2011 was a banner year for anti-choice activists who succeeded in pushing through a record number of abortion restrictions. But it’s a new year, and it appears the GOP is dead set on outdoing itself. Republicans in Congress and across the country are introducing a variety pack of extreme anti-abortion bills — including personhood initiatives, heartbeat bills, and fetal pain bills — that saw some success last year. Here is a run-down of the abortion restrictions American women across the country are already facing in the first month of 2012:

– PERSONHOOD: The Virginia General Assembly’s very first bill, House Bill 1, is a “personhood” measure that defines life as beginning at conception and would essentially outlaw abortions. Modeling it on Mississippi’s failed measure, Virginia Republicans threaten to outlaw birth control and in vitro fertilization for couples trying to have a baby. Anti-choice activists hope to push similar measures in at least 11 other states, including Ohio and Kansas.

Full Story Here: The War On A Woman’s Right To Choose, 2012 Edition | ThinkProgress.

With the 2012 presidential election before us, the country is again caught up in debating national security issues, our ongoing wars and the threat of terrorism. There is one related subject, however, that is rarely mentioned: civil liberties.

Protecting individual rights and liberties — apart from the right to be tax-free — seems barely relevant to candidates or voters. One man is primarily responsible for the disappearance of civil liberties from the national debate, and he is Barack Obama. While many are reluctant to admit it, Obama has proved a disaster not just for specific civil liberties but the civil liberties cause in the United States.

Civil libertarians have long had a dysfunctional relationship with the Democratic Party, which treats them as a captive voting bloc with nowhere else to turn in elections. Not even this history, however, prepared civil libertarians for Obama. After the George W. Bush years, they were ready to fight to regain ground lost after Sept. 11. Historically, this country has tended to correct periods of heightened police powers with a pendulum swing back toward greater individual rights. Many were questioning the extreme measures taken by the Bush administration, especially after the disclosure of abuses and illegalities. Candidate Obama capitalized on this swing and portrayed himself as the champion of civil liberties.

Full Story Here: President Obama has been a disaster for civil liberties – latimes.com.

In spite of multiple reported incidents of possible police violence, major media outlets seem to be content to let the protests go by completely unreported, following the same “who-cares” attitude they have taken toward recent revelations that the NYPD has violated the Constitutional rights of American citizens by spying on them as possible terrorists and enemies of the state despite a complete absence of evidence of any crimes.

Watch this video of the macing incident, embedded via YouTube, below:

Full Story Here: Police pen up and mace female ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protesters | Raw Replay.

7:57 PM – Occupy Wall Street marchers have started off for One Police Plaza. NYPD are following with arrest net.

7:30 PM – Dark now.  Above Lady Liberty (name unknown) wrapped in an American Flag and Betsy Ross wig makes impassioned appeal to NYPD officers, “We’re fighting for you pension, we’er fighting for your social security, we’re fighting for you children and your children’s children.  We’re fighting for liberty.  We’re peaceful.”

7:00 PM – General Assembly decides half of Liberty Plaza protesters to remain and keep the occupation. The of 1/2 of the protesters will be marching to One Police Plaza to demand information and medical care for those arrested.

6:00 PM – 2000 occupiers remain in Liberty Plaza.  They are being surrounded with NYPD fencing.  Many more protesters have evacuated.  

4:25 PM – 60 plus protesters arrested at Union Square many pepper sprayed.  Details as they become available.  Orange nets used.

Live Feed at link:

Full Story Here: OpEdNews – Article: Occupy Wall Street Day 8: 100+ Arrested for Peaceful, Legal Protest; Nets & Pepper Spray Used..

The document, which is to be auctioned next week, relates a 1965 concert at the Cow Palace in California.

Signed by manager Brian Epstein, it specifies that The Beatles “not be required to perform in front of a segregated audience”.

The agreement also guarantees the band payment of $40,000 (£25,338).

Full Story Here: BBC News – The Beatles banned segregated audiences, contract shows.

U.S. authorities now have statistical data from the ten Swiss banks being investigated by the United States for helping U.S. clients to dodge taxes, Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung reported on Saturday.

TagesAnzeiger, another Swiss newspaper, reported that the Swiss banks now had until Sept 23 to hand over more specific client data.

Credit Suisse , which is one of the banks under investigation, had already handed over data earlier in the week, while the nine other banks had handed over the data through an intermediary on Friday, NZZ said without citing any sources.

The newspaper also said the Swiss government had given them “plenty of rope” to do this.

Full Story Here: U.S. Obtains Data From 10 Swiss Banks In Tax-Dodging Probe.

Fifty-some years ago the Freedom Riders defied Klu Klux Klan church bombings and bus burnings to end racial segregation in the Jim Crow South.

Today, the crisis is catastrophic climate change — carbon pollution that threatens all life on our planet — and a new generation of Freedom Riders is returning home from peaceful protests, and mass arrests, at the White House.

The sheer dignity and poise of the demonstrators is stunning as you view the photographs – wave after wave — day after day for two weeks — more than twelve hundred people stepped forward, peacefully sat down in front of the White House fence and were arrested. This was the largest act of civil disobedience on this continent during this century.

Full Story Here: Tar Sands Protest: ‘When Ordinary People do Extraordinary Things’ | Common Dreams.

Yesterday, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) announced his presidential campaign’s “Justice Advisory Committee,” along with its co-chair Robert Bork.

The Senate rejected Bork’s 1987 Supreme Court nomination in a bipartisan 58-42 vote, but Bork has since emerged as the slain martyr at the center of the conservative legal movement’s creation myth. In this sense, Bork’s involvement is a coup for a campaign that is struggling to prove Romney’s hard right credentials in the face of his decision to ensure that all people in his state enjoy access to affordable health care.

For the majority of Americans who are uninterested in hard right governance, however, Bork’s record raises very serious questions about whether someone who would take legal advice from him has any business appointing judges and Supreme Court Justices:

Full Story Here: Romney Advisor Robert Bork: Civil Rights Act Is ‘Unsurpassed Ugliness,’ But Contraception And Porn Bans Are Fine | ThinkProgress.

Judge Carlos Murguia granted a request from the two clinics for a preliminary injunction to block enforcement of the rules, which went into effect Friday morning.

At a hearing, lawyers for the clinics argued the rules are unreasonable and the state gave less then two weeks’ notice for them to be imposed.

The Kansas Department of Environment and Health said the two clinics — the Center for Women’s Health and Aid for Women — failed to meet the requirements and could not be licensed.

Full Story Here: Judge blocks Kansas anti-abortion law | The Raw Story.

Thirty minutes before the bill was signed, protesters began amassing underneath the windows of the Governor’s office shaking metal lunchboxes with pennies inside, playing vuvuzuelas and trumpets, banging on drums, and shrieking as if for their lives.

A contingent from the Republican Party of Waukesha County was escorted into the governor’s parlor by Rep. Don Pridemore of Hartford, who recently introduced a racial profiling/anti-immigrant bill. Soon the Waukesha Republicans were chatting it up with Rep. Jeff Stone, co- author of the Voter Suppression bill. As the chants of protesters penetrated the walls and windows of the parlor and cries of “Who’s in ALEC?” wafted through the doors, one Waukesha County stalwart inquired about the identity of the rabble outside. Stone said, “Oh, they are just the same 20 people who are here every day disrupting hearings. I know them all. They try to make it seem like there’s a big grassroots movement behind them, but after the out-of-state union protesters left in March the people protesting now are really just the same 20 people.”

Full Story Here: Protesters Crash Gov. Walker’s Voter ID Signing Party | The Progressive.

After Republican gains in the fall election, a reliably antiabortion bloc has been reenergized. The bills seek to end federal funding for abortion providers and to shorten the window during which a woman may have the procedure.

Energized by Republican gains in the last election and still stinging from the passage of President Obama‘s healthcare overhaul, conservative lawmakers in statehouses around the country have put forward a torrent of measures aimed at restricting abortion.

The measures now under consideration in dozens of states reflect advances in technology and a political cycle that has reempowered a reliably antiabortion bloc — conservative Republicans — on the state and federal levels.

Some proposed laws, drawing upon improvements in medical imaging, seek to shorten the window during which women may have an abortion, though states may not impose restrictions in the first trimester.

Full Story Here: Antiabortion bills: Measures flood state legislatures – latimes.com.

Indiana governor and possible presidential hopeful will end all state funding for organization

Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels said Friday he will sign restrictive abortion legislation, making Indiana the first state to cut off all government funding for Planned Parenthood and boosting Daniels’ credentials among social conservatives as he considers whether to run for president.

Daniels said he supported the abortion restrictions from the outset and that the provision added to defund abortion providers did not change his mind. He said women’s health, family planning and other services will remain available.

“The principle involved commands the support of an overwhelming majority of Hoosiers,” Daniels said in a statement announcing his intention to sign the bill when it arrives on his desk in about a week.

Full Story Here: Daniels to defund Planned Parenthood in Indiana – Abortion – Salon.com.

This year’s commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination in Memphis during a 1968 labor dispute has galvanized union activists and progressive forces against what they see as a wholesale assault on labor rights.

Events scheduled for today and Monday’s official 43rd anniversary have been organized by the AFL-CIO’s “We Are One” campaign and individual unions from coast to coast.

