SSM Wakes Up Trav

Our biggest sleeping puppy, Senate President Robert (Don't Call Me Bobby) Travaglini, snapped to yesterday afternoon. He stated that at today's ConCon, he intends to chew through the whole 20-question agenda, agendum by agendum.

The Boston Globe article on his remarks said that if they don't get to agendum 20, the amendment, they are likely to reconvene a ConCon before the end of the year to do so. This would meet requirements to keep the amendment on track for next year's ConCon -- assuming that 50 of the 200 legislators commit to approving it this year.

Trav has great power in this. He is the presiding officer of the ConCon. On the other hand, moving an agendum up on the list requires an almost-impossible-to-get unanimous vote of the ConCon.

He said, "It is my intention to bring all of the items on the calendar before the body for a vote. However, each of the 20 items left on the calendar is likely to generate significant debate among the members, and we will see how far we get in the proceedings on Wednesday."

He meets with fellow Democratic Senators at noon, an hour before the ConCon convenes today. Those wanting to show support for SSM should be there by 1 p.m., ideally by 9 a.m. The hall may be full, but there's lot of room outside for milling, politicking and demonstrating.

House Republicans, including minority leader Bradley H. Jones, are urging him and House Speaker Sal DiMasi to take a simple yea or nay vote on the matter. The anti folk have said for months that they have far more than the 50 needed.

A delay this time, even if another ConCon occurs this year might help pro-SSM forces. As Sen. Stanley C. Rosenberg (Amherst Democrat) put it, "We've seen enormous progress from when this issue started to be debated three years ago or so, but we still have some work to do. So time is our friend."

By the bye, the Globe has a handy-dandy flow chart showing the what-if possibilities for the amendment at this year's ConCon, next year's should it pass, and to the 2008 plebiscite should it advance to the ballot.

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Tags: massmarrier, Massachusetts, amendment, same sex marriage, Travaglini, ConCon

Wall Walking in JP

Another post of local interest would be way off subject here. JP history and nature combine in a huge, hidden urban wild, Allandale Woods.

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Tags: massmarrier, Boston, urban wild, Allandale Woods, Jamaica Plain

What MA Legislators Need to Hear

When you contact you legislators today and tomorrow before the ConCon, be plain:

1. If the amendment banning same-sex marriage comes to a vote, they must vote against it.
2. As yesterday's SJC decision stated so strongly, the amendment would be "discrimination in its rawest form."
3. Stopping this amendment in any legal way is just fine.

If you want to quote from yesterday's decision, pick from the Greaney/Ireland comments, including:

The proposed initiative cannot be said to further a proper legislative objective (as was categorically decided by the Goodridge court, there is none [Secretary of State]). The only effect of a positive vote will be to make same-sex couples, and their families, unequal to everyone else; this is discrimination in its rawest form. Our citizens would, in the future, be divided into at least three separate and unequal classifications: heterosexual couples who enjoy the right to marry; same-sex couples who were married before the passage of the amendment (but who, if divorced, would not be permitted to remarry someone of the same sex); and same-sex couples who have never married and, barring the passage of another constitutional amendment on the subject, will be forever denied that right.

That is certainly not an association the senators and reps want to have. They do not want to be remembered, either by historians or voters for that.

Say it loud, say it clearly, and say it to all concerned. If you don't have the contact info handy, start with this page to find your public servants.

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Tags: massmarrier, Massachusetts, Constitutional Convention, same sex marriage

SJC Gives Nod and Warning

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled unanimously today that the drive to stop same-sex marriage here through a constitutional amendment can go to Wednesday's ConCon.

Note: Click here and on option 2 today to see the initial ruling. The link is to a slip decision, which is temporary and will disappear when the SJC releases the formal ruling. The GLAD link at the bottom of this post should be less ephemeral.

Key to the finding was concurrence with Attorney General Tom Reilly's interpretation that this does not violate Article 48 of the commonwealth constitution. Specifically, the slip decision includes:

In sum, the plain meaning of the words "reversal of a judicial decision" does not include the concept of "overruling" the prospective or precedential effect of a decision by an amendment to the Constitution or by the enactment of a new statute. The debates further confirm that the "reversal of judicial decision" exclusion was not intended to preclude such an amendment (or enactment), so long as its subject matter was not barred by other important exclusions not at issue in this case.

On the other hand, the SJC was not delighted with the intent of the drive. It also includes:

There can be no doubt after the Goodridge decision that the Massachusetts Constitution protects the right of a couple who wish to marry, and are otherwise eligible to marry, to obtain a marriage license, regardless of gender. It is equally clear that the proposed initiative is directed toward withdrawing this right from a distinct segment of our community, thereby prohibiting, as matter of constitutional law, same-sex couples from committing to civil marriage and from attaining the multitude of legal rights, and financial and social benefits, that arise therefrom. The proposed initiative cannot be said to further a proper legislative objective (as was categorically decided by the Goodridge court, there is none [Secretary of the Commonwealth]). The only effect of a positive vote will be to make same-sex couples, and their families, unequal to everyone else; this is discrimination in its rawest form. Our citizens would, in the future, be divided into at least three separate and unequal classifications: heterosexual couples who enjoy the right to marry; same-sex couples who were married before the passage of the amendment (but who, if divorced, would not be permitted to remarry someone of the same sex); and same-sex couples who have never married and, barring the passage of another constitutional amendment on the subject, will be forever denied that right.

It also hinted at further legal action by concluding "There is no Massachusetts precedent discussing, or deciding, whether the initiative procedure may be used to add a constitutional provision that purposefully discriminates against an oppressed and disfavored minority of our citizens in direct contravention of the principles of liberty and equality protected by art. 1 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights."

The SJC notes that Reilly skipped that key aspect because no one specifically asked him. "If the initiative is approved by the Legislature and ultimately adopted, there will be time enough, if an appropriate lawsuit is brought, for this court to resolve the question whether our Constitution can be home to provisions that are apparently mutually inconsistent and irreconcilable," the opinion reads.

The Globe had a short on the decision, including quotes from a disappointed GLAD executive director,Lee Swislow. "The courts are very reluctant to rule against a sitting attorney general, despite our strong legal arguments. So now obviously the focus is going to turn to the Legislature, which has a chance on Wednesday during the constitutional convention to do the right thing and defeat this amendment."

GLAD also has a press release with its immediate reaction and a link to the decision. The release quotes plaintiff Johanna Schulman as saying, "“I'm disappointed, but the fight is far from over. I was able to marry the person I love after 19 years together, and when people see how ordinary our marriages are, they are ready to move on to other important issues."

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Tags: massmarrier, Massachusetts, amendment, same sex marriage Shulman Tom Reilly

SJC Does Not Stop SSM Petition

The headline teaser on the Globe site reads that the SJC will permit the ConCon to proceed on considering the drive to stop future same-sex marriage by a constitutional amendment.

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Tags: massmarrier, Massachusetts, amendment, same sex marriage Shulman Tom Reilly

SJC SSM Cavalry

Let us heap praise on our Supreme Judicial Court, even before the ruling today. I see in BlueMassGroup, that the decision on whether the current petition drive for to stop same-sex marriage by a constitutional amendment will come down today.

The case, Shulman v. Attorney General (SJC 9684), argued that the drive tries to overturn a judicial decision (Goodridge) and is therefore unconstitutional in Massachusetts. While we concur heartily, Tom Reilly's office countered that because it is only stopping them going forward, this doesn't really overturn the SSM decision.

The timing is great, with the ConCon on Wednesday. It's far better to have this aspect settled before the tentative General Court members have to huddle. I suspect they'd love the court to decide this, as with SSM originally.

It looks plain enough to us. We'll hang loose and see and then report.

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Tags: massmarrier, Massachusetts, amendment, same sex marriage Shulman Tom Reilly

Another Loudmouthed Lesbian...

