Eideard

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman

Two days after same-sex marriage became legal in New York, the state’s attorney general has taken legal action challenging the constitutionality of the U.S. law which defines marriage as between a man and woman.

In court papers filed on Tuesday in U.S. federal court in Manhattan, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, violates same-sex couples’ right to equal protection under the U.S. Constitution.

The 1996 law prohibits same-sex couples from receiving marriage-based benefits such as Social Security survivor benefits, health benefits and the right to file taxes jointly.

Schneiderman argued the law intrudes on the state’s right to regulate marriage. On Sunday, gay couples began to marry in New York after it was made legal…

“By discriminating among married couples based on sexual orientation and sex, DOMA deprives New York of the ability to extend true equality to all marriages valid in the State,” Schneiderman wrote…

In February, the Obama administration announced it would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act’s section which defines marriage as between a man and woman.

Yes, the bigots and homophobes of America will continue to join with the most backwards elements in American politics to try to halt the progress of this new generation of civil rights advances. They should fail as abysmally as they did in the 1960′s.

This act by the New York State AG feels to me like the 1958 passage of the Fair Housing Practices Law. When the business and commercial capital of the world stands up for human rights, the nation, the world, has to step back and acknowledge their failings. The state of New York has set an example for all the United States that pretend to modernity to get up on their hind legs and fight for the rights of all their citizens.

Emmanuel celebrates in a Chicago bar

The Chicago elections board underscored an important rule for politicians Thursday when it cleared Rahm Emanuel to run for mayor, which is that it’s fine to rent your house out to a complete stranger, as long as you leave your wife’s wedding dress stuffed under the stairs, or maybe just some old pasta in the refrigerator.

But for all the farce surrounding the question of Mr. Emanuel’s residency, the elections board, whether or not it intended to, also affirmed a serious and more important principle with its ruling — that Washington is in fact an extension of the rest of the country, rather than some alien territory cloistered within it.

This, of course, was not the most obvious issue to surface in the proceedings to decide whether Mr. Emanuel really was or was not a Chicagoan, a sideshow that must have made the former White House chief of staff pine for the relative sanity of Congress. Led by the man who rented Mr. Emanuel’s house from him and who had himself threatened to run for mayor, about 30 citizens questioned Mr. Emanuel, under oath, about whether he had actually left behind any boxes in the basement that might prove his continued residency…

“Were you ever a member of the Communist Party?” one of the interrogators jokingly asked Mr. Emanuel, tacitly acknowledging, it seemed, the ludicrous nature of the entire hearing.

Illustrating the stupidity and core values of populist opposition to this union called the United States, describing teabagger ideology by repeating the ironic question characteristic of paranoid nutballs years back in our poltical history of fear.

And yet there was a serious cultural subtext to the debate, beyond the question of whether Mr. Emanuel, a lifelong Chicagoan, is enough of a Chicagoan to run the city. At issue was also the larger question of whether someone who goes to Washington to serve his community and his country, as Mr. Emanuel did as both a congressman and a presidential aide, can be seen as having left his home to take up residence somewhere else.

This was essentially the argument [countered] by Mr. Emanuel’s lawyer, Kevin Forde, who pointed out that the residency law made allowances for people who were away “on business of the United States,” like soldiers stationed overseas. “If being chief of staff for the president of the United States isn’t in the service of the United States, I don’t know what is,” he said…

As it is, assuming the decision survives an inevitable appeal, Mr. Emanuel, who is leading handily in public polls, can now look forward to the election. After that, perhaps, he can return to his house and unpack the contents of those disputed storage boxes, the accumulated this-and-that of your average American life.

The appeal is guaranteed by sufficient funding for delay by those in high places and low whose singular interpretation of Constitutional Law holds that holy writ supersedes legal precedent, secession remains a viable alternative to federal decision-making, dedication to parochialism in education, religion and jurisprudence is what is lacking in government.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Married same-sex couples will be counted as such in 2010, Census Bureau officials said, reversing a decision of the Bush administration.

Steve Jost, a spokesman for the Census Bureau, said same-sex couples would be counted, “and they ought to report the way they see themselves,” adding, “In the normal process of reports coming out after the census of 2010, I think the country will have a good data set on which to discuss this phenomenon that is evolving in this country.”

Same-sex couples could not be married in the United States during the last decennial count. But last year, after two states had approved same-sex marriages, the bureau said those legal marriages would go uncounted because the federal Defense of Marriage Act prevented the government from recognizing them…

The White House announced Friday that its interpretation of the act did not prohibit gathering the information.

First, the Obama government and our heroic Democrat-majority Congress should dump the Defense of Marriage Act (sic) for what it is. Bigoted, reactionary legislation passed by opportunist politicians to cater to the most backwards elements in American society.

Yes, the same holds true for the environment and alternative energy, inclusive rights for workers, actively working for peace everywhere we stick our noses – especially the Middle East. I’m not a single issue kind of dissident. Civil liberties and civil rights, peace and prosperity are what we’re always promised. I just would like to see the folks who say they’re leading the political side of these struggles – prove it on a daily basis.