Yesterday, all 850 employees of Catholic Charities in Washington, DC received a letter (actually an e-mail) informing them that as of today, Catholic Charities would no longer provide health benefits to spouses either of new employees or current employees not already enrolled in the plan. The DC Gay Marriage law approved in December is set to go into effect on Wednesday.

Back when the DC City Council was debating legalizing gay marriage, the Catholic Church made a huge fuss - a political bluff - threatening to cut off social services to DC's 68,000 poor and homeless it currently served. Well the bill passed. In February, in order to adjust to the new law, Catholic Charities stopped its 80-year-old foster care program and about 40 children were transferred to new foster care facilities. Now, in what is hopefully the last adjustment the Church will have to make, Catholic Charities will cease to provide spousal benefits (a program only about 100 employees currently use). So basically, a few hundred people have been slightly inconvenienced by the Catholic Church's adjustment to the gay marriage law.

So, for all the threats and hype circulating in December about thousands of poor people without services, the transition has been relatively easy and painless. It is unfortunate that Catholic Charities chose to withdraw spousal benefits rather than simply re-categorize "spouses" as "legally domiciled adults" like in San Francisco and at many Catholic Universities (I explained this and the whole debacle in January here). Even though the Church has taken a different route this time, it seems to have caused relatively little harm for all the hype it produced. Why? Because the Church has decided that it is not content to preach during mass, it wants to play politics as well.

Further proof that all the talk about ending social services was a political ploy comes this little analogy many people have mentioned when discussing spousal benefits. In the past, the Church has provided services to couples in its employ through basically a don't ask don't tell benefits policy - namely - people who had been previously married. See, people who have been remarried after a divorce are not considered legitimately married in the eyes of the Church. Basically, because it would be socially bizarre to make a fuss over an accepted social norm (divorce), the Catholic Church turned a blind eye and never looked back (Andrew Sullivan fleshed out this comparison in Februay). This only goes to show that when it came to gay marriage in DC, the Catholic Church probably drew upon something besides its strict adherence to Church dogma when they made a big hullabaloo over gay marriage.

Fortunately, despite the recent back-and-forth between the Church and the city, it seems those who rely on the Church for social services will come out largely unscathed. Perhaps the real victim will be the Church itself. After all, getting called on your bluff means you lose the hand. Personally, I am greatly appreciative of the Church's commitment to the common good; I want to see that work uninterrupted by the slow and halting march of progress.

There's a lot of bad news out there, from the economy to Iran, but often the ingenuity and dedication of individuals makes it all better. Here's a pretty cool example.

On January 13th, the Supreme Court ruled that the hearings of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the federal challenge to Prop 8 in California, could not be broadcast. The ruling was a huge disappointment to many, myself included. As I wrote at the time, putting the biased arguments against gay marriage on the witness stand could be really eye-opening to many people across the country. When prejudice masquerades as logic, putting it on the witness stand and subjecting it to rational argument is generally a pretty good way to expose it for what it really is. So when the trial was banned from video-broadcasting, it was a great loss.

Fortunately, a few like-minded individuals decided to re-enact the entire trial and put it up on youtube, bringing the trial to everyone with internet despite the Court's ruling. Two producers, John Ainsworth and John Ireland are co-producing the project through a production studio in Los Angeles. With dozens of actors volunteering their time to play the judge, lawyers, plaintiffs, defendants and witnesses, court transcripts as well as first-hand accounts were used to recreate the trial as accurately as possible. The result is really remarkable.

Broken up into 12 days, the Proposition 8 Trial Re-Enactment is made up of hours upon hours of footage. Just as I imagine the trial was, some of it is really boring, and some of it is really moving. The re-enactment is done in a style that is completely believable to watch; after just a minute of watching, you forget it is a re-enactment. This means that a lot of the valuable moments lost in the original trial are regained: a young gay man discussing the effect of the Yes on 8 campaign ads; Ted Olson arguing that Prop 8 is unconstitutional; a woman emotionally describing the experience of receiving a letter from the City of San Francisco formally telling her she is no longer married. The list goes on.

In a case that could ultimately be momentous not only for the gay community but the entire country, being able to watch the trial unfold, and see the mechanism of the justice system at work, is important.

So far, not all the videos have been put on youtube, but they are all accessible at http://marriagetrial.com. Each day has a brief rundown of what happened, so that you can browse for the testimony or arguments you are interested in watching. Links to the exhibits, like Prop 8 campaign ads, have also been gathered for each day of the trial.
 

Yesterday the Supreme Court issued a stay blocking any television broadcast of the federal challenge to Prop 8 in California, Perry v. Schwarzenegger. The conservative-leaning  court handed down a 5-4 opinion, citing "irreparable harm" to the advocates of Prop 8 if the public were able to view the trial. As SCOTUSblog reports, "As a practical matter, the ruling almost certainly dooms any broadcast coverage of the trial as it goes on." This is a huge loss to the millions of Americans who deserve to see this historic trial. It is also a bad sign for a case which most expect will eventually land at the Supreme Court.

The idea that Yes on 8 anti-gay marriage activists may be harassed for their views if the trial is broadcast, is ridiculous. These are all high profile people who have already made numerous public - and videotaped - appearances as they crusaded against marriage equality. It seems ironic that anti-gay marriage advocates would site fear of harassment as they crusade to overturn the rights of a minority constantly subject to fear of being verbally and physically abused, even killed, for their sexual orientation.

For Yes on 8 crowd, who frame their public image through bizarre arguments about the danger homosexuality poses to society, putting them under oath, and then on camera, could have done a lot to highlight the bigotry behind the anti-gay marriage movement. As Gabriel Arana sagely noted in an American Prospect article, the scare-tactics used in ad campaigns and in the pews, won't hold water in a court of law: "in the harsh light of the courtroom, with the legal profession's rules of evidence in play, you can't argue that allowing gay marriage means pastors will have to sanctify gay unions, one of the 'Yes on 8' campaign's favorite lines. Or that if gay marriage is legal in California, other states will fall 'one by one into the hands of Satan.'"