Local 1733 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which represented the striking sanitation workers King came to Memphis to assist, will hold its annual march to the government plaza Downtown Monday as well as events at the National Civil Rights Museum today.

Full Story Here: Events across across nation connect labor struggles to civil rights movement, 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike » The Commercial Appeal.

Ralliers filled the steps of the Utah State Capitol Saturday morning, showing support for organized labor and advancing Monday’s “We Are One” events across the country that will remember the April 4, 1968, assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Wisconsin continues to be a focal point to workers’ rights issues because of a partisan effort to curb most state workers’ collective-bargaining rights as a way of cutting wages. Similar actions followed Ohio and are on the legislative agenda in Florida as cash-strapped states look for ways to improve their bottom line.

In Utah, unions see threats from the Legislature, including the recently repealed HB 477, which would have limited the public’s access to communications involving state lawmakers.

Full Story Here: Utah rally advances ‘We Are One’ events supporting labor and civil rights on Monday | Deseret News.

The day after Scott Walker’s ceremonial signing of a bill stripping collective bargaining rights from Wisconsin’s public employees, tens of thousands of protestors once again filled the Capitol Square Saturday. “Kill the bill” was no longer heard, but a new chant rose to take its place: “What’s the word? Kloppenburg!”

Although they lost a battle in the legislature, pro-union protestors have pledged to win the middle class war. Their newest slogans centered around this goal, urging protesters to recall the eight eligible Senate Republicans, and to vote JoAnne Kloppenburg to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

To that end, clipboard-wielding activists commandeered a Carroll Street bus shelter, urging protestors parading past to sign (if they hadn’t already) their senator’s recall petition. “Vote for Kloppenburg” signs suddenly became a ubiquitous fixture of the protest landscape.

Full Story Here: Capitol Square overflows in largest Wisconsin labor solidarity demonstration yet – Isthmus | The Daily Page.

Cheers and bells rang out as tractors bearing signs declaring “Walker’s budget = war on workers, middle class” and “pull together — support working families” slowly circled the towering statehouse which has been the scene of mass protests for weeks now.

The battle began when Wisconsin’s newly-elected Republican governor Scott Walker proposed a controversial bill to strip public workers of bargaining rights.

Full Story Here: Mass protest against Republican cuts to services, union rights | The Raw Story.

At the same press conference where Dane County, Wisc., District Attorney Ismael Ozanne told reporters he found nothing criminal in Gov. Scott Walker’s comments to a prank caller last week, Dane County Sheriff David Mahoney spoke about law enforcement’s role in the push and pull over access to the Capitol building in Madison. Mahoney revealed that yesterday he pulled his officers from a duty to guard the building’s entrances.

According to WisPolitics, Mahoney said that over the last two days, “we have placed those law enforcement officers in the position of being palace guards.”

The deputies had been told that the doors would be open at 8 a.m. yesterday, but that didn’t happen and the officers didn’t find out why until the afternoon, Mahoney said.

Full Story Here: Wisconsin Sheriff Pulled Deputies From Capitol, Says They Won’t Be ‘Palace Guard’ (VIDEO) | TPMDC.

Labor unions are not exactly popular, though: A third of those surveyed viewed them favorably, a quarter viewed them unfavorably, and the rest said they were either undecided or had not heard enough about them. But the nationwide poll found that embattled public employee unions have the support of most Americans — and most independents — as they fight the efforts of newly elected Republican governors in Wisconsin and Ohio to weaken their bargaining powers, and the attempts of governors from both parties to cut their pay or benefits.

Americans oppose weakening the bargaining rights of public employee unions by a margin of nearly two to one: 60 percent to 33 percent. While a slim majority of Republicans favored taking away some bargaining rights, they were outnumbered by large majorities of Democrats and independents who said they opposed weakening them.

Full Story Here: Majority in Poll Back Employees in Public Sector Unions – NYTimes.com.

Continuing his unprecedented power grab Governor Walker ordered the State Capitol cleared on Sunday, closing the building to Wisconsinites protesting his plan to gut civil rights for tens of thousands of Wisconsin’s citizens. Dozens of ministers, rabbis, and priests joined workers and students from across the state, risking arrest to protest the closing of the State Capitol to the public.

“First Governor Walker tried to take away workers’ rights, now he is trying to take away our Constitutional right as Americans to peacefully assemble,” said Steelworker Roy Vandenberg. “I have a message for Governor Walker, your plan to silence us won’t work. We are not going away, and we will not be silenced.”

“This is a critical moment for Wisconsin and for so many states,” said Rev. Leah Lonsbury of Memorial United Church of Christ. “Clearly, this is about far more than a budget. It’s a moral issue, and the rights at stake here are so basic to our common good and our common humanity, to the very idea of justice, that we are willing to risk arrest to protect them and have our voices be heard. Our faith calls us to stand with the vulnerable and speak truth to power. This is what we are called to do.”

Full Story Here: Thousands Crowd The Wisconsin State Capitol As Walker Tries To Close Building–UPDATED | Crooks and Liars.

On Feb. 7, with Wisconsin united in the afterglow of a Green Bay Packers victory in the Super Bowl, brand-new Gov. Scott Walker convened a dinner meeting of his Cabinet at the Governor’s Mansion.

Walker held up a photo of President Ronald Reagan, who had famously fired striking air-traffic controllers, and said his plan to sweep away decades of protections for state public employees in a stop-gap budget bill represented “our time to change the course of history.”

“It was kind of the last hurrah before we dropped the bomb,” he said.

The budget-repair bill, which would strip most collective-bargaining rights from 175,000 public-sector workers while imposing immediate benefits concessions, went public four days later. Walker, a Republican, called for passage in the GOP-controlled Legislature within a week.

Full Story Here: Anatomy of a protest: From a simple march to a national fight.

Progressives have forcefully challenged the conservative and Tea Party message in a massive showing of support for the middle class.

“Welcome Senators!” a Chicago protest sign declared, as thousands rallied in solidarity with Wisconsin workers and celebrated Democratic senators hiding out in Illinois.

Thousands rallied nation-wide on Saturday, with MoveOn putting the total at over 100,000 people in Madison and 50,000 in other state capitols and major cities. Protests at state capitols were also a warning shot to governors around the country: workers will fight major cuts to social programs and attacks on unions.

The protests in Wisconsin have now sparked a nation-wide movement. This is the first time progressives have forcefully challenged the conservative and Tea Party message over the past two years, rejecting the notion that deficits and government spending are the country’s biggest problem. (Click here to see AlterNet’s collection of photos from the rallies).

In Philadelphia, demonstrators chanted, “Tax the rich, stop the war.”

Full Story Here: Rally for the American Dream: Huge Gatherings Nationwide in Solidarity with Wisconsin Democratic Uprising | | AlterNet.

Early this past Friday morning the republicans in the Assembly passed Governor Walker’s union busting Bill. The State Senators still have to vote on the Bill before it can be signed by Walker, but they need the States democratic Senators to be present in order to have a three-fifths quorum which is required for the vote to take place.

Currently, the Senate democrats have not made themselves available for a vote, and they have said that they will not be available until Walker removes the portion of the Bill that takes away collective bargaining rights for unions. The unions have already agreed to wage cuts and benefit cuts.

Full Story Here: Wisconsin protest rallies spread to all 50 States – Las Vegas Democrat | Examiner.com.

In one of the biggest rallies at the state Capitol since the Vietnam War, union members and their supporters braved frigid temperatures and a light snowfall to show their displeasure.

The mood was upbeat despite the setback their cause suffered earlier this week when the state Assembly approved the Republican-backed restrictions on union collective bargaining rights over fierce Democratic objections.

Full Story Here: Largest crowds since Vietnam War march in Wisconsin – chicagotribune.com.

From inside the Wisconsin State Capitol, RAN ally Ryan Harvey reports:

“Hundreds of cops have just marched into the Wisconsin state capitol building to protest the anti-Union bill, to massive applause. They now join up to 600 people who are inside.”

Ryan reported on his Facebook page earlier today:

“Police have just announced to the crowds inside the occupied State Capitol of Wisconsin: ‘We have been ordered by the legislature to kick you all out at 4:00 today. But we know what’s right from wrong. We will not be kicking anyone out, in fact, we will be sleeping here with you!’ Unreal.”

Ryan HarveyYou can find more updates from Ryan Harvey on Twitter @ryanharveysongs and his blog Even If Your Voice Shakes.

UPDATE: This video says it all. It makes me proud of my neighbors. “Let me tell you Mr. Walker, this is not your house, this is all our house.”

Full Story Here: The Understory » BREAKING: Wisconsin Police Have Joined Protest Inside State Capitol.

OPS:  The Police are smart enough to understand that they would be next

When the Nazis came for the communists
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews
I remained silent;
I wasn’t a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984)

South Dakota is one of the most anti-abortion states in the country. In 1994, the state banned abortion providers inside its borders. “Planned Parenthood flies a doctor in from out-of-state once a week to see patients at a Sioux Falls clinic. Women from the more remote parts of the large, rural state drive up to six hours to reach this lone clinic” and must “receive counseling and wait 24 hours before undergoing the procedure.”