...does a great job on the New York Court of Appeals non-decision tossing the same-sex-marriage back to the legislature.

In today's Salon, Sarah Miles writes truth in Ban on gay marriage denies justice to children. Among other things, she notes that the judge who wrote the befuddled majority decision "delivered a surprising attack on the heterosexual agenda: Straight people, he said, are really bad at marriage."

A protection and partial fix is thus to ban same-sex marriage. Double huh? from here.

She also notes that the decision declared with no basis other than common sense that it is almost always better for kids to grow up with a mother and father. At the same time, he dismissed out of hand over 20 years of science indicating otherwise, showing that same-sex couples are at least as good parents.

We see again that when someone falls back on it's obvious or it's common sense, there just emotion and not intellect or supportable reason. We're back to geometry and are supposed to start with postulates. Bovine feces.

Miles piggybacks on Chief Judge Judith Kaye's dissent that included that New York surely has an interest in promoting heterosexual couples to marry before reproducing. The opinion diverges with "the exclusion of gay men and lesbians from marriage in no way furthers this interest."

Miles adds "...if the courts should encourage marriages that help kids, why aren't the courts supporting the more-likely-to-be-stable relationships of gay couples?"

She is in a Wonderland of legal oddments. She is the biological mom of Katie. She and the other mother were briefly married in San Francisco in 2004 before the legal union was court-annulled, "making us ex-wives living together raising a child, a category not frequently found in surveys of marriage statistics."

The schadenfreude-afflicted and addicted would certainly say that Miles took a chance and lost, bringing this limbo-situation on herself. Pooh on them, what we are asking is what Miles does, why should the child be penalized because her moms can't remarry? What of health insurance other stable couples can share and protect the child with? What of other legal protections -- tax, probate, health care, Social Security and on and on and on?

Miles concludes with a spot of impatient hope:

Which brings me back to feeling powerful -- seriously. As we've seen in South Africa and Eastern Europe and San Francisco, civil society in its richness is always greater than official codes about who is, and isn't, a full person. Katie and a million kids like her are here, and their families will continue to thrive. At some point, the courts will catch up.

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Tags: massmarrier, same-sex marriage, New York State, Sara Miles, New York State, Salon

What You Can Do for ConCon Wednesday

Just two days before the Constitutional Convention to advance the anti-same-sex-marriage amendment, GLAD says get loud. Last week, GLAD sent an email blast urging pro-equality folk to contact their legislators.

If you don't have the contact info handy, start with this page to find your public servants.

Certainly the anti-gay forces have had their say long and often. We should certainly expect a few thousand of us to speak up, write up and call up in the next week.

As GLAD Executive Director Lee Swislow put it, "Opponents of marriage equality are flooding the State House with calls urging legislators to pass a new, extreme amendment that will ban marriage and replace it with no benefits or protections whatsoever for same-sex couples and their families."

Amusingly enough, the hypocritical anti forces are already crying foul over the possibility that the pro guys will use any of several legislative procedural methods to block voting on the amendment at the ConCon. This is after every sneaky signature method and dancing around the law prohibiting a ballot initiative trying to overturn a court decision (thanks to Tom Reilly and Mitt Romney).

If the amendment does not get a mere 50 legislators (25% of the combined General Court) to approve it this year, it loses. The Dark Side is back to square one trying to strip homosexual citizens of marriage rights. We would not weep.

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Tags: massmarrier, Massachusetts, Constitutional Convention, same sex marriage

Second SSM Opinion Nails It

As befuddled as yesterday's Boston Globe editorial was on the pending ConCon, today's Eileen McNamara version was much savvier and showed a much clearer sense of the issues. She also saved us work in pointing to opinion on the amendment.

In case you haven't followed or analyzed the key issues, head to her piece for some clarity. She notes:

• We have representative democracy, not plebiscites, in no small part to avoid majorities tyrannizing minorities.
• The let-the-people-vote gimmick our commonwealth constitution, which to quote SJC chief Justice Margaret Marshall is "more protective of individual liberty and equality than the federal Constitution."
• The VoteonMarriage people and local R.C. Bishops are muddling civil contract law and their personal religion. "The question before the court in 2003, like the question before the Legislature meeting in Constitutional Convention on Wednesday, is about the civil, not the religious, definition of marriage. The issue is not who shall be blessed, but who shall be licensed."

We can join her in accepting that a subset of our citizens neither likes nor condones same-sex marriage. The glib response can be that if you don't like homosexual marriage, don't marry a homosexual. The underlying truth is accurate though. As years of this blog have covered, our commonwealth's marriage laws from colonial days to now and beyond are of civil contract. People are welcome to add a religious veneer and consider that the real marriage, but the state does not and never has.

Here, we think this long and divisive effort to strip rights from one group and to illegally try to overturn a court decision show what we have to do. The abuse of ballot initiatives illustrates clearly how perverted they have been by anti-democratic, anti-gay, anti-civil-rights groups. The legislature needs leadership, either internally or from a new governor and attorney general. They need to fine-tune the process and return it to the legal safeguard it was when first added to our rights here.

Let us be plain. We should never permit the majority to vote on civil rights for a minority.

To Wednesday, the Globe editorial board seems pretty Pollyannaish about it all. Gee whiz, you kiddies in the General Court. By gum, your job is to vote this amendment down. That'll show 'em.

The amendment is more than cruel, it is unconstitutional. It should never have gotten this far, even with 125,000 or so coerced signature. We can lay this monster at the feet of Mitt Romney, Tom Reilly and Sean O'Malley; its there baby more than the Mass Family folk.

No matter how it loses -- the SJC ruling it illegal, the ConCon not voting on it, a down vote at the ConCon, or otherwise, it needs to go down. Then beyond it, the momentum needs to go into the legislative process. Let's make sure that those who would trample on any minority get a loud, "NO!"

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Tags: massmarrier, Massachusetts, Constitutional Convention, same sex marriage ballot initiatives Eileen McNamara

Mass. Marriage: Vote/Don't Vote

From every angle, Massachusetts folk, media and politicians -- and the occasional bloggger, are weighing in on the pending ConCon on July 12th. Worse than Groundhog Day, this joint legislative session can promise not weeks, but two years of discomfort if we do the wrong thing.

One way or another, the proposed constitutional amendment to stop same-sex marriage here will lose. How we get there will say much of the spirit and intellect of the Massachusetts legislature. Consider if it loses:

• By a lack of quorum (101 of 200 of the General Court) — the addlepated, POTUS-coveting Gov. Willard Romney promises to work with the hateful amendment-pushing organizations for court action to compel a vote -- a true irony for bozos who can't stop using the phrase activist judges and disparaging judicial victories of the pro-equality/pro-SSM side.
• By a vote on the lame, doomed Goguen/Travis version — followed by adjournment without considering the new amendment. There would be weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth, perhaps followed by a court suit. The self-identified victims on the far right have never forgotten their previous loss like this on a ConCon procedural move.
• By fewer than 50 legislators (the minimum) supporting the amendment — There would be threats (always hollow) of loss of office and ritual heaping of disdain. Pout. Pout. Pout.
• Time Out — A real possibility with 20 agenda to consider in a single day. The amendment is 20 or 20 and could simply not come up. Rearranging the set sked requires a unanimous vote; that will never happen. A time-out would bring a futile and divisive call for another ConCon this year.

A recap of other possibilities and variations appears in the current In Newsweekly here. Note that if the amendment passes this ConCon, we contend over it for another year until the next ConCon, at which the whole damned process repeats. With every day, the public support for SSM and boredom with the gay haters grow. This year's loser is next year's big loser, but the time, money and distraction from real legislative business are absurdly expensive and annoying.

