Tag: gay marriage
Endorse This! RuPaul Roasts Ted Cruz On Marriage Equality

Endorse This! RuPaul Roasts Ted Cruz On Marriage Equality

Filling in for Jimmy Kimmel, guest host RuPaul laid into pretend human being Ted Cruz during a recent taping of Jimmy Kimmel Live.

“Sen. Ted Cruz says that the Supreme Court was clearly wrong about its 2015 same-sex marriage ruling,” the drag icon said of the Texas senator. “In gayer news: Child, fuck Ted Cruz.”

The legendary drag performer and host of RuPaul's Drag Race spoke out amid increasing fears that the Supreme Court — which jeopardized abortion rights when it overturned Roe v. Wade— might soon come after gay marriage.

While Democrats in the House quickly passed a bill to ensure that gay marriage stays intact at the federal level, Republicans in the Senate either oppose gay rights or prefer to ignore the matter. And of course Sen. Ted Cruz had to reiterate his anti-gay bigotry -- despite the fact that his teenage daughter has publicly rebuked her dad and come out as bisexual.

Fun for the whole family!

Watch the entire segment below:

Top Senate Leaders See Bipartisan Support To Pass Gay Marriage Bill

Top Senate Leaders See Bipartisan Support To Pass Gay Marriage Bill


By Moira Warburton

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Top Senate Democrats and Republicans said on Wednesday they may have the votes to pass a bill protecting same-sex marriage rights nationwide, the day after the measure passed the House of Representatives with a bipartisan majority.

The measure, intended to head off any Supreme Court effort to roll back gay marriage rights, passed the House on Tuesday with all Democrats and 47 Republican representatives - just over a fifth of their caucus - voting in favor.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Wednesday said he was "really impressed by how much bipartisan support it got in the House."

When the Supreme Court last month struck down its landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling protecting the right to abortion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the court should also reconsider its past rulings that guaranteed access to contraception and the right to gay marriage because they relied on the same legal arguments as Roe.

Under Senate rules, Schumer would need at least 10 Republicans in favor to pass the bill in the 50-50 Senate.

Senator John Thune, the chamber’s No. 2 Republican, said he believed a bill codifying gay marriage could receive enough Republican support to pass.

"I wouldn’t be surprised. We haven't assessed that at all, yet," he told reporters when asked if 10 Republicans could back such legislation. "But as a general matter, I think that is something people in the country have come to accept."

Republican Senator Ted Cruz said on Saturday that the Supreme Court was "clearly wrong" in establishing a federal right to gay marriage. Senator Lindsey Graham said he would not support a bill codifying same sex marriage.

Several other Republicans have said they could support the bill. Senator Susan Collins co-sponsored a Senate version of the House bill. Senator Thom Tillis told CNN on Wednesday that he would "probably" vote in favor.

(Reporting by Moira Warburton, additional reporting by David Morgan; Editing by Scott Malone and Howard Goller)

Democratic Aspirations Are Headed For The Ash Heap

Democratic Aspirations Are Headed For The Ash Heap

Most political analysts and pundits — myself included — spent the election season predicting the death of the Republican Party, which was embroiled in civil war. We were right: The GOP, at least the GOP of Ronald Reagan and the George Bushes, is dead.

The party in power calls itself Republican, but it is really the party of Donald Trump. We are about to find out what that means.

Still — along with dismissing the plausibility of a President Trump — the commentariat missed an equally important development that is now startlingly obvious: The Democratic Party is bleeding out and near death, too. It may not be terminal, but it is certainly comatose. It may recover, but even if it does, its health will be fragile for years, if not decades, to come.

As a few recounts around the country continue, it’s clear that Republican governors and state legislative candidates have romped to victory in most races. The GOP (or the party of Trump) now controls the vast majority of governorships and legislatures. Brooklyn College history professor Robert David Johnson told The Washington Post that a political party has not been so dominant since the World War II era.

That’s after taking into account the smoldering heap of Democratic aspirations left behind at the federal level. Republicans now control the White House, both branches of Congress and, shortly, the U.S. Supreme Court. Not only is there a vacancy left by the death of Antonin Scalia, but there are two justices over the age of 80 (liberal Ruth Bader Ginsberg and moderate Anthony Kennedy) and one who is 78 (liberal Stephen Breyer).

That means that Trump could conceivably pick four justices with no resistance from a GOP-controlled Senate. If he chooses conservative justices who are, say, in their 50s, the nation’s governing document will be interpreted by a right-wing faction for more than a generation.

