the fact that House and Senate republicans of recent decades have incessantly expressed bitterness and hostility towards any notions of civil rights, the court's vote on this could be extremely ugly. Incredibly, we won't know the court's decision for many months. I guess questions of morality and decency are difficult for them to figure out. Whatever they decide will define the legacy of the 9 judges as a group and as individuals, plus the court itself.

Rhetorical question of the day: What kind of court system even considers the right to discriminate against our LGBTQ brothers and sisters to even be a legitimate question? The "Supreme" Court should be excoriated for even deliberating on the question, and, those hate-filled judges and lawyers that propelled this question as far as it's gotten deserve far worse.

We all know by now, or should know, that bigotry of all kinds is the central driving negative life force of all Republicans whether they admit it or not. At this point, judges appointed and approved by republicans, and, to be fair, conservative democrats like Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin, should ditch their black robes or suits and replace them with KKK sheets and hoods since that's the kind of thing they endorse regardless of their own gender, race, orientation, or preference.

A Closet Mentality Is All About Deceit-- And Can Be Very Problematic To Break Free Of-- The Case Of McKinsey Pete

On Friday we took a little look at McKinsey Pete's gay identity politics. Several people have asked me to explain why living in the closet is such a terrible thing. To live a double life, a person has to start learning how to lie and deceive and eventually that deceitfulness takes over someone's whole being and they stop understanding when they're lying and when they're telling the truth, not just about their sexuality, but about everything. This is something I've studied carefully when it comes to politicians. I read and then re-read Maryland top-dog GOP outed congressman Bob Bauman's fantastic book, The Gentleman From Maryland. Bauman, founder of the American Conservative Union and Young Americans For Freedom, wrote poignantly about how his secret double life was so stressful that it led to alcoholism. I had dinner with Mark Foley after he was caught bonking young congressional pages and we began an honest years-long correspondence. And here in California when far right-wing ultra-homophobic state Senator Roy Ashburn was caught, drunk, with a young male prostitute, I studied his fascinating public epiphany. I respect him for it. He now talks about how a tawdry and fearful existence in the closet ruined his life (below) and forced him into an existence predicated on hypocrisy and deceit. Ashburn, when asked if he's been a hypocrite, said, flatly, YES! "I was in hiding."





From an L.A. Times interview Patt Morrison did with Roy Ashburn in 2010 soon after he was busted:

For decades you worked so hard to keep your sexual orientation under wraps. This must have been a torment, but in another sense, was there an element of relief?

I'm sensing relief now. I had not consciously decided to come out, but there's no doubt looking back that I had become increasingly bold about attending gay events, like pride festivals, and going to dance clubs and bars. Last year I attended Las Vegas Pride and San Diego Pride.

Were you looking over your shoulder?

A little more in San Diego than Las Vegas.

...At some point, you must have realized a public career was incompatible with being open about your sexual preferences.

Something happened that I guess caused me to realize that. When I was in sixth grade, the police had a raid in the sand dunes [near San Luis Obispo] and a bunch of gay men were arrested, probably charged with indecent activity. That sticks in my mind-- the publicity and the shame around it. One of my teachers was one of the people. The talk among the kids, the talk among the adults, the talk in the community, the press-- at that time the choice was pretty clear: If you were gay and open, it was a life of shame, ridicule, innuendo about molesting and perversion. It was a dark life. Given that choice of whether you come out or whether you're in secret, I mean, there really wasn't a choice.

You worked for members of Congress, then were elected to public office yourself from Kern County. Were your sexual preferences in the back of your mind, or did you just go about your business?

The answer is both yes and no. I was married and had children. And I had a career and a passion. I also had a huge secret. But given my circumstances and my responsibilities, it wasn't an overwhelming issue for me. The desires were always there, but my focus was primarily on-- well, pretty selfishly-- on me and my career and my family.

Barry Goldwater had a gay grandson and didn't think government had any business in anybody's bedroom. But the recent brand of Republicanism has championed anti-gay issues.

I truly believe the conservative philosophy as embraced by Goldwater: that the government has no role in the private lives of the citizens. In the 1980s, there was a coming together of the religious right and the Goldwater right, sort of a marriage of convenience. It propelled Ronald Reagan to the presidency. Reagan never repudiated that but-- this is just my view-- I don't think he really embraced it either. In no way do I want to put down people of strong religious convictions; I happen to have very strong religious beliefs myself. But it was a merger of those two, and the religious [right's issues] were about same-sex rules, same-sex marriage, abortion, gun rights, these sort of core, litmus-test issues.

Did you feel uneasy with that combination? You did help to organize and speak at a rally in 2005 against a legislative bill sanctioning same-sex marriage.

How I ever got into that is beyond me. I was very uncomfortable with that, and I told one of my confidantes, "I'm never doing that again." It was not what I wanted to do, it wasn't me, but I helped to organize and lent my name.

A lot of people, gay or straight, are probably wondering why you voted even against issues like insurance coverage for same-sex partners.

The best I can do is to say that I was hiding. I was so in terror I could not allow any attention to come my way. So any measure that had to do with the subject of sexual orientation was an automatic "no" vote. I was paralyzed by this fear, and so I voted without even looking at the content. The purpose of government is to protect the rights of people under the law, regardless of our skin color, national origin, our height, our weight, our sexual orientation. This is a nation predicated on the belief that there is no discrimination on those characteristics, and so my vote denied people equal treatment, and I'm truly sorry for that.

"Roy [Cohn] was not gay," Republican operative and Trump crony Roger Stone remarked about Trump's mentor, to CNN legal commentator Jeffrey Toobin. "He was a man who liked having sex with men. Gays were weak, effeminate. He always seemed to have these young blond boys around." Political closet cases live in darkness, fear and self deception. Their lives are a lie and lying becomes the norm. All Republican closet cases are, at heart, Roy Cohn. A lifelong homosexual-- and a swell guy-- Mark Foley, long before he was caught, drunk, sneaking into a boys dormitory looking for sex, was a critic of President Clinton. "It's more sad," he told the media, "than anything else, to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual addiction."

McKinsey Pete is a Democrat, so at least politically, he is very different from Bauman, Foley, Cohn and Ashburn (not to mention Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell, neither of whom has been publicly outed yet). Sunday, the NY Times published a sure-to-be-controversial piece by Jeremy Peters, Pete Buttigieg’s Life in the Closet-- And why it took him until he was 33 to come out.

The closet that Pete Buttigieg built for himself in the late 1990s and 2000s was a lot like the ones that other gay men of his age and ambition hid inside. He dated women, deepened his voice and furtively looked at MySpace and Friendster profiles of guys who had come out-- all while wondering when it might be safe for him to do so too.