Now, it seems South Dakota is willing to legalize acts of terror in order to be the number one anti-abortion state in the U.S. The South Dakota House is taking up a bill to redefine “justifiable homicide” that may “make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions,” Mother Jones reports. Passed out of committee on a 9-3 party line vote, the GOP-backed bill “could in theory allow a woman’s father, mother, son, daughter, or husband to kill anyone who tried to provide that woman an abortion — even if she wanted one.”

South Dakota’s House of Representatives is dominated by the GOP — a party that was swept into power by promising job creation, and is delivering the “most comprehensive and radical assault on women’s health in our lifetime.” The recent barrage of anti-reproductive rights bills betray “a broader national strategy” by pro-life advocates to manufacture callous, often perverse, obstacles to women’s reproductive rights. During the first months of their legislative sessions, GOP lawmakers at the state and federal level have come up with four other radical abortion restrictions to marginalize women’s rights and eradicate choice:

Full Story Here: ThinkProgress » REPORT: The Five Ways That The GOP Is Trying To Eradicate A Woman’s Right To Choose.

Since his arrests, numerous civil liberties groups and investigative journalists have protested the conditions under which Manning is being held, noting that he has been kept in solitary confinement and is denied even access to a pillow or bed sheets. This is particularly shocking in light of new information revealed that Manning was suspected of having poor mental health before he was deployed to Iraq, with some superiors even requesting that he not be given firearms. Yet despite this press coverage of Manning’s treatment the military has offered very limited access to him and has refused to address the concerns of human rights and civil liberties advocates.

Full Story Here: ThinkProgress » Kucinich Requests To See Bradley Manning, Soldier In Solitary Confinement For Alleged Leaks.

The remarkable thing about this annual review of King’s life is that several years–his last years–are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn’t take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.

Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they’re not shown today on TV.

Why?

It’s because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King, Jr., stood for during his final years.

Full Story Here: FAIR Blog » Blog Archive » The Martin Luther King You Still Don’t See on TV.

William Galston — former Clinton adviser and current Brookings Institution Senior Fellow — has a column in The New Republic about the Gabrielle Giffords shooting that illustrates the mentality endlessly eroding basic American liberty: namely, the belief that every tragedy must lead to new government powers and new restrictions on core liberties. The lesson of the Arizona tragedy, he argues, is that it’s too difficult to force citizens into mental institutions against their will. This, he says, is the fault of “civil libertarians,” who began working in the 1970s on legal reforms to require a higher burden of proof for involuntary commitment (generally: it must be proven that the person is a danger to himself or to others). As a result, Galston wants strict new laws imposing a litany of legal obligations on the mentally ill, their friends and family, and even acquaintances, as well as dramatically expanded powers to lock away those with mental illness (with broader definitions of what that means).

Listen to what he proposes: “first, those who acquire credible evidence of an individual’s mental disturbance should be required to report it to both law enforcement authorities and the courts, and the legal jeopardy for failing to do so should be tough enough to ensure compliance”; those reporting obligations should apply not only to family and friends, but extend to “school authorities and other involved parties.” And “second, the law should no longer require, as a condition of involuntary incarceration, that seriously disturbed individuals constitute a danger to themselves or others”; instead, involuntary commitment should be imposed whenever there is “delusional loss of contact with reality.” He concludes on this melodramatic note: ‘How many more mass murders and assassinations do we need before we understand that the rights-based hyper-individualism of our laws governing mental illness is endangering the security of our community and the functioning of our democracy?”

Full Story Here: The reflexive call for fewer liberties – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.

In a press conference on Wednesday, President Obama sounded a hopeful tone on LGBT rights. Though he has maintained that he favors civil unions but opposes same-sex marriage, Obama told reporters that his views on the subject “are constantly evolving” and it is an issue he will “continue to wrestle with going forward.” In an interview with The Advocate, Obama said he “strongly supports” repealing the Defense of Marriage Act, which permits states not to recognize same-sex marriages performed in another state. He also called on Congress to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would prohibit discrimination against employees due to their sexual orientation.

Now, Vice President Biden is moving the administration’s stance even further. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos this morning, Biden declared that gay marriage is inevitable in the United States:

Full Story Here: ThinkProgress » As President Obama ‘Wrestles’ With The Issue, Vice President Biden Says Gay Marriage Is Inevitable.

Friends have started to say something they have never said before: I’m too frightened to protest

So now we know. When our politicians complained over the past few decades, in a low, sad tone, that our young people were “too apathetic” and “disengaged”, it was a lie. A great flaring re-engagement of the young has take place this year. With overwhelmingly peaceful tactics, they are demanding policies that are supported by the majority of the British people – and our rulers are trying to truncheon, kettle and intimidate them back into apathy.

Here’s one example of the intimidation of peaceful protest by the young that is happening all over Britain. Nicky Wishart is a 12-year-old self-described “maths geek” who lives in the heart of David Cameron’s constituency. He was gutted when he found out his youth club was being shut down as part of the cuts: there’s nowhere else to hang out in his village. He was particularly outraged when he discovered online that Cameron had said, before the election, that he was “committed” to keeping youth clubs open. So he did the right thing. He organized a totally peaceful protest on Facebook outside Cameron’s constituency surgery. A few days later, the police arrived at his school. They hauled him out of his lessons, told him the anti-terrorism squad was monitoring him and threatened him with arrest.

Full Story Here: Johann Hari: Your right to protest is under threat – Johann Hari, Commentators – The Independent.

Earlier this week, the House had passed the same legislation by 250-175 vote. More than 14,000 servicemembers have been dismissed because of the DADT policy.

For many Democrats, including President Obama, today’s final passage (and the signing of the bill, which will occur in the near future) marks the fulfillment of a promise that they made repeatedly. In a speech to the Human Rights Campaign in October, Obama said, “I will end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. That’s my commitment to you.”

Full Story Here: ThinkProgress » Senate Passes DADT Repeal, Sending Bill To Obama For His Signature.

Florida will immediately stop enforcing its ban on adoptions by gay people following a decision by a state appeals court that the three-decade-old law is unconstitutional, Gov. Charlie Crist said Wednesday.

Crist announced the decision after the 3rd District Court of Appeal upheld a 2008 ruling by a Miami-Dade judge, who found “no rational basis” for the ban when she approved the adoption of two young brothers by Martin Gill and his male partner.

“I’m very pleased with the ruling on behalf of the Gills,” Crist told reporters in Tallahassee. “It’s a great day for children. Children deserve a loving home.”

Full Story: Florida Overturns Gay Adoption Ban.

A senior Democratic leadership aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Reid met with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Monday to inform the Republican leader that the fiscal year 2011 defense authorization bill will come to the Senate floor the week of Sept. 20.

The aide said Senate leadership is anticipating the Senate won’t have unanimous consent to bring the legislation to the floor, so 60 votes will be necessary to end a filibuster and move forward with debate on the bill.

“We are going to take it the floor next week to see where the votes are,” the aide said.

Full Story: Reid to schedule ‘Don’t Ask’ vote next week : Washington Blade – LGBTQ News.

With the election of President Barack Obama, the country heralded the coming of an age in which an African-American could overcome significant historical prejudice to ascend to the presidency. But while the country celebrates this collective step forward, a Nettleton, Mississippi public school is taking a clear step back. According to Nettleton Middle School’s rules, children running for certain class officer posts must meet a specific race requirement: to be president, the child must be white.

A school memo, obtained by MixedandHappy and The Smoking Gun, was passed out to every 6th, 7th, and 8th grader to inform them of the breakdown. The upcoming elections are divided between offices delineated for black and white students. Of the 12 offices for which students can compete, “eight are earmarked for white students, while four are termed ‘black seats.” The presidency is reserved for white students across each grade, but a black student is permitted to be the 8th grade vice-president or reporter, the 7th grade treasurer, or the 6th grade reporter. So, along with a “B” average and “a good disciplinary status and moral character,” a child hoping to represent his or her class must be the right race:

Full Story: Think Progress » Mississippi Middle School Segregates Student Government Officers: Only Whites Can Run For President.

Ted Olson, former George W. Bush solicitor general, attorney behind the case against California’s gay marriage ban, and husband of a woman who died aboard the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11, said Wednesday that President Obama was right about his analysis of the “Ground Zero Mosque” as a constitutional right protected by the First Amendment.

Olson’s wife, conservative commentator and lawyer Barbara Olson, perished on September 11 aboard American Airlines Flight 77, the plane that was hijacked and flown in the Pentagon.

Asked on MSNBC about his opinion on the plans to construct a 13-story Islamic community center two blocks away from Ground Zero, Olson gave a response that served as a rather high profile departure from what has become the conservative norm on the issue.

Full Story: Ted Olson, Former Bush Solicitor General And Husband Of 9/11 Victim, Backs Obama On ‘Ground Zero Mosque’.

TO appreciate how much and how unexpectedly our country can change, look no further than the life and times of Judith Dunnington Peabody, who died on July 25 at 80 in her apartment on Fifth Avenue in New York.

