IMPORTANT NC VOTER INFORMATION

The proposed amendment to the North Carolina Constitution, up for a vote on May 8th, will not be labeled "Amendment One" on the ballot as originally thought.  This is the amendment proposed by those who want to ensure that gay marriage can never be legalized in North Carolina.  If we can defeat the amendment, we will keep a path clear to eventually legalizing gay marriage in our state.  Defeat the amendment by going to the polls May 8th and voting AGAINST it.

Originally described as "Amendment One", the amendment is actually a referendum that will appear under the heading "Constitutional Amendment"  (See sample ballot above.)  Some advocacy materials still contain the Amendment One wording, and there was a story in the N&O still using it yesterday.  PLEASE SHARE THIS LINK.  The wording of the amendment itself is confusing enough, as are the real implications of the amendment.  Let's all make sure everyone knows how to find it on the ballot.

VOTE AGAINST!

To that end, I'll share something I've learned over a couple of decades of being involved in the fight for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights.  I hope it inspires you to discuss this upcoming vote with the people around you in whatever way you normally engage, knowing you may be helping the cause more than you realize just by talking informally.

Obviously many LGBT people are still in the closet, and the increasing popular attention to this issue is a double-edged sword; as voices of acceptance and support grow stronger, so do the voices of hostility and judgement.  For the same reason, some straight people who have gay loved ones can be just as closeted.  Even those who feel no personal connection to the issue, but are offended by the obstruction of gay rights, sometimes stay quiet too.  In certain environments, simply speaking up against intolerance appears treacherous. 

In the conservative settings we sometimes find ourselves in at work, at church, with relatives, or in some whole towns, voicing progressive ideas can feel like walking on eggshells.  So if you do feel comfortable speaking up for LGBT issues in a group situation, there may be someone quietly listening to you, amazed to find they are not alone.  You may not know it then, you may never know it.  But more than once I have later learned that incidental comments I've made have been silently appreciated.  It's an unexpected pleasure to find out that during some past party or break room conversation at work, I have unknowingly signaled my support to a quiet observer.  You don't have to show up at a rally to make a difference.  If you feel like you are in a position to speak up, even in a low-key way, do.

Of course in general I myself am a rowdier troublemaker than most.  But I also try to remember that sometimes social progress takes place without fanfare, in the simplest social settings. 

Just something to keep in mind over the next couple of weeks.  The TV ads and news stories are starting to get intense, so it's easy to get anxious.  Let's just keep talking to the folks in our own circles, and trust that most people, in the privacy of the voting booth, will do the right thing. 

It took over 90 years to overturn this one.  Maybe we could save a century and just not pass the one against gay marriage on the May 8th ballot.

Vote AGAINST the Constitutional Amendment on May 8th, 2012, in Wake County, NC.
The amendment defines any marriage or domestic union in NC as invalid, unless it is between a man and a woman. 

I hate this column by Joan Walsh about the Republican response to Democrat Hillary Rosen's unfortunate comments about Ann Romney.  Walsh is the forthright liberal editor of Salon.com and a frequent contributor to MSNBC.  I’ve never been impressed by her, and lost more respect after reading this piece.  She uses shorthand to describe complex societal issues and comes across like all of this is so obvious that it's a chore for her to have to explain it.

After Rosen's comments on Wednesday, Walsh wrote about the ensuing uproar, and noted derisively in her column on Thursday that even after Rosen had apologized, "Republicans still won’t shut up about it."  Still?  It hadn't been 48 hours. 

Walsh writes, "An aggrieved Ann Romney even told Fox News, 'I will tell you that Mitt said to me more times than I can imagine, Ann, your job is more important than mine...'"  An "aggrieved" Ann Romney? I would have been aggrieved if someone said I’d never worked a day in my life, but as it turns out, Mrs. Romney chose to be gracious and thoughtful in her response.

Walsh goes on, "The point Rosen was making was, and is, valid: Mitt Romney repeatedly refers to his wife, Ann, in lordly terms, ‘reporting’ to him what matters to women. Reporting to him, like she’s an employee, or maybe a translator...  He should stop referring to his wife’s ‘reports’ about women’s issues, sounding like Thurston Howell III.  Ann Romney...  is a woman of great privilege. Most mothers don’t have the ‘choice’ to stay home full time with their kids; they need a paycheck. Meanwhile, her husband supports the Paul Ryan budget, which cuts nutrition programs for pregnant women and new moms and their kids. It cuts Medicaid for poor women and children. It slashes food stamp funding, when women and children make up two-thirds of the people who get food stamps. He wants to get rid of Planned Parenthood, which provides not just contraception but breast cancer and cervical cancer screenings for millions of low-income women."