Chris Pappas, who was two years ahead of Mr. Buttigieg at Harvard and is now a Democratic congressman from New Hampshire, said he arrived at college “pretty much convinced that I couldn’t have a career or pursue politics as an L.G.B.T. individual.” Jonathan Darman, who was one class ahead of Mr. Buttigieg, remembered how people often reacted to a politician’s coming out then: “It wasn’t a story of love but of acknowledging illicit desire.” And Amit Paley, who graduated in Mr. Buttigieg’s class, recalled that “it was still a time where vocalizing anti-gay sentiments was not only common, but I think pretty accepted.”

The thought that 15 years later someone they might have shared a dorm or sat in a lecture hall with would become the first serious openly gay candidate for president of the United States never crossed their minds. But no one would have found the possibility more implausible than the young man everyone on campus knew as Peter.

Mr. Buttigieg, now the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, struggled for a decade after leaving Harvard to overcome the fear that being gay was “a career death sentence,” as he put it in his memoir.

Many in his generation and in his college class decided to come out as young adults, whether they were confident they would be accepted or not, and had their 20s to navigate being open about their identity-- a process that helped make Americans more aware and accepting of their gay friends, family members and co-workers. Instead, Mr. Buttigieg spent those years trying to reconcile his private life with his aspirations for a high-profile career in public service.

Attitudes toward gay rights changed immensely during that period, though he acknowledges that he was not always able or willing to see what broader social and legal shifts meant for him personally.

“Because I was wrestling with this, I’m not sure I fully processed the idea that it related to me,” he said in an interview.

More than most people his age-- even more than most of the ambitious young men and women he competed against at Harvard-- he possessed a remarkably strong drive for perfection. He went on to become a Rhodes scholar, work on a presidential campaign, join the military and be elected mayor all before he turned 30. After being deployed with the Navy to Afghanistan in 2014, he said he realized he could die having never been in love, and he resolved to change that. He finally came out in 2015, when he was 33.

He took a longer journey than his peers did, he has said, because of the inner turmoil he experienced over whether in fact he wanted to be known as the “gay” politician.

His record of accomplishment during those years in the closet is impossible to separate from the isolation and anxiety he felt as he weighed the cost of telling his family, friends and constituents who he really was. Pursuing so many goals had two outcomes, intentionally or not: It distracted his busy brain from a reality he wasn’t ready to face, and provided him the armor of a life experience that would make his sexual orientation just one of a litany of attributes.

“Peter struck me very early on, at 18 or 19, as someone who would run for president regardless,” said Randall Winston, a close friend of Mr. Buttigieg’s from college. Over beers and Chinese food, Mr. Winston said, they spent late nights on campus talking about the right and wrong reasons for getting into politics. “If you want to be a political leader, why?” he recalled. “Is it about yourself? Is it really about the good of the nation? I think he was asking himself those questions from the jump.”

Mr. Buttigieg said in the interview that if he had been interested in a career other than politics, he would have found the decision to come out much easier. “The arts is one where you could have jumped in there in the 2000s, and it would have been sort of incidental,” he said. “Whereas something like finance, it was getting there. And in politics it would have been completely defining.”

Few experiences in his young adulthood were as formative in shaping his identity as the hypercompetitive environment he encountered at Harvard. Even liberal Cambridge, where meeting a gay student or professor would have been fairly unremarkable, did not always nurture the sense of confidence that he and many of his gay classmates felt they needed to be themselves. At times their surroundings seemed to do just the opposite.

In interviews with a dozen of Mr. Buttigieg’s friends and classmates, people described a culture in which a mix of abundant ambition and youthful insecurity made students carefully attuned to the way they presented themselves to others.

Mr. Winston recalled the dual pressures of having high expectations for yourself while also being aware-- sometimes realistically, sometimes not-- that your classmates and professors had their own ideas about who you were too.

“I don’t want to say it’s all artifice-- a lot of this is just common to growing up,” he said. But the culture at Harvard, he added, caused a lot of students to think, “‘O.K., I’m going to maintain this aura, this impression I’m giving to others.’”

Describing the insecurities he felt as a young man, Mr. Buttigieg has said he sometimes marvels at how differently the world treats him today compared with what he expected when he was too afraid to come out. On the day he kicked off his presidential campaign, he said he had imagined what he would say to his teenage self. “To tell him that on that day he announces his campaign for president, he’ll do it with his husband looking on,” he said with a note of disbelief in his voice. “Would he believe me?”

Mr. Buttigieg took a long and fraught path from life as an undergraduate who once had a girlfriend to a presidential candidate who travels the country with his husband in tow. While he was still in the closet, the country became a different place very quickly. And to understand Mr. Buttigieg’s journey is to understand the microgeneration in which he came of age.

When members of the Harvard class of 2004 were juniors in high school, Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man from Wyoming, was bludgeoned, tied to a fence post and left to die in a murder that shocked the nation’s conscience. By the time they shipped off to Cambridge, few would have any gay friends — at least ones who were open about it. And the idea of a man marrying another man, or a woman marrying another woman, seemed almost absurd. The closest thing gay men and lesbians had to marriage was a civil union, which in 2000 was legal in exactly one state: Vermont.

“Gay marriage was not this obvious liberal no-brainer,” said Mr. Darman, a journalist and historian who came out in his senior year of college, 12 years before Mr. Buttigieg would. While Harvard was certainly a liberal bubble, it was still in many ways very socially conventional in the early 2000s, he said. “In a lot of social settings at Harvard in that period, the default assumption was that you were straight. And that would not have been true even five years later.”

Friends and classmates remembered Mr. Buttigieg as thoughtful and clearly on a trajectory that would bring him success of some kind, even if it dawned on few of them that might mean the White House.

One thing no one seemed to peg him for was someone wrestling with being gay. He was so discreet that many of his friends and classmates said in interviews that they never would have guessed he was hiding anything until he told them. He left the testosterone-fueled campus sex banter to others. Hegel and de Tocqueville were more to his conversational tastes.

“His sexuality didn’t present as a really big thing in his life,” said Joe Flood, a classmate. “I think he always thought about himself politically,” he added, noting that Mr. Buttigieg would become active in the university’s Institute of Politics, an organization at the Kennedy School of Government that hosted big-name politicians like Senator Edward M. Kennedy and Howard Dean during their time in school. “You don’t end up there accidentally,” Mr. Flood said... There was a small, close-knit social circle of L.G.B.T.Q. students. But they existed a world apart from Mr. Buttigieg’s Harvard.

Peter at Harvard

...But when Mr. Buttigieg and his peers left college and started embarking on their professional lives, the country was changing in significant ways, jolting their sense of what it could mean to be openly gay and have a high-profile career.