Now to the latest definitive and very varied solutions, consider just the editorials in the Boston Globe and In Newsweekly. The Globe calls for a fantasy world. It wants fewer than 50 to support the amendment. There, peachy, keen, everyone's happy because we have had process. The Globe buys into Romney's sleazy arguments about the legislature having to vote on every proposed amendment. Its editorial board seems to have missed the past 200-plus years of U.S. and Massachusetts politics, where compromise and procedural options are the way business is done.

The very low bar of a quarter of the legislature putting an amendment to a popular vote is the rule, but not necessarily a good one. When the ballot-initative process has become so perverted, this process is suspect. You could probably get a quarter of the General Court to vote for the aardvark as the commonwealth's official anteater if you lobbied as long as the anti-gay folk have.

Ruling out procedural options to stop this drive is not reasonable when you have permitted dirty petition drives and have a paralyzed attorney general who allows an amendment to proceed to overturn a court decision, which is against the law here.

The Globe is whistling past the graveyard. Depending solely on the wisdom and fairness of one fourth of our legislators shows a lack of wit.

On the other extreme, In calls for another delay in the vote. It points out in accurate detail that the court case suing to stop the clearly illegal amendment from proceeding has had its arguments before the Supreme Judicial Court. In wants to wait until the SJC decides. It could render the process null.

I can't see any side buying that argument. The SJC should have expedited this. The issues are clear enough. To our interpretation, GLAD's legal team skunked Reilly's. If our AG had vision and guts, this amendment would never have gotten certification and never gotten this far.

We'll monitor the other calls before Wednesday. Reilly and Romney have already made it plain that they want two more years of agita and expense on this turkey amendment. Others would like it to lose this way, that way or another way.

Regardless of how it loses, it will not be the true end of it. The Catholic hierarchy may cut its losses and maybe turn to the business of God instead, but the hardcore anti-gay forces will whine, cry foul and attempt another ballot-initiative for a law or amendment.

By then, they will not stand a chance. I can't wait.

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Tags: massmarrier, Massachusetts, Constitutional Convention, same sex marriage

MBTA Victim: Minimal Update

The Jamaica Plain Gazette has another smattering of information on the fellow killed on the Orange Line tracks on June 26th. The short is not online, in the print edition only.

Eventually last week, the Globe did run a short with the man's name, hometown and age. Maybe they're waiting for his family to pay for a death notice.

They cite information from MBTA spokesperson Joe Pesaturo. This is the same source quoted by the Boston Globe for the original and follow-up shorts.

Media Outage: The Globe has been terribly about this and the Herald has ignored it. They are getting like FoxNews it hitting heavy on injured children and kidnapped blonde women. A man died here and it's a yawn. By the bye, I sent email to the Globe's city editor, asking when they would do some original reporting on this rather than passing along the scrawny MBTA press releases. No response yet...

According to the Gazette:

• No witnesses saw him get on the tracks.
• He may have come from either Forest Hills or Green Street stops.
• The T's guessing that high walls and fences would have prevented any other entry to the tracks.
• He was lying on the tracks motionless.
• He may or may not have been dead when the train hit him.
• He may have died from third-rail electricity, the impact or both.
• He had injuries from both possibilities.
• Another driver saw him on the tracks and called it in, but not in time to stop Northbound traffic.

We don't know the usual journalism requirements. His name is what the T released and does not have an online search result of any type. There has been no death notice or obit that we can find. There are no details -- work, family, reason to be on the track, or such on top of all the unknowns from above.

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Tags: massmarrier, Jamaica Plain, Green Street, mbta

NY Decision: One-Off or Pattern?

We thought we had done plenty on yesterday's NY State's highest court decision sending the same-sex-marriage issue back to the legislature. However, the New York Times analysis of the ruling's impact is worth a look.

See the basics here and some commentary on the majority and dissenting opinions here.

A highly partisan observer, Monte Steward, president of the Marriage Law Foundation, reveled in what many anti-SSM folk are calling a monumental victory. His gleeful pronouncements included, "When people look back and write the history of this issue, they will view the New York decision as the Gettysburg in this big contest."

In reality, the Court of Appeals majority did not say that New York could not recognize SSM. It ruled that the decision was the legislature's. The Monte Stewards will not be snickering in schadenfreude delight if the lawmakers there enact a civil-union or SSM law in reaction.

However, Steward had a prediction that may or may hold. It is what we all should watch. He said that other judges weighing SSM in their states, including neighboring New Jersey, may feel the influence of the New York ruling. As the Times put it:

Specifically, Mr. Stewart praised Judge Robert S. Smith for refusing to use the racist legacy of miscegenation laws as a justification for extending marriage rights to same-sex couples. Too often, Mr. Stewart said, trial court judges and politicians are cowed by the premise that barring their unions would be the same as barring people of different races to marry.

"It's going to carry a lot of intellectual clout with other judges around the country," Mr. Stewart said.

One lawyer on the other side, Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund Marriage Project Director Davis S. Buckel, did agree that judges will read the New York ruling. On the other hand, the legally questionable and ham-fisted reasoning in some places of the majority ruling may work to opposite effect in other states. "In particular, (SSM supporters) noted one section suggesting heterosexual couples need marriage to be preserved as a way to shore up their faulty relationships and protect their children who might suffer in broken-home situations," he said.

Buckel went on to suggest, "It's a mess of a decision that in the end makes a very weak argument: That you can justify barring same-sex couples from marrying because of the unstable relationships of heterosexual couples." Likewise, Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese was as surprised as Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye that the N.Y. majority tied the decision to the ability of some heterosexual couples to procreate as some evidence they were superior at raising children.

He and many who have seen the ruling were also astonished to read references to homosexuality as a choice, a "sexual preference." Solmonese said of the opinion, "If nothing else, this ruling will cause people —— gay and straight alike —— to reflect on this judge's unusual view of gay marriage and then come to their own conclusions."

The Times does not say so, but from this vantage, Steward's hopes of snuffing U.S. SSM are overly optimistic. The majority ruling may well not convince a single other court to vote its way. We'll have to see whether the N.Y. legislators react by providing the civil-rights protections that N.Y. citizens have come to expect. After all, the Court of Appeals said it was their decision.

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Tags: massmarrier, same-sex marriage, New York State, Court of Appeals

Electability as a Code Word

Our governor's race seems to be dissolving into a battle of electability claims. This can be a code word for race. In this contest, it certainly gives voters the chance to choose wealth over ideas, the chance to take the okay future behind door number one over the shining aspirations behind another.

Electable has two definitions, one covers likely and the other covers fitness. In news coverage, we are seeing and hearing more and more from candidates and polled voters alike that they want to go with the electable one.

A case in point is the trend piece in this week's Bay Windows. It certainly isn't scientific research, but it does a great job at highlighting the electability meme in considering whether the gay community will be torn between voting for Deval Patrick or Chris Gabrieli.

Statewide, gay voters are not a huge factor, but they are substantial enough to bring candidates around and flavor the debates. Specifically, the issues of both the pending anti-same-sex-marriage amendment and those disgraceful 1913 laws used to keep out of staters from marrying here keep coming up as debate questions.

In the most recent televised debate, Patrick had a fairly strong statement against the amendment, but Gabrieli mush-mouthed his attitude. Patrick has the edge in public gay support, but Gabrieli is not far behind. Neither stresses gay issues on his Website.

The BW piece interviews some Patrick-to-Gabrieli converts and some fence sitters. One switcher, Mark Walsh, conveyed another meme with, "I like to look at it as like ‘The Three Bears’: we got one that’s too liberal, one that’s too conservative and somebody who’s just right and Chris is just right from my perspective."

Regular readers here should know that I endorse Patrick. To me, his ideas, platform and proposals are fleshed out, headed in the right direction, and much more substantial and any other candidate's. Yet, I find him not liberal enough. I am amazed that the popular thought seems to be that he is too pink. I would call him a moderate or a moderate progressive.

