What Three Years of LGBT progress looks like: White House.
At the end of January, New York’s Conservative Party, the most influential of the minor parties that complicate the state’s politics, celebrated its 50th anniversary at a Holiday Inn near the Albany airport, a vast and dingy venue that reminded me of athlete housing left over from the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Politicians like former Gov. George Pataki, who owed his election to the Conservatives, came to pay homage to the party for its record of steering the state’s politics to the right.
But one calamity darkened the mood of nostalgia and self-congratulation: the passage last summer of a law legalizing same-sex marriage. For many New Yorkers, the June 24 marriage vote was a rare moment of goosebump drama from a capital better known for tedious dysfunction. For the Conservatives, and in particular for Mike Long, the ex-marine who has been the party’s chairman for nearly half of its history, the vote was a triple humiliation.
It was, first, a defining triumph for the state’s ambitious new Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo. Second, it was an abandonment by Republican leaders, who had invoked party discipline to kill similar legislation in 2009. This time the Republican leaders publicly opposed gay marriage, but knowing that both public opinion and lobbying muscle were coalescing on the other side, they freed their members to vote as they wished. And that led to what was, for Mike Long, an unforgivable betrayal. All four of the Republican senators who voted for the bill and provided the necessary margin for it to pass had been elected with the Conservative endorsement, a prize for which opposition to gay marriage was an essential litmus test. Two of those wayward senators would not have won their seats without the Conservative boost.
Try as they might to explain away the defections — perhaps it was the lure of money from gay hedge-fund billionaires, or some devilish deal with Cuomo — the Conservatives feared that this defeat, if not punished, could mean an ominous loss of influence.
The four Republican apostates now had targets on their backs.
Read the whole thing here - definitely worth it.
From the Brisbane Times:
A Queensland MP railing against same-sex civil unions has accused gay people of attacking his cultural values and demanded they “explain their heterophobia”.
Independent MP Rob Messenger said today gay people should stop causing him distress, insisting he respected them but they should also respect his belief “that marriage is a divine gift exclusively to a man and a woman”.
Mr Messenger argued he would feel discriminated against if gay people tried to “interfere” with his values, in a letter emailed to media outlets headlined: “Homophobic or Heterophobic about Civil Union?”
I am surprised that he did not seek to use the “but I have gay friends!” excuse. Really pathetic rhetoric from a man who has absolutely no place in modern political discourse— we need to out these people for who they are and what they believe in.