One of the biggest developments was right in Harvard’s backyard. In 2004, Massachusetts became the first state where same-sex couples could marry. Students flocked to Cambridge City Hall in the early-morning hours on May 17 to watch the first couples wed at 12:01 a.m.-- the earliest moment possible under the new law. Mr. Buttigieg remembers the occasion but was not there. “I don’t remember feeling that connected to it actually,” he said.

Soon states from Iowa to Maine would start allowing same-sex couples to marry. Then Congress would repeal the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban on serving openly as gay or lesbian. And the Supreme Court would declare the rights of gay men and lesbians to have their relationships recognized by the state, first in 2013 when it struck down the Defense of Marriage Act in United States v. Windsor, and then again in the 2015 decision that guaranteed same-sex marriage as a right protected by the Constitution in Obergefell v. Hodges.

In 2004, when Mr. Buttigieg’s class graduated, public opinion polls showed that roughly one-third of Americans favored allowing same-sex couples to marry. A decade later it was more than half the country and rising.

Many closeted people found their plight more difficult during the early years of social and legal change, as they wrestled with whether to finally open up after years of trying to maintain an impression of themselves that was false.

Mr. Paley, who was Mr. Buttigieg’s college classmate, remembers sitting in his dorm room in 2003 as a closeted junior and crying as he read Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s opinion in the landmark case Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down bans on intimacy between homosexuals on grounds that such laws were an affront to their dignity. “That helped me realize I can’t live my life this way,” he said of hiding his sexual orientation. It took Mr. Paley until the end of his senior year to fully come out, and he now serves as chief executive of the Trevor Project, an organization that works to advance the rights of L.G.B.T.Q. youth.

Mr. Pappas, the congressman from New Hampshire, ran his first race for state legislature in 2002 as an openly gay candidate and won. “It’s an important facet of who I am,” he said. “And I think over time I realized how powerful it was that I share that with more and more people.”

He said he ran as an out candidate in that first race because he saw no point in turning back after he came out in college. And after hearing from people who told him how encouraging it was to see him as an openly gay man in politics, Mr. Pappas realized he had made the right choice regardless of the political implications. “I don’t think I fully appreciated that at first,” he said.

After he graduated, Mr. Buttigieg went to work for John Kerry’s presidential campaign in Arizona and quickly immersed himself in the job. Mara Lee, who worked with him at the time and remains a friend, remembered meeting her co-worker for the first time: “Here’s this guy who’s doing a million things at once. He has seven or eight TVs on to monitor the local and national news. He’s introducing himself to me-- being genuine-- and having a conversation while typing.” She remembers two computer screens on his desk.

Once he came out, she said that being gay was never the first thing he wanted people to see when they met him-- a veteran, Rhodes scholar, polyglot who was first elected mayor of South Bend when he was 29. “While it’s an important part of who he is, it’s not the only part,” she said.

When he first ran for mayor in 2011 and won, he was closeted. A local gay rights group did not initially endorse him in that race, opting instead for a candidate with a more established track record on the issues. Mr. Buttigieg endured some awkward moments, like signing a city law banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in 2012. To not think about how the law directly affected him, he acknowledged, “took a little compartmentalization.”

His employees and constituents saw an eligible bachelor in their young mayor and wanted to set him up with their daughters. Some on his staff even joked about his old light green Ford Taurus as a “chick magnet.” He did not bother to correct them.

When he did come out in the summer of 2015, the forum he chose was an op-ed for the South Bend Tribune. “It took years of struggle and growth for me to recognize that it’s just a fact of life, like having brown hair, and part of who I am,” he wrote.

He may have waited far longer than most young gay men today. But ever the overachiever, he made record time in setting a new bar. In less than four years he went from being single and closeted to being married and out as a gay candidate for president.

Peters, who is a member of the LGBTQ community and not closeted, didn't bother to mention that he's gay for this story. He probably should have. But something more important that he should have done is spend some time looking into Pete's time as a consultant for McKinsey, a firm that inculcates its employees with an ability to lie smoothly and effectively. Pete's life in the closet prepared him for that perfectly-- for that and for the life of a politician. He may not lie as much as Trump and Biden... but he's still young and tends not to tell the truth about anything that can be seen as controversial.

Bernie also beat Hillary in South Bend

Wisconsin GOP Faces Backlash After Being Caught Trying To Sneak A Homophobic Fanatic Onto The State Supreme Court

Obsessed homophobic maniac wants to be a Supreme Court judge

Late last month it came out, so to speak, that the right-wing nut who the Wisconsin Republican Party is running for an open Supreme Court seat, has been a closeted homophobic fanatic. People knew Brian Hagedorn, son of Milwaukee County GOP chair Sam Hagedorn, wasn't exactly gay friendly but more and more started leaking out showing that the man is obsessed with his hatred for the LGBTQ community. Is that kind of overt bigotry something anyone wants on the state Supreme Court? Hagedorn turns out to have founded a school that expels students and fires teachers if they are accused of being gay. You know how lots of realtors are gay? The Wisconsin Realtors Association, which is a major pro-GOP player in Supreme Court races, withdrew its endorsement of Hagedorn and asked for their $18,000 contribution back. They justified their decision by explaining that "The real estate related issues that served as the basis for our endorsement have been overshadowed by other, non-real estate related issues-- issues with which we do not want to be associated and that directly conflict with the principles of our organization and the values of our members."

Yesterday, Patrick Marley and Molly Beck, writing for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, reported that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce doesn't want any part of Hagedorn's crackpot homophobia either and will not be putting any money into his race, as they normally do for Wisconsin GOP Supreme Court candidates. "The national organization," wrote Marley and Beck, "often funnels money to Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce to help conservatives in court races but won't do so this year, according to three sources familiar with the plans. The move comes as other conservatives signal they're staying on the sidelines after reports about Hagedorn founding a school that can ban teachers and students in gay relationships and giving paid speeches to a legal organization that has argued in favor of anti-sodomy laws."

The Wisconsin Realtors Association last month withdrew its endorsement of Hagedorn and asked him to return an $18,000 donation. Soon afterward, longtime Republican consultants R.J. Johnson and Deb Jordahl-- who have run past independent efforts to help conservatives running for the Supreme Court-- wrote a column defending the Realtors' decision to stay out of the race.

Hagedorn faces Lisa Neubauer in the April 2 election to replace retiring Justice Shirley Abrahamson. Hagedorn and Neubauer both sit on the District 2 Court of Appeals based in Waukesha.

Conservatives control the Supreme Court 4-3. A win by Neubauer would keep that majority in place, while a victory by Hagedorn would widen it to 5-2 in conservatives' favor.

