NBC News released today a leaked copy it had obtained of the memo that the Obama administration has created that it claims justifies its murdering of anyone whom it considers its enemies, including its own citizens, anywhere in the world . According to the BBC: [Read more…]
For nonbelievers like me, one of the most irritating aspects of the US tax system is the tax-exemption given to churches under the section of the code known as 501(c)(3) that is meant to provide tax relief for organizations that improve the general welfare. This topic has been discussed before in the context of whether churches that overtly take political stands should continue to receive that benefit and I concluded that it was unlikely that the IRS or the courts would eliminate it. [Read more…]
Janson Wu is a staff lawyer with GLAD (Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders) who last year won the David Carliner Public Interest Award given by the American Constitution Society for his work for equality. He played a key role in persuading the New Hampshire legislature to pass marriage equality legislation in 2010 and more recently worked with a 12-year old trangender girl named Nicole Maines in beating back an attempt to create an exemption to Maine’s anti-discrimination laws that, if passed, would require trangender people to use the bathroom that matched their sex at birth. [Read more…]
In addition to the Boy Scouts, the National Football League may be the only major organization with a male membership that seems to think that there are no gay people in its ranks, even thought it should be obvious by now to even the dimmest bulb that gay people are present in every area of work and life and the only difference is whether the climate allows them to be open or not. But just as the Boy Scouts are beginning to take tentative steps towards acceptance of gays, so is the NFL. In fact, things are moving quite rapidly over there, with players from both the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers, the teams playing in today’s Super Bowl game, calling for equal treatment of gays. [Read more…]
The US government routinely invokes its right to keep things secret and the courts are loath to overrule them whenever the government wraps itself with the cloak of national security. For example, consider a recent ruling by a federal appeals court. [Read more…]
The US Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments on some same-sex marriage cases in late March with its rulings expected to come towards the end of its term in the summer. The constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that defines marriage as between a man and a woman is one of the cases pending before them. [Read more…]
France has been steadily moving to implement a promise made by its president Francois Hollande to legalize same-sex marriage, despite the Catholic Church and right wing groups mobilizing large protests against it, similar to what they have done in the US. [Read more…]
In a lighter vein, That Mitchell and Webb Look struggles with some of the same issues of racism that this blog has been grappling with in the last few days. [Read more…]
Politics often features heated rhetoric. Hyperbolic language is often deliberately used by politicians in order to achieve more modest goals like electoral gains but, like a controlled burn in a forest that suddenly breaks its boundaries and wreaks havoc, it can take on a life of its own that its originators can no longer control. [Read more…]