Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has an op-ed in the Washington Post, celebrating “the right to be ordinary“:
… Nine years ago Friday, same-sex marriages started happening in Massachusetts, and the time since then has proved wonderfully unremarkable. The sky has not fallen. The earth has not opened to swallow us up. Thousands of good people, contributing members of our society, have made free decisions about whom to marry. Most have been joyful and lasting. Some have failed. Ho-hum. And even as this principle of government treating people equally spreads to 11 more states and the District of Columbia, even as mean-spirited politicians stoke discord over marriage equality in election years, people just keep on being people, choosing their life partners by the same old mysteries, regardless of sexual orientation. Gays and lesbians, like blacks and whites a generation ago, want nothing more than to be ordinary.
As our nation’s highest court considers two cases addressing same-sex marriage — one challenging the ban on equal marriage in California and the second challenging the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) — I hope the justices consider the Massachusetts experience. If our constitutional democracy doesn’t mean that people come before their government as equals, then democracy itself is up for grabs. And the impact of affirming that principle, by striking down the California ban and DOMA, is to let a large part of our population keep their personal decisions private.
Our court’s 2003 decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health was clear-eyed about that. The majority opinion, written by then-Chief Justice Margaret Marshall, remains an urgent call to justice. It also offers a timeless and eloquent description of marriage that transcends sexual orientation.
“Civil marriage is at once a deeply personal commitment to another human being and a highly public celebration of the ideals of mutuality, companionship, intimacy, fidelity, and family,” Marshall wrote. “Because it fulfills yearnings for security, safe haven, and connection that express our common humanity, civil marriage is an esteemed institution, and the decision whether and whom to marry is among life’s momentous acts of self-definition.”…
Two footnotes: Patrick wasn’t governor nine years ago; it was Mitt Romney who got presented with this decision, and he handled it with all the grace and aplomb he’d later demonstrate during his 2012 presidential campaign (i.e., none). A majority of us Bay Staters were good with the decision at the time, and the percentage in favor has increased every year, as it becomes clear that same-sex marriage changes nothing for most Massachusetts residents — which is, of course, one reason the professional homophobes fought so hard to stop it.
Second, despite the out-of-state rumors, I have every reason to believe that Governor Patrick won’t leave Massachusetts before his term expires at the end of 2014, because all three men involved are considerably smarter than the rumor-mongers would like to pretend.
**********
What’s on the agenda for the Friday doc dump end of another workweek?
raven
Waiting to hear if the city is going to allow us to continue our addition or if the sewer line easement is going to shut it down.
raven
Speaking of Mitt, Lisa Meyer just very seriously let us know that the 2012 election would have been “very different” if the IRS officials hadn’t hidden the truth.
BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: City’s are the real jack booted thugs. About 20 years ago we put in a spa and a patio cover. The planning dept. kept on asking questions about the drawings, amount of additional concrete coverage; it wasn’t much more. Next to me was a guy demo-ing and adding a new anchor store to the local mall. The clerk was just stamping each page approved, more than 100 pages of plans. I finally told the planning clerk that I was working with, lets just stop wasting both our time; tell me what you want and I’ll redraw them. She stamped the plans and I was done.
BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: Joe’s back to his usual self, I guess someone cast aspersions on his asparagus on his day off.
Debbie(aussie)
@raven:
What truth? I be confused.
raven
@Debbie(aussie): She’s saying “officials” knew about it and didn’t spill the beans.
Todd
Yeah, but President Santorum is going to change all that.
I walked into our waiting area yesterday (we keep CNN going on the big screen – not my decision), and Jake Tapper had him on, fluffing away….
raven
@BillinGlendaleCA: Yea, we hit the waste line while excavating and further exploration found that the city sewer line cuts right across the new addition footprint. It continues through our yard and the one of our rental and then goes right under the next house to the street. Our contractor is a careful guy and felt we should check with the city so we did. It does make sense that they have access but hopefully there can be an exception. Holding our breath.
Liquid
Convict: Mr. Holmes. Everyone says you’re the best. Without you, I’ll get hung for this.
Sherlock Holmes: No, No, No, Mr. Bewick. Not at all. “Hanged,” yes.
