Civil Rights

A new review of eight states where marriage laws have been recently amended to extend the franchise to gay men and women found that less than half of the Republican lawmakers in those states who supported the effort no longer hold office today, stoking intraparty bickering on whether support for marriage equality is a career-ender for Republicans.

Of the 47 GOP lawmakers who cast decisive votes for gay marriage in the last three years, only 21 remain in office, according to a survey by The Associated Press.

Some retired outright or were felled during Republican primary contests, while many others still were defeated during general election bouts. But the survey nonetheless gave gay-marriage-supporting GOPers a terminal diagnosis.

For Brian Edwards and Tom Privitere of New Jersey, the photo was a beautiful reminder of the day they were engaged. Instead, the iconic photo of the two men kissing was stolen by an anti-gay group and used in a political mailer to attack a Colorado state Senate’s support for gay marriage. While there is no doubt that their likeness was misappropriated and the photographer’s work was stolen, really something more happened here: Brian and Tom were the victims of hate.
 
It’s a teenager’s worst nightmare: provocative photos are stolen and posted online by classmates who want to ruin your life. Or an ex-boyfriend lets the world see a sex-video that you thought was just for you and him. It’s called “slut-shaming,” and it’s the latest and most vicious form of cyber bullying.

I applaud President Obama for his extraordinary leadership in this momentous effort to forge long overdue comprehensive immigration reform. Yesterday, a Senate bipartisan working group released an unprecedented set of core legislative principles to resolve our broken immigration system. Today, President Obama advanced this promising and historic moment, outlining a vision that embraces our nation’s long-standing traditions for protecting all families, including same-sex partners, and accepting the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

President Obama has said one of his biggest regrets from his first term was that he didn’t pass immigration reform. We want to make sure he won’t have the same regret four years from now.

The Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM) and the millions of Latino and immigrant families we represent are committed to working with the president and Congress to pass legislation that will provide a path to citizenship for the 11 million aspiring Americans living in the United States.

As a member of Congress, I took an oath to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution. I did not swear to uphold only the sections I liked. The Bill of Rights contain civil liberties so fundamentally important that no matter how unpopular at times, these rights are guaranteed and no president, no Congress and no person can deprive them from us. The Second Amendment, hated by some, is a fundamental right as well. I, and millions of others, see the wisdom of the Second Amendment even as many do not. But whether you see its wisdom, all public officials were sworn to uphold it.

And this is where I part ways with the president. On Wednesday, President Obama sought to undermine constitutional guarantees when he unveiled 23 measures, in a combination of executive orders and proposed new legislation, to restrict gun ownership.

Our nation and our children are safe and secure when law-abiding Americans are allowed to defend themselves without interference from politicians.
 
Not only have gun bans and anti-gun laws utterly failed to reduce crime or protect innocents, statistics prove anti-gun measures actually increase crime and lead to tragedy.
 
For example, in the 22 years prior to 1990 federal enactment of “gun-free school zones” there were two terrible mass shootings on school or university campuses.
 
In the 22 years after the gun ban there were 10.

What can we learn from the fiscal cliff deal? That Congress could actually enact comprehensive immigration reform.

Let’s face it, the Congress passed the fiscal cliff deal because its members had a sudden epiphany. The compromise — hammered out by the Senate early New Year’s morning as the country teetered over the cliff — was approved by the House of Representatives because the Republican leadership, fearing the wrath of the American people if the nation went cliff-diving, had little choice. And it wasn’t even the whole Congress or even the whole Republican conference that made the deal happen. It was a bipartisan group, with Speaker John Boehner pushing forward. To get there Boehner violated the “Hastert rule” — the majority of the majority rules — and actually got something done on a bipartisan basis.

At the heart of Django Unchained and Lincoln -- two critically-acclaimed films that are both up for best drama at Sunday’s Golden Globes -- is slavery.  Django Unchained chronicles the experiences of a freed slave while Lincoln a focuses on the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which formally abolished slavery. The renewed attention on slavery and the Thirteenth Amendment calls for fuller consideration of the amendment’s specialized meaning and its applicability to contemporary harms.
 
Enacted in 1865, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation and several months following Lee’s surrender to Union forces, the Thirteenth Amendment declared that “[n]either slavery nor involuntary servitude. . . shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

The 112th Congress adjourned last week without reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). The failure of Congress to pass either the Senate- or House-approved (S. 1925 or H.R. 4970) versions was the by-product both of partisan wrangling, as well as acerbic personal attacks that were later derided by the Huffington Post as “incendiary and extreme.”
 
But the last-ditch negotiations between Vice President Joe Biden and House Leader Eric Cantor side-stepped the most important question of all: Are VAWA-funded programs working?

In a year where we have seen much progress from the White House and from the Department of Justice in addressing the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) survivors of violence, there is one national body that has failed to act. The 112th Congress has left much undone and has been slow to compromise or propose solutions to a myriad of issues and concerns facing the country – including for LGBTQ survivors of violence.