“Simply put, if The Lord made homosexuals as well as heterosexuals, why should I discriminate against their civil marriage?” asked Nelson. “I shouldn’t, and I won’t. So I will add my name to the petition of senators asking the Supreme Court to declare the law that prohibits gay marriage unconstitutional.”

http://floridaagenda.com/2013/04/05/on-solid-ground-u-s-sen-bill-nelson-endorses-marriage-equality/

WASHINGTON, DC — Although a growing chorus of national law- and policymakers of both major political parties have voiced their support for same-sex marriage, Florida’s senior United States Senator, Bill Nelson, remains one of just a handful of prominent Democrats who continue to withhold their support for marriage equality for gay Americans.

Within the last week, three Democratic U.S. Senators—Jon Tester of Montana, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania—have announced that, like President Obama, their views on gay marriage have “evolved” to supporting full marriage rights for gay men and women.

But Nelson, who was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2000 after serving for a dozen years in the U.S. House and a stint as state Insurance Commissioner, remains committed to the traditional definition of marriage.

“My personal preference is that marriage is between a man and a woman,” Nelson, 70, said last week. After serving in the U.S. Army in the late 1960s, the Miami-born Nelson became a lawyer and was elected to the state House of Representatives, and then to Congress. In 1986, he became one of only two sitting Members of Congress to travel into space, undergoing NASA training and serving as a Payload Specialist aboard the space shuttle Columbia during a seven-day mission.

Including Nelson, only eight Democratic U.S. Senators remain opposed to marriage equality: Tom Carper (Delaware), Joe Donnelly (Indiana), Heidi Heitkamp (North Dakota), Tim Johnson (South Dakota), Mary Landrieu (Louisiana), Joe Manchin (West Virginia), and Mark Pryor (Arkansas).

On Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Bob Casey (Pennsylvania), a pro-life Roman Catholic Democrat who opposes abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is in danger, announced his support for marriage equality.

“We’ve always known that there are some Democratic lawmakers who are social conservatives and who still take issue with the idea of full civil rights for gay Americans,” Michael Emanuel Rajner, Legislative Affairs Director for the Florida Democratic Party GLBT Caucus, told the Agenda.

“We are now seeing many of those who opposed marriage equality for political reasons are finally coming around to speaking the truth,” he added.

So what is Nelson’s “problem?” In spite of his opposition to marriage equality, Nelson is consistently ranked (including by the respected National Journal) as a liberal-to-moderate lawmaker on matters relating to the economy and social issues.

“For a long time, Nelson has stated that marriage is an issue that should be left to the states,” Rajner noted.

That position has been shared by many other prominent Democrats, including President Obama, who last year announced his own personal “evolution” towards supports for full marriage rights for gay Americans.

Rajner says that despite Nelson’s national credentials as a liberal, his support for civil unions leaves LGBT Americans out in the cold.

“Even where civil unions are permitted, married gays are denied over 1,000 federal benefits that DOMA [the Defense of Marriage Act] prevents them from receiving. And Nelson’s refusal to co-sponsor legislation—like the Uniting American Families Act—which would narrow that gap for gay families casts him in a particularly suspect light,” added Rajner.

He also noted that Nelson refuses to endorse the Respect for Marriage Act (RFMA), proposed legislation to repeal DOMA and require the federal government to recognize the validity of same-sex marriages. Among those who support RFMA are President Obama, former President Bill Clinton, who signed DOMA into law in 1996, and former U.S. Rep. Bob Barr, the Georgia Republican who was the original House sponsor of DOMA.

“If Nelson supported RFMA, it would truly make it a states’ rights issue. Where’s the disconnect?”

The Gibson Les Paul, a solid body electric guitar first sold in 1952, is one of the most well-known electric guitar types in the world. The guitar, which retails for $1,099, includes a Mahogany body with carved Maple top, a Rosewood fingerboard, vintage-style tuners, and other classic Gibson features.

The Brian Neal Fitness and Health Foundation is a Greater Fort Lauderdale-based service organization that supports fitness and nutrition programs for individuals with HIV and non-HIV-related life-threatening conditions, assisting financially-challenged people with free group workouts and ongoing lifestyle education classes which cover all aspects of living a healthy, balanced lifestyle.

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“I don’t want to seem alarmist,” said Truex, who was elected last week to head the county’s GOP, “but the definition of marriage is one that’s held up well for thousands of years, really since the beginning of history. It’s not something to change based on this year’s polls. It’s much more serious. Families are the most basic institution in all of civilization.”