That about sums it up.
max
What’s on the agenda for the
Friday doc dumpend of another workweek?Everyone keeps trying to say that all these R congressmen are the dumbest people ever… but I keep not seeing, because most of them are just crazy, not dumb dumb MDUB.
Louie Gohmert, on the other hand, is a flat-fucking pinhead. (He’s a specific kind of dumb, too – he’s an Deep East Texas backwoods pinhead, a type I have experience with.)
So, can I get a consensus on that the Gentlemen from East Jesus should be forever after be dubbed Louie ‘Pinhead’ Gohmert?
max
[‘Walks like a pinhead, sounds like a pinhead, named like a pinhead… PINHEAD!’]
BillinGlendaleCA
I’ve got an infrared camera outside my window. I see very strange things at night. Flashes of light streaking across the screen, it’s birds. Just now I saw a light towards the street moving up and down. Looked closer, it was my neighbor on his porch smoking.
Baud
@raven:
If she’s correct (ha!), I’m glad they kept it secret.
Liquid
@BillinGlendaleCA: See ‘The Burbs’ / re: Bruce Dern. — “Smells like they’re cooking a goddam cat over there.”
BillinGlendaleCA
@max: Now Max, you don’t want to cast aspersions on Louie’s asparagus.
gene108
@max:
Whose more stupid: The Congressman or the voters, who keep re-electing him?
Says something about America don’t it….
Linda Featheringill
An IRS scandal in 2012 wouldn’t have made any difference. The people had lived with Obama for four years and they knew him. They accepted his faults and decided to stay with him. One more criticism wouldn’t have changed their minds.
In this election, it wasn’t the black man that was strange.
Kay
So, Republicans adding the phrase “including the State Department” to the email seems to indicate this is mostly directed at Clinton, doesn’t it?
Adding the phrase is hilarious, BTW. They’re basically 7th graders.
gene108
Watching CSPAN this morning.
The House voted for the 37th time to repeal Obamacare yesterday.
….Jokers…
NotMax
@Linda Featheringill
Plus, Romney wasn’t about to start making the IRS a theme after evading scrutiny of the bulk of his tax history.
gene108
@gene108:
One independent, from Texas, caller has just chimed in about Obamacare stating he read on-line that anyone seeking medical care under Obamacare will be tagged with an RFID chip.
danielx
@gene108:
It does make you wonder. I’ve done a lot of work with PRIZM groups which are (wiki definition):
PRIZM segmentation, generally by zip code, is used in marketing research for a variety of purposes. Zip codes are less than optimum (in researchspeak), but everybody knows what zip code they live in and nobody knows from census tracts. Based upon demographic/economic characteristics, and very useful and descriptive they are – I confess that my personal favorite group label is Shotguns & Pickups.
I’ve always wondered why they don’t have a group called No-neck Mouthbreathing Asshats, and may write to Nielsen suggesting a new group label of this nature. Sort of like Soccer Moms and Nascar Dads but with a little more kick to it.
Kay
@Linda Featheringill:
They still think it was about a national strategy, a media-driven “air war” and I don’t think that’s what happened.
Republicans here believed Obama was going to lose well before the skewed polls nonsense. Months before. Skewed polls followed the base, it didn’t drive them.
It was like two different elections, a national (Republicans were winning) and a local (they were losing). I’ve never seen anything quite like that, that level of disconnect. I didn’t know who was right, but I knew one side had to be way off.
Suffern ACE
@Todd: yeah. I saw that. It’s just so typical of our fucked up election obsession. Santorum went some obscure event in Iowa that we need to interpret like its news that will help determine 2016. Who cares?
Baud
@Kay:
Reporters should have gotten suspicious when one of the emails was quoted as saying “And Obama is a poo poo head.”
Baud
@gene108:
You can’t post anything on the Internet that isn’t true.
NotMax
@raven
There’s a wonderful Yiddish expression (English versions prevalent in the NYC area when I was a young’un) for when people drag out that type of “if only” construction she posits.
As di bubbe volt gehat beytsim volt zi gevain mayn zaidah.
Direct English translation (used when only adults are present): If my grandmother had balls, she’d be my grandfather.
Not so accurate translation, altered for use when non-adults are present: If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a trolley car.
