Remember when I wrote about Angelisa Young and Sinjolya Townsend's plans to marry once it was legal in the District of Columbia? Via Think Progress, the first gay and lesbian couples are officially getting married in Washington, D.C. today after picking up thier marriage licenses. Young and Townsend's wedding is in the video below.
Tomorrow is the first day the District of Columbia plans to begin accepting applications for same-sex marriages. The day is big news for LGBTQ activists in D.C., who started working on this issue back in 1975, when the first activists testified on this issue before the D.C. Council.
This is exciting for them, despite the fact that potential attacks on the bill come on many fronts: Last night, the opponents of same-sex marriage filed a last-minute appeal to the Supreme Court. No word on whether the Supreme Court will accept the case, and it's likely the law will face other challenges from ballot initiatives, legislation that has been introduced but hasn't moved yet in Congress, as well as budget amendments.
Still, many LGBTQ folks aren't letting such potential challenges get them down. On a blogger call this afternoon, two African Americans who are residents of D.C., Angelisa Young and Sinjolya Townsend noted, "We're just so happy to be getting married in the District of Columbia."
They plan to marry on March 9 at the Human Rights Campaign building. The couple, who has been together for 12 years and met in an undergraduate constitutional law class, held a commitment ceremony in 2005, but are looking forward to having a marriage recognized by law for their family and friends.
When asked if they had registered for gifts, they said, "The gift for us is to have our families witness this."
UPDATE: The Supreme Court has refused to stop the D.C. government from offering same-sex marriages.
Yesterday the first inaugural bus tour of LA Gang Tours took on 50 passengers at $65 each and a waiver acknowledging they could be crime victims. According the the Associated Press, it is the first tour of it's kind outside of historical crime tours across the country.
The tour goes through several neighborhoods, which are to some people, no-mans land. This brings me to Washington D.C., where a large portion of the population lives in poverty, however, this is largely unknown by tourists.
It seems like a revolutionary idea, one that could benefit ex-gang members and potentially bring light to issues in areas that many would never go.
Living in Washington, D.C., I see bus tours almost everyday during my work week when I go downtown and I've been on one with relatives when they came into town. It took us to the monuments, Arlington Cometary, historical houses: sites that were at one time lively, but now serve mostly tourists. They are relics to what was and where we've come from. But these tours are most definitely limited. I am not sure if there are any tours that specifically focus on the 1960s race riots in D.C. after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. or impoverished neighborhoods not on a tourists radar.
Ignorance comes from a lack of exposure and this would definitely be a way to expose someone. However, there is also a fine line between education and exploitation. If a tour of this kind started in D.C., it would need to benefit the communities or be run by the people living there. But it's an idea worth mulling over. Perhaps the apathy toward these communities could be abated by simply opening a bus door.
Last night, the District of Columbia held its own town hall on health care reform. As the local FOX news channel points out, it wasn't rowdy like other town hall debates around the country.(Check out Campus Progress' own Arielle Fleisher ask what health care reform will do for young people!)
There were no accusations of Nazi/socialist/communist-run health care in this room -- perhaps because everyone had to be a resident of the District of Columbia to be admitted.
Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes-Norton said, "This is a wonderful district to represent. The black people and the white people and the Hispanic people and the young people and the old people and the middle-aged people -- They're all progressive!" Still, Holmes-Norton is a non-voting delegate to the House of Representatives. The District of Columbia doesn't have representation in Congress.
Holmes-Norton said that she'd gotten over 2,000 letters from D.C. residents in support of health care reform. But she also noted that she'd gotten letters from non-D.C. residents saying they were opposed to health care reform. When one resident asked what D.C.'s people could do to pass health care reform, she said that while she had gotten so many letters opposing health care reform from non-D.C. residents, she hoped her constitutants would "return the favor" and write to members of Congress that oppose health care reform.
The town hall featured stories from D.C. residents, including one from 26-year-old Jennifer Abbott, who said she got kicked off Medicaid when she turned 21. She's been rejected for health insurance beacause she has asthma and insurnace companies consider asthma a pre-existing condition. Because she was uninsured, she rejected an ambulance ride after she had been in an accident. She was concerned she would be stuck with the cost, but still ended up with thousands of dollars in medical bills that she has "no hope" of paying off.
Karen Pollitz, project director at the Health Policy Institute at Georgetown University, also pointed out that some proposed reforms include allowing young people to stay on their parents' insurance longer so that young people don't find themselves uninsured the minute they graduate from college.
Banning insurance companies from rejecting people based on pre-existing conditions is one of the central components of health care reform -- and one of the least controversial. All bills under consideration contain bans on insurance companies rejecting customers based on pre-existing conditions.
Still, the town hall ended up sounding more like a rally because no one in the room was opposed to passing health care reform. One resident, a woman who looked to be in her early 30s, said as she left, "I was disappointed." She said she had hoped the town hall would get more into the "nuts and bolts" of the legislation proposed rather than as a rally for reform.
Today the House passed a resolution to give the citizens of the District of Columbia the right to elect a voting member in the House of Representatives. The bill would also give Utah an additonal at-large House seat, which was denied after the 2000 Census failed to count the several thousand Mormon Missionaries serving abroad. If it is approved and signed by the President, the bill would for the first time, give Citizens of the Democratic leaning District of Columbia a voting member in Congress, and give Republican leaning Utah an extra seat increasing the size of the House of Representatives from 435 to 437.
The bill was first introduced in March, but Democrats withdrew the bill after an attempt by Republicans to add an amendment which would have lifted a ban on simiautomatic handguns in the District of Columbia. The bill was re-introduced this week with rules to prevent Republicans from using parliamentary proceedure to hold the bill hostage at gunpoint (figuratively speaking).
After much wrangling and arguing over Constitutional issues centering around Washington D.C.'s status as a federal district rather than a state, the bill passed 241-177. These Constitutional arguements have some measure of validity. It is possible that the bill may end up in the Judicial system should it be passed by the Senate and signed by the President. Its passage in the Senate is uncertain, and already Republican leader Mitch McConnell has stated that he will use the filibuster to block its passage in the Senate. President Bush meanwhile has stated that if the bill arrives on his desk he will Veto it (along with nearly a dozen other pending bills).
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