Syndicate and Hague

I’m not entirely sure how to start this, so I will start by saying I’m going to obscure some specifics in this to protect someone I care about while still trying to communicate the larger implications/issues in the decision that was handed down.

Megan and I were asked to participate in an interview with a media outlet with a fairly large distribution. The interview was - in general - about relationship decisions and dynamics and whether the choices we made in ours caused us to fight less or made our relationship different from others.

I was surprised, and a little impressed, that they would be willing to interview a married couple about something that had nothing to do with our status as a “same-sex” couple. Of course, it was my friend who was hunting down people for the story, and we came to mind because Megan and I make a big effort to look at the major stumbling blocks of relationships - chores, responsibilities, money - and make explicit, managed decisions about things so that we don’t wind up passive-aggressively damaging the relationship due to resentment/grudges.

Also, we really like being happy.

Anyway, tonight the word came down that we couldn’t be interviewed because they didn’t think that it was “surprising that a same-sex married couple would *insert doing the thing we do here*” and needed a straight married couple for it.

My initial surprise at the wonderful banality of us doing a story that had nothing to do with our genders was misguided. It wasn’t the institution of media that didn’t care, it was our friend who analytically looked at the topic and decided we would be a great couple to speak to it.

And here is where the diatribe comes in:

In this instance, they didn’t want a same sex couple because then they couldn’t play traditional gender roles against the “change” that they perceive is going on. Essentially, the decisions themselves weren’t the story, but the perceived decrease of male authority in the household was the story.

Media is one way we interpret our existence. We consume it, we are influenced by it, and I think we often forget how contrived things are. People in general don’t spend a ton of time thinking about audience and how carefully interview subjects are selected to influence a certain desired perception in the audience. Yes, liberals deconstruct FOX News, but venerated news outlets spin constantly as well.

This is why it drives me crazy when straight people say things like “Well, we don’t have a ’straight’ pride parade, I don’t understand why you have to do that sort of thing.” Heterosexuality is inscribed and reinforced as dominant, and homosexuality is so threatening that - unless a story is specifically constructed around it - it cannot exist. It cannot be banal, it must always be controversial. Decisions are made on a daily basis about what can be spoken to and what cannot be, and without us running around waving flags and making our presence known, we would be swept under the carpet forever.

The media outlet’s decision on this was one part homophobia, one part sexism, and one part reinforcement of the aberration of female equality or power in a heterosexual relationship.

That last one is what really kills me about this. Let’s give the management the benefit of the doubt on the homophobia and say that wasn’t a factor (::ha::). The point of explicitly wanting to frame the discussion around a straight couple making decisions that, for some reason, you wouldn’t expect them to make should force the question: why is this an issue? Usually, it’s about some traditional female role that is being upended:

• she’s making more money now, how does the guy feel?
• the guy decided to stay home with the kids, is he being mocked?
• she has a more advanced degree, does that make him feel inferior?

I’m sure you could add to the list, because you read/watch/hear these stories all the time. And they reinforce to us as a society that we should feel surprised by these showings of female authority/power. That we should be concerned by the lowered status of men in these relationships. It inscribes a very specific kind of spin and serves as a form of societal push-back onto a select group of people who either represent a changing society or people fear are representing a changing society.

It’s messed up.

Anyway. I wish I could actually talk about what we were going to talk about, because it’s interesting, but I wanted to be able to be critical without jeopardizing anyone’s job. It’s crappy times out there, you know?

I wanted to open this by saying that there are so many things I don’t understand about the people crying “socialism” in regards to having public health care, but that isn’t entirely true. I intellectually understand a lot of the factors leading them to that reaction. Some of it is simply that they have good insurance through their employers and don’t want to possibly wait another day to get seen by a doctor so that we can all be covered. It’s a naive way to think in this economy when a person could lose his/her job and be without insurance or with insurance at staggering COBRA premiums.

I could go into the racial undertones of the anti-health care reform language (directed both at Obama, and at the “others” who may take away “our” health insurance/doctors), but what I want to focus on is why public health care is good for entrepreneurs - and, by extension, for capitalism.

If our leaders are really concerned with the needs of small businesses and individual start-ups of new businesses as they say they are, their resistance to publicly run health care is puzzling. Needing to maintain a relationship with a specific employer in order to have health insurance actually deters people from striking out on their own and becoming innovators.