The proper names in her biographical sketch suggest a stereotype from a bygone New Yorker cartoon: Miss Hewitt’s Classes, the Ethel Walker School, Bryn Mawr, the Junior League. She “was introduced to society,” as they said of debutantes back then, at the Piping Rock Club, Locust Valley, N.Y., in 1947. As the fashionable wife of Samuel P. Peabody in the decades to follow, she shared the society pages with Pat Buckley, Babe Paley and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. But to quote Tracy Lord, the socialite played by Katharine Hepburn in the classic high-society movie comedy “The Philadelphia Story,” “The time to make up your mind about people is never.” In 1985, Judith Peabody, a frequent contributor to the traditional good causes favored by those of her class, did the unthinkable by volunteering to work as a hands-on caregiver to AIDS patients and their loved ones.

Full Story: Op-Ed Columnist – Angels in America – NYTimes.com.

Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker made his ruling Wednesday in a lawsuit filed by two gay couples who claimed the voter-approved ban violated their civil rights.

A copy of the ruling had not yet been publicly released.

Both sides previously said an appeal was certain if Walker did not rule in their favor. The case would go first to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals then the Supreme Court if the high court justices agree to review it.

Full Story: Federal judge overturns gay marriage ban in Calif..

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle took Rand Paul to task when he suggested earlier this year that Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act shouldn’t apply to private businesses.

But a new report from Congress’s Office of Compliance notes that Congress has never applied the provision to itself.

“The OOC Board of Directors has taken the position that the rights and protections afforded by Titles II and III of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 against discrimination with respect to places of public accommodation should be applied to the legislative branch,” OOC officials wrote in the report.

Full Story: Congress exempt from Civil Rights Act – Erika Lovley – POLITICO.com.

As Judge Vaughn Walker prepares to hear closing arguments today in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the landmark case against California’s Proposition 8, supporters of the measure are urging him to “go a step further and revoke state recognition of the marriages of 18,000 gay and lesbian couples who wed before” voters stripped same-sex couples of their right to marry in November 2008:

Such an order would honor “the expressed will of the people,” backers of the November 2008 ballot measure said Tuesday in their final written filing before Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker.

Andrew Pugno, an attorney for Prop. 8’s backers, said in an interview that the sponsors aren’t asking Walker to nullify the 18,000 marriages, but only to rule that government agencies, courts and businesses no longer have to recognize the couples as married.

Full Story: Think Progress » Opponents of same-sex marriage ask Prop. 8 judge to invalidate 18,000 marriages of gay couples..

The Friday afternoon news dump, wherein someone tries to hide their major, super important news in the hustle and bustle and happy hours of a dawning weekend, was the tool of choice as Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (NPA) announced his veto of a horrifically bad piece of Republican legislation.

Known as the “ultrasound bill,” the law would have required women seeking an abortion to first pay for and obtain an ultrasound test, in which they would either have to view the embryo or listen to a doctor describe it. Tests range from several hundred dollars to $1,500, and would effectively block the abortion option for many, if not most, women.

In his veto statement, Crist, who earlier this week signaled his intention by removing harsh anti-abortion language from his campaign web site, acknowledged a woman’s right to decide.

Full Story: Pensito Review » Breaking News from Florida: Crist Vetoes Ultrasound Bill.

Mistreatment of Indians is America's Original Sin, and the narrative is consistent. They lose their land, get portrayed as caricatures of social maladies, and are ripped off by the likes of Jack Abramoff. So it's no surprise that a tale with a very different ending, namely the righting of a horrible wrong affecting 500,000 Native Americans, proceeds with virtually no notice.

Indeed, you'd think that even Tea Party diehards should rally to this cause, given their anti-government and pro-property rights passion. They might even want to pay homage to the intrepid female accountant-turned-banker, who inspired one of the most fiercely litigated disputes against the federal government in history. But they likely won't. Who will? Not even many Indians believe that belated fairness is now on the way, given more than a century of government abuse and deceit whose undisputed facts strain credulity.

The facts are these: Following the House's approval, the Senate is considering whether to approve a $3.4 billion settlement of a 15-year-old lawsuit, alleging the government illegally withheld more than $150 billion from Indians whose lands were taken in the 1880s to lease to oil, timber, minerals and other companies for a fee. Back then, the government started breaking up reservations, accumulating over 100 million acres, giving individual Indians 80 to 160 acres each, and taking legal title to properties placed in one of two trusts. The Indians were given beneficial ownership but the government managed the land, believing Indians couldn't handle their affairs. With leases for oil wells in Oklahoma, resorts in Palm Springs, and rights-of-ways for roads in Scottsdale, Arizona, some descendants of original owners receive six- and even seven-figure sums annually. But the prototypical beneficiary, now poised to share in the settlement, is a poor Dakotan who struggles to afford propane to heat his quarters and has been receiving as little as $20 a year. More than $400 million a year is collected from Indian lands and paid into U.S. Treasury account 14X6039.

Full Story: A Victory for Native Americans? – National – The Atlantic.

Today, on ABC’s This Week, former Bush adviser Matthew Dowd asked rhetorically, “They socialize with kids that are openly gay and all of the sudden they go in the armed services, somebody gives them a rifle and they’re not supposed to be around gay people anymore?” Then he took a shot at the GOP intransigence:

DOWD: It doesn’t make any sense. It’s long been decided in the public’s mind. I think the Republicans are so far out of step about this, where the country is…Republican office holders are so far out of step with this.

Full Story: Think Progress » Former Bush Adviser: ‘Republicans Are So Far Out Of Step’ On ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’.

In a historic vote last night, the House passed an amendment to repeal the military’s discriminatory “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. Earlier this week, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), the House’s third-ranking Republican, had “promised unified GOP opposition to lifting the ban” on gays serving openly in the military. “The American people don’t want the American military to be used to advance a liberal political agenda. And House Republicans will stand on that principle,” Pence said. But dismissing Pence’s leadership, five Republicans joined 229 Democrats to vote for the repeal:

The vote was 234 to 194.

Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Ron Paul (R-TX), Joseph Cao (R-LA), Rep. Judy Biggert (R-IL), and Charles Djou (R-HI) were the only Republicans to vote in favor of scrapping the law.

Full Story: Think Progress » Defying Pence, five Republicans join majority to vote for repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’.

Chiefs claim Holder told them federal challenge is imminent

A group of police chiefs who have launched a campaign against the new Arizona immigration law which they believe will damage community relations with law enforcement agencies across the nation are set to meet with Attorney General Eric Holder on Wednesday morning.

A press release sent to RAW STORY states, “Arizona police chiefs are concerned that the new SB 1070 law in Arizona will drive a wedge between the community and the police, and will damage the trust that police agencies have worked to establish over many years with members of all their communities. More than a dozen other states are considering laws similar to Arizona’s. Police chiefs from some of America’s largest cities are joining with their Arizona colleagues to express these concerns and to seek the Attorney General’s advice and discuss the ramifications of state and federal immigration laws.”

The Washington Post's Spencer S. Hsu reports, “Arizona's new crackdown on illegal immigration will increase crime in U.S. cities, not reduce it, by driving a wedge between police and immigrant communities, police chiefs from several of the state's and the nation's largest cities said Tuesday.”

Full Story: Police chiefs worried Arizona immigration law will increase crime meet with Attorney General | Raw Story.

KELLY: Rand Paul is a libertarian. You are a libertarian. He is getting excoriated for suggesting that the Civil Rights act — what he said was, “Look it’s got 10 parts, essentially; I favor nine. It’s the last part that mandated no discrimination in places of public accommodation that I have a problem with, because you should let businesses decide for themselves whether they are going to be racist or not racist. Because once the government gets involved, it’s a slippery slope.” Do you agree with that?

STOSSEL: Totally. I’m in total agreement with Rand Paul. You can call it public accommodation, and it is, but it’s a private business. And if a private business wants to say, “We don’t want any blond anchorwomen or mustached guys,” it ought to be their right. Are we going to say to the black students’ association they have to take white people, or the gay softball association they have to take straight people? We should have freedom of association in America.

KELLY: OK. When you put it like that it sounds fine, right? So who cares if a blond anchorwoman and mustached anchorman can’t go into the lunchroom. But as you know, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 came around because it was needed. Blacks weren’t allowed to sit at the lunch counter with whites. They couldn’t, as they traveled from state to state in this country, they couldn’t go in and use a restroom. They couldn’t get severed meals and so on, and therefore, unfortunately in this country a law was necessary to get them equal rights.
Full Story: Stossel calls for repeal of public accommodations section of Civil Rights Act | Media Matters for America.

The man convicted of killing both men, then-Supervisor Dan White, was also the subject of a separate FBI political corruption probe before he gunned down Moscone and Milk at San Francisco’s City Hall.

Agents in the FBI’s San Francisco bureau were looking into whether Moscone and Milk had collaborated to “defraud the federally sponsored San Francisco Community Development Fund,” according to documents obtained by San Francisco blogger and gay rights activist Michael Petrelis. (The relevant pages from those documents can be seen here.)

FBI officials were also investigating whether Moscone had received $10,000 “for favorable treatment in the building of a controversial McDonald’s restaurant,” according to the files.

Full Story: Exclusive: FBI probed Harvey Milk, George Moscone prior to their murders | Raw Story.

As ThinkProgress has reported, many far-right members of the Oklahoma legislature have made denying women rights a full-time mission. What the legislature has done in recent weeks:

– Both the House and the Senate passed a law mandating the collection of personal details about every single abortion performed in the state, which will then be posted on a public website.