One of the interesting consequences of that most bloody of all American conflicts that was addressed by the series, and by many of the historians who lent their expertise and knowledge to its production, is the literary and intellectual movement that developed in the Southern states in the years immediately following the Civil War’s 1865 conclusion.

As a movement, the so-called “Lost Cause” had a generally successful impact, over a roughly 80-year period, in reconciling the members of the South’s traditional white society to the military defeat of the Confederacy.

Authors, poets, artists, historians, and other intellectuals who contributed to the Lost Cause portrayed the Confederacy’s secession from the Union as a noble crusade for states’ rights (against a power-hungry federal government backed by industrial and banking interests) and a “lost way of life,” as described by Margaret Mitchell, the author of one of the most enduring examples of Lost Cause literature and its impact on American culture, “Gone With the Wind.”

The movement also portrayed many Confederate leaders—and particularly the well-loved military hero Robert E. Lee—as archetypal examples of chivalry and honor (like knights of old) who were beaten by the Union because of the North’s crushing military might and industrial power, rather than through virtue, personal bravery, or skill.

In Mitchell’s 1936 book, slavery, when it is portrayed at all, is presented (like other so-called “Southern plantation fiction” of that and earlier periods) from the point-of-view and through the values of the slaveholding class, rendering an image of slaves as happy and docile.

The slaves depicted in “Gone With the Wind” are loyal servants, like Mammy, Prissy, and Uncle Peter, who stay on with their masters even after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 set them free.

As can be seen in the 1939 film version of “Gone With the Wind,” adherents to the Lost Cause condemned the Northern-compelled Reconstruction that followed the war, seeing it as a form of cultural genocide devised by vengeful Northern lawmakers and self-serving business interests aimed on destroying the South’s traditional way of life.

In fact, the almost complete opposite was true. Prior to the Civil War, abolitionists, free state and territory supporters, Northern journalists, and independent commentators referred to what was known as the “Slave Power” (or sometimes “Slaveocracy”) to describe the out-sized influence and political power of the slaveholding states and the Southern aristocracy that dominated them.

This cabal of rich cotton and other agricultural planters and their sympathetic allies in Congress (and often the White House) conspired to use unfortunate Constitutional guarantees made by the Founders, along with pro-slavery laws (such as the Fugitive Slave Act), and Supreme Court rulings like the despicable Dred Scott Decision (to say nothing of the largely pro-slavery justices themselves) to force every American to become a co-conspirator in that vile institution.

After the Southern defeat, the myth of the Lost Cause gave former slaveholders and supporters of bigotry a form of cover, plus a chance to revise the history. Thus former Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, one of the loudest advocates of the Lost Cause lie, would claim when the war began that slavery was the “cornerstone of the Confederacy,” while after the war he wrote that states’ rights, not slavery, prompted the South to rebel.

In fact, states’ rights was—at best—a secondary concern to the Slave Power, with the pro-slavery states arguing before they seceded that the U.S. Constitution—a federal document—constrained the national government from interfering with slavery in any state. After they seceded, they decided that the new Confederacy’s Constitution would impose a federal prohibition of any state interfering with their federally-protected institution. This speaks volumes to the notion that slavery, and not any peripheral concerns about states’ rights, is what really lay at the heart of their argument, and that of their Lost Cause apologists.

The arguments and ideologies that sustained the Slave Power and the later Lost Cause have strong parallels to those employed by the defenders of so-called traditional marriage. They can rant and rave about the religious antecedents that helped shape society’s idea of what marriage means, but as Rev. Durrell Watkins of Sunshine Cathedral notes in his Q-POINT piece on the following page, the Bible has been used to justify all sorts of things—including slavery, and polygamy—but in the end, the Good Book, like the law, like the history books, and like Supreme Court rulings, was and is written by men.

Let’s hope that homophobia—cloaked in the guise of tradition, religion, conservatism, and that old bugbear, states’ rights—is just another soon-to-be Lost Cause.

Harris, a former offensive tackle who played for six seasons in the NFL, told CNN that he regrets not being able to admit his sexuality during his pro career.

“I wasn’t publicly out until, I don’t know, beginning of the Super Bowl when it was publicized,” said Harris.

Kwame’s sexual identity became an issue after he and an ex-boyfriend were seen arguing publicly and a subsequent comment from current 49ers cornerback Chris Culliver, who said during a radio interview that there were “no gay people on the team.” Culliver later apologized for adding, “They got to get up out of here if they do.”

According to Freeman, the player is concerned about a negative reaction from fans.