Walsh is muddling her critical opinion of Mitt Romney's policy positions, (an opinion I certainly share,) with Rosen's very telling disrespect for Ann Romney's life choices.  It is simply shallow for us to say, "well, maybe Rosen shouldn't have said that, BUT...." so that we can greedily get to our own (critically important but pretty easy to make) points about the Republican approach to women's issues.  Liberals are in no danger of losing the trust of American women.  Real policy speaks louder than words.  We don't need to cram a lot of words into the reactionary moment of this particular quote.

Rosen just shouldn't have said what she said.  And the ugliest part about it was she meant it.  In the latest contribution to the bad apologies epidemic, Rosen made clear in her later commentsthat this wasn’t a gaffe.  She reinforced the points she wanted to make, using a discussion of Ann Romney’s life choice as a vehicle to criticize her husband’s positions.  

Unfortunately, the low-hanging fruit here is the opportunity to exploit the complex feelings women have about other women's choices.  This isn't just an  "upper-class problem", like Walsh complains.  If you want to classify it, literally, it is also a middle-class dilemma and distressful for low-income families.  There is a wide range of economic status that allows for some sort of choice in this area.  For some women, work outside the home would be preferable but their education and professional experience don't qualify them for positions that pay enough to cover childcare.  Conversely, some women who are high-earners sacrifice significant material comforts so they can stay at home.  There are multiple options, constraints, and desires in this area, and families make different decisions over the tenure of their child-rearing years, always vulnerable to the judgement of others.

Walsh simplistically says in the clip, “feminists learned 20 years ago that this is a dumb argument.”  But in fact, it’s a perennial topic, it’s not “dumb” or easy, and each generation of women must confront it anew.  It’s been a quarrel at times, and we won’t get anywhere by jumping all over each other or rolling our eyes about it.

As a phenomenon, the question of “working” women crept into the collective conscious on a wide scale in the mid-20th century when women who had been called to work outside the home during WWII found they wanted to keep doing so after the war.  It bubbled up as a more intensely debated issue in the 60's and early 70's, creating painful division among feminists.  The discord came to head in the 80's, when there were both improving professional opportunities for women, and increasing acceptance of the idea of the enlightened stay-at-home mom.  Playgroups and "mother's morning out" sessions popped up, and there were countless news pieces about the educated, liberated women who were leaving the workforce in droves to raise their kids.  They had three or four kids, home-schooled, grew their own food, and maintained an active civic life.  Psychologists and social scientists debated how children were affected by growing up in daycare centers.  Marriage counselors worked with couples who were struggling with confusion about the new expectations of men, obsolete expectations of women, and the division of labor in the home.

Apparently it’s time to talk about it as a nation again, but let’s take care to separate out the issues.

One discussion we should have is about the rush to polarized outrage when a partisan public figure says something stupid or offensive.  That’s about modern politics and cable news.

Another discussion should be about whether women who work at home are valued as much by society as women in the workforce, which is complex cultural question.

The plight of women who want to stay home and raise their kids but can't afford to – that’s a discussion about the economy.

The plight of women who have to stay at home, existing on welfare food stamps, WIC, and Medicaid, is a discussion about conservative disdain for funding birth control, childcare, education, and job training.

Yet another discussion is about which presidential candidate has the better interests of women at heart.  That one is about health care, equal pay for equal work, (really, America? still?), reproductive rights, equal status, (really, Augusta?) domestic violence and sexual harassment, and more.  

Democrats need not get that last one confused with the Rosen issue.  There will be more than enough time to talk about it before November, and Republicans don't hold a candle to Democrats in this area.  We are the force behind decades of progress on these issues, and no one is seriously confused about the who's who on that one.  Right-wing Republicans are hard at work today trying to reverse these accomplishments.

The Romney campaign wants to pretend that the off-base comments of a random pundit have uncovered some larger truth, like the Democratic Party's real feelings about women's issues.  That’s bogus of course, but it’s just as intellectually dishonest for liberal analysts (notably not being joined by the White House) to blather on about the right blathering on.  Give them their time: their First Lady-hopeful was brashly, inaccurately insulted. 

Just don’t let them confuse the issues.  

41 days with no arrest in the Trayvon Martin case.  A grand jury was scheduled to convene this Tuesday, April 10th, but that has been cancelled.  One more setback?  Or are we about to turn a corner?

Aggressive Florida prosecutor Angela Corey has taken over the investigation and possible prosecution of George Zimmerman.  The first thing she did was kick the much-awaited grand jury to the curb. 