Yet Walsh's view is significant in and beyond the gay communities. It reflects the dissatisfaction with the decades of Republican leaderless stagnation in every sense for the commonwealth. People seem afraid of supporting a candidate who might turn off the huge number of independent voters here. They also know that beyond a few urban areas, much of Massachusetts remains socially conservative, often fiscally conservative, and racially homogenous.

Which bring us to another electability issue -- how afraid are liberal voters that other voters will not ink the oval for a Black man?

As Gabrieli is courting gay voters, Tom Reilly plays his own Black card. He grew up and remains good friends with Black men and families, particularly in his native Springfield. His effort to curry favor against a Black candidate has the underlying theme that he is palatable and electable to white voters.

Additionally, Patrick is still earning name and message recognition in Black communities. His support is probably under 50% still with Blacks. While like gays, Black voters do not swing elections here solo, they represent a solid enough set of numbers to pursue.

So, we are back to a contest with three candidates who claim they will spend what it takes. New reports suggest that indy Christy Mihos may not have enough voter support or personal disposable income to keep pace with Gabrieli and GOP Kerry Healey. Yet at least the two latter make much of their money.

The message from Healey is much like Gabby's -- "I can spend and spend. I can buy this election."

With my view that Patrick has the right ideas, the right stuff, that is the wrong claim. What we need is 1) to knock the do-nothing Republicans out of the governor's office, 2) have a progressive governor who will lead us out of economic gloom and public-policy stagnation, and 3) install a leader with both the ideas and the will to force the inert legislature to sit up and do the people's business.

Unfortunately, the candidates who promise to buy the office don't deliver on any promise other than electability. What do we liberals and progressives gain if we elect one of them and end up with more of what we've had?

We can hope that Suffolk and other local pollsters ask those questions about electability. Would you sacrifice content for a sure winner? Are you afraid that Patrick's left slant or skin color will freak the independents and exurbanites?

To illustrate the gay angle, BW quotes hesitant and waffling voter, Arlene Forunato:

With three candidates in the race, she says, "it just seems like they’re all cannibalizing each other’s candidacies and we’re going to end up with Governor Kerry Healey." Fortunato says she believes that Gabrieli would be "a fantastic governor." Yet she also says, “after the convention I thought they all should get behind Deval. He’s got the endorsement, let’s just forget about our own individual agendas and make this thing work. But that’s not going to happen."

Indeed, she's right. We have to consider then whether we have the guts to go with ideas and direction. We could take the electable option and always wonder what we might have had behind the other door.

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Tags: massmarrier, Massachusetts, electability, Chris Gabrieli, Deval Patrick, governor, Bay Windows

Lost in Albany, Looking for SSM

The kindest view of yesterday's New York Court of Appeals decision tossing SSM back to the legislature is that it was "an unfortunate misstep." That was the ending phrase in the dissenting opinion Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye.

The ruling in a PDF version is here. The gist of it is that a four-to-two decision was not convinced that SSM is a civil-rights issue. Instead, they relied on such non-legal, emotional bases as "the common-sense premise that children will do best with a mother and father in the home."

In abrogating their responsibility, the majority suggested:

We do not predict what people will think generations from now, but we believe the present generation should have a chance to decide the issue through its elected representatives. We therefore express our hope that the participants in the controversy over same-sex marriage will address their arguments to the Legislature; that the Legislature will listen and decide as wisely as it can; and that those unhappy with the result -- as many undoubtedly will be -- will respect it as people in a democratic state should respect choices democratically made.

Our view is that Kaye must have 20 or 30 IQ points on Judge Robert S. Smith, who wrote for the defense. She clearly graduated from law school too.

Smith's actual wording is offensive on many levels, both patronizing and devoid of legal reasoning. Kaye's dissent alternately took a scalpel or a machete to the majority finding.

For state law, she tromped on the tradition assertion for banning SSM. She noted that marriage has changed both culturally and legally there continually, from the 19th Century law that literally made a wife her husband's property. "The historical record shows that through adjudication and legislation, all of New York's sex-specific rules for marriage have been invalidated save for the one at issue here."

To this case, she elaborated that, "It is no answer that same-sex couples can be excluded
from marriage because marriage, by definition, does not include them. In the end, 'an argument that marriage is heterosexual because it just is amounts to circular reasoning." Indeed, there is much of that in the majority decision. The by-cracky-that's-the-way-it's-been attitude lives in Albany.

Unlike the majority, she found a clear correspondence to anti-miscegenation laws. She also cites Lawrence v. Texas' finding that "...the fact that the governing majority in a State has traditionally viewed a particular practice as immoral is not a sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting the practice."

She covers a variety of legal points in her disagreement. Key is that she finds forbidding SSM a violation of equal protection. As she wrote, "...each one of the plaintiffs here could lawfully enter into a marriage of convenience with a complete stranger of the opposite sex tomorrow, and thereby immediately obtain all of the myriad benefits and protections incident to marriage. Plaintiffs are, however, denied these rights because they each desire instead to marry the person they love and with whom they have created their family. ..and thus constitutes
discrimination based on sexual orientation."

It was also in the bizarre class that she even had to address Smith's absurd, repeated argument that marriage was for procreation and that two homosexuals cannot create babies as a unit. She notes that state and federal law permit prisoners who are not allowed sex to wed, and that sterile, elderly and intentionally childless couples can marry and stay married legally.

More to the point, she demolished the majority assertion that the state had a vested interest in encouraging heterosexual spouses to procreate. As she concluded:

...it is not enough that the State have a legitimate interest in recognizing or supporting opposite-sex marriages. The relevant question here is whether there exists a rational basis for excluding same-sex couples from marriage, and, in fact, whether the State's interests in recognizing or supporting opposite-sex marriages are rationally furthered by the exclusion.

She went on that "the exclusion of gay men and lesbians from marriage in no way furthers this interest. There are enough marriage licenses to go around for everyone."

Unlike the majority, she is aware that marriage is about more than babies. It includes a broad and deep range of protections and benefits.

From that point, she tore into the majority's assertion that they were acting in the interest of the children by trying to maintain live-in one-man/one-woman role models. In her words:

The State plainly has a legitimate interest in the welfare of children, but excluding same-sex couples from marriage in no way furthers this interest. In fact, it undermines it.

Depriving these children of the benefits and protections available to the children of opposite-sex couples is antithetical to their welfare...

She also bemoans her Court's avoidance of "its obligation to remedy constitutional violations in the hope that the Legislature might some day render the question presented academic." She states that the role of the courts is safeguard liberties and offer redress.

Her closing words are clear and prophetic. "The Court's duty to protect constitutional rights is an imperative of the separation of powers, not its enemy. I am confident that future generations will look back on today's decision as an unfortunate misstep."

Local Note: Short-term, this may mean that New York couples will not be able to marry here, under the Romney/Reilly scheme of using anti-miscegenation laws. In theory, our courts ruling on a case-by-case basis could find that New York law does not forbid SSM, as there is no specific DOMA law there. That is unlikely. Again, we need to look to a progressive governor and attorney general to drive repeal of the 1913 laws. That won't happen with the current crew.

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Tags: massmarrier, same-sex marriage, New York State, Court of Appeals

NY Court Washes Hands of SSM

Bwaak. Bwaak.

Depending on where you are, it seems courts, governors and legislators all want someone else to take responsibility for ruling on same-sex marriage. Here, we ended up with court-mandated SSM because the legislative leaders looked away too often for too long. As we write, Washington State's elected high-court judges have been sitting on their decision for a year and one-half.

In New York State this morning, the Court of Appeals threw it back to the legislature in a four-to-two decision. The New York Times recap is here and AP's somewhat misleading version is here.

The initial wire-service report is that the court rejected SSM, while the reality is that it was pushing it away. Instead, as the Times reports, "The court did not rule that the state should not or could not allow gay marriages, only that the state constitution did not require that it allow them."