I could write up some scenarios for you, but you should already know them. Someone with a child with chronic health conditions cannot stop working at a job with great benefits just because they “have a great idea for a business” because no individual plan would provide the level of care the group employee plan does (nor would the individual plan probably cover the child, what with the child’s pre-existing conditions and all).

You could have Crone’s, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, severe mental illness, whatever - and you are either lucky enough to be trapped with an employer who offers benefits that keep your illness from driving you into bankruptcy, or you get sick. And sickness can be disastrous.

So what are you going to do? Forget yourself, even - if you have people relying on you who absolutely need good medical care are you going to strike out on your own with that new business idea or are you going to stay at your job (hoping benefits don’t get cut more, hoping you don’t get laid off)? In my experience, people with great ideas stay at their jobs because when faced with the kinds of medical bills they would be paying without it, they simply can’t do anything else.

If you’re a capitalist who thinks big business is the only way to go, then this is a pretty good set up. However, no politician likes to go on about how much they looove big business. They’re always talking about “the little guy.” American ingenuity and exceptionalism blah blah blah. But they don’t really mean it. Our fates are tied to the whims of behemoths. Social programs support us so that we have a safety net. As anyone who has ever gone from a dangerous situation to a safe one knows, safety brings freedom. When you’re not in reactive mode, you can plan and dream and innovate.

It’s hard for me to untangle this argument from morality though. At its root, I think it’s immoral for us as a society to not leverage our power as a community to support and buffer each other so that we can all do better.

(A side note to the “SOCIALIST/COMMUNIST” screamers: please read Marx. It is so embarrassing when you use the term “socialist/communist” in place of “i don’t even want to hear what you say” because, due to the context in which you are using it, it is plain that you don’t actually have full knowledge of the tenets of that philosophy.)

Way back during the Clinton impeachment hearings (over his blow job), my (dearly missed) grandmother and I were talking about the state of politics in this country. She said “If politics when your grandfather was alive was like politics now, I never would have allowed him to run for anything.”

What she meant, of course, was that character assassination was steadily growing as the focus of political battles. It didn’t matter how much damage it did to his family at the time, but if all the Republicans could distract us with about Clinton was that he got a blow job, then that was going to take precedence over policy and legislation.

I can’t imagine what her impression of the politics of today would be.

Here is the situation we’re in: a small minority of very loud Americans will do or say anything to bring down our president. I’d say that they get media play because the media gets a lot of airtime out of the Battle of Left Vs. Right, but I don’t know about that. Back in 2003, when the global Iraq war protest was staged, somewhere between 100,000-400,000 people flooded the streets of New York (the figure depends on the source), and between 6-10 million people protested that day in February in different cities all over the world. We weren’t covered with nearly the same seriousness as the town hall screamers are.

The anti-health care reform people; the birthers; the right wingers in general get a few dozen people at a rally - maybe even a hundred or two at a protest - and this is a movement? Yes, they’re loud and very good at parroting Fox’s talking points, but their numbers are hardly representative of massive public sentiment.

The problem is that every time their screaming town halls are reported on, it lends them credibility. Just like every time the media even asks questions like “should the president’s message to schoolkids be allowed in the classroom?” gives that insanity credibility.

(A sidebar on that: are you people fucking kidding me?????!!! He’s the president. George Bush made me want to gouge my ear drums out every time I heard him talk, but if he wanted to get on TV and tell the kids to study hard and have a good school year, I wouldn’t have batted an eye. And neither did my parents back when Reagan and HW broadcast messages to schoolkids. Way to raise your kids to have respect for this country.)

I just don’t understand why the media is legitimizing the ideas that are coming out of the right wing machine. It’s not like having “two sides” of an issue=critical analysis of an issue. There are things called facts, and when one of the two sides has an argument that consists of “socialism,” “death panels,” and “Hitler,” they are not a “side” of an argument, they do not have an argument.

To be clear, I have no problem engaging in a debate with someone who wants engage in an actual discussion of the pros/cons of various types of health care reform. However, I have found that many right wing-identified people begin an argument with me by calling me a socialist. That’s not an argument, that’s invective and hyperbole and has no place in a debate/discussion.

In fact, I want to extend Godwin’s law to the “Socialist” moniker. If you have to say “Socialist!” or “Socialism!” in order to win an argument, you automatically lose. It’s like sinking the 8 ball. You say “socialist” to win an argument, you fail.

