After counting, Franken’s lead increases to 312 votes.
At some point, Norm Coleman is going to have to recognize that he’s falling further and further behind at every stage of the process. He’s going to have to admit defeat. I don’t know when that day will come — maybe, as John Cornyn said, it will be years. But Norm Coleman has lost. All he can do at this point is delay the seating of the duly elected Junior Senator from the Great State of Minnesota. That man is Al Franken.
Speaking of how the marriage segregationists have already lost, here’s a great video, via Andrew Sullivan, of Iowa Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal refusing to support an effort to amend the Iowa Constitution to forbid same sex marriage. Without his support, the amendment cannot move forward.
Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.
From the Burlington Free Press:
The Legislature voted Tuesday to override Gov. Jim Douglas’ veto of a bill allowing gays and lesbians to marry. The vote was 23-5 to override in the state Senate and 100-49 to override in the House. Under Vermont law, two-thirds of each chamber had to vote for override.
The vote came nine years after Vermont adopted its first-in-the-nation civil unions law.
It’s now the fourth state to permit same-sex marriage. Massachusetts, Connecticut and Iowa are the others. Their approval of gay marriage came from the courts.
Let the marriage segregationists push their hate. Let them rail against the concept of two loving people committing to one another for life. Let them insist that people who don’t follow the dictates of their chosen faith should be second-class citizens. Let them argue against love.
The fact is, they have already lost.
Hallelujah.
Video after the cut.
Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.
Through a kind of weird set of circumstances, I ended up acting in a TV show last night, playing Paul Stine, victim #7 of the Zodiac Killer. I’ve included a couple of pics, but at least one includes movie-gore, so I’m putting them behind a cut.
Nearly two years ago, I was out of commission for a week or two due to mysterious left arm agony. The arm agony is back, so once again I’m not paying much attention to blogging.
Last time I (after far too long a wait, due to my not having a primary care physician at the time) I got to a Doctor’s office and got a shot of cortisone, which provided relief fairly quickly. This time it’s in my left shoulder, unlike last time when it was mostly in my left forearm, and the cortisone shot I got last Wednesday (much earlier in the process this time) didn’t seem to do anything. The doctor also did some movement stuff — pulling my arm into various positions and pressing on my bicep and shoulder in various, extremely painful ways — which I’m not at all sure were not crank medicine. In any case, my arm hurt more post-doctor than pre-doctor.
Anyway, going to see a different doctor tomorrow. Fingers crossed. It is my considered opinion that pain sucks. My concentration is impaired, typing is painful, the vicodin I’m taking doesn’t seem to help much, and I’m sleep deprived. Hopefully the pain will just go away again soon, as it eventually went away last time, but until then my blogging (and, damn it, my drawing) will be extremely limited.
In fact, I’m mainly watching mind-numbing TV, since often what I need is something that will be amusing but I don’t care if I fade in and out of it a bit. I watched a ton of “How I Met Your Mother,” which was fine for season one but the writing went downhill in season 2 and I just gave up on it after the first few episodes of season 3. This is a strange sentence to write, but watching HOMYM made me appreciate how relatively skillful the writing and characterization on “Friends” were. I’m going to try “Big Bang Theory” next, but I’m not optimistic.
Apparently Ann Althouse is marrying someone she’s known via her blog comments for years, although she met him in person only a short time ago. I don’t understand why this is something to make fun of; seems perfectly reasonable to me. There have been plenty of times when I’ve found Althouse unreasonable, terrible, and illogical, but on this occasion I think “congratulations!” is actually the appropriate response.
On the bright side, the controversy led me to this video (via Althouse), which is delightful:
Someone in Ann’s comments writes,
The video translates loosely to “Raising the roof at Antwerp Central Station”…with The Sound of Music…the Flemish have a strange sense of humor…
And then, via Obsidian Wings, this diagramtastic retelling of Little Red Riding Hood:
I’m not really keen on having photos of myself on facebook and flicker accounts. As in, I’d greatly prefer that people didn’t take photos at parties and such and then post the ones of me publicly, without permission, tagged with my name.
Is there any way to discourage people from doing this while not being a jerk?
You’re seeing the ABW on its new server. We’re still working out the kinks and getting the design the way we like it, so things will be up to speed in a few days.
A friend of mine who writes for the anarchist magazine The Fifth Estate recently sent me their headline story for Spring 2009, issue #380. The piece by Henry Reed discusses the exorbitantly long sentences given to “terrorists” who damage property as a way to protest damaging environmental policies, using the case of Marie Mason (“sentenced to nearly 22 years in prison… after pleading guilty to two acts of eco-sabotage”) as a lens for analyzing the phenomenon.
There’s a lot of interesting and scary information in the piece that highlights how much the huge penalties given reflect wounded capitalist ideology rather than actual criminal fears:
For several years I lived in an apartment building on a crowded residential street on one of the last ungentrified blocks in my neighborhood. In one year, the buildings on both sides of my dwelling mysteriously burned. In their place, condos were built. No charges were filed; the police, the courts, and the city government smiled upon these “accidental” fires. The lives of dozens, if not hundreds, of people were put at risk.