Angela Correy's office can make up its own mind about whether to bring charges, she announced.  But for some of us, the upcoming grand jury was a bit of reassurance - as the days have dragged on with no arrest, it seemed like at least by Tuesday we would have some movement in the case.  And Corey has been a controversial figure in Florida, particularly in racially-charged cases.  Her ability to be fair in cases involving young black men has occasionally been questioned.  Will she focus on the theory that Martin turned on Zimmerman and engaged him in a fight to the death rather than the critical fact that Zimmerman pursued Martin?

Unlikely.  While Corey's reputation is one of complexity, she seems to have a history of being absorbed, more than anything else, with victim's rights.  She seems to be somewhat unpopular but respected by defense attorneys who have opposed her.  She horrified many last year with a decision in the case of a 12 year-old boy who had pushed his 2 year-old brother against a bookcase and killed him; she charged the 12 year-old with first degree murder and ordered him tried as an adult.  Corey is a Republican and long-time supporter of Governor Rick Scott, who has been accused of dragging his feet in appointing a task force to review Florida's Stand Your Ground law.

But Corey is also known to be dogged in her pursuit of prosecutions in cases of gun violence.  Her advocacy for victims of all races is legion.  She has said, when asked about this case, that it will be important to get to the truth and let the chips fall where they may.  Her history does not describe a woman who would have any patience for a defense plea of "I didn't really mean for this to happen," from a man with a gun in his hand, standing over a dead boy.

There remains a greater balance in this case of what we don't know than what we do, and most everyone seems to know that .  To repeat what I have observed on other posts: I'm impressed to see that by and large the consensus in the public seems to still be that we just need to understand what happened.  Zimmerman's defense attorneys might do well to note that as public frustration grows, impartial jurors will be harder to find.  Cooperation with investigators would appear to be in their best interest regardless of what really happened that night.

Tracy Martin, Trayvon's father, has said that he draws comfort from the idea that his son's death has put a spotlight on the broader injustices at work in this case.  He even said he felt his son was sacrificed for this reason, as a "calling from God."  Trayvon's mother, Sybrina Fulton said in an interview two days ago, "I have no time for anger. I don't want to grant it a place in my heart.  But my son died and we deserve to know what happened."

Tomorrow morning each of them will wake up to what is forecasted to be a warm and partly-sunny Easter Sunday in Sanford.  I don't even want to imagine what those early quiet moments will be like, and have been like each morning of these 41 days.  All we can do as fellow citizens around the country is to keep pushing for justice, in hopes that it will offer some small comfort to these two when it finally comes.

sources: The Miami Herald, Reuters, The Tallahassee Democrat, The Palm Beach Post, The Chicago Tribune, Global Grind

Today marks 36 days since Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by George Zimmerman.  It also marks 36 days without an arrest.  The grand jury won't convene until April 10th.  Surely an arrest will come out of that, but in the meantime, is the DA's staff just crossing their fingers?  They seem to be assuming that:

• Zimmerman is not a flight risk
• there will still be 14 impartial jurors to be found
• frustration in the community won't build to a boiling point
  

What more do they need?
The initial reason given to the press by the Sanford Police Department for releasing Zimmerman was that there was not enough probable cause for an arrest.  Probable cause is defined as reasonable grounds for holding a belief that justifies bringing a legal proceeding against a person.  The burden of proof is not the same for an arrest as for a conviction of a crime.  A police officer simply must have a strong suspicion, based on observable facts, that a crime has been committed.

We aren't asking for a conviction.
Since the time this case has been covered nationally, the public has been inundated with bits and pieces of information that appear to be ample probable cause for arrest.  From the things we have heard, we could be forgiven for developing a focus on a particular charge, even a particular verdict.  But most people haven't gone that far.  I have been impressed with the fact that the vast majority of people continue to press instead for two things:

• an arrest and trial, so that a jury can sort out what happened
  
• an investigation of the Sanford PD and the DA's office
  

Most of us aren't being irrational.
Certainly there have been irresponsible voices on the fringe.  But the consensus has been more thoughtful.  The majority of journalists, pundits, elected officials, community leaders, and writers in the blogosphere are simply calling for appropriate legal action.  And I have observed that in my own circle of family and friends, everyone seems to simply want answers.

Just tell us what gives!
Americans are savvy enough to be skeptical of the fragments that have leaked out so far.  We can't help but to form opinions, but mostly we are just waiting for those who are privy to the all the verifiable facts to either make an arrest or tell us what it is we are missing.