“The player would attempt to continue his career” after his coming out announcement, wrote Freeman in a March 25 blog posting.

“Based on interviews over the past several weeks with current and former players, I’m told that a current gay NFL player is strongly considering coming out publicly within the next few months,” he reported.

“I’m told this player feels the time is now for someone to take this step—despite homophobic remarks from San Francisco 49ers defensive back Chris Culliver and the controversy arising recently at the Indianapolis Scouting combine, when prospects were asked questions about their sexuality.

“This player’s true concern, I’m told, is not the reaction inside an NFL locker room but outside of it. The player fears he will suffer serious harm from homophobic fans, and that is the only thing preventing him from coming out. My sources will not say who this alleged player is.”

With the majority of justices expressing reservations about DOMA, LGBT advocates were cautiously optimistic on the second day of testimony that the high court’s progressive wing seemed especially poised to deconstruct the section of the 1996 federal law that defines marriage exclusively for straight couples.

Observing that DOMA creates “two kinds of marriage,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg compared “full marriage” to “this sort of skim milk marriage” of civil unions and other alternative classifications such as domestic partnership agreements.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, the high court member who is believed to possess the likely swing vote, addressed the relationship between the law and families, stressing that the federal government must respect “the historic commitment of marriage and questions of the rights of children to the states.”

Allowing DOMA to stand, said Kennedy, would put control of marriage laws—which traditional are given to the states—in the hands of the federal government, which means “you are at real risk with running in conflict with what has always been the essence” of the regulation of families.

Justice Elena Kagan, appointed to the court by President Obama in 2010, asked if homophobia was at play when DOMA was enacted in 1996.

Addressing remarks from the 1996 U.S. House of Representatives official record during the debate about DOMA which referred to a “moral disapproval of homosexuality,” Kagan asked, “Do we really think Congress was doing this for uniformity reasons or do we think the Congress’s judgment was infected by dislike, by animus, by fear?”

Acknowledging the historic occasion, Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr. observed, “You’re asking us to do something we’ve never done before to reach this case.”

“It’s unusual,” replied U.S. Deputy Solicitor General Srikanth Srinivasan, representing the Obama Administration.

“No, it’s not unusual,” Chief Justice Roberts responded. “It’s totally unprecedented.”

Roberts also expressed a measure of the frustration that he and the conservative wing of the high court experiencing with the administration’s seemingly contradictory position of enforcing the law but not defending it.

“I don’t see why [the President] doesn’t have the courage of his convictions,” said Roberts.

Justice Kennedy came close to offering a view to hearten LGBT rights activists, acknowledging the high court’s standing in the case. “It seems to me there’s injury here,” Kennedy offered.

If the court strikes down the section of DOMA under review, married same-sex couples in nine states and the District of Columbia will start receiving federal benefits. But that ruling would not affect any state that has not legalized same-sex marriage.

Wednesday’s hearing lasted an hour and featured arguments from Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. and Paul Clement, Solicitor General under President George W. Bush, who represented the anti-equality side.

The case being argued, United States v. Windsor, involves two New York women, Edith Windsor and Thea Clara Spyer, who were married in 2007 in Canada. In 2009, Spyer died and Windsor inherited her property.

Under the 1996 law, the IRS did not consider Windsor to be a surviving spouse, and required her to pay close to $360,000 in federal taxes—an amount that a spouse in a heterosexual marriage would not be required to pay.

Windsor sued, and in 2012 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit struck down the law as unconstitutional.

Similarly, in February 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. announced that DOMA was unconstitutional and would no longer be defending in court, although the administration would continue to enforce it. The federal government enforced and defended DOMA prior to 2011.

“I know now that, even worse than providing an excuse for discrimination, [DOMA] is itself discriminatory. It should be overturned.” Bill Clinton

One of the things I find most regrettable about Modern American Life is that we have such a deep disconnect with our own history. Although the History channel and its kins-networks, A&E, Biography, Discovery, etc., etc. are but a channel click away—to say nothing of, gasp!, books, or as my partner would say “Kindles” (whatever those are)—most of our fellow countrymen don’t have much connection to the Great Moments in Time which have shaped the framing of this still-being-framed (with apologies to the strict constructionist crowd) Picture of What and Who Is America.

Our nation’s Anti-Federalists, Frontier Hunter/Heroes, Mugwumps, Know-Nothings, Free-Soilers, Barnburners, Doughfaces, Copperheads, Fire-Eaters, Scallywags, Bourbon Democrats, Locofocos, and their likewise ash-heaped brethren will likely be remembered (if they are remembered at all) by a small sub-culture of sallow, wine-drinking, tweed-wearing, Metro-sexual types who listen to NPR (or its 22nd Century-equivalent) and stalk Wikipedia in the wee-small-hours.

