Kersten’s marriage was under direct attack by GOP Rep. Tim Kelly, who offered an amendment that would have stripped the word “marriage” from Minnesota statutes and relegated all current marriages, as well as future same-sex marriages, to the status of civil unions.

That amendment failed by a 22-111 margin before the final 75-59 vote on the marriage equality bill.

Great news, and also unsurprising news to me after being an Iowan for my first 24 adult years.

Iowa has a strongly non-partisan process for selecting justices for its supreme court. The governor appoints them from a pool of candidates deemed to be qualified by bar association members and appointees. So, despite the governor’s mansion returning to Republican hands in 2010, in sync with bouncing the 3 justices, the governor couldn’t immediately flood the appointment committee with social conservatives after taking office. The probable outcome from the beginning was that any of the competent, qualified justices bounced from the court would be replaced by competent, qualified justices.

I can’t wait for whatever fundraising messages come next from NOM. OK, so you funded our ouster of 3 justices, which has turned into a bust, and a 4th justice, which fell flat. Please, please, please, drop more money in the bucket so we can pretend that (a) we can dump more justices (including the ones we helped put on the court, and (b) it will make even the tiniest difference.

Besides the palpable resignation on Plante’s part, note what’s missing thus far: Neither Brown nor Plante are making bellicose promises to unseat the entire GOP delegation in the RI Senate. No commitment to rewarding no-voting Dems in both houses with future campaign cash.

But of course, it’s no big deal that Plante couldn’t hang on to a single GOP supporter in the RI Senate.

I love the header graphic they’re using.

I’m not much of a graphic designer, but I’ve worked with some great ones. In this one, it’s not the org that’s getting the focus. In fact, the top half of its logo is divorced from the bottom half. It’s not members of the org getting graphic attention, either. It’s Brian Brown… or, well, his desk?

I don’t envy Brown’s post-NOM job hunt. Having a keen eye for self-promotion won’t help him any in getting another top-dog job.

Great stuff.

I love imagining NOM’s pitch to its donors now. “Yeah, your previous dollars got us nothing here, not even a single GOP senator. Sorry about that. So, give us more money now, because we’re going on the warpath to unseat the entire Republican delegation in the senate. Wait, what? You’re questioning our competence? You don’t want to throw good money after bad?”

Yikes. As much as I’m happy that MN’s FDL (Dem) control means that we’ve got a shot at a decent health care exchange, I’m skeptical about passing marriage equality, and the balance could shift all too quickly/decisively in 2014.

This quote made me laugh: “We don’t segment our constituents by race or cultural background, any more than we separate them by age or gender.”

Age? So, services for infants/toddlers, kids in foster care, and senior citizens are all the same?

Thanks for the update, Pam.

Based on the Globe reporting, he sounds determined to muddle his message

The “I’m a traditionalist” comes out on conservative talk radio.

Hours later, after a Dem press conference attacking him, his line is “I believe DOMA should be reversed.” As senator, that’s the only piece of the issue where he could potentially play a role; he wouldn’t have any option to reverse marriage equality in MA (apart from supporting a never-gonna-happen 2006-style anti-gay federal marriage amendment).

It would be welcome, as far as I’m concerned, if he identified as a traditionalist in his own church and also a supporter of letting civil law treat everyone equally… but that strikes me as unlikely.

The correlation with obnoxious stereotypes is obvious, and a convenient direction for Lively to go.

I can’t escape the sense that it’s less about Lively’s ignorance and more about maliciousness. He’s determined to slime bi people side-by-side with the rest of the community as unprincipled and incapable of committed relationships.

In addition to the impacts on GBTQ scouts, sponsoring orgs can make it difficult for scouts with openly LGBT parents or role models. When my son was a Cub Scout in a troop sponsored by a conservative church (not a choice I was allowed to contribute to), it didn’t matter that I never tried to become a recognized leader. I was not welcome as a server for pancake suppers or a volunteer on clean-up crews.

I wasn’t prevented from participating in parent/scout activities with other parents, but under specific instructions that I was never to “stand in authority over a child.”

So, the BSA has no problem making some straight scouts second-class members based on orientation of their family members.

