Black Gay Nominee To NJ High Court Unlikely To Be Confirmed

New Jersey Star-Ledger

Rod 2.0 is reporting that Republican Governor Chris Christie's Republican, Black, gay nominee to the New Jersey Supreme Court Bruce Harris is unlikely to be confirmed by the Democratic Party-controlled State Legislature.

The New Jersey Star-Ledger reports:

A group of black state legislators announced its opposition to Gov. Chris Christie's choice of a gay, black Republican for the Supreme Court on Thursday, mounting evidence that Democrats were ready to reject the second of the governor's high court picks.

The New Jersey Legislative Black Caucus told The Associated Press that attorney Bruce Harris's legal qualifications fall short of the high standard required of the court's seven justices. No blacks currently sit on the court.

"The nomination of Mr. Harris sends the wrong message , that we can only achieve diversity on the Supreme Court through lowering the bar for qualifications," said Sen. Ron Rice, the caucus leader. "In a state with many distinguished African-American lawyers and judges, nothing could be further from the truth."

The Republican governor failed to reappoint the court's only black justice in 2010, touching off a firestorm among Democrats. Justice John Wallace had two years to go before reaching the mandatory retirement age of 70.

The governor nominated Harris, a 61-year-old Morris County mayor, and Phil Kwon, a 45-year-old with a top spot in the state attorney general's office, to fill two open court slots in January. Democrats rejected Kwon in March over ongoing concerns regarding cash deposits from a liquor store owned by his wife and mother. Kwon, who was born in South Korea and came to the United States when he was 6, would have been the first member of the court to be born outside the United States and its first Asian-American member.

Interestingly, the Star-Ledger editorialized Sunday in favor of the Harris nomination. Only time will tell if that will have any impact on the votes necessary to lead to confirmation of New Jersey's first openly gay State Supreme Court justice.

POLL: Maryland Supports Marriage Equality 57-37

A new poll shows that Maryland voters would likely vote to retain their state's marriage equality law if a referendum on the measure were to qualify for the  November 2012 ballot. Wide attention has been given to the new result that a majority of Black Marylanders for the first time say that they support marriage equality as well, 55% to 36%, which is an almost about-face reversal from previous polls, and comes just a few weeks after President Obama publicly endorsed marriage equality on May 9th.

Also in the new poll by PPP, a majority of Maryland likely voters also say that they support marriage equality (52% to 39% with 9% "unsure"). The poll used an oversample of African-Americans and was conducted May 14th-May 21st. The margin of error overall is ±3.4 points and for Black voters it is ±4.9 points.

2011 Nebula Award Winners Announced

The 2011 Nebula Award winners were announced last weekend. The winner of the Best Novel was  Among Others  by Jo Walton, which is also nominated for the 2011 Hugo Award. I have not read Among Others and really don't have any intention to (I might take a look at it if it becomes a rare Nebula-Hugo winner). The nominees were announced in February 2012, and included China Mieville's Embassytown (see my review) and Jack McDevitt's Firebird. I have started reading McDevitt's Alex Benedict series, which Firebird is the latest entry.

As part of the Nebula Awards, two of my favorite female science fiction authors, Connie Willis and Octavia Butler were also recognized. Willis was named a "Grand Master" of Science Fiction, and Butler was posthumously given the Solstice award.

The Hugos will be announced in late August at WorldCon in Chicago.

Hat/tip to Whatever.

Eye Candy: Gabriel "Carioca" from MundoMais

Gabriel is another model I found at the Brazilian website, MundoMais. Previous MundoMais finds are Filipe and Flavio. According to MundoMais his name is Gabriel Carioca, but I think that means "Gabriel from Rio" in Portuguese. The website says he is 25-years-old and  that's about all the information I can find on him. I still think he's more than handsome enough to qualify as Eye Candy, since I have said many times, "hawt is hawt" and I have a thing for Brazilian guys anyway. :)

Doesn't everyone?

New Poll Shows Dramatic Shift Towards Marriage Equality

A new poll from the ABC/Washington Post poll shows a dramatic shift towards marriage equality following President Obama's declaration that he thinks same-sex couples should be allowed to get married. The top line number is that an astonishing 53% of respondents say they support legal same-sex marriage while only 39% say they think it should not be legal.