– The legislature overrode the governor’s veto of an ultrasound mandate, which requires that doctor’s show women seeking an abortion ultrasounds of their babies and “describe the size of the fetus and any viewable organs and limbs. There are no exceptions for rape or incest.” The law also “limits who can do the ultrasound and which technology can be used — issues lawmakers are ill-equipped to decide.”

– The legislature also overrode the governor’s veto of a measure to prevent women from filing “wrongful life” lawsuits against “doctors who withhold information about a fetus or pregnancy that could cause a woman to seek an abortion.”

Full Story: Think Progress » Oklahoma Is At It Again: State Legislature Passes Bill Stripping Abortion Coverage From Health Insurance.

Broad opposition to the law, SB 1070, has produced some of the immigration debate’s strangest bedfellows: civil rights advocates have aligned with police chiefs to warn of the consequences of entangling local police in federal immigration policy. And law enforcement officials nationwide have warned that the growing trend of localizing immigration enforcement undermines years of progress in establishing “community policing” techniques that are believed effective in preventing crime.

Shortly before Gov. Jan Brewer signed the bill, the Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police warned in a statement that the policy “will negatively affect the ability of law enforcement agencies across the state to fulfill their many responsibilities in a timely manner.” Concerned about new liabilities created by the legislation (one provision enables local citizens to sue if they believe police are not enforcing immigration law strictly enough), the organization called on Congress “to begin the process of comprehensively addressin

Full Story: t r u t h o u t | Police Across Arizona See Dangers of New Law.

Oklahoma’s attorney general agreed Monday to temporarily block enforcement of a controversial new state law that requires pregnant women to get an ultrasound and hear a detailed description of the fetus before they get an abortion.

The Center for Reproductive Rights was set to argue for a temporary restraining order Monday, but attorneys for both sides agreed to accept the order before the court hearing, Oklahoma County District Judge Noma Gurich said. She signed the order Monday afternoon.

“We’re sorry to see implementation of the law delayed,” said Tony Lauinger, state chairman of Oklahomans for Life and vice president of the National Right to Life Committee. “This has been a long process and apparently it will be a little longer.”

Full Story: New Oklahoma Abortion Restrictions Temporarily Blocked.

However, today Defense Secretary Robert Gates sent House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-MO) a letter (in response to an inquiry from Skelton) telling him that he doesn’t want Congress to take any action at all on DADT this year. From the letter obtained by ThinkProgress:

I believe in the strongest possible terms that the Department must, prior to any legislative action, be allowed the opportunity to conduct a thorough, objective, and systematic assessment of the impact of such a policy change; develop an attentive comprehensive implementation plan, and provide the President and the Congress with the results of this effort in order to ensure that this step is taken in the most informed and effective matter. [...]

Therefore, I strongly oppose any legislation that seeks to change this policy prior to the completion of this vital assessment process.

Full Story: Think Progress » Gates To Congress: Don’t Repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell This Year.

Arizona lawmakers approved a sweeping immigration bill Monday intended to ramp up law enforcement efforts even as critics complained it could lead to racial profiling and other abuse.

The state Senate voted 17-11 nearly along party lines to send the bill to Gov. Jan Brewer, who has not taken a position on the measure championed by fellow Republicans. The House approved the bill April 13.

“This bill goes a long way to bringing law and order to the state,” said Sen. Al Melvin, R-Tucson, who cited costly services provided to illegal immigrants and the recent slaying of a southeastern Arizona rancher near the U.S.-Mexico border as reasons for the move.

Full Story: Arizona Immigration Law Sparks National Uproar.

Thomas Mitchell has found himself defending his “satirical” look at the differences in the voting patterns of men and women after receiving a “swift and voluble” public reaction to his column on Friday, which was entitled “Time to repeal the 19th amendment?”

“People and candidates for public office should be judged on the basis of their ideas, stance on the issues, character, experience and integrity, not on the basis of age, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, religion or disability,” Mitchell wrote. “Therefore, we must repeal the 19th Amendment. Yes, the one granting suffrage to women. Because? Well, women are biased.”

Full Story: End women’s right to vote, Nevada’s largest newspaper says | Raw Story.

President Obama has signed a memorandum directing the Department of Health and Human Services to establish rules that would bar hospitals from denying visitation rights to partners of gay and lesbian patients.

Many hospitals currently restrict hospital visitation to a patient’s family members by blood or marriage. Because gay marriage is not legal in most states, partners are often unable to visit their loved ones–even in emergency situations.

Any hospital that receives federal Medicare or Medicaid money will be subject to the new rule, according to a White House official who spoke to The Washington Post.

Full Story: Obama Directs HHS To Establish Rules Ensuring Hospital Visitation Rights For Gay, Lesbian Couples.

Olson, who co-chairs Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher’s appellate practice, made that assertion while talking to reporters shortly after addressing the annual Outlaw networking dinner. Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher has hosted the dinner in its Connecticut Avenue office for the past four years to give members of the Georgetown Law Center student group that focuses on legal issues affecting gays, lesbian, and bisexuals a chance to mingle with Big Law partners.

Full Story: Ted Olson: Prop 8 Challenge Could Have Global Impact – The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times.

State lawmakers in Oklahoma argued that the Shepard Act would trample on the free speech rights of religious leaders “who preached out against the lifestyle of the victim who was attacked.” On March 10, the Oklahoma state Senate thought it was passing a bill prohibiting “local and state law enforcement agencies from sharing information about hate crimes with federal authorities if the state of Oklahoma did not recognize the crime as a hate crime by its own statutes.” Oklahoma state law does not recognize “sexual orientation or gender identity” as a special class and fails to provide gay and lesbians with hate crimes protections.

But in trying to strip gays and lesbians of protection, the Oklahoma State Senate inadvertently cited the wrong section of the U.S. code. The bill stripped rights under Title 18 U.S. Code Section 245, but protections for sexual orientation and gender identity is actually under Section 249. From the bill:

Full Story: Think Progress » Attempting To Strip Gays Of Hate Crimes Protections, Oklahoma Removes Protections For Race/Religion Instead.

Berks County Judge Scott Lash said he could not grant a divorce to Carole Ann Kern and Robin Lynn Taney because their marriage is not recognized under Pennsylvania law.

“Relief under the divorce code can only be obtained by parties who are recognized to be married,” Lash wrote in a ruling issued Thursday.

Kern, a Berks County resident, had filed a petition in October seeking to divorce Taney on grounds their marriage was irretrievably broken. The pair had married four months earlier in Brewster, Mass.

Full Story: Pa. judge refuses to grant woman same-sex divorce | AP | 03/26/2010.

A teacher in California was found to have violated a student’s First Amendment rights by disparaging religion in the classroom. The ruling could silence outspo

ken teachers.

Most weekdays, some 2,700 students crowd the sidewalks and hallways of Capistrano Valley High School, which is a quick drive from Orange County, California’s finest beaches. Capo, as the school is informally known, boasts a champion surf team as well as a prestigious academic reputation, among other distinctions.

The world’s most powerful megachurch, Saddleback, is about eight miles south of Capo; nearby are the skyline-dominating Crystal Cathedral and the nation’s largest Christian broadcast network. Non-Christian faiths, too, have set up shop in the OC, home to growing numbers of Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Zoroastrian worshipers. In fact, for all the associations of Orange County with implants and Botox and for all the TV shows that depict a shamelessly decadent lifestyle, such as “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” this is foremost a highly religious place.

All of which has come to play out in the classroom of history teacher James Corbett, the defendant in a federal lawsuit that, depending on its outcome in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, could threaten traditional notions of academic freedom.

Full Story: Teacher Sued For Bashing Christianity — Will Others Be Censored? | Civil Liberties | AlterNet.

RANDOLPH: Three thousand children are in need of adoption and are waiting for us to do the right thing. But Florida’s current adoption ban does not allow gay and lesbians to adopt in this state. In an era of very tight budgets, this cost of inaction on this issue is $2.5 million a year. It’s time to let family judges and child welfare advocates do their job by making the best standard for each child to be the only standard for deciding adoption cases. The legislature has the power to stop that right now today.

Watch it:

Full Story: Think Progress » Lawmakers introduce legislation outlawing Florida’s ban on gay adoptions..

Anti-abortion activists are screening an expertly-made documentary to black audiences across the country. Maafa 21 creates a highly selective, distorted history of the reproductive rights movement and frames abortion as a tool of eugenics and genocide.

or several years now, the religious right has been trying to appropriate the moral authority of the Civil Rights Movement. It’s an audacious strategy, given that Christian conservative politics were forged in the white Southern backlash to school integration. But it’s had some successes, particularly in rousing black churches against the gay rights movement. Now, the anti-abortion movement is making a push to enlist African Americans in their cause by framing abortion as a tool of eugenics and genocide.

The campaign is already having an impact. As the New York Times reported late last month, the overwhelmingly white Georgia Right to Life has spent more than $20,000 erecting 80 billboards around Atlanta that proclaim, “Black children are an endangered species.” The group has created a Web site, Too Many Aborted, with excellent production values, designed to portray legal abortion as a plot against the black community. Meanwhile, according to the Times, the new documentary Maafa 21: Black Genocide in 21st Century America, which purports to “trace connections among slavery, Nazi-style eugenics, birth control and abortion,” is finding an audience among black organizations nationwide. The Times quoted Markita Eddy, a sophomore at the historically black Morris Brown College, who had turned against abortion rights after seeing the film.