The election is April 2. What's most galling about this ugliness is that Hagedorn and his GOP cronies are running around screeching about how their homophobia is part of their religion and that anyone who opposes them is attacking their religion (including the Realtors!). I turned to John Pavlovitz's blog and a post he wrote yesterday, A Jesus Who Makes Walls. "I know," he wrote, "thousands of people who say they follow Jesus, and I see millions more who I know are just like them. For the past two decades I’ve pastored them in small rural chapels and in suburban megachurches. I’ve served alongside them in the streets of Center City Philadelphia and in the tin-roofed slums of Nairobi, Kenya. I’ve led their teenage children on overseas mission trips and weekend retreats and spontaneous service projects. I’ve been in their homes and they’ve been in mine. I know what these people have seen, the work they’ve been a part of, the kindness they’ve shown others, the faith they’ve professed, the God they’ve read and sang about. Which makes it all the more heartbreaking now, to admit that I no longer recognize them; the venomous words they share on social media, the hateful theology they now ratify, the blatant corruption they turn their heads from, the human rights atrocities they are stunningly silent on. The only conclusion I can come to, is that we were never following the same Jesus-- or at the very least we aren’t any longer. They are following a Jesus who is foreign to me, a Jesus who makes walls."

It is not the Jesus I shared with them on all those Sunday mornings;
the one who touched the hand of the leper,
the one who fed a starving hillside multitude;
the one who preached the scandalous goodness of a despised Samaritan,
the one whose family fled political genocide soon after he was born,
the one who said he and the forgotten prisoner were one in the same,
the one who dined with both priest and with prostitute,
the one who lived off the kindness of those he met as he traveled,
the one who said our neighbors and enemies, deserve the same love we give our families and ourselves.

They seem to have no recollection of this Jesus anymore or have willingly discarded him-- or maybe they never had interest in him at all and it’s only now that I can see it.

Stranger still, is that these people tell me that I’m wrong; that my Jesus of compassion and gentleness and mercy is one found in spiritual error. They mock me for this Jesus, saying that it is my bleeding heart that has led me far afield; that in seeking such empathy I have drifted into heresy.

I’m good with that-- really good with that.

I am going to take my chances with a wall-breaking Jesus.


I’m going all in with a Jesus who errs on the side of loving people, of welcoming them and healing them and embracing them.


I’m betting that the carpenter Jesus, would have me make tables and set a banquet for every hungry, hurting, exhausted person who crosses my path, without caveat or condition.

I will not worship or preach or serve a Jesus who makes walls; whose ministry is one of separation and disconnection and segregation.

I have no use for a white privileged, gated community Christ, whose only concern is America.

I have no interest in a religion that manufactures outsiders based on their nation of origin, sexual orientation, pigmentation-- or any other inherent part of who they are.

These Christians I’ve known in close proximity and the ones I’ve seen from a distance, are welcome to this God.

They can have a Jesus who makes walls.

I’ll stay outside here with my Jesus, setting tables and breaking bread.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Meet the new face of the Republican Party! No, it's not Uncle Fester; this is West Virginia (say no more!) Republican state legislator Eric Porterfield, a rising new star in Republican Party politics. Please, no jokes about inbreeding in them thar hills (I'll get to that). Why is Porterfield being so well thought of in the world of Trumpian politics? Well I'm so glad you asked! First of all, he's a God-fearing, gay-hating "Christian" minister who has overcome his physical blindness to become the leader of his own Blind Faith Ministries. His mental blindness is a whole different matter, but hey, he knows what Republican voters like and why they elected him.

Fester, er, a, Porterfield's reputation in the Republican community is rising because like virtually all "Christians" and Republicans, he goes all out in playing the "I'm so abused" and "I'm being victimized" cards. He recently used the slur "faggot" in a committee session and says gays are a "terrorist group" and says he's being "persecuted." It seems that the LGBTQ community make the MAGA hat-wearing legislator so... well... uncomfortable. "I'm terrified of these people. They represent a socialist activist agenda." Last Wednesday, which was also known as "All kinds are welcome" day in the state. Porterfield claimed that "The LGBTQ is a modern day version of the Ku Klux Klan." Funny thing about that one is that you would think most Republicans might think he's paying the LGBTQ folks in West Virginia a compliment and get all angry with him.

What set Porterfield off into such a tizzy? Easy, Democrats in the state legislature introduced a bill to ban discrimination against gay people. He feels the ban would be an affront to "religious liberty" and he's determined to preserve his right to be a bigot. Democrats feel the bill is necessary because some municipalities in the state have recently passed ordinances that grant permission to discriminate against LGBTQ people.

As of this writing, Porterfield has not been censured or removed from any committees. Don't hold your breath waiting. Hell, his party leadership probably sees him as presidential or at least cabinet level material by now. Two days ago, I posted about Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker and i wondered where Trump finds such freaks, listing several by name. Looking at pictures of Whitaker and Porterfield side by side, one can't help but wonder if they are brothers from the same sister and if Porterfield is in line for a "Supreme" Court nomination or perhaps a new position as secretary of a newly created Department of What Would Republican Jesus Do.

Next Month, A Special Election Gives The Democrats Another Opportunity Pick Up A Seat In The Tennessee State Senate

Over the weekend, Natalie Allison reported for The Tennessean about the new effort by Republicans in the state legislature to outlaw same sex marriage... again. State Senator Mark Pody (Lebanon) and Rep. Jerry Sexton (Bean Station) have reintroduced the "Tennessee Natural Marriage Defense Act," having seen it defeated in committee last session and despite the $9 billion in federal funding it would cost the state. They claim that the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage "is void in Tennessee because the state has already passed its own law and constitutional amendment limiting marriage to one man and one woman."

The bill would prohibit government officials-- presumably including clerks issuing marriage certificates-- from giving recognizing any court ruling that affirms same-sex unions, and specifies they cannot be arrested for failing to comply with court orders that do so.

It would also require the Tennessee attorney general to defend the state's law on marriage in any subsequent court challenge.

In the event the marriage defense act did take effect, plaintiffs would likely quickly step immediately to challenge it in court, which could result in a federal district court ruling that the law cannot be enforced.

The statute appears to require the state to appeal such a ruling and defend the law, potentially taking the case to the 6th circuit federal appeals court. From there, it could go ultimately advance to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"The far right’s dream scenario is this would go back before the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court would accept it," said Chris Sanders, executive director of the Tennessee Equality Project, an LGBTQ rights advocacy group that has previously opposed the bill.

Extremists in the state legislature can pretty much do whatever they like. The governor is a Republican and each house of the legislature has a GOP super-majority. 73.7% of voters picked a Republican and there are 73 Republicans in the state House, as opposed to 26 for the Democrats (a gain for the Dems of one member since 2016) On the senate side, 84.4% of Tennesseans voted for Republicans and the party has 26 seats (+ an independent caucusing with them) to the Democrats' 5 seats (also a one seat gain for the Dems).