Interestingly enough in what the legislature may take as arguments when it takes this issue up -- as it surely will under public pressure from all sides, the court stressed the importance of marriage to children. Again, as the Times put it:

First, the court said, marriage could be preserved as an "inducement" to heterosexual couples to remain in stable, long-term, and child-bearing relationships. Second, lawmakers could rationally conclude that "it is better, other things being equal, for children to grow up with both a mother and the father."

The justices did not buy the plaintiffs' comparison with segregation by race. The case had 44 couples as plaintiffs.

Writing for the majority, Judge Robert Smith concluded, "We do not predict what people will think generations from now, but we believe the present generation should have a chance to decide the issue through its elected representatives."

The 70-Page Decision: Majority and dissenting rulings are in the PDF of the decision. We haven't read or analyzed this yet. But wait, we have read it now, Friday. See a few comments and some citations here.

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Tags: massmarrier, same-sex marriage, New York State, Court of Appeals

Ragging on the Marriage Bigots

Today's Boston Globe and Boston Phoenix swat at pests, typical of their particular cultures. By placement and context, the Globe's front-page lead story shows the anti-same-sex-marriage crowd to be out of touch with the Zeitgeist. The Phoenix' editorial uses heavy-handed invective as you might find here to call Mitt Romney's and Sean O'Malley's bigotry what it is.

Whether either or both of these has any influence on the pending ConCon to consider stripping commonwealth homosexuals of the now established right to marry remains to be seen. Come July 12th we'll see whether the General Court is as tired of the fakery and whining of the anti-gay, anti-equality clusters as the rest of us are.

Despite the fun, funny, yet fair name calling in the weekly, the daily's piece is more noteworthy. It has the feel of one of those many movies about making movies or a novel about a novelist. Using its insider advantage, it covers an ad the Globe will run on Monday, two days before the ConCon.

MassEquality is buying the ad opposing amendment. It carries the names of 156 politicians and business big shots. That is an amusing pig pile on the three bishops who stood up with Romney last week to ask for a vote in favor of stripping existing rights from one class of citizens.

Legislators will have to decide whether it is more politically savvy to stand up with the majority of voters and civic leaders or stay with the hard-line regressives. Given that the ballot-initiative amendment process only requires 50 -- a quarter of the combined General Court -- to advance this to the next ConCon for approval and on to the 2008 ballot, this is still in the air.

We have not seen the full ad, but the Globe cites some of the signatories and part of the content. On paper opposing adding discrimination to our constitution are:
Boston Mayor Tom Menino

• Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce President Paul Guzzi (and 20 Chamber board members)
• Pats owner Bob Kraft and his wife Myra Kraft
• Mystery writer Robert Parker
• Charles River Ventures Founder Richard M. Burnes Jr.
• Boston Foundation President Paul S. Grogan
• Former Chairman of the Bank of America Chad Gifford
  

A key point in the ad is that passing such an amendment would hurt the commonwealth in many ways at a particularly tenuous moment. "These people whose expertise are the business and the economy are harping on the topic that banning same-sex marriage is bad for business, bad for job growth, and bad for the economy. That is a very powerful message for legislators from the biggest business leaders in the state," according to Co-Chair Arline Isaacson of the Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus.

Those favoring the amendment are still harping on their fantasy that we should have plebiscites on the rights of minorities. That goes right to the Phoenix' view, not too subtly titled Nouveau Jim Crow.

A lot of haters and wafflers get it in the editorial:

• O'Malley is "invoking Caesar to render unto God, or at least his God. When God is on your side, civil rights are beside the point."
• Reilly says he would vote against the amendment were he a legislator but thinks the ConCon should vote on it. "Those are weasel words. They appear reasonable, but their import is that he is willing to put same-sex marriage in mortal danger."
• Deval Patrick favors SSM, but "believe the legislature should call its own shots. A waffle is a waffle by any other name."
• Chris Gabrieli "dodged the issue. When offered an opportunity to define how he differs from Patrick and Reilly, Gabrieli, to his shame, flubbed it."

The editorial is as hard on Reilly as we are, writing:

Where would the civil-rights movement have been if Tom Reilly had been in the fight? It’s a safe bet that the schools of Little Rock, Arkansas, still would be segregated.

It calls Reilly and O'Malley "latter-day Jim Crows." The former cynically wanting to have it both ways politically. The latter "because he is promoting redneck theology as a public practice." For good measure, they finally get to Romney "busy actively courting Jim Crows throughout the land."

The concluding call is for Patrick and Gabrieli to stand up and speak out strongly for civil rights, now. They should say plainly that the Supreme Judicial Court settled this and that "any effort to interfere with those rights is as repugnant as it is undesirable."

Nuff said.

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massmarrier, Mitt Romney, Tom Reilly, Deval Patrick, Gabrieli, ConCon, Sean O'Malley, Boston+Globe, Boston Phoenix

Dying Newspapers?

I try not to miss Mark Morford's weekly Notes & Errata in the San Francisco Gate. You should probably subscribe, unless you are squeamish, uptight or a Republican, in which case it would upset you every seven days.

Apropos the Media Giraffe conference:

1. We'll be posting more snatches and ideas as we get to them.
2. Morford's piece today on newspapers' health is right there on the press.

With his palpable allusions to body parts, and in this week's column, your very own dead skin, he nails key issues about newspapers right now. The wheezing meme is that they are dead. Lackaday, they have lost ads to broadcast and even the Web. They are poorer news sources than Net sites, including bloggers. They are doomed atavisms.

If you want to hide from or stop change, get out of his way. He writes:

Here is the thing: Everything is changing. Everything is changing at a rather unprecedented pace that excites and terrifies almost everyone involved until you want to hold your head in your hands and scream and drink and cry. Technology is moving so fast you shall soon need a wireless router for your digital toaster that also produces grappa and makes stock recommendations and plays MP3s through your fingernails. This is just the way.

He parallels those who wail Oooo, doomed newspapers! with the many in his town (as in Manhattan, Boston, Paris and elsewhere) who cry how terrible change is in their city.

For papers, he notes that they "may not be perfect, they may be tainted by human foible and bias, but when compared with all other forms, they remain far and away the one with the most reliable integrity." Morford adds that our hunger for news is at an all-time high.

Cities, your body and media are all constantly changing and shifting, decaying and rebuilding. He offers a haunting image of walking down the street or scratching your arm and tens of thousands of dead skin cells, part of you, fall off. It's similar with newspapers, he writes.

"The bad news is that you are never quite the same, which is why you look just a tiny bit different every single day. The good news is there is not a damn thing you can do about it."

He suggests shrugging, sighing, sipping, loving and laughing -- and to find out the world's view, picking up the paper.

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Tags: massmarrier, newspapers, Media Giraffe, MGP2006, Mark Morford, SFGate

Not Meeting Marcia Ball

Over at the Michael Ball (Only) Club, there is a post unrelated to marriage, legal issues or politics. It's kind of about being unrelated to blues singer Marcia Ball.

It's a mini-travelogue of Lowell too, but it sure doesn't belong here.

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Tags: massmarrier, manymikes, Lowell, Marcia Ball

Inciting Violence in Lexington

Click over to today's Boston Globe for a sad commentary on anti-gay, anti-same-sex-marriage emotionality. Wingnuts have gone from their usual absurdity of lying about actual events to urging folk to contact Lexington's public school's superintendent, Paul Ash.

According to the article, he has gotten close and far threats by phone and email. It stops short, so far, of the anti-abortion-rights sites that published the phones and residences of abortion clinic staff. Some of those were murdered by the crazed readers and others threatened or assaulted.

We hear the self-righteous rights murmuring and muttering now. Hey, what about KnowThyNeighbor? Didn't they publish the names, addresses and home numbers of the people who signed the petition for an amendment to stop same-sex marriage?