Full Story: Anti-Choice Doc Aims to Link Reproductive Rights to ‘Black Genocide’ | ReligionDispatches.

Today, federal judge, for the second time, granted an injunction against Congress’ unconstitutional de-funding of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) to apply to federal budget provisions signed into law by President Obama in December 2009 and ordered the United State of America and several named agencies to rescind orders cutting off funding to ACORN and its affiliates and allies. A preliminary injunction was won in December 2009 in the Center for Constitutional Rights’ (CCR) case charging Congress with violating the U.S. Constitution’s protections against Bill of Attainders and the First and Fifth Amendments in several recurring resolutions. Today’s opinion extends that protection by ordering a permanent injunction and directing agency heads to disregard the provisions denying funding and to rescind the memos that implemented the Congressional action.

CCR Legal Director Bill Quigley,

Full Story: Judge Strikes Down Congressional Ban on Funding ACORN | Center for Constitutional Rights.

Full Story: Emilie Townes: The Selma Marchers Weren’t Just Activists — They Were Believers.

“It is my advice that the law and public policy of the Commonwealth of Virginia prohibit a college or university from including ’sexual orientation,’ ‘gender identity,’ ‘gender expression,’ or like classification as a protected class within its non-discrimination policy absent specific authorization from the General Assembly,” he wrote. Colleges that have included such language in their policies — which include all of Virginia’s leading schools — have done so “without proper authority” and should “take appropriate actions to bring their policies in conformance with the law and public policy of Virginia,” Cuccinelli wrote.

Full Story: Think Progress » Virginia attorney general instructs state colleges to stop protecting gay students from discrimination..

The nation’s broadest public intoxication law gives TX cops virtually free range to arrest anyone for drunkenness — even if they’re quietly nursing a beer in a bar.

Late on a balmy Saturday night last June, six Fort Worth cops and two officers from the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission went looking for trouble. They had just raided two Hispanic bars in an industrial stretch of town and nine detainees now sat in the paddy wagon (pdf), hands bound with plastic ties. The rest of the city’s bars would soon shut down. It seemed like the night was over, except for the paperwork. Then Sergeant Richard Morris had an idea. “Hey,” he said. “Let’s go to the Rainbow Lounge.”

A half-dozen police cruisers, an unmarked sedan, and the prisoner van slid to a stop in front of the Rainbow Lounge, Fort Worth’s newest gay club, at about 1:30 a.m. on June 28, 2009 — 40 years, almost down to the minute, after New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn with billy clubs and bullhorns. Inside the bar, the officers fanned out, grabbing and arresting six patrons for public intoxication. Benjamin Guttery, a 24-year-old Army vet, says an officer told him to put down his drink, then “bulldozed” him through the crowd to the paddy wagon but then let him go. “I’m 6’8″, 250 pounds, and I had just finished my second drink,” Guttery told a local reporter. “I might have had enough to have a loose tongue, but not a loose walk or anything like that.” Another man alleges that he was slammed against a wall, elbowed, and fell on the ground, landing him in intensive care for a week with bleeding in his brain. He was charged with public intoxication and assault.

Full Story: Drinking While Brown (or Gay) in Texas Will Get You Arrested | Investigations | AlterNet.

The court ruled that the bill passed by the legislature addressed too many disparate topics and therefore violated the Oklahoma Constitution’s “single-subject” rule which requires laws only address one topic at a time. [...]

The law also would have banned abortions based on a woman’s gender preference for her child; created new responsibilities for state health agencies to gather and analyze abortion data and enforce abortion restrictions; and redefined a number of abortion-related terms used in Oklahoma law. [...]

Full Story Think Progress » Oklahoma declares anti-choice law posting details of women’s abortions online unconstitutional..

Coakley's office filed a lawsuit in July challenging the federal Defense of Marriage Act. In papers filed late Thursday, Coakley asks a judge to deem the law unconstitutional without holding a trial on the lawsuit.

Coakley argues that regulating marital status has traditionally been left to the states. She also says the federal law treats married heterosexual couples and married same-sex couples differently on Medicaid benefits and burial in veterans' cemeteries.

Massachusetts was the first state to legalize gay marriage and is the first to challenge the law.

Full Story Mass. Says Federal Marriage Law Unconstitutional – NYTimes.com.

The problem?

He's worried the US government, which calls the group a terrorist organization, will throw him in prison for 15 years as a collaborator.

So Fertig has challenged the law as the lead plaintiff in a case the Supreme Court will hear early next week.

Full Story Civil rights activist seeks to prove anti-terrorism law a violation of free speech | Raw Story.

McDonnell (R) on Feb. 5 signed an executive order that prohibits discrimination “on the basis of race, sex, color, national origin, religion, age, political affiliation, or against otherwise qualified persons with disabilities,” as well as veterans.

It rescinds the order that Gov. Tim Kaine signed Jan. 14, 2006 as one of his first actions. After promising a “fair and inclusive” administration in his inaugural address, Kaine (D) added veterans to the non-discrimination policy – and sexual orientation.

Full Story Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell Rolls Back Non-Discrimination Protections For Gay State Workers | TPMDC.

The level of public support for allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly far outpaces that in the spring of 1993, when Congress and the Clinton administration established the policy.

Civilian and military officials held their first meetings this week to begin a year-long review of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which forbids commanders to ask about service members’ sexuality and requires the discharge of openly gay men and women. President Obama called for the policy’s repeal last month in his State of the Union address, and the military’s top civilian and military leadership has also expressed personal support for a repeal

Full Story 75% back letting gays serve openly – washingtonpost.com.

A funny thing happened after Adm. Mike Mullen called for gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military: A curious silence befell much of the right. If this were a Sherlock Holmes story, it would be the case of the attack dogs that did not bark.

John McCain, commandeering the spotlight as usual, did fulminate against the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” But the press focus on McCain, the crazy man in Washington’s attic, was misleading. His yapping was an exception, not the rule.

Many of his Republican colleagues said little or nothing. The right’s noise machine was on mute. The Fox News report on Mullen’s testimony was fair and balanced — and brief. The network dropped the subject entirely in the Hannity-O’Reilly hothouse of prime time that night. Only ratings-desperate CNN gave a fleeting platform to the old homophobic clichés. Michael O’Hanlon, an “expert” from the Brookings Institution, speculated that “18-year-old, old-fashioned, testosterone-laden” soldiers who are “tough guys” might object to those practicing “alternative forms of lifestyle,” which he apparently views as weak and testosterone-deficient. His only prominent ally was the Family Research Council, which issued an inevitable “action alert” demanding a stop to “the sexualization of our military.”

Full Story Op-Ed Columnist – Smoke the Bigots Out of the Closet – NYTimes.com.

In his speech Thursday to attendees, former Republican congressman Tom Tancredo invoked the loaded pre-civil rights era buzzword, saying that President Barack Obama was elected because “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country.”

Southern states used literacy tests as part of an effort to deny suffrage to African American voters prior to Johnson-era civil rights laws.

Full Story Tea party opening speaker suggests blacks be kept from voting | Raw Story.

OPS:  If they get away with this, will the Jews be next?

Today, the Senate Armed Services Committee held hearing on the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, the first such session in 17 years. During the hearing, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Michael Mullen made the powerful announcement that he personally it is time to allow gay men and women to serve openly:

MULLEN: Mr. Chairman, speaking for myself and myself only, it is my personal belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do. No matter how I look at this issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy that forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.

Watch it:

Full Story Think Progress » Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mullen: ‘It is my personal belief’ that repealing DADT is ‘the right thing to do.’.

It turns out that the $199,530.00 funding for his efforts come from only four main sources, all from outside of D.C. according reports filed with the D.C. Office of Campaign Finance. … Jackson’s largest contributor is his own Maryland church based non-profit group, High Impact Leadership Coalition. [...]

The next largest contributor is the Colorado headquartered national group, Focus on the Family. … [T]hey were able to contribute $40,000 to harming gay families in D.C. … National Organization for Marriage (NOM), the national group dedicated to keeping gay people from marrying contributed $32,138.00. … Family Research Council, the D.C. based national gay bashing group, donated $25,000 through it’s 501(c)(4) lobbying organization, Family Research Council –Action.

Full Story Think Progress » All the funding for anti-marriage equality campaign in the nation’s capital came from outside of D.C..

The attorneys working to overturn Prop 8 concluded most of their evidence and testimony last week, and this week the supporters of the gay marriage ban presented only two witnesses, pared down from a much larger number.

MONDAY JAN 25

Attorneys David Boies and Theodore Olson, who argued on opposite sides of the Bush v. Gore case before the Supreme Court back in December 2000, kicked off the week by showing some videos to give the court an idea of the type of advertising run during the 2008 campaign for Prop 8. The idea was to show that the motivation behind the initiative was not to save marriage, but rather to discriminate against gay people, largely for religious reasons. The videos included Ron Prentice, CEO of the California Family Council and executive director of ProtectMarriage.com, saying things like, “what gays and lesbians do in private does not bother me, but I do not want children exposed to it.”