Overall, 53 percent of Americans say gay marriage should be legal, hitting a high mark in support while showing a dramatic turnaround from just six years ago, when just 36 percent thought it should be legal. Thirty-nine percent, a new low, say gay marriage should be illegal. 

The poll also finds that 59 percent of African Americans say they support same-sex marriage, up from an average of 41 percent in polls leading up to Obama’s announcement of his new position on the matter. Though statistically significant, it is a tentative result because of the relatively small sample of black voters in the poll. 

[...] 

Americans divide about evenly — 49 to 46 percent — on whether gay-marriage laws should be made at the state or federal level. Most backers of same-sex marriage support a federal approach, while opponents prefer letting states decide. That is a stark shift from 2004, when a CBS News-New York Times poll found widespread support for federal authority over gay marriage among its opponents, not its supporters.

Amusingly, now that they are losing the war for public opinion heterosexual supremacists are arguing that polls on marriage equality are not important (and that the polls are wrong). The only polls that matter, they say, is the results at the ballot box. It will be interesting to see what they say once they start losing at the ballot box as well.

We shall see this November!

2012 FRENCH OPEN: Day 1

The second major tournament of the year, Roland Garros, began in Paris today. Two Americans in the twilight of their careers, Andy Roddick and Venus Williams, took the court and had contrasting results. Roddick, playing with a very pedestrian win-loss record of 7-9 for 2012 lost in the first round of a grand slam tournament for the first time since 2007 by falling to hometown favorite Nicolas Mahut 6-3 6-3 4-6 6-2.

Venus, playing in her first grand slam match since she withdrew from the 2011 US Open after revealing she suffers from Sjogren's Syndrome (an energy sapping auto-immune disorder), started off slowly but eventually won her first round match against Paula Ormaechea 4-6 6-1 6-3. Unfortunately, she will almost certainly play World #3 Agnieska Radwanska in the next round. I don't see her getting through that match, despite sporting a 5-2 career head-to-head against the red-hot Polish player who has the most wins on tour this year.

Other players to watch who survived Day 1 were 2010 French Open finalist Samantha Stosur, #5 seed Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Angelique Kerber, Juan Martin del Potro, Fernando Verdasco and 2009 French Open champion Svetlana Kuznetsova.

Analysis Of Marriage Equality On Marriage Rates

This above graphic comes from an analysis by Slate magazine of marriage rates in jurisdictions which have legalized marriage equality (Massachusetts, Iowa, Vermont, Connecticut, New Hampshire and District of Columbia) versus the national marriage rate. Do you see a trend or correlation? Me neither!

Neither does Slate, according to "Does Gay Marriage Destroy Marriage?":

Start with Massachusetts, which endorsed gay marriage in May 2004. That year, the state saw a 16 percent increase in marriage. The reason is, obviously, that gay couples who had been waiting for years to get married were finally able to tie the knot. In the years that followed, the marriage rate normalized but remained higher than it was in the years preceding the legalization. So all in all, there’s no reason to worry that gay marriage is destroying  marriage in Massachusetts. 

The other four states that have legalized gay marriage—New York, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, and New Hampshire—have done it more recently, somewhere between 2008 and 2011. But from the little data we have, it looks as if the pattern will be more or less the same—a temporary jump in marriage followed by a return to virtually the same marriage rates as before gay marriage became legal. Washington, D.C., which started accepting same-sex marriages in March 2010, saw a huge 61.7 percent increase in marriage that year, though it’s too soon to see where it will settle. Again, no signs of the coming apocalypse.

The piece also goes on to look at divorce rates in the states where same-sex couples can get legally married (and divorced) right now to try to determine if such activity has any impact on the divorce rates of opposite-sex couples. The data just does not indicate that there is any impact of marriage equality on divorce or marriage rates in a state, unsurprisingly. What a shock, another talking point by religious extremists and heterosexual supremacists turns out to be obviously false.

Hat/tip to Americablog

Saturday Politics: Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

Hat/tip to Joe.My.God

Celebrity Friday: Jim Parsons Comes Out

Jim Parsons is one of the stars of CBS's The Big Bang Theory, one of the highest-rated comedy shows on television. He has earned two consecutive Emmy awards (2010 and 2011) and a Golden Globe award (2011)  for his portrayal of Dr. Sheldon Cooper, the central character of the show. Parsons, 39, came out recently in a piece in the New York Times:

By the winter of 2011 Mr. Parsons had won his first Emmy for “Big Bang” and was midway through Season 4 when he felt he was “spinning my wheels” as an actor, and began looking to do a play again. He landed the role of Tommy Boatwright, a young gay activist in “The Normal Heart” who bucks up the main characters in their fight against AIDS. The humanity and intensity of the play appealed to him, he said, just as Beckett and Büchner once did; in graduate school, too, his thesis project was a 15-minute performance piece about a mentally disabled death-row inmate, a psychiatrist and a murder victim’s father — all played by Mr. Parsons. 