Kay
@gene108:
I get this question all the time. There’s a section of the law that deals with the numbers used to identify implanted medical devices. They codified that, made it uniform.
Tea Partiers pull that section out to make it appear as if it’s describing a device to be implanted.
Chris
@Linda Featheringill:
Oh, man. That must REALLY bite, especially when you put it like that. :D
aimai
@Baud:
How come there are no laughing emoticons for use here?
On the open thready thing I will spend the weekend packing up the spousal office so he can move from one tiny cubicle to another, driving my children to various dance or musical events, and beginning work on a big art project for my youngest’s graduation. Oh, yes, if I could I would put in an herb garden on my back porch.
Chris
@Kay:
I’ve heard a story about a woman, presumably from the “liberal elite” background, who voiced her amazement at the 1972 election because “no one she knew voted for Nixon.”
Shoe’s on the other foot. They’ve self-segregated into their own little bubble where Americans look, act, talk and think like them, and as a result they didn’t have a clue that the storm was coming. Their loss.
(Personally, though I knew better than to assume loudly and proudly like they did that my candidate was going to win, I had felt pretty good about our chances ever since the Republican primary went into overdrive).
Kay
@Baud:
I love how clumsy it is.
“Including THE STATE DEPARTMENT”
Which is run by HILLARY CLINTON :)
NotMax
@Baid
Seeing or hearing that statement always reminds me of the page oh so cleverly outlining the tale of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and Boilerplate.
aimai
@Kay: Maybe you should try dumbing it down for them. Remind them of all the Bones episodes that turn on someone’s unidentified, murdered, corpse identified becaue they had a prosthesis or implant with an ID number on it–and remind them, as well, that things like that need to be ID’s and traceable to prevent corporate malfeasance and fraud as in the implanation of sub standard parts or pirated/toxic/imitation parts. I find that people who are this gullible are also very influenced by tying new information to something they already “get” like a TV episode, which after all is written for people like that.
dmsilev
@Chris:
Pauline Kael, the film critic. Per Wikipedia, the original version is likely this:
“The story most likely originated in a December 28, 1972 New York Times article on a lecture Kael gave at the Modern Language Association, in which the newspaper quoted her as saying, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”[49] ”
In other words, she was well aware that she was living at one end of the bell curve.
Kay
@Chris:
Obama was “toast” I heard it over and over. I’m superstitious and I had no idea if they were on to something so I didn’t respond, but they were convinced.
On the flip side, they’re all stirred up and energized by the promise of impeachment now. I think that could go both ways. If they don’t impeach ( and I don’t think they can) I would think the base is going to feel that they chickened out. They’ve been told these actions are unlawful, worse than Watergate. They believe it. Then what?
Kay
@aimai:
Sadly, one of the emails I got on it was from a former D county chair. He’s a very nice man, great father, great GRANDfather, but he’s a railroad retiree and he has a lot of free time that he spends drinking coffee with crazy old wingnuts who are also retired from the railroad.
I answered it completely respectfully because I like him and he was genuinely concerned.
Suffern ACE
@Kay: based on passed experience, the Republican House members will now claim that their own doctored e-mails were edited by Obama and use that as a basis to call for impeachment.
JPL
@Kay: Ask them why it is worse than Watergate. Maybe just ask them what happened during the Nixon years.
Chris
@dmsilev:
I stand corrected. A level of self-awareness that conservatives would never stoop to.
@Kay:
Yeah, I agree. That’s the problem with drumming up that kind of hysteria – they all think it’s true and expect their leaders to act accordingly.
gene108
Also, too why is it that whenever news folks get someone to interview about the “IRS Scandal” they only interview Republicans or Tea Party groups that had trouble with the forms?
It’s like the other 75% of groups that got stuck in the word search don’t merit attention or Democrats shouldn’t be able to voice their opinions.
Michael Bersin
The right wingnut controlled Missouri General Assembly is in its last week of session (it ends tonight). No one is safe until that hour. I spent two days in Jefferson City this week documenting some of the atrocities.
gene108
@Kay:
What does it then say about the media, who take them so seriously?
