Kerry Eleveld interviews Hillary Clinton

The Obama administration floodgates seem to have opened wide, in terms of press availabilities with the gay media.

Feeling your way through an interview with one of the world’s most powerful women is more art than science. Marriage seemed like the place to start, since Clinton had been caught off guard by a recent inquiry on the issue while visiting Australia. Her husband has said that he now supports full marriage equality: Many of his gay friends are in committed relationships, former president Bill Clinton said in 2009. As far as marriage goes, he said, he had just been “hung up about the word.”

Did she share his experience? I wondered. Was she at odds with President Barack Obama’s stated position in support of civil unions but against marriage equality?

But on the phone, Clinton is circumspect about her husband’s comments. “Well, I share his experience because we obviously share a lot of the same friends, but I have not changed my position,” she says without elaborating. The secretary wasn’t taking any political bait, nor was she going to tangle with anything that could figure negatively for her boss.

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LCR's response to Motion to Hold Appeals in Abeyance re: DADT

The Log Cabin Republicans have issued a response to "Motion to Hold Appeals in Abeyance."

ARGUMENT

Although a bill to repeal the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” statute, 10 U.S.C. §654, has been passed and signed by the President, this legislative “repeal” is not yet effective. It is undisputed, and the government’s motion acknowledges, that repeal will not take effect for 60 days following certification by three officials that several requirements have been met – a certification for which there is no deadline or expected timetable. The repeal also may not take effect at all if threatened Congressional action to “repeal the repeal” proceeds. In the meantime, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell continues in full force. Homosexual Americans who wish to enlist in the armed forces may not do so openly; current homosexual servicemembers must continue to lie about their identity and serve under ongoing threat of investigation; and servicemembers identified as homosexual continue to be subject to discharge.

More good stuff in there, but touché, LCR, touché. Read the rest of this post...

For Iowa's House GOP, legislative gay-bashing is top priority

Des Moines Register took a look at what issues will be hot, warm and cold in the upcoming session of the Iowa legislature. Same-sex marriage rates a "warm" -- meaning "One chamber likely to approve it, but not enough enthusiasm yet in both chambers to make passage likely."

Here's the analysis:

Expect fiery rhetoric as Republicans call for the Legislature to begin the multiyear process that would lead to a statewide vote on same-sex marriage. The House will pass such a resolution “sooner rather than later,” said House Majority Leader Linda Upmeyer, the Republican who decides when votes take place. Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal, a Democrat, has vowed to block a Senate vote on the grounds that discrimination doesn’t belong in the Iowa Constitution. Opponents of same-sex marriage, such as Sen. Kent Sorenson, R-Indianola, hope to force a vote to suspend Senate rules and ask lawmakers to override Gronstal. It’s not known whether such parliamentary maneuvering would succeed, or, if a vote is taken, whether enough Democrats from conservative districts would join Republicans for approval.

That same Linda Upmeyer also hypocritically told the Register that the GOP leaders were going to focus on jobs:

Leaders of both parties will struggle to keep lawmakers' attention on helping unemployed Iowans.

"We told the people of Iowa that we were going to focus on jobs and the economy. We're going to do that," said House Majority Leader Linda Upmeyer, R-Garner.

Politicians always speak out of both sides of their mouth. One usually doesn't see it in the same article. But, that's what Upmeyer did. She said the focus was on jobs -- with that one big caveat: Legislative gay-bashing is really a top priority.

Senate Democrats want to stay focused on jobs:

With a slim edge in the Iowa Senate, Democrats intend to keep up the "we're focused on jobs" mantra to avoid the social issues if they can. But certain bills could be used as bargaining chips to preserve Democrat-treasured programs such as state-funded preschool and health care for children.

How sick is that? The GOPers could use health care for kids as a bargaining chip. Wow. Read the rest of this post...

How Marriage Has Changed

Stephanie Coontz provides a useful primer at the Washington Post on how marriage has changed over the years as gender roles have changed. She sees same-sex marriage as a logical step in the evolution of marriage. The entire article is worth reading. Here are a few excerpts:

We are near the end of a two-stage revolution in the social understanding and legal definition of marriage. This revolution has overturned the most traditional functions of the institution: to reinforce differences in wealth and power and to establish distinct and unequal roles for men and women under the law.

For millennia, marriage was about property and power rather than love. . . . But a little more than two centuries ago, people began to believe that they had a right to choose their partners on the basis of love rather than having their marriages arranged to suit the interests of parents or the state. . . .

But huge as the repercussions of the love revolution were, they did not make same-sex marriage inevitable, because marriage continued to be based on differing roles and rights for husbands and wives: Wives were legally dependent on their husbands and performed specific wifely duties. This was part of what marriage cemented in society, and the reason marriage was between men and women. Only when distinct gender roles ceased to be the organizing principle of marriage - in just the past 40 years - did we start down the road to legalizing unions between two men or two women.

During the 1940s, '50s and '60s, sociologists and psychiatrists remained adamant that marriage required strict adherence to traditional feminine and masculine roles. In 1964, a year after Betty Friedan published "The Feminine Mystique," an article in a journal of the American Medical Association described beating as a "more or less" satisfactory way for an "aggressive, efficient, masculine" wife to "be punished for her castrating activity" and for a husband to "re-establish his masculine identity."

Well into the 1970s, marriage was still legally defined as a union that assigned differing marital rights and obligations according to gender. The husband was responsible for supporting the family financially, but he also got to decide what constituted an adequate level of support, how to dispose of certain kinds of property and where the family would live.

The wife, in turn, was legally responsible for providing services in and around the home, but she had no comparable rights to such services. That is why a husband could sue for loss of consortium if his spouse were killed or incapacitated, but a wife in the same situation could not. And because sex was one of the services expected of a wife, she could not charge her husband with rape.

In 1970, inspired by the Supreme Court decision that interracial couples had the right to marry, two Minnesota men applied for a marriage license. Asked by a reporter which one would be the wife, their reply was: "We don't play those kinds of roles." The incident received little serious attention. Most Americans could not imagine a marriage in which one partner did not assume the dominant role of husband and one the subordinate role of wife.

During the 1970s and 1980s, however, a new revolution in marriage rolled across North America and Europe. As feminists pressed for the repeal of "head and master" laws enshrining male authority in the household, legal codes were rewritten so that they no longer assigned different rights and duties by gender. Over time, people came to view marriage as a relationship between two individuals who were free to organize their partnership and their parenting on the basis of their personal inclinations rather than pre-assigned gender roles. Today, as Judge Vaughn Walker noted in his decision striking down California's Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage, "gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage; marriage under law is a union of equals."

Coontz's essay provides valuable historical perspective to counter arguments that marriage is a sacred institution solely meant to further procreation. It should be required reading for marriage equality activists.

Hat tip to Gay Marriage Watch for spotting this one. Read the rest of this post...