Yes, indeedy, they did. We here as well as numerous pro-gay groups were opposed or ambivalent about that tactic. However, there are key differences here:

• KnowThyNeighbor got the lists from public record at the Secretary of State's office
• There was no slander, lies or other deceit about the petition signatories. In contrast, our local anti-gay sites, many conservative entertainers like Limbaugh, and the sites like TownHall.com that posted Ash's home info reported that the adults there encouraged beating of a child, which they know is both extremely inflammatory and totally untrue.
• Also, KnowThyNeighbor was not targeted at an individual. Rather you could search the records by your town and see which of your neighbors were signing. Zero nastiness has been reported as a result of this scattershot political tactic.

In this case, even the Mad Dad told the Globe that his son was not likely targeted by another kid because of the father's anti-gay views. "Are parents and administrators telling little children to get [my son] on the playground because of his father's beliefs? No, I doubt it."

Yet, he feels some paranoia that because he is out of synch with the inclusive Lexington, "You have children being exposed to the notion that this guy, or this family, is wrong and maybe is a bad guy. That can influence their actions."

He's waiting for the monster in the closet to leap out and get him. For monsters, he need look no farther than the groups and sites that bear false witness.

So, here we come down to it. The hate mongers are willing to twist and lie to rouse the base emotions of their readers and listeners. In the Lexington case, once they found out that the 7-year-old to 7-year-old belly punch was over who got a particular lunchroom chair, there was no apology or correction.

Like so many arrows shot blindly into crowds, the lies continue to harm and imperil.

Pointer Update: MassResistanceWatch has details and analysis of the Globe piece and related issues here.

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Tags: massmarrier, Massachusetts, Lexington, Mad Dad, public school, bullying

Your Duty Before July 12th

Just eight days before the Constitutional Convention to advance the anti-same-sex-marriage amendment, GLAD says get loud. Yesterday, GLAD sent an email blast urging pro-equality folk to contact their legislators.

If you don't have the contact info handy, start with this page to find your public servants.

Certainly the anti-gay forces have had their say long and often. We should certainly expect a few thousand of us to speak up, write up and call up in the next week.

As GLAD Executive Director Lee Swislow put it, "Opponents of marriage equality are flooding the State House with calls urging legislators to pass a new, extreme amendment that will ban marriage and replace it with no benefits or protections whatsoever for same-sex couples and their families."

Amusingly enough, the hypocritical anti forces are already crying foul over the possibility that the pro guys will use any of several legislative procedural methods to block voting on the amendment at the ConCon. This is after every sneaky signature method and dancing around the law prohibiting a ballot initiative trying to overturn a court decision (thanks to Tom Reilly and Mitt Romney).

If the amendment does not get a mere 50 legislators (25% of the combined General Court) to approve it this year, it loses. The Dark Side is back to square one trying to strip homosexual citizens of marriage rights. We would not weep.

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Tags: massmarrier, Massachusetts, Constitutional Convention, same sex marriage

Nice is Free

July Third before a Tuesday holiday must be a down day for Starbucks. A little before 7 a.m. usually means the Financial District salmon spawning wildly to their offices from South Station. Their competition starts long before they push and flop up to their desks.

Today though was a strolling one, down a nearly empty Summer Street. In the distance, I saw a 30-ish woman losing to her parcels. She had a rolling suitcase and two overstuffed shopping bags, one with a new comforter in turn stuffed into a plastic pouch and the other with wrapped gifts.

She was trying to balance both bags and repeatedly heard and then saw them on the street as she tried to move.

The few commuters, of course, hurried by. She was not the droid they sought.

I had time and the inclination and asked whether she was going to South Station and wanted help. She said, "No. Thank you," but thought better of it in a few seconds. She called to me and I carried the bags.

We caught up with her two male relatives in a few blocks in front of the train station. She said they were Moroccans visiting the United States. They were headed to the bus terminal section and she released me with thanks. Her chums each had one bag but turned, wheeled off and left her to her struggle. Perhaps that's cultural; is it a woman, burdens, natural order?

I picked up the bags and we walked ahead down Atlantic Avenue. She said they were headed to Vermont to be with friends and celebrate the Fourth. She asked why so many people came to Boston for this holiday.

As wrapped up as we are here in Revolutionary War history (and its marketing value), that was rather endearing. I told her a bit about the Adams boys, the rude bridge, and later developments such as the U.S.S. Constitution and the Pops on the Esplanade. It was all new to her and put our fervor in perspective.

I suspect she was wary of a strange man wanting to mess with her stuff when we met, but to her credit, whe realized she could use a hand. I recommend lending one when you find yourself in the situation. She literally gave me one, with a smile, and introduced herself as Nadia as we parted.

For me, it took a bit of the edge off South Station. The flailing financial fish will still slap their way around, but the occasional smiling visitor helps counterpoise them.

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Tags: massmarrier, Boston, tourists, commuters, South Station

Lying Down with Lydon?

Egalitarians and cosmopolitans need not apply. However, Christopher Lydon is looking for a provincial ideal, something he calls New England Common. Holding court as best as a wispy aging preppy can, he spoke to a few dozen journalists and bloggers at the Media Giraffe conference last week.

Lydon believes that we live in the smartest, most innovative part of the country. He is astonished that both the D.C. and California areas are far ahead of us in Internet-based communities reflecting the ideas and ideals of the region.

What Chris Wants

He laments that the Boston Globe "is not the community institution that it was when I grew up." He addressed the 30 some of us ringed in stacking chairs like a UU discussion group with a call that "The moment is hot right now," and that the governor's race is the best in years.

He wants an online community focused on his glorious region, filled with junior Harvard professors and other superior sorts. He wants to feel like when he opens the Website that he's in effect walked into a great bar and is astounded by the mental power and salon wit in one place. He wants the smart gossip, to know what is happening in centers like MIT and Harvard Divinity School and the like, and even to get personal commentary on the previous night's symphony performance.

He firmly believes that the Boston area is the only place you get the best and brightest. We on the other hand wonder how long it has been since that was true.

Reality Touch: You can get a sense of how stacked the regional progressive communities are by hitting LeftyBlogs. This aggregate of state-by-state politics and ideas does not include the leading Net communities, but does show who's getting read in these areas. Click on the top 50 of the day and week by readership. You'll see D.C. and California dominating, with Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia and other states everywhere. Massachusetts has a few on the lists and otherwise New England is not in the mix.

Goal Clarity

A couple of decades ago, when I worked for Inc. magazine, the brilliant -- far brighter than Mr. Lydon -- publisher Bernie Goldhirsh inadvertently showed that intelligence in some areas does not translate to all. He fired several editors-in-chief quickly because of his inability to define what he wanted from them.

Probably Meaningless Coincidence: Lydon and Goldhirsh were both born in 1940.

He would have regular staff meetings in his top level loft on Commercial Wharf. Those always started well. He created an employee friendly house in many ways. We could sail at lunch, bring our dogs or kids, and conduct our meetings in local bars with gins and tonic in hand.

Invariably though, the meeting would be a macrocosm of what must have occurred before he fired yet another editor. He'd say he wanted Inc. to be an MBA in the cover of a magazine. Over the course of a year, he wanted his target entrepreneurial readers to get smarter through exposure to the key subjects. He'd sketch 3D cubes on a chalkboard, acting like the MIT math teacher he used to be, and plugging in broad and then narrow topics across various edges.

Also invariably, the editor or a senior editor would ask him to specify what he wanted. Bernie would end up saying something like, "I can't tell you, but I'll know it when I see it."

That was his intellectual failure and cowardice. As we learn in real MBA programs and even time-management classes, "If you can't define it, I can't deliver it."

Lydon's effort suffers similarly as Bernie's did. At Inc. we knew that he expected us to buy into the ideals of small, entrepreneurial businesses. That is, they are the only innovators around and they drive job growth here and elsewhere. Those presumptions are moot.