Then the defense introduced their first witness, Claremont McKenna College professor Kenneth Miller. Before he could say a word, however, plaintiff’s attorney Boies objected on the grounds that Miller is not an expert on the subject of gay and lesbian political power, and that he has done no research on the subject. Boies was overruled and Miller took the stand.

Full Story OpEdNews – Article: Prop 8 Trial Week 3: The Cliffhanger.

harry1 On June 9, 2006, “three prisoners at Guantánamo [Bay] died suddenly and violently.” The commander of Guantánamo at the time, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, immediately declared that the deaths were “suicides,” adding that he believed that the suicides were “not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

The conclusion that the deaths were suicides was largely uncritically accepted by the press at the time, and the matter was considered closed. Then, late last year, an investigation by Seton Hall law school faculty and students found “serious and unresolved contradictions” in the military’s report on the incidents, and even declared that it was an “obvious cover-up.”

Now, following the Seton Hall investigation, Sergeant Joe Hickman and other soldiers stationed at Guantánamo have informed Harper’s Magazine’s Scott Horton that they suspect the three prisoners did not commit suicide but rather were killed by interrogators. Horton reports that Hickman — a stalwart solder who enlisted after being inspired by Ronald Reagan (whom he called “the greatest president we’ve ever had“) — was told by Navy guards and clinic staff that the men had been died because they had rags stuffed down their throats:

Full Story Think Progress » Will The Justice Department Investigate A Possible Cover-Up Of Homicides At Guantánamo Bay?.

The situation has prompted a new push in Congress, led by Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, to require that all records relating to the life and death of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. be located, reviewed, and released by a review board at the National Archives similar to those established for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and for Nazi war criminals.

Kerry’s plan to introduce legislation this week, however, is seen as only the first step in a broader movement to force the government to disclose what it knows – and did – about violence against blacks during the civil rights era, including scores of unsolved lynching and bombing cases.

Full Story US Cloaks Case Files Involving Civil Rights | CommonDreams.org.

In the filing, U.S. senators James Inhofe (Okla.) and Roger Wicker (Miss.) and 37 House Republicans align with Bishop Harry Jackson, pastor of Hope Christian Church, in asking the court to reverse a D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics decision prohibiting the same-sex marriage question to be put before voters.

Full Story Think Progress » 39 Congressional Republicans want to trample on D.C.’s right to pass same-sex marriage law..

How did we get to the point where denial of abortion funding for poor women has apparently become an acceptable tradeoff in the campaign for health insurance reform? Here, the former president of Catholics for Choice traces the history and tells us why justice demands the immediate repeal of the Hyde Amendment.

January 4, 2010

The debate about abortion coverage in health insurance reform is the latest disappointing moment in the efforts of feminists to ensure that the social transformation Roe promised women was equally available to all women, including those who were dependent on the government for health care. To hear President Obama call the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of federal Medicaid funds for abortion, an “American tradition” is only the most recent of many misstatements about what a fundamental right entails. It seems that prochoice legislators, following the president’s lead, now explicitly consider that throwing women who cannot afford to pay for their own abortions under the bus is a reasonable compromise between those who favor and those who oppose legal abortion and a sensible concession to those who think abortion is immoral.

The compromise is the logical outcome of one of Roe’s essential weaknesses: the fact that the constitutional right to abortion was based on the principle of privacy rather than non discrimination. A private right, even a fundamental one, did not, according to the Supreme Court, require the state to pay for its implementation.

The Hyde Amendment, which was introduced in Congress starting in 1973 and passed for the first time in 1976, was the first and most important defeat the abortion rights movement sustained—and it embodied the profound disapproval and stigmatization of abortion that no other restriction on the right to choose represents. When affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1980 in the Harris v. McRae case, it sent the message that abortion was immoral and that no taxpayer should be obliged to pay for something they think is immoral.

Full Story Reclaiming Legal Abortion as a Fundamental Right By Frances Kissling.

But when David Gregory asked former Bush CIA director Michael Hayden on Meet The Press today if we are “effectively ethnically profiling” potential terrorism suspects, Hayden pushed back against the idea of ethnic profiling as a solution:

HAYDEN: I’m not quite sure the context in which you’re asking the question David about ethnically profiling, but with regard to intelligence…

GREGORY: Isn’t there a profile of who we think the terrorists are?

HAYDEN: Of course there is, but it’s based more on behavior. I mean, for example, the individual in question here, Abdulmutallab, I mean he would not have automatically fit a profile if you were standing next to him in the visa line at Dulles, for example. So it’s the behavior that we’re attempting to profile. And it’s the behavior, these little bits and pieces of information that were in the databases that we didn’t quite stitch together at this point in time. But it wasn’t a question of ethnicity or religion. Those are contributing factors, but it’s what people do that we should be paying attention to.

via Think Progress » Chertoff: More Ethnic ‘Profiling’ Could Be ‘Misleading And Arguably Dangerous’.

This year, I’m not keeping score of feminist victories and defeats. That strategy feels artificially black-and-white and imposes a false sense of closure on an ongoing process. Instead, I’m looking back on those times in 2009 when feminism felt strong and when feminists spoke out — the times when feminists asserted ourselves and our belief in equality, often in the face of powerful opposition, and even when it seemed like no one was listening.

A feminist moment isn’t only when we’re dancing in the streets celebrating a victory, although that certainly counts. We also reaffirm our commitment as feminists when we continue to advocate for equality despite roadblocks, setbacks and challenges. A woman running for president of the United States is a defining feminist moment, and it is also one when she loses. At such turning points, we must reassess the state of our movement and rethink its direction. What follows is a list of some of my defining feminist moments for the year. They’re not all positive — some, like the health care reform process, were mega-downers — but they were the moments when I felt the most sisterhood.

Full Story 10 Defining Feminist Moments of 2009 | Reproductive Justice and Gender | AlterNet.

The order comes as part of Obama’s promise to push government to err on the side of disclosure as it tackles the need to keep certain information from the public.

In a post on the White House blog, William H. Leary, the senior director of records and access management at the National Security Council, writes that the effort is aimed at shifting the burden of defending secrecy to the government.

“While the Government must be able to prevent the public disclosure of information that would compromise the national security, a democratic government accountable to the people must be as transparent as possible and must not withhold information for self-serving reasons or simply to avoid embarrassment,” Leary wrote.

Full Story 44 – Obama orders creation of declassification center.

OPS:  Talk is cheap. We’ll see.  So far, the transparency promised has not materialized.

A key pro-choice House Democrat, working on health care in Congress, hinted on Monday that said she might be willing to support the Senate’s abortion language.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) who has been tasked by leadership with helping hammer out a compromise on abortion between the two chambers, said she was not thrilled with either the House or Senate legislation’s provisions. But in an interview with the Huffington Post, the Connecticut Democrat did say she would support the Senate’s version of abortion-related language provided that she could confirm her belief that it did not go beyond current law.

“There are some questions I still have,” DeLauro said. “And that’s why I want to see this side-by-side with the language. It’s not Stupak-Pitts [the House's language]. So, it’s already [an improvement]. And it would appear to be current law. I would have to look at the questions that surround it, et cetera. But if it is current law then it would be something that was my goal at the outset: let’s maintain current law and then let’s pass health care.”

Full Story Rosa DeLauro, Key Pro-Choice Dem, Makes Case For Senate Abortion Language.

“This issue shows exactly why Congress needs to repeal” the law, which prohibits federal benefits to same-sex couples, government lawyer Elaine Kaplan said in a message to attorneys for court employee Karen Golinski.

One of Golinski’s lawyers, Jenny Pizer of the gay-rights group Lambda Legal, said Kaplan’s response was “something we might have expected from the Bush or Reagan administration, and not from a ‘fierce advocate’ of LBGT rights,” as President Obama has described himself.

The case is one of two in which the Office of Personnel Management has balked at orders by judges on the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to provide coverage to the same-sex spouses of federal employees.

Full Story Feds defy order to provide same-sex benefits.

Full Story Think Progress » Marriage equality is now legal in the nation’s capital..

By the way, I don’t use the the other f- word unless I’m quoting someone saying it. This is definitely a quote.

Maybe McDonalds corporate will again try to remind us that they are an lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) friendly organization, but individual restaurants seem to have a history of discriminating against LGBT people. Remember Kentucky’s “faggot” story? Remember New York’s Christina Sforza story? I do.

Full Story Pam’s House Blend:: An Orlando McDonalds Manager To A Trans Applicant: “We Do Not Hire F**gots”.

WASHINGTON — Senators debating health care legislation are headed for a clash over abortion, the issue that threatened to derail the bill in the House.

Anticipating the showdown, hundreds of abortion rights supporters gathered on Capitol Hill Wednesday to call on senators to keep new abortion restrictions out of the health care bill. Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., plans to unveil an anti-abortion amendment as early as Thursday that abortions rights supporters inside the Senate and out say they can’t support.

Nelson says he won’t vote for the underlying bill without his strong abortion language. But opponents say his amendment doesn’t have the votes to pass. The outcome could be critical in determining the fate of President Barack Obama’s signature health overhaul agenda.