Exactly one month from today-- March 12-- the Democrats have a shot at picking up another state Senate seat. Republican businessman Paul Rose and Democrat Eric Coleman are running for a seat that long-time legislator Mark Norris gave up when Trump appointed him to the federal bench. The district, north of Memphis leans heavily red. It includes rural Tipton County and Republican-leaning suburbs of Shelby County. Coleman was very clear where he stands on the marriage equality issue: "We need not find more reasons to separate and divide, and certainly not shift abruptly backward."

Coleman, a former USPS letter carrier, retired from the Navy last year and lives in Bartlett, northeast of Memphis in Shelby County. He told me he's running on a three-pronged plank that he calls his three foundational focuses:

1. A healthier citizenry: We must combat food insecurity as all Tennesseans have the basic human right to eat. No new taxes or fancy gimmick policies are necessary, merely a realignment of existing revenues and shifting of priorities (i.e. a 100% audit of expense accounts, discretionary funds, fuel cards, etc.). The state must embrace Medicaid Expansion to allow low-income citizens to shop for and purchase private insurance with Medicaid funds, increasing reimbursement rates to a 100% match. There must be an urgent push for more primary care providers by effectively employing our state’s nurses in community health centers and mobile care initiatives.

2. An informed citizenry: There is an undeniable need to shore up the educational structure-- folks and facilities. There must be a robust recruitment effort to hire teachers who want to work in our schools and budget space carved out to pay them competitive salaries so they can focus on teaching instead of other distractions like resource shortages or unsafe and outdated facilities.

3. A safer citizenry: We have a dire need to create a strong bond between police and the communities they serve through active civic cooperation and community-oriented policing. We cannot become complacent and believe that we’re exempt from the potential for controversy. Safe, responsible use of firearms for self-defense coupled with common sense legislation will help us develop the type of society where neither sportsmen and women nor gun enthusiasts feel infringed upon, yet equally average citizens don’t fear each other or the irresponsibly insecure state of some personal arsenals. My questions remain static-- if these weapons are tactical and manufactured for tactical application, what makes them practical and what tactics are you practicing? In the extreme cases where hostages are taken, explosives used, etc. we should explore the expanded employment of drones/robotics to preserve as much life as possible. Just as we spent decades developing the use of canines for law enforcement, we can invest much less time and effort finding more logical interfaces for technology to abate the loss of human life.

Endorsed by Our Revolution and VoteVets, you can read more about Eric here and you can contribute to his campaign here.

Five True Things About Mike Pence

Image courtesy The Atlantic, "God's Plan for Mike Pence"

by Gaius Publius

In the wake of ultra-right bombings and shootings, with the Mueller investigation in mind and thoughts of the 2020 election close at hand, it seems appropriate to look at Vice President Mike Pence. He could be made president before 2020, and if so, he may be president afterward as well.

So let's consider this set of five true things about Mike Pence.

1. Mike Pence Is the Most Powerful Christian Supremacist in U.S. History

In 2016, just after the November election, Jeremy Scahill wrote this about the soon-to-be vice-president:

Pence’s ascent to the second most powerful position in the U.S. government is a tremendous coup for the radical religious right. Pence — and his fellow Christian supremacist militants — would not have been able to win the White House on their own. For them, Donald Trump was a godsend. “This may not be our preferred candidate, but that doesn’t mean it may not be God’s candidate to do something that we don’t see,” said David Barton, a prominent Christian-right activist and president of Wall Builders, an organization dedicated to making the U.S. government enforce “biblical values.” In June, Barton prophesied: “We may look back in a few years and say, ‘Wow, [Trump] really did some things that none of us expected.’”

Trump is a Trojan horse for a cabal of vicious zealots who have long craved an extremist Christian theocracy, and Pence is one of its most prized warriors. With Republican control of the House and Senate and the prospect of dramatically and decisively tilting the balance of the Supreme Court to the far right, the incoming administration will have a real shot at bringing the fire and brimstone of the second coming to Washington.

“The enemy, to them, is secularism. They want a God-led government. That’s the only legitimate government,” contends Jeff Sharlet, author of two books on the radical religious right, including “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.” “So when they speak of business, they’re speaking not of something separate from God, but they’re speaking of what, in Mike Pence’s circles, would be called biblical capitalism, the idea that this economic system is God-ordained.”

This is extreme as it gets in the world of Christian dominionism. "They want a God-led government" — their god that is, an Old Testament god who terrorizes enemies, punishes unsanctioned sex and permanently assigns to women a status less than human. If you were to equate this god's dogma with Sharia law, you'd not be wrong.

Interestingly, one of the most prominent voices for dominionism, R.J. Rushdoony, was also a fan of Ludwig von Mises and his extreme form of economic libertarianism, a belief that put Rushdoony in the same economic camp as Charles Koch. Expect a President Pence to follow in those footsteps as well — religious restriction for you, extreme economic freedom for him and his friends.

2. Mike Pence Is Anti-Science

In 2002 Mike Pence said on the floor of the House (h/t Mike Stone at Progressive Secular Humanist):

I would simply and humbly ask, can we teach it as such and can we also consider teaching other theories of the origin of species? Like the theory that was believed in by every signer of the Declaration of Independence. Every signer of the Declaration of Independence believed that men and women were created and were endowed by that same Creator with certain unalienable rights. The Bible tells us that God created man in his own image, male and female he created them. And I believe that, Mr. Speaker. ...

I believe that God created the known universe, the earth and everything in it, including man. And I also believe that someday scientists will come to see that only the theory of intelligent design provides even a remotely rational explanation for the known universe. ...

I just would humbly ask that, as new theories of evolution find their ways into the newspapers and into the textbooks, let us demand that educators around America teach evolution, not as fact, but as theory [among competing explanations]. ... But let's also bring into the minds of all of our children all of the theories about the unknowable, [so] that some bright day in the future, through science and perhaps through faith, we will find the truth of from whence we come. [bolding mine]

It's easy to imagine a Mike Pence Education Department mandating this teaching to the extent it can, and a Supreme Court dominated by "five Antonin Scalias" — Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh — upholding him.

3. Mike Pence Is Virulently Homophobic

Pence is not only anti-woman, he's rabidly anti-gay, so much so that others suspect he has "those urges" himself. So far those suspicions have proved groundless, but there's no doubting the virulence of his homophobia.

Just one example (h/t Mike Gallagher at LGBTQ Nation): As Governor Mike Pence signed a bill to jail same-sex couples who apply for a marriage license. "To prove that he wasn’t singling gay people out, Pence was also willing to jail marriage clerks who supplied a license or clergy who performed the wedding."