If the anti-marriage equality crowd can't come up with a real social threat of gay marriage, and if people can see that, it would go a long way to changing public opinion. Sadly, that won't happen now.

Apparently Monica Hesse's horrible puff piece on Brian Brown, the director of the National Organization for Marriage, wasn't enough to stop her from publishing more worthless drivel in the pages of the Washington Post. She didn't want to step too far from the topic she knows she can screw up write about: marriage.

See, Hesse is like other unimaginitive journalists. She cannot possibly comprehend that what's going on in her own personal life isn't interesting to the rest of the world. That's why, apparently she decided to write a very annoying article on the fact that she's getting married. Um, is this just some gaint scheme to link to her wedding registry?

Jeffrey Rosen isn't happy with the Court's decision:

So what makes the legal reasoning so inflammatory? Most controversially, the Court held that sexual orientation discrimination should be treated just as skeptically as racial discrimination–a conclusion that the U.S. Supreme Court and the other state Supreme Courts have refused to accept. Social conservatives are already invoking contested science to question one of the premises of this conclusion: that sexual orientation, like race, is immutable. “There is no evidence to establish that a homosexual lifestyle is an immutable characteristic such as race,” a lawyer for Advocates for Faith and Freedom told The New York Times. There was no need to open this Pandora’s Box: The Court could have held more modestly that there are no rational reasons for limiting the label “marriage” to straight people and denying it to gays and lesbians.

 

Via DCist. Maryland's Attorney General Douglas Gansler is in full support of gay marriage, making his case during a state senate judicial committee hearing.The committee hearing was to debate proposed legislation that would grant marriage and all marriage rights to gay couples in the state.

"This bill is fundamentally about equality," Gansler told the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee. "It would be wrong for me to have this job knowing there's something so wrong in our society and just ignore it." He said qualms about same-sex unions seem to be limited to older people: "For the younger generation, this is a non-issue."

Predictably, the Family Research Council who also testified at the hearing, said in an email to its subscribers, "If the sponsors think that reserving the definition of the word 'marriage' to churches and religious institutions will somehow make government subsidies for homosexual relationships more palatable, they should think again."

It's interesting that the gay marriage controversy has pretty much been left behind since 2004. Now, some states like Maryland are taking lessons from anti-gay groups and pushing legislation in the states.

Must-see video, via reddit, of San Diego's mayor, Jerry Sanders, struggling very publicly with the issue of gay marriage.

The AP has coverage here. 

While flyering for the Clean My Ride campaign, our fellow interns ran into some people from the Republican Youth Majority. It's not a clone of Young America's Fascists...er, Foundation, but rather has three main positions: pro-choice, pro-environment, and fiscally conservative. Board members include some of moderate Republicanism's greatest hits: Pete Wilson, Bill Cohen, William Weld, and so on. 

What to make of this? The not-surprising part is that there is a group like this; many young people (and plenty of older ones) are sick of the litmus tests in politics, and young people(even with evangelical Republicans) are almost always to the left of their parties - though the Iraq War is a notable exception to this rule. The surprising part is their choice of issues. More in extended.

From The Boston Globe: 

NEWS UPDATE: A joint session of the Massachusetts Legislature has defeated a constitutional ban on gay marriage 151-45, eliminating any chances of getting it on the ballot in November 2008. At least 50 votes were needed to advance the measure.  --Developing  

Somewhere, James Dobson just angrily punched a kitten.

South Africa has passed a ruling that homosexual couples can get married, which is a huge step in the gay rights movement. This is a large change in Africa, since homosexuals face attacks in South Africa, and it is illegal in many African countries. However, there is a clause included in the legislation that would allow clergy to “opt-out” from marrying the couple due to moral grounds. But if you read some of the comments that Christian leaders have made in South Africa about this legislation, it’s not surprising that an opt-out clause was included.

~世界の革命

This is just about the funniest prank so far in the 2008 presidential campaign.  Mad props to Mike D. from <i>Newsvine</i>:

John McCain's people commandeered my world-renowned MySpace design template and did a few things wrong:

 

1. They did not credit me for the template, even though the template explicitly requested credit.
2. They used my own unmodified imagery, specifically for the "Contacting John McCain" table.
3. As if #2 wasn't bad enough, the McCain crew is actually pulling their image directly from my server on each page load. So every time someone visits the McCain MySpace page, my bandwidth is being used to deliver part of the page! Bad McCain!

So...

Numerous people have written me over the last few weeks to tell me that McCain has been using my code, but up until I realized he was pulling images from my server, I didn't really care. A lot of celebrities including Ryan "Van Wilder" Reynolds and the beautiful Nelly Furtado use my code and I'm totally cool with it.

But then I read the article in today's Newsweek about how politicians are all setting up MySpace pages in order to "connect" with younger audiences. McCain's MySpace page is listed, as are the pages from several other candidates. I think the idea of politicians setting up MySpace pages and pretending to actually use them is a bit disingenuous, so I figured it was time to play a little prank on Johnny Mac.

...

So, the only thing necessary to effectively commandeer McCain's page with my own messaging was to simply replace my own sample image on my server with a newly created sample on my server. No server but my own was touched and no laws were broken. The immaculate hack.

Abortion? The Iraq War? Probably too heavy to joke about. Gay marriage seemed like a more of a non-lethal subject to center the prank around.

So with a few minutes in Photoshop and a quick FTP, a new John McCain was born...

...and The Straight-Talk Express isn't just for straight people anymore.

Bravo, sir.  I salute you.