Mason and Ambrose, on the other hand, burned down an unoccupied research building in the middle of the night, far from residential housing. No one was intended to be hurt and no one was.
The difference is that their acts were an attack on the “marketplace” ‐ not on humans. Attack the marketplace and you are a terrorist in the eyes of the State. Threaten the lives of hundreds of low-income residents to build condos and you are an entrepreneur and an upstanding citizen.
But what really jumped out at me about the article was a tangent that relates to the issue at hand, but which I also felt suggested a deeper analysis:
Since when have ideas been part of a “marketplace”? Intellectual thought, at its best, has always been a deeply subversive enterprise, unconstrained by the society in which it germinates.
Situationist theorist Guy Debord declared that in modern society the commodity form had colonized all aspects of everyday life, and both Grey and Maloney’s statements illustrate this. They cannot even talk about ideas, which are free, without framing them in the language of the market. Socrates committed suicide as a testimony to the power of critical ideas to resist the social norms of society.
I found this latter quote very profound. An economy is only part of a functioning culture. It’s frightening how much everything, from human relationships to ideological pursuits, is rendered through the lens of capitalist economics. It’s frightening, and it’s unhealthy. My ideas are not a marketplace, and my personhood is not determined by my economic worth alone.
The Iowa Supreme Court this morning unanimously upheld gays’ right to marry.
“The Iowa statute limiting civil marriage to a union between a man and a woman violates the equal protection clause of the Iowa Constitution,” the justices said in a summary of their decision.
The court rules that gay marriage would be legal in three weeks, starting April 24.
Amending the Iowa Constitution “requires the votes of a simple majority in both the Iowa House and Iowa Senate in two consecutive sessions, followed by a passing vote of the people of Iowa.” The Senate majority leader, a Democrat, said before the ruling that it was “exceedingly unlikely” that the Iowa Senate would take this up this session, so it appears that marriage equality will be the law in Iowa until at least November of 2012.
You can find a pdf file of a summary provided by the Iowa Supreme Court, or read a pdf of the full opinion. For something shorter, the blogger at WordInEdgewise has written an excellent summary of the decision.
Here’s a few bits from the Iowa Supreme Court’s summary:
Promotion of Optimal Environment to Raise Children. […] Although the court found support for the proposition that the interests of children are served equally by same-sex parents and opposite sex parents, it acknowledged the existence of reasoned opinions that dual gender parenting is the optimal environment for children. Nonetheless, the court concluded the classification employed to further that goal—sexual orientation— did not pass intermediate scrutiny because it is significantly under-inclusive and over-inclusive.
The statute, the court found, is under-inclusive because it does not exclude from marriage other groups of parents—such as child abusers, sexual predators, parents neglecting to provide child support, and violent felons—that are undeniably less than optimal parents. If the marriage statute was truly focused on optimal parenting, many classifications of people would be excluded, not merely gay and lesbian people. The statute is also under-inclusive because it does not prohibit same-sex couples from raising children in Iowa. The statute is over-inclusive because not all same-sex couples choose to raise children. The court further noted that the County failed to show how the best interests of children of gay and lesbian parents, who are denied an environment supported by the benefits of marriage under the statute, are served by the ban, or how the ban benefits the interests of children of heterosexual parents. Thus, the court concluded a classification that limits civil marriage to opposite-sex couples is simply not substantially related to the objective of promoting the optimal environment to raise children.
Promotion of Procreation. Next, the court addressed the County’s argument that endorsement of traditional civil marriage will result in more procreation. The court concluded the County’s argument is flawed because it fails to address the required analysis of the objective: whether exclusion of gay and lesbian individuals from the institution of civil marriage will result in more procreation.The court found no argument to support the conclusion that a goal of additional procreation would be substantially furthered by the exclusion of gays and lesbians from civil marriage.
Promoting Stability in Opposite-Sex Relationships. The County also asserted that the statute promoted stability in opposite-sex relationships. The court acknowledged that, while the institution of civil marriage likely encourages stability in opposite-sex relationships, there was no evidence to support that excluding gay and lesbian people from civil marriage makes opposite-sex marriage more stable.
I’m particularly glad that the Court’s decision brought up the best interests of children being raised by same-sex parents, a group that has been too frequently ignored in debates regarding marriage equality.
I don’t have enough understanding of Iowa politics to guess whether or not anti-equality folks will be able to amend the Iowa constitution to remove equal protection guarantees from same-sex couples for marriage laws. But in the meantime, this is extremely good news.
UPDATE 2: PG in comments writes:
I think we’ll be able to gauge the potential for backlash by whether the judges up for retention elections in 2010 (Justices Marsha K. Ternus, Michael J. Streit and David L. Baker) win those elections. Judicial retention elections tend to be pretty pro forma; when a justice loses, it’s indicative of public angst about his/her actions. If the anti-SSM folks can rally people to show up for a mid-term election and vote against the retention of these judges, that’s a bad omen for 2012.
UPDATE: Pam’s post at Pandagon includes some nice quotes of various right-wingers losing their shit.
Curtsy: Box Turtle Bulletin. Image from Dunechaser.
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