The New England Common concept seems to rely strongly on provincial pride, particularly in the twin towns on each side of the Chuck (the river and I are on intimate terms). Boston and Cambridge are, in Lydon's mind, the intellectual center of the country and world. To him, this is not shallow boosterism, but obvious reality.

From Scratch?

From another angle, the personal, BlueMassGroup's Charley Blandy asked likely the most pointed question early on. After getting booted a few years ago from his long-running WBUR radio show, The Connection, in a contract fight, Lydon has been sidling his way back into public radio and the limited fame that can come with that. Charley asked whether his Common proposal might be an effort to gain, "institutional respectability of your own?"

Lydon seemed taken aback by that and made a weak joke about being nailed. Yet, others in the room danced around the same idea. Some compared his effort to a magazine or to the HuffingtonPost. Another mentioned that in their disparate ways, both UniversalHub and BlueMassGroup already addressed many of Lydon's aims.

He actively and strongly denied that these approached his vague Goldhirsh-like goals. Yet after the session, many said that he clearly wanted a Huffington thingummy with his imprimatur and a Boston slant instead of a West Coast one. Quite a few of us also would rather that he had not been so coy about his ego tripping. There's no shame in that kind of proposal. Say it, Chris.

We actually could take only an hour of this. Several who lasted the whole thing expressed their jealousy of those who left earlier. They heard more of the same repeatedly.

Lydon admits that his vision for a Lydon-serving Web community would require buy-in from contributors. As he put it, his best and brightest would have to know that "you don't have to feel like you need to feed the beast every day." His free-thinking, let's call it again, salon-type community would provide him with intellectual food, plus the proof that this region is still that essential center of the universe.

Lydon made it easy to spoof his puffiness. Most of us seemed to find him as stuffy as ever, but it also seems clear that he thinks, he knows, he is a fun guy as well as smart.

His ideal is certainly egocentric and likely working against such great starts as the BlueMassGroup. Yet, he does recall to us knowing such pre-Net brains as James Luther Adams, the theologian. I happened to go to church with him for years and because of my positions there, spoke with him more than some others did.

Hearing Lydon hold forth, I suddenly remembered the intellectual pleasure he could bring even to a coffee hour in the submarine-drab basement of the Arlington Street Church. Dr. Adams, or Jim as he preferred, was both a charmer and scholar. He openly leered in very non-UU ways at attractive women attending to his words. Yet, even when was discomforted by his back braces and pains, he was quick to debate and develop ideas on and beyond religion. A Website populated by the James Luther Adamses of their fields would be a delight indeed.

I don't have a lot of faith that Lydon can do this. I certainly don't believe that Boston and Cambridge are uniquely prepared to provide the right content. However, I think we have sufficient stuff here to expand a BlueMassGroup to do this more and better. We can thank Lydon for acting as catalyst perhaps, and maybe we could put up a brass plaque.

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Tags: massmarrier, bloggers, Media Giraffe, MGP2006, New England Common, Christoper Lydon

Mob Rule for Romney and Reilly

North and South, aspiring POTUS Willard Mitt Romney made same-sex marriage news. He was decidedly on the side of the Devil in both South Carolina and Massachusetts.

Down there, as folks are wont to say, he had his PAC donate $5,000 to the regressive effort to pass an anti-SSM amendment to the state constitution. S.C. is one of the states that already defines marriage in DOMA terms as one-man/one-woman. This is yet another mean-spirited, anti-democracy bind on future citizens and legislators by writing this discrimination into the state constitution to make it harder to correct when they come to their senses.

By the bye, the Globe covered this, but the S.C. newspapers did not. Tough luck, Willard.

Romney's bribe to the early-Presidential-primary state is the largest single contribution to the anti-SSM effort there. Tradition had it that a vote could be purchased for a couple of dollars or a bottle of cheap whiskey. If this works, per capita, it'll be a cheap investment

O'Malley and Romney from a Bay Windows pic at left, not necessarily playing soccer.

Meanwhile, back in Boston, Romney played his incompetent self with the backup of the Nodding Bishops at a press conference calling for the July 12th ConCon to pass the anti-SSM amendment. If that is successful, the vote must repeat at next year's ConCon to put it on the statewide ballot in 2008. The vote there would be a sure loser. Almost daily, support for same-sex marriage grows and people tell pollsters they have gotten over the whole issue.

There's amusing coverage of the local press conference in the Bay Windows article. (Don't make the mistake of thinking that the two dailies will give insightful and full reportage of political debates and dais dances.)

BW's Ethan Jacobs reports on Romney's confused and unintentionally comical response to real questions. We suspect that Jacobs was the reporter asking the questions. They are too insightful and crisp for the usual suspects'.

Romney treated the question of whether gay couples could be good parents "as radioactive, taking pains to answer the question while avoiding any discussion of gay parents," reports BW. The response in all its glory was:

“I believe the ideal setting for raising a child is where there’s a mother and a father, and the development of a child is enhanced by having the attributes of a male and a female part of their parents,” Romney answered. “And of course there’re going to be settings which don’t have that ideal characteristics, as the cardinal indicated, where there’s a single mom or single dad, or where there are grandparents raising children, and in many cases they’ll do just as well. And they’ll have wonderful children and they’ll have a terrific experience in raising their child. But the ideal setting for a society overall is a setting where there’s a mother and a father, and society therefore, every society I know of in the history of the earth has said the right kind of setting that we’re going to encourage and incentivise, recognizing there may be exceptions and there may be great single mom settings that are just as good as a heterosexual couple marriage, but overall on the averages society will be enhanced by having moms and dads associated with the development of a child, and that’s my view as well.”

The reporter, unsatisfied with this tortured response, asked Romney again whether he believed gay and lesbian couples could be good parents. “I think I just indicated that of course there are going to be a wide array of exceptions to the normal observation that children’s development is best enhanced when there’s a mother and a father,” Romney answered, taking care to not actually mention gay and lesbian couples.

As Tom Reilly at the gubernatorial debate a couple of days later, Romney muddled democracy and giving the mob the vote over others' civil rights with a call for a vote on the anti-SSM amendment. Again, with the full effect from the BW coverage:

A reporter followed up by asking whether ending segregation in the South should have been put to a popular vote, since Romney had argued that civil rights issues should be put up to a popular vote. Romney immediately backpedaled, claiming he had not advocated putting civil rights issues on the ballot, and, inexplicably, seemed to confuse segregation with slavery.

“I didn’t say all civil rights should be put up to a popular vote. That is not what I said. What I said is that this is a nation that is ruled by people and the people make the decision. And what I wouldn’t want to do is to have people say, ‘Oh you can’t vote on this and you can’t vote on that,’” he responded, and then, seemingly ignorant of the history of the Civil War, said, “No, all things are ultimately decided by people, and the people of this country were very clear in their decision with regards to slavery, and that was it’s wrong and evil and that’s why it’s not here.”

Sad Note: Recent stories of horrific abuses by one-man/one-woman traditional families of their children do not necessarily prove that this model leads to death, torture and mental conditions in their offspring, at least not commonly. However, these incidents should cause even Romney and O'Malley to think about their adamant claims that gay parents are intrinsically inferior to straight ones.

We should probably discount Romney because of his shameless self-promotion on the drive to be POTUS. Yet, when he is so obviously winging it on issues essential to the commonwealth's and the nation's principles, we have to call him, or in this case let BW do that in his own words.

It is time here to put in another call to clean up our abused ballot-initiative system. We had a gutless attorney general and governor permit the current effort to overturn a Supreme Judicial Court decision proceed, even though that is forbidden by our laws. Now, they both urge this long, expensive, divisive amendment campaign that distracts the government from important business.

Enough with pseudo-democracy! We should never have the majority voting on the rights of any minority. We call for our next governor and our next attorney general to lead the General Court to stop these abusive ballot initiatives.