4. Mike Pence Could Well Be Guilty of Obstruction of Justice in the Comey Firing

From Jed Shugerman at Law and Crime in 2017 (emphasis added):

On Friday, news broke that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had obtained a draft letter written by President Trump and advisor Stephen Miller explaining Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director Jim Comey. They wrote the letter over the weekend of May 5-7, and then on May 8th, Trump distributed and read the letter to senior officials, including White House Counsel Don McGahn and Vice President Mike Pence. Then the letter was edited, and Trump fired Comey the next day.  On Friday, I suggested on Lawrence O’Donnell’s “The Last Word” on MSNBC that the most significant development was Pence’s potential criminal liability for his role in obstruction of justice (and I emphasize “potential,” because all we have at this stage are allegations in media reports and a lot more questions about the contents of the letter and Pence’s role in revising or editing it).

I have explained in other posts why Trump’s firing of Comey constitutes obstruction of justice under 18 U.S.C. 1512(c)(2), and arguably Sections 1503 and 1505. “(c)Whoever corruptly- (2)… obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.” 18 USC 1515 defines “official proceeding,” and includes Congress and authorized government agencies. The 2d and 5th Circuits have held that an FBI investigation is an official proceeding (but a 9th Circuit case raises questions about that interpretation). But keep in mind that 1) Congress had already started its investigation (including having Comey testify about the Russia probe), and 2) prosecutors had already obtained grand jury subpoenas in the Flynn case. These official proceedings had already begun, particularly in the Flynn investigation, which had been the focus of Trump’s questions to Comey in January through April. Firing Comey would impede those official proceedings, and Trump himself more or less confessed to trying to influence and impede the Russia investigation by firing Comey: first on national TV to NBC’s Lester Holt, then in the Oval Office to Kislyak and Lavrov on an official transcript.

In this new post, I explain Vice President Pence’s potential criminal jeopardy for conspiring to obstruct justice, aiding the obstruction of justice, and “misprision of a felony” in concealing the obstruction of justice. ...

This should put him squarely in Robert Mueller's crosshairs. But the point may be moot, because...

5. Robert Mueller Appears to Be Protecting Mike Pence

I've always seen Robert Mueller as a political actor, a Republican political actor, the greatest evidence of which is his apparently deliberate mishandling, as head of the FBI, of the Bush era anthrax attack investigation, about which Marcy Wheeler has written a great deal.

As I read the evidence, the motive for sabotaging the investigation appears to be that it was veering in the wrong direction, beginning to point to domestic terrorists on the right. Evidence of domestic terrorism was not countenanced under President Bush, and Mueller was, among other things, a "loyal Bushie." The only other explanation for this obviously bungled investigation is incompetence, and I think Mueller is perfectly competent at what he considers his job. The question was, what did he consider the more important aspect of his job, finding the truth or supporting the Bush-Cheney agenda? (I may write more on the anthrax attack later, pulling all that evidence together, but it's too much to go into here.)

So I don't believe Robert Mueller's mission in the Trump-Russia investigation is to "find the truth." I think his mission is to "find enough truth to get rid of Donald Trump," and in that mission he's supported by the whole of the Democratic Party, the centrist media establishment, the national security establishment, and any elements of the Republican Party establishment not dependent on Trump supporters for power.

It's beyond obvious that anyone looking for crimes by Donald Trump will find them. He's been soaking in criminality his entire career. Mueller is very likely finding enough financial crime to blackmail Trump from office should he want to take that route.

As you read above, Mike Pence looks very much a part of that criminality by his behavior during the James Comey firing. So why isn't Pence being investigated by Robert Mueller along with the myriad others whose lives Mueller has pulled open?

From Allegra Kirkland at Talking Points Memo:

‘A Bit Of A Mystery’: Why Is Mueller Keeping His Distance From Pence?

...Pence was absent from many of the key incidents Mueller is reportedly investigating as part of his sprawling probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. But he was intimately involved with several, including the firing of former FBI director James Comey, and the subsequent efforts to settle on a rationale for that firing, which appear to be at the center of the Mueller investigation.

So it’s puzzling that Mueller appears to have made no attempt to talk to the administration’s second-highest-ranking official. Pence’s lawyer met with Mueller last year to offer Pence’s full cooperation.

“It’s a bit of a mystery to me that Pence’s name hasn’t really surfaced at all,” Michael Zeldin, a former federal prosecutor who worked closely with Mueller in the Justice Department’s criminal division, told TPM. “There are things that Pence seems to be relevant to. So I’m surprised.”

Pence’s lawyer, Richard Cullen, declined to comment to TPM on the record, while the special counsel’s office declined comment. Pence press secretary Alyssa Farah did not respond to TPM’s request for comment, but in December [2017] forcefully denied to CNN that Pence’s office was preparing for a meeting with Mueller.

As of mid-January [2018], NBC reported that the special counsel had made no overtures to Pence about an interview.

Just a few things you should know as you wait the outcome of the Mueller-Trump cage match. The Koch-funded radical right accomplished one of its most-cherished goals when Brett Kavanaugh replaced Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. It now has "five Scalias" on the bench, and radical rule from the judicial branch is assured for the next generation, if not far longer.

An emotionally stable, ideologically reliable, radical rightwing president is the next goal. Meet Mike Pence.

GP
  

Not Just The Worst President In History, Also The Most Anti-Gay President In History

People in America are used to it but Brits were astonished enough so that one of their newspapers, The Independent ran a headline saying Donald Trump to become first president to speak at anti-LGBT hate group's annual summit. They were talking about that ValueVoters Family Research Council hate fest yesterday. "The Family Research Council," they wrote, "opposes and actively lobbies against equal rights for LGBT persons. The conservative Christian group campaigns against same-sex marriage, same-sex civil unions, LGBT adoption, abortion, embryonic stell-cell research, pornography and divorce. Every year the conference sparks controversy for its choice of speakers and in 2010 the Southern Poverty Law Centre, a legal advocacy organisation which specialise in civil rights, went so far as to classify the Family Research Council as an anti-gay hate group. Richard Cohen, the president of the Southern Poverty Law Centre, condemned President Trump's decision to address the event. 'By appearing at the Values Voter Summit, President Trump is lending the legitimacy of his office to a hate group that relentlessly demonizes LGBT people and works to deny them of their equal rights,' he told The Independent. 'His appearance puts the lie to his campaign promise to be a friend to the LGBT community. Bigotry is not an American value, and our president should speak out against it.'"