Man, I really miss talking current events with my grandma, but part of me is glad she didn’t live to see this insanity.

Two things happened this week.  First, we now own a house.  Second, we had the wedding reception. That one followed the day after the other was a fluke.

I’ve hesitated to write anything in detail about our experience in buying the house this summer because I was unsure if anything I said would come back to hurt us before it was all over.  But now it’s over.

We bought a short sale from a nice guy who had a whole hell of a lot of bad luck.  I know we live in America and all - currently the land of “I’ve got mine and if you don’t then there must be something wrong about you” - but there hasn’t been a day when my excitement and joy about this beautiful house that we now own hasn’t been tempered with a sadness and resignation about the only way we could afford something like this.  And that is by someone else being in desperate circumstances.

When I’ve told people that, they tend to become remarkably uncomfortable.  They usually try to justify the whole exchange as simply financial and amoral, but there is a large part of me that fully believes the amount of pain M & I have suffered this summer in our transience has been some sort of penance for the way we’ve come to own such a special place.

To buy a short sale, a house that is still owned by the person who is losing it, you must have an element of vulture to you.  The ability to rationalize that their loss is inevitable and it may as well be  you who gains.  And I suppose that is good enough for many people, and, despite rationalizing in that way myself, the guilt of it would overtake me at times.

I’ve seen the destruction left in the wake of other houses people were financially forced to vacate: the appliances pulled from the walls, glass doorknobs stripped and sold along with any other valuables that could be harvested from the house.  Those houses are filled with anger and despair.  You can feel it when you walk in.

When we came to see the place that is now our home, it was a last minute thing and the owner was here.  The moment I stepped into the house, I was blown away by the feel of it and how beautiful it is.  We talked with the owner for a while afterward on the porch and decided to come back the next day and look at it in the daylight.  We were smitten with the house, and he made it clear that he wanted us to have it.  I think what he recognized in us was that, despite our status as vultures, we saw the same kind of beauty in the house.  We weren’t going to tear it apart; we weren’t going to flip it.

For months, we waited.  We moved.  We lost the futon to mold, we lost the sofa, area rug, and chair to moths in the storage space.  We moved four times by the end of the summer, living out of suitcases and hardly anything to cook with or eat on.  I reminded myself constantly that our homelessness was - to an extent - of our own making. It was a waiting game.  Would the house win? Or would we give it up and move to an apartment and call it quits?

Obviously the house won.  But not until we gave up and decided to abandon it, only to be talked back into trying a new loan.

This weekend, the former owner of the house routed an email through his realtor to our realtor to us.  He said that leaving this house was the hardest thing he’s ever had to do, but that he’s glad that we’re the ones who got it.  He told us the history of the house, of its former owners before him, of the things he’d done to the house to make it look the way it should (things that I had assumed were original to the house).  Though some people may find the email guilt-inducing (being reminded of the kind of work and care poured into this place), I found it a relief.  I cannot forget how I’ve profited on someone else’s misery - and despite people wanting to make me feel better about it, I don’t think I should forget it - but having that person feel that their love of a place wasn’t in vain, that he trusts us to do right by the house means a lot to me.

My father likes to tease me and is currently saying that nothing makes you a capitalist like becoming a homeowner, but I think he’s wrong.  I think the loss of community identity is tied to a feeling of entitlement.  If you continually question that entitlement, if you dig down and look at the privilege you have and what the effects of your choices are, then the often-repeated triteness that we become more conservative as we age doesn’t have to become true.

And to the former owner: Thank you for giving us so much in this house.  I know the house itself wasn’t voluntary, but everything you carefully added to the house over the years was your choice to leave and I recognize that as a gift.

For those of you who missed the rally, or want to forward this on, or use the arguments, I’m pasting the text of my speech from this afternoon’s rally below.

I want to start by saying that though the administration often frames dissent like this as us hating the University, they’re wrong. We love the University. I am a graduate of the English department, and when I moved back here from New York I made an effort to get a job at the University of Minnesota. Our faculty and students are wonderful, and it was actually my job here at the University that inspired me to go back to school and work on my PhD.

Everyone has made fantastic arguments about the encouraging the culture of learning at the University and this being a big part of who we are and why we are here, but I’m going to focus on those of us whose degrees or coursework directly pertain to our jobs.

