by itabix | Jul 29, 2016 | Assimilation, Celebration, Hillary Rodham Clinton, SCOTUS
That’s what she said. And so, my friends, it is with humility, determination, and boundless confidence in Ameria’s promise, that I accept your nomination for president of the United States. —Hillary Clinton, Acceptance Speech, the Democratic National...
by itabix | Jun 10, 2016 | Assimilation, Barack Obama, Celebration, Coming out, Coming to terms with the past, Fighting Back, Freeing yourself of it, Queer, SCOTUS, Sexuality, The future, The Gay Revolution, Transgender
Last night, Rachel Maddow interviewed Elizabeth Warren. Warren endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Presidency and, toward the end of her comments, spoke of Clinton’s character and what she has shown through the long primary fight. (counter 8:00) She won because she’s a...
by itabix | May 12, 2016 | Barack Obama, Celebration, Fighting, Fighting Back, SCOTUS, The effects of bigotry, Transgender
Amazing things have been happening in the last four days. Last week, the Department of Justice delivered a five-day ultimatum to the Governor and State of North Carolina and the University of North Carolina, and others, which fell due Monday. Instead of giving in and...
by itabix | May 2, 2016 | Barack Obama, DOMA & DADT, London April 23 2016, SCOTUS
Friday, April 23, President Obama spoke with a group of 500 youth leaders at a town hall meeting in London, and among the students who spoke were a number who raised questions that involved the relationship between principles and tactics in social movements like LGBTQ...
by itabix | Feb 29, 2016 | Fighting Back, SCOTUS, The future
Bruce Hay, a faculty member in the Law School at Harvard, has written an essay on Antonin Scalia, published on Salon. See here. He speaks of being a “naive young fool,” when he first took a job as one of Scalia’s law clerks. He concludes this way: He [Scalia] died as...
by itabix | Feb 25, 2016 | Barack Obama, Coming to terms with the past, Federal Court Cases, SCOTUS, The future
At first, writers found good things to say of Antonin Scalia. From the day of his death (February 13, 2016), TV commentators took the he-celebrated-the-rule-of-law-despite-his-conservatism route when writing obituaries or appreciations of him. They said he was...
by itabix | Sep 7, 2015 | Fighting Back, Marriage, Marriage cases, SCOTUS, Sexuality, the South
I was in the Back Bay Thursday, on the second floor of the Library, when I saw the headline, US Clerk jailed for gay marriage defiance; dispute goes on. I was on the subway coming back to Somerville, ruminating on the headline. It made people think of the sixties. I...
by itabix | Jun 26, 2015 | Barack Obama, Celebration, SCOTUS
I began to realize yesterday that the SCOTUS decision on marriage would probably come down today, and I already knew that Rev. Clementa Pinckney’s funeral was going to be today, with the President giving the eulogy, and it occasionally crossed my mind that they might...
by itabix | Apr 28, 2015 | Marriage cases, SCOTUS
First, the name of the case is Obergefell v. Hodges. The link to one of the online pronunciation sites is here. Lyle Denniston, of SCOTUSblog, has put up a post “Same-Sex Marriage: The Decisive Questions.” This is fairly technical, but, like anything from Denniston on...
by itabix | Apr 20, 2015 | Marriage cases, SCOTUS
I was in the Institute for Contemporary Art yesterday, at an exhibition entitled When Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South. I left South Carolina temporarily in 1957 and permanently in 1963. While I’ve not always been interested in what was going on...
by itabix | Apr 17, 2015 | 10th Circuit, Marriage cases, SCOTUS
SCOTUSBLOG.COM has introduced a seriously good series by Michael Klarman. They say, “As part of our expanded coverage of this month’s oral arguments in the challenges to state bans on same-sex marriage, we are pleased to present this post by Michael Klarman on the...
by itabix | Apr 15, 2015 | 10th Circuit, Marriage cases, SCOTUS
Dahlia Lithwick of Slate proposes that the gay marriage cases will be the most important gay rights cases ever. I think everybody agrees. These cases will be argued on April 28, 2015, in two weeks, with a decision in late June. Between now and then, it behooves us to...
by itabix | Mar 26, 2015 | Fighting Back, SCOTUS
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a badass. Dahlia Lithwick, in Slate, tells us how she got that way and whether she’s happy being called that, and whether it’s OK for people who support the ascendency of women to use terms like that to describe a longtime feminist. It’s a great...
by itabix | Jan 16, 2015 | Marriage cases, SCOTUS
So, they took ‘em! This puts us in a different place entirely. Now the Supreme Court has granted the petitions from Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Having accepted that a split in the Circuit Courts is a bad thing, they pretty much had to, to resolve the...
by itabix | Jun 26, 2013 | SCOTUS
What we are looking at here is a developing definition of gay man that is very porous. There isn’t really such a thing. Alfred Kinsey collected data on sexual histories that resulted in his creation of a seven point scale in which he said everyone could be placed....