Coincidentally, the Daily Beast conjectured that the morons of the gay persuasion who were stupid enough to vote for Trumpanzee last year no longer see him as the great straight hope. He sure hasn't lived up to his ridiculous promises to be a champion for the gay community. (Exit polls indicate that 14% of gay voters-- all 14% sick, stupid and self-loathing-- pulled their levers for Señor Trumpanzee.)

The Trump administration’s record on LGBT issues has been defined by retrenchment, both sides concede. Many of the advances made under the Obama administration have disappeared, replaced by policies and directives that could have been written by an anachronistic social conservative instead of the cosmopolitan New York businessman occupying the Oval Office.

“I think, personally, the president has met my expectations,” said Chris Barron, a longtime conservative gay-rights activist. “My concern has always been what happens at the department and agency levels. And I definitely have concerns with what is going on at Department of Justice. The attorney general [Jeff Sessions] has a very different position on LGBT issues than the president does. But his job is to carry forward the president’s agenda and not push his own… I’m certainly concerned he is [pushing his own].”

Among gay-rights advocates, few had higher hopes for this White House than Barron. He was largely responsible for arranging for Trump to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2011-- an event credited with helping bring the reality TV star into the GOP mainstream. And though the activist occasionally soured on Trump’s campaign, Barron also launched an LGBTers for Trump group and championed the argument that the Republican nominee would be inherently better for the community than Hillary Clinton. After the election, Barron wrote that Trump would be an ally, friend, and advocate.

Instead, Barron and others are alarmed at the direction the administration is taking. Trump is responsible for some of it, having signed a directive banning the recruitment of transgender troops. But much of it has originated from his agencies. The Justice Department has changed its position on whether sexual orientation is covered under the Civil Rights Act, withdrawn federal protections for transgender kids in schools, and said it will not prosecute organizations who cite religious objections when declining to serve gay customers.

Recently, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services quietly withdrew a 2014 rule that would have required longterm-care facilities to recognize same-sex marriages when deciding visitation rights and decision-making responsibilities. The agency argued that the legalization of same-sex marriages by the Supreme Court made the ruling moot, but advocates warned that it would open the doors to discrimination. This week, the National Park Service abruptly decided to withdraw its sponsorship of New York’s pride flag, which had been dedicated at the iconic Stonewall National Monument.

“Trump’s supporters like to say, ‘It’s not what he says, it’s what he does that matters.’ That’s definitely the case when it comes to issues affecting LGBT Americans,” said Jimmy LaSalvia, who started the now-defunct conservative gay rights group GOProud along with Barron. “I never thought that Donald Trump was an anti-gay homophobe. I certainly didn’t think that when I met him back in 2011. But we’ve all learned a lot about who he really is since then. With his political pandering and posturing to endear himself to the intolerant wing of the GOP over the last few years, it doesn’t surprise me that this administration will go down as the most anti-LGBT in history.”

It gets better. Oh... and does Mother know?

Holding Senators Accountable For Bad Votes-- Like Confirming Neil Gorsuch To The Supreme Court

Gorsuch throws a gang sign: "thin the herd"

What do you think-- should senators be considered responsible-- by voters-- for the actions of Supreme Court judges they vote to confirm? I've always thought so. There were 3 Democrats-- Joe Donnelly (D-IN), Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) who voted to confirm Neil Gorsuch and a 4th, Michael Bennet (D-CO) , who voted with the Republicans procedurally to enable the confirmation. Donnelly, Heitkamp and Manchin are all up for reelection next year-- and in states which Trump won by big majorities-- 56.82% to 37.91% in Indiana, 62.96% to 27.23% in North Dakota and 68.50% to 26.43% in West Virginia. The electoral calculus by each senator was that they had more to lose by voting NO than to gain by voting YES, knowing Democrats in their states would be likely to ignore the bad vote for the Gorsuch-- as well, in each case, bad vote after bad vote all year.

And no one can claim they weren't warned about how bad Gorsuch was likely to be on the Court. There wasn't a good government group in the country that wasn't sounding the alarm. Ian Millhiser, the Justice Editor for Think Progress was especially outspoken and especially dire in his predictions. Over the weekend, he wrote an I told you so piece. The carefully choreographed and intentionally deceptive hearings didn't indicate the Gorsuch would likely be the worst justice on the Court-- but you had to be deaf, dumb and blind to have missed that during the process. Today, writes Millhiser, "Gorsuch is disrespectful of precedent and eager to move the law very far, very fast. His agenda is both well-thought out and extraordinarily conservative. When the Court splits into its old factions, with Justice Clarence Thomas staking out a position that no other member of the Court will sign onto, Gorsuch embraces Thomas’ view. Gorsuch spent the last day of the Court’s just-concluded term, moreover, laying out a vision that will make culture warriors bounce with glee. His ascension to the Supreme Court was the culmination of an effort to protect religious conservatives by any means necessary. And, if Gorsuch gets his way, some very basic civil rights will bow to the Christian right."

[Robert] George is probably the nation’s leading anti-LGBTQ scholar. A former chair of the National Organization for Marriage, which tried and failed to halt the spread of marriage equality in the United States, George was cited twice in a dissenting opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, which complained that the so-called Defense of Marriage Act was struck down.

George gushed about the Gorsuch nomination in an op-ed published by the Washington Post. “Gorsuch will be a hard man to depict as a ferocious partisan or an ideological judge,” George wrote of a man who tried to hobble a law protecting disabled children before he was unanimously rebuked by his eight new colleagues.

Yet, in a straightforward admission that George knew what he stood to gain from a Gorsuch confirmation, the professor also wrote that, on “abortion, same-sex marriage, gun control, campaign finance reform and religious freedom,” Gorsuch was likely to vote “pretty much the same way Scalia did.”

Indeed, if Neil Gorsuch gets his way, the hundreds of defiant conservative leaders who signed George’s Manhattan Declaration will be given broad discretion to defy the law by the Supreme Court itself.

Echoing religious conservatives who sought the right to deny birth control coverage to their employees, Gorsuch wrote as a lower court judge in the original Hobby Lobby litigation that “all of us face the problem of complicity,” and “all of us must answer for ourselves whether and to what degree we are willing to be involved in the wrongdoing of others.”

Hobby Lobby set off a doctrinal earthquake when it reached the Supreme Court, holding, for the first time, that a religious objection can be wielded to limit the rights of a third party. And now, with Gorsuch occupying a seat on the Supreme Court, the Court is preparing to hear a case that could grant the Christian right a license to engage in straight up discrimination.

Gorsuch, moreover, has already telegraphed how he will vote in this case.

Last Monday was a big day for Neil Gorsuch--  and not a hopeful day for anyone who believes that LGBTQ people are fully human and entitled to the same rights as everyone else. Gorsuch revealed himself as a hardline conservative on marriage equality and called for a broad expansion of Hobby Lobby. And he did so on the very same morning that the Court announced that it would decide whether religion is a license to discriminate.