First of all, I will hammer home the fact that this is a pay cut. Not only is it a pay cut, but it is one of the only cuts in our compensation that will almost exclusively affect low- and middle-wage employees.

Whether it’s the first degree or PhD, the people who take these courses are people for whom education will improve their professional lives. Senior-level employees and faculty members, who for the most part make much more than the rest of us, will not feel this cut personally. And I want to thank those faculty and senior employees who support us and know that cutting the Regents scholarship is the wrong thing to do.

Let’s talk about what kind of pay cut this is.

If you are working on your first bachelors degree, taking one four credit course at a time each spring, summer, and fall, you will be paying approximately $390 per year. An employee working towards their first degree makes less money, so based on a salary of $25,000 per year, that is a 1.5% pay cut.

Let’s say you have a Bachelor’s degree and let’s be generous and say you make $37,000 per year. At the 25% rate, taking a spring, summer and fall undergraduate course will cost you about $950 – about a 2.5% pay cut.

Taking a graduate course each semester at $37,000 per year will cost you about $1,900 – about a 5% pay cut.

Who is being asked to sacrifice? Who is taking the pay cut?

I am a technology professional in the civil service/bargaining unit here at the University. I am also a PhD student in Curriculum and Instruction. Part of my focus is on Learning Technologies. My PhD program directly benefits my boss and my department and my school. I am not unique. The University of Minnesota staff in my courses bring inspiration and new knowledge back to our departments so that we create improve the output of the University.

This pay cut effectively renders the education that is part of our compensation package unaffordable. It will lead to decreased inspiration, innovation, and that will affect the strategic positioning of the University and the quality we currently provide.

This pay cut will affect staff recruitment and retention. Once the economy recovers, the University of Minnesota’s ability to recruit talented staff will decrease, as will our ability to retain staff. Other schools offer dependent and spousal tuition support at varying levels, we offer none. Decreasing a part of our compensation that doesn’t stand up to what other schools currently offer is misguided.

This pay cut is not about the myth of 10% annual increase: the Regents Scholarship increases in cost on average 10% a year. So does tuition. The program itself isn’t getting too expensive, tuition is.

Using short-term tax incentives to market a pay cut that affects long-term policy decisions is fraudulent. Destroying the Regents Scholarship and justifying it with temporary tax incentives that only a small part of our population can even use is disingenuous at best.

The Regents Scholarship didn’t become a perk until the administration wanted to decimate it. Prior to that, it was part of the compensation package that HR reminds us of on an annual basis.

This is a pay cut.

We are better employees because of our classes. We have new ideas, fresh ideas, current ideas. We make the University a better place, we make the education better, and we keep morale strong.

The common portrayal of gays and lesbians in the media is this: dual income, no kids; highly educated; artistic; relatively affluent; white. It’s been part of the argument some have made about gay marriage - think of all the money gay and lesbian people would bring in with their fancy weddings!

This observation is, of course, somewhat true. The only reason Megan and I are traveling out East for our wedding (along with a few friends, all of us contributing to the Massachusetts economy) is because it’s legal there and not here in Minnesota. Middle class people can travel, upper class people can travel and throw lavish affairs.

This perception was something that ran under some anti-gay sentiment during the arguments over proposition 8, and also reinforces the idea that gays are just rich, white, and privileged.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that there are poor gay people. It shouldn’t surprise me that gays and lesbians are poorer than our heterosexual counterparts, but it did. The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law released the results of a study they did that compiled and analyzed data from the 2000 Census, the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth and the 2003 and 2005 California Health Interview Surveys. via Echelon

Though poverty is on the rise among all Americans, the authors of the study–entitled Poverty in the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Community–suggest that unique social and political aspects of LGB life play a role in contributing to higher rates of poverty in this community, including vulnerability to employment discrimination, inability to marry and higher numbers of uninsured.