That means that President Obama, whom Democrats once believed would be transformational, will have no legacy beyond serving two terms as the nation’s first black president. Every major policy or program he put in place is about to be overturned. His executive orders on issues such as deportation will be easiest to reverse, of course.

But a President Trump will also find few obstacles on his way to repealing the Affordable Care Act. Or rolling back Obama’s agreement with Iran limiting its nuclear program. Or reversing the president’s seemingly historic treaty to curb climate change. The Donald has pledged to rescind all these, and there is no reason to doubt him. Republican leaders already had those legacy-making accomplishments in their gun-sights.

Looking back, the signs of a Democratic Party skating toward disaster have been apparent for some time. Since Obama’s first term, news accounts have recorded the decline of state Democratic organizations around the country, a dangerous frailty that became more apparent after the 2010 midterm elections.

The backlash against President Obama was already in full roar, and furious Tea Partiers and their GOP establishment allies turned out at the ballot box in droves. The highly vaunted Obama coalition, by contrast, apparently didn’t understand the importance of those elections, and Republicans took over statehouses, Congress and the U.S. Senate. But because the White House was still in Democratic hands, it was easier to overlook the vulnerabilities lurking just beneath the level of the Oval Office.

Now, there is nothing to stop a rollback of the personal liberties and human rights that Americans had begun to take for granted. Vice President-elect Pence, a Christian fundamentalist, will surely want abortion rights abolished and the full array of gay and lesbian rights curbed. Gay marriage? There is every reason to expect right-wingers will try to get a new Supreme Court to overturn its historic marriage ruling.

Perhaps, though, those rollbacks in personal and civil liberties would seed a rebirth of the progressive movement and the political party that has, for decades now, been associated with it: the Democratic Party. It’s a shame that the nation will first have to suffer through some oppressive times to get there.

Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.

IMAGE: Campaign Chairman John Podesta  hugs Tina Flournoy, chief of staff to former U.S. President Bill Clinton, as they attend an event being held by Hillary Clinton to address her staff and supporters about the results of the U.S. election at a hotel in the Manhattan borough of New York, U.S., November 9, 2016. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore Ousted Over Gay Marriage Defiance

Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore Ousted Over Gay Marriage Defiance

(Reuters) – The chief justice of Alabama’s Supreme Court was effectively ousted on Friday by a judicial panel that found he unethically resisted U.S. court rulings that legalized same-sex marriage.

Chief Justice Roy Moore, 69, violated judicial ethics with an order seen as directing probate judges to withhold marriage licenses from same-sex couples, defying federal court decisions, the Alabama Court of the Judiciary ruled.

It was the second suspension for the outspokenly conservative Moore. Earlier, he was sanctioned for refusing to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments in a state building.

Moore on Friday blasted the decision that followed a trial earlier this week.

“This was a politically motivated effort by radical homosexual and transgender groups to remove me as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court because of outspoken opposition to their immoral agenda,” he said in a statement on social media.

His lawyer, Mat Staver, said he plans to appeal the unanimous decision to suspend Moore without pay for the rest of his term, effective immediately. Staver said it essentially removes Moore from the bench, as the chief justice will be too old to seek re-election at his term’s end in January 2019.

Civil rights proponents hailed the move. “The people of Alabama who cherish the rule of law are not going to miss the Ayatollah of Alabama,” Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said in a statement.

The Alabama Court of the Judiciary said in the ruling that Moore’s Jan. 6 order showed “disregard for binding federal law” after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark June 2015 decision giving gay and lesbian couples the right to marry.

The judiciary court rejected the chief justice’s argument that he was providing a status update. Moore has insisted there was uncertainty after conflicting opinions on gay marriage from state and federal courts.

“I think this ruling is an abuse of power,” Moore’s lawyer, Staver, said by phone. “It’s a de facto removal.”

The ruling noted the state judiciary court had removed Moore from the bench in 2003 for defying a federal order to take down a Ten Commandments monument he installed in the state’s judicial building. Voters re-elected him as chief justice in 2012.

He was charged after the Southern Poverty Law Center filed ethics complaints.

“It undermined the integrity of the judiciary, the spectacle of a chief justice telling other judges not to follow a court order,” the SPLC’s Cohen said by phone.

(Reporting by Letitia Stein in Tampa, Fla.; Editing by David Gregorio and Matthew Lewis)

IMAGE: A same-sex marriage supporter holds a sign referring to Alabama’s Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, during a protest outside the Jefferson County Courthouse in Birmingham, Alabama February 9, 2015.  REUTERS/Marvin Gentry