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Tags: massmarrier, ballot initiatives, Mitt Romney, Tom Reilly, Bay Windows, South Carolina

Reilly Fails Yet Another Leadership Test

Leave town for one day and the pols act up worse than usual. Thursday night's Dem debate of gubernatorial candidates found Tom Reilly showing yet again 1) why he is really a Republican and 2) why he doesn't have the leadership ability we need now, and always.

Reading his pronouncement that we need to let the public vote on the anti-same-sex marriage amendment, I recalled a work by one of my favorite poets, Frederick Nicklaus. One of his starts:

I remember a horse in Indiana;
it came from the fields, it ran alongside
the bus. I remember its reddish hide.

But believe me, I failed the fright of its eyes.

Well, likewise, SSM is Tom's horse and repeatedly, he has been unable to deal with it and even unable to look directly at it. For the debate, the Globe coverage notes that Reilly was the only of the three candidates to say he favored ramming this amendment through this ConCon, the next one and onto the 2008 ballot.

That can't be too much of a surprise. Reilly has made himself the catalyst for this expensive, time-consuming and divisive process.

We would expect a decisive governor to bring his executive machete into the jungle that has grown from Republican and legislative inertia and inattention. We have had one governor after another enabled by a do-nothing General Court hiding from key issues -- failing the fright of their eyes -- while our economy sputters to a halt and our infrastructure collapses. Instead, they let anti-equality legislation advance under the guise of perverted democracy.

The most cynical among them, such as POTUS-envying Gov. Mitt Romney and the poorly directed Archibishop Sean O'Malley, echo "let the people decide" spouted by the ballot-initiative abusing VoteonMarriage.

So, as AG, Reilly had at least three chances to lead on this amendment and the related 1913 marriage laws currently in court proceedings. Instead, we are left to see what he has not done.

As AG, he did not lead the drive to remove the 1913 laws from the books and when Romney urged him to wield them as weapons against homosexuals, he actively participated and did not then demand quick action from the General Court to repeal them. Instead, he did the I'm-only-following-orders-and-enforcing-laws routine.

Likewise, over his entire tenure as AG, as it became increasingly obvious that small, narrowly focused special interest groups has subverted the ballot-initiative process, and our dull-witted governors did not act, Reilly did nothing. Here again, his role included identifying this threat to our laws and constitution. We needed and need a leader to say giving the majority the ability to strip civil rights from a minority is wrong. We need to clarify the legal process here.

Silence from Reilly has been followed with, as he said at the debate, "(the public) should vote on this."

No, they should not, and he should not accept the tyranny of mob rule, not as an AG and not as governor.

We'll deal with the whole debate as related to these two issues in future posts. Meanwhile, the transcript is here.

Unfortunately, neither Deval Patrick nor Chris Gabrieli took the lead here when they had the chance. Both said they were strongly for SSM. Patrick wished there'd be no vote on the amendment at this month's ConCon. Gabrieli seemed befuddled and would say only that he would work against a ban as governor. Patrick at least said that he thought the Supreme Judicial Court had ruled properly in Goodridge.

These candidates are all going to have to speak to ballot initiatives. Letting small hate groups and church politicians run your legislative agenda is no way to operate.

Apologist Note: If you are a Reilly fan, you can pretend with Scot Lehigh that unlike what everyone else heard, the debate was great for Romeilly, excuse me, Reilly. Lehigh is the main Globe anti-Deval-Patrick op-ed guy and lives in a fantasy world.

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Tags: massmarrier, Massachusetts, Constitutional+Convention, same sex marriage, amendment, debate, Tom Reilly, Deval Patrick, Gabrieli

No Live Blogging from Amherst (by Me)

Someone asked, "Didn't you promise to live blog the Media Giraffe conference?" Yeah, kinda, but I didn't blog live. For anyone seeking a vicarious attendance, I apologize.

I did take my laptop and I did register with UMASS for a wireless logon. However, not only did I manage to bury my logon slip, but I am glad that I did not go from session to session trying to snippets. I certainly would not have been in the moment and could not have taken decent notes.

In my defense, my temp logon was not mnemonic. I did not recall mgir102 az}drq{. The slip fluttered out of a sheaf of papers when I returned. This clearly was Ganesha's way of seeing that I wrote during the conference.

The conference deserved attention, even for us poor stepchildren, the bloggers allowed for one day for $40. Thank you Media Giraffe and Michael DeChiara of WonkNOT, who organized our foray.

I'll drop a few posts in the next several days. I already have a rant about Christopher Lydon's session. You can catch the straight and nice version now at BlueMassGroup, where David put his very restrained Chris Lydon looks for the "New England Common".

For nothing much in particular, I add that my wife and I went Thursday night, partly because the boys are at camp and we can be adults 24 hours a day, and we wanted to catch our whole $40 worth.

Even smarter than the conference was the Thursday dinner choice -- Chez Albert in ho-hum-just-passing-through downtown Amherst. Our contrast came at the end of our full day of the conference on Friday. We noticed the brewpub when we walked around on Thursday and drank up/chowed down at the Amherst Brewing Company before were headed back to Boston. There was a great symmetry to Friday. We had pretty good ale (a moderately hoppy, but overly chilled Cascade IPA) and an insipid house Chardonnay, with a pretty good salad and a pretty good Reuben. Shortly after we were seated, Lord Lydon arrived with his claque. His celebrity is certainly modest, even by New England standards, but the 10 or so younguns were not dissuaded. He was king of the brewpub, or at least that one table.

Back in time and a block away, Chez Albert is worth a trip to Amherst and certainly if you are there for a conference, get a reservation. The bistro is only a year old and is respected chef Paul Hathaway's first solo effort. It is a winner for foodies.

Unfortunately for them, most of the guests we overheard in the small room loved their own voices much more than they paid attention to the food and its presentation. Pity. They should have reveled in the food, but competed to say how smart they were, how smart the people they knew were, and how much this or that cost them or made them. Honk. Honk. Squeeze the big red nose.

Chez Albert is almost Japanese in the simplicity and artistry of its presentation. Vegetables are highly colored and complement the tones of the entrees. Dishes are alternately arranged as artwork horizontally or vertically. The food tastes superb, but the display makes it visually pleasing too.

We had the house paté, which the chef makes himself. It is coarse and earthy. The accompanying breads are likely not from the small kitchen, but wonderfully challenging -- no pseudo-baguettes here.

Main courses for us were the grilled grouper special and bouillabaisse. We matched our favorite hot-weather wine, muscadet. We could rant about the entrees and shall if you ask. The overview is that flavors were charmingly balanced. For example, my stew relied on a counterpoint between well cooked fennel and the saffron base.

We shared a chocolate crepe. It followed the theme of the meal, rich flavors, a gorgeous sunburst of strawberry sauce accents on the plate.

Our waiter was a treasure. We may have helped our case with the wine. He told us he was born and raised in the Loire. He concurred that muscadet was the perfect wine for the season and our dishes. He was a toucher, in the European style, and we left feeling he was a relative.

Chef Paul himself was charming, with a solid handshake and warm smile. He seemed genuinely pleased when I specifically complimented dishes. He gave us a hearty, "Come back soon." We'll certainly try. We have Dad's Weekend at camp coming up. This seems like a call for a sidetrip on the way back.

Oh, supposedly this post was about the Media Giraffe conference. That shall come. Otherwise, I noted that the laptop users in sessions were 1) largely Mac types who seemed uncomfortable when they were not hiding bechind their screens, and 2) those with machines on were obviously looking at stuff on the Net and grinning or otherwise tuned out. Bozos.

We took notes on actual paper. More to follow.

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Tags: massmarrier, bloggers, Media Giraffe, MGP2006, Chez Albert, Amherst, Amherst Brewing, Christoper Lydon