Key findings include:

• After comparing families with similar characteristics, gay and lesbian couple families are significantly more likely to be poor than are heterosexual married couple families;
• In general, lesbian couples have much higher poverty rates than either different-sex couples or gay male couples;
• African-Americans in same-sex couples have poverty rates that are significantly higher than black people in different-sex married couples;
• People in same-sex couples who live in rural areas have poverty rates that are twice as high as same-sex couples who live in large metropolitan areas;
• Employment discrimination, lack of access to marriage, and a greater likelihood of being uninsured exacerbate poverty among LGB people.
• Children of gay couples are living in poverty at a rate that is twice as much as the children of straight married couples. (this one is via Pam’s House Blend)

Also, a note about the the lack of transpeople in this study:

Because no representative data exist for transgender people, the report does not analyze poverty in that community. Previous Williams Institute studies, however, found that large proportions of transgender people report very low incomes, which suggest that poverty is also a major concern for transgender people.

This seems like an important analysis, and sad. It was really amusing to both Megan and me today when we drove behind some bigot’s truck with his “Marriage = 1 man + 1 woman” bumper sticker, pulled in front of them so they would be forced to drive behind my big ol’ rainbow-stickered car.

That is what life is like when you’re comfortable. You live in a big, liberal city and the bigots are out of place driving down 28th street. You don’t feel like the people who dominate this report. You have agency. There are parts of your existence you’re powerless over, but on the whole you’re not powerless. Hell, in my case, your life is filled with people - mostly straight - who go and buy you the stones for your wedding rings because you can’t afford them right now yourself.

I think it is important to recognize that those of us who are gay and comfortable - incomes we can live on, jobs we can be out at, relationships we don’t have to hide - are like refugees who have found the safehouses. It’s not like we’re truly ignorant of our status - people feel free to slap their prejudices on their bumpers, even in Minneapolis - but that we have the privilege to pretend they don’t exist at times.

I think I couldn’t say it better than this: be careful who you hire as your legislative assistant, people.

I wrote a short email (about 3 short paragraphs) to Sen. Koering explaining how tired the phrasing “we have more pressing issues” is in regard to refusal to support the marriage equality bill in MN. I noted that, as a gay man, he should know better. That marriage is about economic security, among other things. That at this economically scary time this is in fact the ideal topic to be discussed because it affects GLBT people’s homes and health care and jobs. I noted that we’re leaving the state to get married in May (yay!) and are happy about it, but that not being able to legally marry here puts parts of our shared lives in jeopardy. With her parents being unsupportive to say the least, I’ll be frank, I’m nervous about what they would do to us in a crisis. I noted that marriage would provide protection for us on a number of levels, and repeated that he should know better. End of email.

This gem is what I got back. (Seriously, at least read the bolded parts. This is from Koering’s legislative assistant. This is professional communication.)

My name is Ken Swecker, Senator Koering’s Legislative Assistant. Senator Koering and I both would like to respond to the e-mails we’ve been receiving regarding his intention to not vote in favor of Senate File 120. I am currently responding to the e-mails to give you the Senator’s home phone number so that you might call him over the weekend and speak with him personally on the matter. This much he asked me to do.

To add to that, as a personal statement, is to say that SF 120 is something that the majority of the People of Senate District 12, the People that he was elected to represent, do not favor this piece of legislation. In case you have forgotten, we are a government of the People, by the People, and for the People. He was not elected serve his personal interests. I personally believe that instead of sending e-mails full of threats and hateful words you should take his example to heart and congratulate him on being a legislator who cares more about what the People of his district want than what he may want personally. You and I both know that this is a rare quality to find, and just because this is contrary to how you wish for him to vote, you must remember and respect he is here to represent the interests of his rural Minnesota constituents who voted him into office. As a constituent of his myself, I am happy to see him take non-personal votes on several issues. After all, I would not want another politician taking another vote that would serve his or her personal interests more so than the People’s, would you?

I can testify all day long about how much Senator Koering cares for the People of Senate District 12. He ran three consecutive times, being defeated the first two, and why did he put himself through so much hard work? Do you think it was because he needed another job? Absolutely not! He did it because he believed he was the best person to serve the People that he calls neighbors, friends, and family. And especially now, in a time like this, we are being bogged down with this completely pointless issue. There are People in Morrison and Crow Wing Counties, and across the State who are losing their jobs, their homes, their insurance, and were you to ask them if this is an issue that should take one second of precedent over these conditions they’re facing every day, do you believe, do you honestly believe that they would say to you, ‘Yes, please, waste the time of the State Legislature with a piece of legislation that will not help, but in fact, overshadow the current situation we’re living in? Please, waste their time with this piece of legislation while I tell my son and daughter that mom and dad aren’t hungry tonight?’