I mention this because at this very moment, we stand upon the precipice of one such Great Moment in Time, with the U.S. Supreme Court hearing oral arguments this week in the cases which challenge the egregiously exclusionary Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), and the last gasp of Jim Queer-disguised-as-states’-rights (or worse, Popular Sovereignty, another slave-era holder; check History for times and listings…), California’s Proposition 8.

Justice Anthony Kennedy himself, the Is-He-Or-Isn’t-Boy for LGBT Rights among the high court, wrote in his majority opinion for Lawrence v. Texas that, “As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.” That 2003 decision illegitimated sodomy laws as violating constitutionally-protected liberty.

When the voters approved Proposition 8, they rewrote the California constitution so that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in” that state. For purposes of all federal laws, the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act defines the word “marriage” to include “only a legal union between one man and one woman.”

In their brief to the high court arguing in support of DOMA, opponents of same-sex marriage argued that, just as the states have a right to define marriage as they choose for their own purposes, so does the federal government. This is, of course, the same argument used to justify slavery (including, sadly, by the Supreme Court of its day; see History for the “Dred Scott Decision”).

This week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on challenges to a section of DOMA and to Prop. 8. Though very different in nature (see this week’s POLITICS, “DOMA or Prop. 8: Which Ruling Matters More?” on the facing page, for an analysis), in both instances, the court has the opportunity to rule that the U.S. Constitution prohibits the federal government and every state from so narrowly defining the fundamental right of marriage, and that it likewise fully protects the liberty of same-sex couples.

As the California Supreme Court noted when they legalized same-sex marriage (prior to the enactment of Prop. 8), the reason for denying marriage equality was to officially label these unions as not of “comparable stature or equal dignity” to heterosexual marriages.

The intent of Proposition 8—passed, of all places, in the “Land of Fruits of Nuts”—was to enshrine discrimination into law and to encourage the stigmatization of gay men and women and same-sex couples.

DOMA has the same impact. And in depriving gay couples and their kids federal benefits and recognition, it fails to pass Constitutional muster.

It’s dangerous to compare what sits before the high court—particularly the Proposition 8 case—to Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregated schools (and the Jim Crow doctrine of “separate but equal”).

The problem with Brown was the justice’s call for states to end racial discrimination in public schools “with all deliberate speed.” It permitted the states to drag their feet in meaningful integration of the schools much as the aftermath of Reconstruction (more History channel stuff) gave them an excuse to delay implementing the civil rights of African-Americans for a century after the Civil War won them their “freedom.”

Between now and June, the high court can decide—without ambiguity—that the Constitution upholds equally the right to marry for all couples, and that this right applies both to the federal government and to every one of the United States.

Pullen, 52, told the court that he does not remember pulling the trigger and firing the shot that killed Jones, 40, on June 22, 2009, inside Pullen’s home on the 1600 block of NW 3rd Avenue in Fort Lauderdale.

What Pullen does remember, he testified, is waking up in the middle of a savage beating at the hands of Jones, whom he and his partner, Allyn Swalley, had met earlier that evening at the popular Levis and western bar located on the outskirts of Wilton Manors.

“I was being beaten. It was brutal,” said Pullen, who is charged with first-degree murder. “I was scared to death. I’ve never been in any kind of fight before.”

During two days of testimony, Pullen’s attorney, David Bogenschutz, presented witness accounts of Jones’ alleged past anti-social behavior, including domestic calls made by police to the man’s residences.

Bogenschutz argued that Florida’s controversial Stand Your Ground Law provides his client with legal protection because he felt that his life was endangered.

Pullen said he couldn’t recall leaving Scandals, and awoke at home on the floor while Jones beat him.

“I didn’t know what this man was going to do to me,” Pullen testified. “I thought he was trying to kill me.”

Jones was killed by a single shot to the chest, from a .38-caliber revolver Pullen keeps in his bedroom. Swalley called 9-1-1, who read Pullen his rights after he requested an attorney.

Prosecutors say that Pullen murdered Jones after an alcohol-fueled argument. They cite the testimony of the responding police officer, who said that, while in his squad car, Pullen told him, “I had a few drinks and I just snapped. I did it, and now I have to pay the price.”

Broward County Circuit Judge Raag Singhal will rule on the applicability of the Stand Your Ground Law in the case by the end of June.