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Kay:
Gerald Ford observed that an impeachable offense is pretty much what Congress says is an impeachable offense so it’s likely that the House, by a simple majority, will at some point pass articles of impeachment against Obama. There’s a near-zero probability that the Senate would convict and vote to remove Obama from office, but that doesn’t matter because house Republicans are only interested in doing damage. Passing articles of impeachment early in the next General Election cycle would be a great distraction from the inevitable pack of Republican fools who will be running for president.
Kay
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
This is cynical, but I wonder if there isn’t some wheeling and dealing going on here.
All of a sudden, we’re getting some Senate confirmations through.
I’m looking at Cordray. If he gets through I’ll get more suspicious about how much of this is showy outrage, to allow the GOP to appease the base AND do some governing :)
MomSense
@gene108:
Wow, some of the paranoia is just so crazy. Why on earth is that particular independent so important that the government would want to track her/him 24/7?
When our utility switched to smart meters people were convinced that it was a way for the government to track them to facilitate relocation to a FEMA camp. I once said to one of the bozos who told me this that I highly doubted he was sufficiently dangerous or enough of a threat to warrant that. He looked a bit deflated after I said that.
jamick6000
Jonathan Karl, ABC reporter who published the bogus BENGHAzI emails, comes out of the right wing college journalism movement: http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/a-right-wing-mole-at-abc-news/
MomSense
@Kay:
And noone is talking about some of the good news on the deficit or CBO projections which would really deflate all of the Republican panic whoring about ObamaCare and our imminent metamorphosis into Greece style financial ruin.
jfxgillis
Anne:
Actually, I think Deval might leave a month early. Holder retires the day after the election, Obama picks Patrick, Tim Murray gets a month in the Corner Office, everyone’s happy.
Kay
@MomSense:
I really think that should be the media outrage that equals their Iraq fuck up.
They had a responsibility to push back against the deficit hysteria. Once again, they punted. I don’t know anything about economics, but I know taking a snapshot of an economy during the worst downturn in my lifetime is bullshit. They had to know that. All of the excuses, the Harvard study, whatever, don’t matter. They know why the projected deficits were higher during that period. We had 16% unemployment here. They were feeding kids at the public library. That is not a normal economy.
MomSense
@Kay:
I remember that stories kept sort of trickling out about the pressure that reporters were under to present the Iraq war in a favorable way in addition to the people who lost jobs over it–Phil Donohue comes to mind. I really have no sense of what the press’ mission is now. It seems like news has been subsumed into the entertainment division or it is presented as a means of propagandizing for political parties or for particular corporate interests. Should we really have been all that surprised that MSNBC was firing hosts who didn’t support the Iraq war? The parent company GE is a huge military contractor. I mean the “bring good things to life” appliance division is a very small piece of their pie.
Really we had 30 years of systematic redistribution of wealth and it was never really discussed as such in that whole time by the big media players. You could see the housing bubble coming from a mile away and there were enough people talking about it that it could have been widely debated, discussed, reported–but nothing from the big media players. It had to have been a choice so I think we always have to ask why the media make the choice not to cover a story and then look deeper to see who the stakeholders are and why they would make that choice. Clearly they have decided what is in their interests to cover and what is not. And then there are also just some really lazy, arrogant people who are finally the kewl kids and measure their success by proximity to power.
Kay
@MomSense:
I love newspapers.
I buy three, a national, a “state” and a local.
But they can’t keep pushing themes that are directly contrary to my best interests and think I’ll continue to buy that.
This place was devastated by the recession. I depend on people here to have money to pay me. Our revenue dropped dramatically. We all took a pay cut. We would have gone under if we had had debt on the business.
So right as things start to get better they all start chanting to cut spending? It felt personal to me, like we were just climbing out and they were pushing us down.
Roger Moore
@aimai:
Re-used. That’s going to freak them out more than anything.
MomSense
@Kay:
It was personal and that is exactly what they did–we were trying to climb out and they were pushing us down.
Chaney said openly that deficits don’t matter and many of the deficit scolds were Republicans who had voted for things which ran up huge deficits and added to the debt. They were rarely called on it. And again, I think we should ask why!
gbear
@raven: Michele Bachmann is burbling that talking point too. The email/tweet must have gotten to everyone.