“If I ever wrote a script myself, it would be strongly emotional material,” he said. “Every time I think about writing, comedy doesn’t interest me in the slightest. I can play comedy, but I don’t think in terms of comic dialogue.” 

“The Normal Heart” resonated with him on a few levels: Mr. Parsons is gay and in a 10-year relationship, and working with an ensemble again onstage was like nourishment, he said. As the production was ending last summer, he heard that the Roundabout Theater Company was considering a revival of “Harvey” — initially with John C. Reilly under consideration for Elwood — and last November the play’s director, Scott Ellis, asked him and Ms. Hecht to do a private reading of the work in Los Angeles.

Hat/tip to Wonder Man.

WATCH: Pres. Obama and the LGBT Community

I'm back in Los Angeles, CA!

Here is the schwag from my 15-day vacation in Madrid, Barcelona and Rome.

GODLESS WEDNESDAY: Atheist Pig On Opposition To Same-Sex Marriage

(via The Atheist Pig)

DOJ Affirms Right To Tape Public Police Activity

Finally!  The U.S. Department of Justice has slapped down state and local jurisdictions who have been trying to criminalize what most people is obviously legal activity by citizens, recording the official activity of police officers in the execution of their duties.

Here's an excerpt from a letter DOJ sent to the Baltimore Police Department on this issue (pdf):

Because recording police officers in the public discharge of their duties is protected by 
the First Amendment, policies should prohibit interference with recording of police activities except in narrowly circumscribed situations.  More particularly, policies should instruct officers that, except under limited circumstances, officers must not search or seize a camera or recording device without a warrant.  In addition, policies should prohibit more subtle actions that may nonetheless infringe upon individuals’ First Amendment rights.  Officers should be advised not to threaten, intimidate, or otherwise discourage an individual from recording police officer enforcement activities or intentionally block or obstruct cameras or recording devices.


Policies should prohibit officers from destroying recording devices or cameras and 
deleting recordings or photographs under any circumstances.  In addition to violating the First Amendment, police officers violate the core requirements of the Fourteenth Amendment procedural due process clause when they irrevocably deprived individuals of their recordings without first providing notice and an opportunity to object.  

There have been some ridiculous horror stories about people being arrested and charged with crimes for recording police officers while they conducted arrests. Hopefully the DOJ letter will put an end to this foolishness and help the police recognize that more information and openness about their activities will lead to more trust between the community they are sworn "to protect and serve," not less.

Hat/tip to Digby.

MD High Court: All Legal Marriages Valid Here, Too

Big news! The Maryland Court of Appeals, the highest court in the state, has issued a 7-0 ruling in a divorce of a lesbian couple (Jessica Port v. Virginia Anne Cowan) who were legally married in California in 2008 that all same-sex marriages legal in the jurisdiction when they were performed are valid and recognized in Maryland, as well!

Chris Geidner of Metro Weekly has the deets:

[N]o still viable decision by this Court has deemed a valid foreign marriage to be "repugnant," despite being void or punishable as a misdemeanor or more serious crime were it performed in Maryland. The present case will be treated no differently. A valid out-of-state same-sex marriage should be treated by Maryland courts as worthy of divorce, according to the applicable statutes, reported cases, and court rules of this State.

More importantly, even if a referendum is qualified this June (and passed this November) to invalidated Maryland's recently passed marriage equality law, Maryland residents can still go get married in any of the 6 states (and Washington, D.C.) that allow same-sex marriage and their marriage will be valid or legal in Maryland as well. It would take a state constitutional amendment to overturn this decision by Maryland's highest court.

This was already believed to be the law in the state of Maryland (like in Rhode Island) due to opinions issued by the relevant Attorneys-General of those states, but a ruling by the state supreme court settles the issue in Maryland and an executive order issued by the Governor of Rhode Island strengthens (but does not completely settle) the legal situation in that jurisdiction.