At issue is how abortions would be handled in the health care bills. In the House, a bloc of anti-abortion Democrats forced Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to accept restrictions that outraged liberals as the price for passing the Democratic health care bill last month.

Full Story Reproductive Rights Showdown Looms in Senate | CommonDreams.org.

But division supervisors refused to “approve further contact with state authorities on this matter,” according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office auditing the activities of the division from 2001 to 2007.

Congress is set to release that report, which did not identify the state in question, on Thursday as the House of Representatives takes up its first oversight hearing of the Civil Rights Division under the Obama administration.

The 180-page report, obtained by The New York Times, is densely packed with statistics about civil rights enforcement by the division’s sections. The accountability office also examined a sampling of matters that were closed without further action, finding several cases — including the curtailed voter intimidation inquiry — in which supervisors rejected the recommendations of career lawyers to go forward.

Full Story Report Examines Civil Rights Enforcement During Bush Years – NYTimes.com.

The State Senate defeated a bill on Wednesday that would legalize same-sex marriage, after an emotional debate that touched on civil rights, family and history. The vote means that the bill, pushed by Gov. David A. Paterson, is effectively dead for the year and dashes the optimism of gay rights advocates, who have had setbacks recently in several key states.

The bill was defeated by a decisive margin of 38 to 24. The Democrats, who have a bare, one-seat majority, did not have enough votes to pass the bill without some Republican support, but not a single Republican senator voted for the measure. Still, several key Democrats who were considered swing votes also opposed the bill.

Mr. Paterson made an unusual trip to the Senate floor minutes after the last vote was cast, saying, “These victories come and so do the losses, but you keep on trying.”

The state’s Roman Catholic bishops, who had actively lobbied against the bill, said they were pleased by the vote.

Full Story New York State Senate Votes Down Gay Marriage Bill – NYTimes.com.

In recent days, Pastor Rick Warren has come under fire for refusing to condemn an Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda that would make some homosexual acts punishable by death. “[I]t is not my personal calling as a pastor in America to comment or interfere in the political process of other nations,” said Warren. On his Twitter feed, Warren is now trying to change the subject, claiming that “no one” cared when 146,000 Christians died last year (so why should he now care about gay men and women in Africa?):

Full Story Think Progress » Rick Warren wonders why there’s so much fuss over the rights of gays..

According to the State Department, there are as many as 200,000 forced laborers in the US, with some 17,500 arriving every year.

“This is a hidden crime,” Louis C. de Baca, the State Department's ambassador for human trafficking, told CNN. “The very nature of this crime masks it from us.”

CNN reported on the case of 30 Thai men, who were promised jobs picking tobacco on North Carolina by a company called Million Express Manpower. The company required the men to pay the equivalent of $11,000 for the necessary visa and transportation.

Full Story CNN finds modern-day slaves in US | Raw Story.

Thirty-five-year-old David Hackbart, of Butler, made the gesture at a driver in April 2006, then did it again when someone yelled at him — realizing only later the second person was a police officer.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued saying Hackbart’s gesture was constitutionally protected speech. A federal judge postponed a September trial indefinitely at the request of attorneys on both sides.

Council gave initial approval to the settlement Tuesday, but must vote again next week to finally approve the payment.

No court documents settling the case have been filed.

Full Story Pittsburgh Man Gives Cop Middle Finger, Cop Gives Man Ticket, City Gives Man $50,000.

Over at Daily Kos, Barbara Morrill complains that The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen “is Karl Rove dressed up in pseudo-sadness” because — according to her — Cohen today “whines that the Attorney General announced that the United States follows the rule of law” by giving trials to 5 Guantanamo detainees. I don’t disagree with Morrill’s general assessment of Cohen, but his point today is actually the exact opposite of what she describes. Cohen wasn’t accusing Obama of lacking moral clarity because he’s giving trials to a few of the 9/11 defendants; rather, Cohen argues that the lack of moral clarity comes from denying trials to many, perhaps most, of the detainees, who will receive only military commissions or be subjected to indefinite detention with no trials:

The Barack Obama of that Philadelphia speech would not have let his attorney general, Eric Holder, announce the new policy for trying Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other Sept. 11 defendants in criminal court, as if this were a mere departmental issue and not one of momentous policy. And the Barack Obama of the speech would have enunciated a principle of law and not an ad hoc system in which some alleged terrorists are tried in civilian courts and some before military tribunals. What is the principle in that: What works, works? Try putting that one on the Liberty Bell.

I point to this because it highlights an extreme logical fallacy coming from some Obama supporters ever since Holder announced the Guantanamo policy — a fallacy that is the inevitable by-product of the administration’s incoherent positions. In order to defend Obama, it’s necessary simultaneously to embrace these self-negating premises:

Full Story Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.

I T had a diary on this order yesterday,  but I don’t think it made it clear enough what the sweeping implications of this order are.

Read I T’s diary for the background of the order (or an article like this one in the L.A. Times, Judge orders compensation for gay couple who were denied healthcare, other benefits), but I here point out two passages from Reinhardt’s order that seem to me to declare that half of DOMA is unconstitutional.

First, there is this footnote 5 on page 10 of the order:

Full Story Daily Kos: State of the Nation.

The federal agency that oversees benefits for government employees “shall cease at once its interference with the jurisdiction of this tribunal,” Judge Alex Kozinski said in response to the Office of Personnel Management’s rejection of his earlier ruling in the case.

He told the agency to let Karen Golinski, a staff attorney at the court’s headquarters in San Francisco, enroll her wife, Amy Cunninghis, in the family health plan that already covers their 6-year-old son.

He also ordered court officials to reimburse Golinski for the costs of buying insurance for Cunninghis since she applied for coverage in September 2008. That coverage now costs $429 a month, Golinski’s lawyer said.

Full Story Give in on same-sex benefits, judge orders feds.

In 2005, the state of Texas adopted an amendment to its Constitution that said marriage in the state could only be between one man and one woman. The amendment also declared: “This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.” Now, Barbara Ann Radnofsky, a Houston lawyer and Democratic candidate for attorney general, is saying that the second section effectively “eliminates marriage in Texas”:

She calls it a “massive mistake” and blames the current attorney general, Republican Greg Abbott, for allowing the language to become part of the Texas Constitution. Radnofsky called on Abbott to acknowledge the wording as an error and consider an apology. She also said that another constitutional amendment may be necessary to reverse the problem.

“You do not have to have a fancy law degree to read this and understand what it plainly says,” said Radnofsky, who will be at Texas Christian University today as part of a five-city tour to kick off her campaign.

Full Story Think Progress » Texas gay marriage ban may have outlawed all marriages in Texas..

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran an article asking readers what was the “craziest thing you’ve ever eaten” and invited them to submit the oddest foods they’ve consumed, saying,

How about you? Have you gone out on a limb for a meal? What’d you try? Did you like it? Have you had friends or family who have tried stuff on a dare?

The school employee, who later lost his job, posted an anonymous, one-word comment that referred, in vulgar terms, to a woman’s anatomy.

The comment was deleted by administrators, then reposted by the reader.

After it was posted a second time, the administrators didn’t just delete the comment, but took it one step further: Kurt Greenbaum, the director of social media at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, found the commenter’s IP address and traced it to a local school.

Full Story School Employee Loses Job Over Vulgar Comment Online.

Full Story Colbert Destroys R.I. Governor For Denying Gay Couples Death Rights (VIDEO).

It all started when he refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance in a West Fork, Arkansas elementary school.

Speaking to CNN’s John Roberts on Monday, Will said he remained seated four straight days while his classmates repeated the words, “with liberty and justice for all.”

“I was analyzing the meanings of it, because I want to be a lawyer,” he said. “… There isn’t really liberty and justice for all. There’s … Gays and lesbians can’t marry. There’s still a lot of racism and sexism in the world. Yeah.”

Eventually, the substitute teacher started giving Will “grief” over his refusal to repeat the words. “What did you say to that teacher?” Roberts asked.

via Ten-year-old refuses to recite pledge until gays allowed to marry | Raw Story.

Now, the movement to repeal the ban on gay men and women from serving openly in the military has gained even more momentum. Three former military chaplains are announcing today that they support a full repeal of the DADT. In a Q&A released by VoteVets, the three men, Charles D. Camp, Chaplain (Colonel), USA (Ret.), John F. Gundlach, CAPT, CHC, USN (Ret.), and Jerry Rhyne, Chaplain (Colonel), USAF (Ret.), also addressed implementation concerns regarding a repeal:

What would be the impact of changing the current law on unit cohesion and morale?

The 2009 Joint Forces Quarterly article states clearly, “After a careful examination, there is no scientific evidence to support the claim that unit cohesion will be negatively affected if homosexuals serve openly.” A 1993 RAND Corp. report concludes the same, as do several other military-commissioned reports. In addition, 68 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan troops said, according to a 2006 Zogby poll, they either knew for certain (23%) or suspected (45%) there were gays in their own unit. That means there are tens of thousands of known gay service members currently working and fighting alongside their straight peers, and there is no demonstrable negative impact on unit morale, cohesion or combat readiness. In fact, 73% of troops in the poll said they were “comfortable” in the presence of gay peers. [...]

via Think Progress » Retired Military Chaplains Announce Support For Repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.