I know very well that you will respond to this e-mail of mine with some probably quirky, snide, and very thoughtless comment that will make me out to be a bad person and threaten the Senator even more just as most of the absolutely tactless and disrespectful e-mails we’ve received have been written, but really, don’t waste your time. We’ll just put your e-mail where it belongs, in the trash.

The Senator’s home number is
xxx-xxx-xxxx

He’s free on the weekends.

Very Sincerely, every word of it,
Ken Swecker

P.S.
I hope you do not believe that this e-mail was written specific to the one that you sent, this is a blanket e-mail, being sent to everyone who has e-mailed us on this issue and I’ve already wasted too much time in responding to you. Good day.

Senator Paul Koering
District 12
131 State Office Building
St. Paul, MN 55155-1206
Phone:651-296-4875

Can I just repeat that the very things Swecker goes positively loony tunes over are the things I addressed to Sen. Koering in my letter? I mean, I know they don’t read those things. But couldn’t they have sorted the letters out and responded to reasonable ones like mine with a less bitchy letter? Ah professionalism…

So there’s going to be a marriage equality bill of some sort weaving its way through the Minnesota legislature this year, and it’s nice and will lay good groundwork for the future, but with Pawlenty in office for the next two years, nothing is going to happen. If anything does happen, I will happily be rendered speechless, but in the meantime…

State Sen. Paul Koering came out a few years ago. He’s a Republican, which is relevant in that his status as gay has not equaled any sort of desire to protect peoples’ civil rights. According to the MN Independent, he said that “he would vote against it because the state faces bigger problems.”

I think that’s the new Republican line. It’s a crisis, we have no time for gay rights! Except that, well, marriage is also a financial structure and when people are losing their jobs…relationships with a little government backing have another layer of security in place. A crisis is actually a very compelling time to right the wrongs that we have entrenched into our laws.

But tonight I’m mentally throwing my hands up in the air. They always have some excuse for not dealing with things - politically and personally. If we have a relationship that’s public, we’re “flaunting our sexuality,” and if we keep things private, we’re lying to them. There’s never the right time, the right place, the right venue to have conversations about our lives.

And, yes, I’m totally talking around something right now. But it isn’t mine to wave around online, in public, so I’m trying to make a roundabout argument and failing. So here’s what I’m going to say:

Get over yourselves.

I’m so sick of bigots acting like seeing gay couples holding hands is the equivalent of having hardcore pornography paraded down the street (*think of the children!!*). I’m sick of bigots moping and whining about how hard it is to have to endure the existence of people whose lives don’t mirror their own. Yes, it must be so freakin hard for you to wake up every morning knowing somewhere two guys got out of bed together and are eating cereal. The agony!

This entire blog post sucks. I’m not eloquent, I’m not crafting a damn thing…I’m just exhausted and pissed off. I’m pissed at the bigots and I’m pissed at people like Koering whose capitulations just encourage them.

In other news, my mom got in a fight with a conservative friend of my dad’s the other night during which time I believe she called W a baboon. Which, if you knew her, would be hilarious. I also got her thinking about calling Pawlenty to yell at him about how her daughter has to leave the state to get married. That would be awesome.

Sometimes when I read tales of the Bush Administration, I think I’m accidentally reading McSweeney’s. Then I pause and check the domain and think - no, no, this is actually real. The stories emerging about Bradley J. Schlozman (Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division, until 2005) are so jaw-gapingly ludicrous that I am actually rendered momentarily silent.

What he did was illegally discriminate against job applicants for legal positions who were liberal/seemed liberal, and tried to push out liberal/seemingly liberal attorneys and replace them with conservatives. He also arranged the hiring of less-qualified applicants if they were ideologically conservative. That’s bad. Dry, though. And abstract.

What does a guy who does this kind of thing sound like, though? What does the former Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division, sound like.

I’m glad you asked. Here are some quotes from a man responsible for ensuring our civil rights, who is actually charged with enforcing our anti-discrimination laws.

