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trailmonkee

trailmonkee's Journal
trailmonkee's Journal
December 7, 2012

Breaking: US Supreme Court to take up same-sex marriage issue

Source: NBC News

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Friday to take its first serious look at the issue of gay marriage, granting review of California's ban on same-sex marriage and of a federal law that defines marriage as only the legal union of a man and a woman.

At the very least, the court will look at this question: When states choose to permit the marriages of same-sex couples, can the federal government refuse to recognize their validity? But by also taking up the California case, the court could get to the more fundamental question of whether the states must permit marriages by gay people in the first place.

The California case involves a challenge to Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment approved by 52 percent of voters in 2008. It banned same-sex marriages in the state and went into effect after 18,000 couples were legally married earlier that year.

A federal judge declared the ban unconstitutional, and a federal appeals court upheld that ruling, though on narrower grounds that apply only to California. Now that the Supreme Court is wading into the battle, the justices could decide the more basic issue of whether any state can ban same-sex marriage under the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection of the law. Or they could limit their ruling to apply only to the ban in California.

Nine states and the District of Columbia have moved to permit same-sex marriage or soon will -- Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont, and Washington.

The Supreme Court also agreed Friday to hear a challenge to the federal Defense of Marriage Act, known as DOMA, passed by overwhelming margins in both houses of Congress in 1996 and signed by President Clinton. A provision of the law specifies that, for federal purposes, "the word 'marriage' means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife."

Read more: http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/07/15756101-us-supreme-court-to-take-up-same-sex-marriage-issue?lite

December 7, 2012

Dan Savage Gets His Same-Sex Marriage License In Washington State (VIDEO)



link



Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights advocate Dan Savage was among the first in his home state of Washington to receive a marriage license just hours after Gov. Chris Gregoire signed the voter-approved law allowing same-sex couples to wed.

"If you had told me when I was coming out when I was a teenager that a time would come when a majority in a state...would vote to endorse marriage equality, would vote to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples, I wouldn't have believed you," a glowing Savage said after receiving the certificate with his husband Terry Miller.

"It's gotten better for us because straight people have gotten better about us."




December 7, 2012

7.7%

I like the sound of that #



Job Creation Hits 146,000 Jobs, Rate at 7.7%

December 7, 2012

25 Awesome Portraits Of Couples Just Married In Washington State

buzzfeed

(all 25 at the link.... here are a few for now..... I am not responsible for anybody that might cry a little on their laptop....)





































and a bonus pic I found on Jackbeck's post



And Finally:

December 7, 2012

A Holiday Message For Bill-O, Faux News & the rest of The American Taliban

Here is an oh, so simple solution for the whole 'keep Christ in Christmas' fake war that the far right whines about every year.... if Fox News, Bill O' Reily and the rest of the American Taliban could figure this out, think of all the time they could spend focusing on Real Christian issues like Poverty, Homelessness and Equality right?

....not going to happen, in that case:



(and out of the public square)

Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802. The original text reads:

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State."

December 6, 2012

Obama Approval Rating Reaches Three-Year High In Poll

Source: huffpo

A month after the election, President Barack Obama's approval ratings are at a level he hasn't seen for years, with contentious negotiations over the upcoming "fiscal cliff" so far not dampening his support.

Obama has an approval rating of 53 percent among registered voters, according to a poll released Thursday by Quinnipiac University -- the strongest approval level the university has measured since the summer of 2009.

Obama's disapproval rating of 40 percent makes the president's net approval rating the best in over a year.

"Nothing like winning an election to boost your job approval," said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. "President Barack Obama hasn't had a score this good since his 52-40 percent approval rating May 5, 2011, right after the death of Osama bin Laden."

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/06/obama-approval-rating_n_2250788.html?utm_hp_ref=politics

December 6, 2012

Ellen Vs. One Million Moms over JCP ad's (and as Ellen brilliantly points out...not quite a million)

Christian group calls for boycott over Ellen DeGeneres ad with elves

raw story



The anti-LGBT activist group One Million Moms is calling on Christians to boycott JCPenney department stores because talk show host Ellen DeGeneres appears in a routine Christmas ad.

As NBC noted on Thursday, JCPenny’s commercial, in which DeGeneres wears holiday clothes and insults elves with short jokes, will not strike most viewer as controversials in any way.

But for One Million Moms, seeing the lesbian comedienne on their television screens was an instant cause for action.

“Since April, JC Penney’s has not aired Ellen DeGeneres in one of their commercials until now,” the group wrote on its website. “A new JCP ad features Ellen and three elves. JCP has made their choice to offend a huge majority of their customers again. Christians must now vote with their wallets.”

Viewers on YouTube were puzzled by the group’s reaction.

“One Million Moms or as I call them a seething hot ball of bigotry, hate, intolerance and inequality,” one commenter wrote. “There is nothing wrong with that ad.”

Earlier this year, DeGeneres spoke out on her television show after One Million Moms called on her to be fired as JCPenney’s spokesperson because she was a lesbian.

“For a group that calls themselves ‘One Million Moms,’ they only have 40,000 members on their page. So, they are rounding to the nearest million and I get that,” she joked.


More at Raw Story (http://s.tt/1w62M)

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