AL, thanks for posting Deval’s op-ed. I’ve put it on my facebook page. We’re still kind of up in the clouds in MN.
NonyNony
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Yes. Though I think that their base is going to need it earlier than the next presidential cycle – they’ll probably need it before the next midterm election to keep the base from primarying them. I expect a number of Tea Party types to do whatever they can to get impeachment onto the table before next summer at this point so that they can point to it proudly and say “he’s a crook – see we tried to get him out of office. Vote for me.”
The fact that it will be a strict party-line vote, and the Senate will tank it on another party-line vote, will not go unnoticed by the rest of the country (nor by the Tea Partiers – who will write it off as all Democrats being part of the “cover-up”).
This is, by the way, why Pelosi took impeachment off the table so early. She knew what it would be – a strict party line vote (if that – Dems would defect where GOPers wouldn’t) that would only serve to look like political attacks from a party that had newly gained power. It wouldn’t go anywhere in the Senate (and even if it did, it would be purely partisan). So nothing would happen except that it would alienate moderate Dem voters who would believe it was about “payback” when what they voted for was “better government”. This kind of theater works great for Republicans to fire up the vote, but Democratic voters are not Republicans, and they don’t get fired up by the same things.
(In fact I would assume that partisan impeachment proceedings against Obama would fire up the Democratic base as much as it will the Tea Party base. Not that Tea Party guys in heavily gerrymandered districts have much to worry about on that score, but any Republican in a marginal district would be in danger from the backlash, I’d think.)
weaselone
@gbear:
Love that talking point.It’s essentially a confession the the primary purpose of Tea Party groups was to get Republicans elected. That this would justify the special scrutiny of these groups by the IRS seems to escape them.
gene108
@NonyNony:
Impeachment, in 2006, would’ve alienated all the disgruntled former GOP voters, who realized the crock of shit they had voted for in 2000 and 2004 and wanted to undo the damage they did.
They didn’t want to vote for partisan Democratic agenda.
I think like trying to tighten up Voter ID laws created a backlash. I really think impeachment would fire up a lot of people, who would otherwise be uninterested to vote in 2014, with Obama not on the ticket.
2014 is all about turn out and the GOP realizes that this early, which is why they’ve broken the dial on the screams about corruption and impeachment.
Bubblegum Tate
@Kay:
Well, one wingnut feels he has the perfect solution. Impeachment won’t go anywhere anyway because of the Senate, so the thing to do is call for a special prosecutor and a select committee because…you know…there’s just been so much lawbreaking, y’all!
feebog
Remember the poll from last week? 41% of Republicans believe that Benghazi is the worst scandal ever? Worse than Tea Pot Dome, Watergate, Iran-Contra all rolled up into one big scandal? Also remember that 39% of those Republicans didn’t know where Benghazi was located (Cuba, really?). That 41% is only about 13% of the electorate and the 39%, who are the real knuckle draggers only represent about 5% of the electorate. If the Boner and Evil Eric can do basic math, they know full well that all of these “scandals” are the result of Faux Noose hysteria and the morons who buy into the hysteria.
Obama knows that of the three current “scandals” the IRS kerfluffle is the most dangerous. That is why heads have rolled, and a few more will roll in the next few days. Benghazi is just about played out, especially considering that it now is coming out that the notorious white house emails were altered by ABC and by Republicans.
Kay
@MomSense:
If it’s bipartisan, and like Iraq the deficit hysteria was (somewhat) bipartisan, that’s when they’re MOST important, because that’s when we get into these stupid Cycles Of Idiocy where there’s this huge group of influential people all saying the same stupid shit. It’s (essentially) a peer pressure situation.
That’s when we NEED a neutral party, a detached “grown up.” I don’t know why they don’t get this yet. They should be MOST vigilant when there’s agreement, because that means no one is pushing back.
Wally Ballou
NYT: “Crowd Led by Priests Attack Gay Rights Marchers in Georgia”
Not that Georgia, the other one.
Check out the accompanying picture. Yeah, looks like a devoted churchgoing crowd, all right. But, just like here, the good holy morally upstanding pharisaic churchmen can always be counted upon to let secular drunken thug youth do their actual dirty work for them in the gay-bashing arena.