• In one Jan. 30, 2004, e-mail, Schlozman declined a lunch invitation from a colleague, citing a previous commitment to interview “some lefty who we’ll never hire.” (ABC News)
• In a March 5, 2004, message, he referred to potential hires in another division of the department as “commies” and said that “as long as I’m here, adherents of Mao’s little red book need not apply.” (ABC News)
• February 2006 voicemail: “[W]hen we start asking, ‘What is your commitment to civil rights? … [H]ow do you prove that? Usually by membership in some crazy liberal organization or by some participation in some crazy cause ? Look, look at my resume — I didn’t have any demonstrated commitment, but I care about the issues. So, I mean, I just want to make sure we don’t start confining ourselves to, you know, politburo members because they happen to be a member of some, you know, psychopathic left-wing organization designed to overthrow the government.” (ABC News)
• [I]n an e-mail on July 15, 2003, to a former colleague, Schlozman wrote, “I too get to work with mold spores, but here in Civil Rights, we call them Voting Section attorneys.” (TPM)
• As part of the same e-mail exchange, on July 16, 2003, Schlozman wrote, “My tentative plans are to gerrymander all of those crazy libs rights out of the section.” (TPM)
• Appellate Section Chief Flynn told us that as early as 2004, when Schlozman was a DAAG with no supervisory responsibility for the Appellate Section, he often came to Flynn’s office to talk about the attorneys in the section. According to Flynn, Schlozman was very critical of the Appellate staff and commented to Flynn that many of the career attorneys in the Appellate Section were “disloyal,” “against us,” “not on the team,” and “treacherous.” Flynn said Schlozman stated on several occasions that when he “came into power,” he wanted to move those people out of the section to make way for “real Americans.” (The original DOJ report - pdf file)
• [Flynn's] notes also reflect that Schlozman stated that this was an opportunity to replace some poor attorneys and attorneys who were opposed to his “agenda” and to bring in some “real Americans.” (The original DOJ report - pdf file)
• “[The section attorney] is a pinko. So why is she leading this impt [important] case?” (The original DOJ report - pdf file)
• “If I recall correctly, [Voting Section attorney] is a crazy lib hans, am I right?” and “a detail would be a great way to get him out of our hair for 6 months.” (The original DOJ report - pdf file)

Here’s the thing. There honestly isn’t much to say about this. It is clear - time after time after time - that the people the Bush administration put into positions of power in the Department of Justice and elsewhere are worse than incompetent. They deliberately broke laws because they thought (and think) they knew (and know) better than the laws and the Constitution and then lied about it. And we let them keep going.

This is shameful.

As I mentioned the other day on Twitter, Megan and I are getting married.  I’m delighted, she’s delighted, apparently many of you are delighted (as you should be), and so I’m going to prey on your cheery goodwill for a moment.

This week, instead of talking to me about flowers and places to have the reception (don’t worry, we can talk about those things later), I want you to come up to me when you see me on Thursday or Friday and tell me you want to add your signature to the letter I’m pasting in below.  If you’re not someone who sees me, you can mail this in yourself.  (the instructions are here)

I want to remind you that it’s not just marriage that is at issue here. The military has kicked out 58 Arab linguists for being GLBT (because we totally don’t need them right now, do we?), discrimination is still legal in a variety of states, and the opposition works tirelessly to ensure that we have second-class citizen status.

The letter you will be signing is below.

January 21, 2009

Dear President Obama,

Congratulations on your historic and inspiring victory. Your lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender citizens, along with families, friends, and heterosexual allies, would like to welcome you to the White House. We are thrilled to see that true change has come to this country.

During your election campaign you wrote an open letter to us, making it clear that you were committed to gaining ‘full equality for the millions of LGBT people in this country.’ In that letter you asked for our vote and promised to:

• Repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and ensure that states treat same-sex couples with full equality in their family and adoption laws
• Enact a fully inclusive Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) to outlaw workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity
• Repeal ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’
• Enact the Matthew Shepard Act to outlaw hate crimes against our community
• Confront the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the stigma surrounding it
• Amend the Uniting American Families Act to afford same-sex couples the same rights and obligations as married couples in our immigration system

We come to you as esteemed citizens of the United States of America in need of equal protections under the law for all families. The LGBT community is part of this diverse country, but do not share the same rights as their heterosexual brothers and sisters. In the spirit of family, respect, and of course, hope, we will work with you to make these promises become a reality.

We paid attention to the statements you made during your campaign, and we voted for you. Now, as you take office, we ask something in return. Please keep your promises to the LGBT community and provide the leadership needed to achieve true equality for all Americans.

Sincerely,
Your Fellow Americans