The marriage equality case involved an Arkansas law providing that a mother’s husband will automatically be listed on a birth certificate as the child’s father, even in many cases where the husband is not the biological father, but that did not afford similar treatment to same-sex couples. Such a rule, a majority of the Supreme Court explained, violates the Court’s holding in Obergefell v. Hodges that “the Constitution entitles same-sex couples to civil marriage ‘on the same terms and conditions as opposite-sex couples.’”

Gorsuch disagreed, pointing to the state’s arguments “that rational reasons exist for a biology based birth registration regime.” Never mind, of course, that Arkansas did not have a “biology based birth registration regime,” as it often listed non-biological parents on birth certificates so long as that parent is a man married to a woman.

The conservative jurist’s use of the word “rational” here is also highly significant, as it offers a window into how Gorsuch views discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation generally. The lowest level of scrutiny the Court applies in constitutional discrimination cases-- the level it typically applies to allegations it views as dubious-- is known as “rational basis,” and it provides that the government is free to do whatever it wants so long as it can articulate a rational reason for doing so.

So when Gorsuch defended Arkansas’s law by pointing to allegedly “rational reasons” for it to exist, he suggested that discrimination based on sexual orientation isn’t something the courts should worry themselves about.

It's another factor that needs to go into calculations for voters when they decide in 17 months whether or not to vote for Donnelly, Heitkamp and Manchin. In Manchin's case, there's also a primary, which, for a progressive, should be a no brainer. There's no chance the progressive Berniecrat running against him, Paula Jean Swearengin, would have ever voted to confirm Gorsuch-- or voted to have confirmed Scott Pruitt as head of the EPA, as Manchin (and Heitkamp) did.

We're stuck with Gorsuch for life-- voters can-- and should-- remove Manchin

Planned Parenthood And Equality California Both Ignore "Identity Politics"-- Each Endorses Jimmy Gomez Based On His Record Of Achievement

Debra Spector presents Jimmy Gomez with Planned Parenthood's Champion of Choice award

Planned Parenthood was never an unhinged group of self-serving profiteers the way EMILY's List is, but many women candidates expect to be endorsed by an organization with Planned Parenthood's stated objectives, which are, after all, focused primarily towards making the lives of women better. And Planned Parenthood does endorse women candidates-- lots and lots of them. Why do they endorse women candidates? Easy: because the women candidates they endorse are better than their opponents. How revolutionary is that? Yesterday Planned Parenthood announced their endorsement of Jimmy Gomez for the open Los Angeles congressional seat that Xavier Becerra resigned from when he was appointed Attorney General. There isn't really anything remarkable about this endorsement, except for the fact that among the two dozen candidates in the race, several are pro-Choice women.

Jimmy's not a woman but in 2015 he was named Planned Parenthood’s "Champion of Choice" and last year he wrote and passed AB-1671, a law that protects Planned Parenthood clinics from illegal recordings by the right-wing extremists and the terrorists who consistently harass them, threatening their staff and patients. One of the women candidates running for the seat, Wendy Carillo, a journalist and former Bernie volunteer, is also a decent candidate and if I had to bet, I'd bet that given the chance she'll be good on Planned Parenthood's issues too? With Gomez, though, there's no guess work.

Celinda Vasquez, Vice President of Public Affairs for Planned Parenthood Advocacy Project Los Angeles explained why her organization gave their nod to Gomez. "Jimmy Gomez is a true champion for Planned Parenthood health centers and the women they serve. For three consecutive years we have turned to Jimmy Gomez to author and pass legislation to protect the safety of Planned Parenthood patients and staff, and to advance access to critical services like birth control and cancer screenings. We are confident that Jimmy will continue to advocate for women and families in Congress, and be a strong ally in the fight for access to Planned Parenthood health centers across the Country. Planned Parenthood Action Fund proudly endorses Jimmy’s campaign for Congress."

The best potential candidate for president in my opinion, Elizabeth Warren, happens to be a woman. I'm glad she is and I'll be glad to see a woman president. But if I thought Joe Biden or Cory Booker or that O'Malley character was a better candidate, I'd be rooting for one of them. I just looked at the Blue America list of the fiercest and most awesome congressional voices of the Resistance. The list includes Pramila Jayapal and, obviously Elizabeth Warren. They're not on the list because they're women; they're on the list because they are the best of the best, the cream of the crop; the smartest, the most effective, the most powerful.

I don't know the folks at Planned Parenthood but from watching them over the years, I've come to trust their instincts on candidates more than most DC-centric organizations. They gravitate towards candidates who are the best fighters for their cause-- man or a woman. Unlike the other candidates in the CA-34 race, Gomez has an incredibly strong record of accomplishment and leadership on their specific issues and on other issues important to progressives. Gender doesn't come into it. Nor should it. No one thinks we need more Betsy DeVoses, Marsha Blackburns, Joni Ernsts and Kyrsten Sinemas in government, right?

Same goes for the gay community. Two of the absolute worst Democrats in Congress both happen to be gay-- Sean Patrick Maloney (New Dem-NY) and Kyrsten Sinema (Blue Dog-AZ). ProgressivPunch rates their lifetime vote scores, very low "F." Sinema is probably worse but just marginally and both are corrupt on a Republican-level of corruption. They don't deserve support from the LGBT community.

This week Equality California, the biggest LGBT organization in the state, joined Planned Parenthood in urging voters to back Gomez. Among the two dozen candidates running, several are gay-- but Gomez isn't. So why did they endorse him? Do you really have to ask? Once again,it's all about the record of accomplishment, not the fine-sounding words. The Assemblyman who represents Silverlake, he worked with LGBT organizations to get his bill, AB 663 exactly right for the community. And then he got it passed. The bill integrates LGBT-specific cultural competency into training for administrators at long term care facilities, helping to ensure that LGBT seniors are treated with dignity and respect. In 2014, he authored AB 1951, which established the right of same-sex parents to be reflected on their children’s birth certificates. Equality California rates every member of the California state legislature. Gomez's rating: 100%.

Rick Zbur is the executive director of Equality California and he was very clear about why his organziation is working to elect Gomez. "As the climate in Washington grows colder and more hostile to LGBT people, immigrants and many others, who we send to Congress matters more than ever. Assemblymen Gomez stood out from a large field of LGBT allies because of his solid record of accomplishment on behalf of LGBT people. Time and again, he has proven himself one of our community’s most committed and dedicated allies in the state legislature, authoring and carrying priority bills for Equality California and helping to secure passage of others that address the needs of LGBT people. We are confident that he will head to Capitol Hill ready to fight for LGBT people, our state and the values important to all of us as Californians."