It’s fascinating that the guy is not claiming that his children have been harmed, or that his parental rights have been violated as of yet. He’s suing because the school refuses to preemptively grant that nothing they teach will be objectionable to him.

The simple, obvious issue for the school is that at some point, kids sharing classrooms with the Tourloukis children may mention celebrating Jewish or Muslim holidays, and competent teachers will admit to all of the students that Jewish, Muslim, Christian and other families exist side-by-side in their community. At some point, kids will mention living with their grandparents or alternating between their divorced parents’ homes.

And, scariest of all scary things to Dr. Tourloukis, his kids will get to know classmates who mention their two moms or two dads during recess, or the existence of those families will come up when kids draw pictures of their families, or treat days may bring same-sex parents into the classroom to drop off cookies or cupcakes.

The nerve of the school officials! Why can’t they promise to pre-warn Dr. Tourloukis and his wife 48 hours ahead of kids blurting out anything about their families that the Dr. doesn’t like?

In my first scan of Hagan’s piece, I could only imagine that it was allegorical satire transplanted from the Onion. A ship full of pasty GOPers steaming past Guantanamo a few days after the election? Please!

From the press conference, the 4 were shot immediately on arriving at the fires. A fifth (off-duty cop who followed the fire truck to the fire) had his vehicle shot at least twice before he backed far enough away to warn other firefighters away from the scene.

Four homes lost, four more damaged.

And, this is the sort of story that gets worse… had the shooter already been taking lives before the fire? setting the fires himself? how many more victims will be found?

It’s both dangerous and weird to think that power and responsibilities you don’t want are worth fighting for because none of the others is as good as you. Messianic, even.

At a tactical level, though, the direct quotes from Tagg (and other family contributions to the campaign) suggest that Romney was unfit to weather the challenges of the White House.

The big question in my mind is, how do the tools built and lessons learned by the Obama campaign get folded back into advancing justice, fairness, and competent government?

Revolting. A 53-y/o guy (that’s me, too), an upstanding Christian (not me), blames a younger female employee for his erections (again, not me), and believes his faith and his marital commitment are too brittle to prevent being hurtled into a sexual affair.

This sets small business owners up perfectly to hire young, attractive employees and rotate them out every 2-3 years because they got too horny or the owners’ marriages are going badly.

It’s also bizarre that Iowa precedent allows termination simply because a family member of the owner finds the employee disruptive to the family. So, it could also be used if this guy’s wife got pissed off at a male employee who became her hubby’s drinking buddy, and they were texting too much about their favorite sports team.

The whole sick mess just ends up privileging the business owner. He isn’t responsible for setting professional boundaries with his employees (no more texting, for example) and then sticking to them like ethical professionals do. He doesn’t have to create reasonable boundaries between his business and family life, asserting himself to his wife and pastor that a competent, loyal employee should stay while he mans up about his own boners. He just gets to say, Whoops! Boners! Pastor! Wife! Bye!

Is it true that the raw data from the study has not yet been released?

Mighty convenient that Regnerus can continue publishing new findings without having pesky peers able to crunch the numbers independently.

When it comes to families, these folks romanticize the Leave it to Beaver families of the 50s, promoting inaccurate stereotypes that didn’t speak to experiences from the 1920s and earlier. (Women working at home in the 20s generally had tough, physical jobs, no time for afternoon bridge games with pearls on.)

With this arm-the-schools nonsense, they’re romanticizing shoot-em-up westerns of the 1920s-50s — that the best we can possibly aspire to is gun battles between good guys and bad guys in classrooms and hallways of our schools.

“Washingtonians apparently didn’t think PMW was a good investment…”

This is the crux of NOM’s challenge… in 2011, only 2 people saw fit to fund 75% of NOM’s operations. In 2012, NOM lost badly across the board.

In 2013 and beyond, even the most desperately anti-equality people will be second-guessing themselves about throwing good money after bad.

Despicable to pass a country like Qatar off as having any concern about same-sex marriage. It’s not about marriage in Qatar, Mr. Brown, it’s about the simple existence of LGBT people.

It’s also interesting to read up on Qatar itself. This is a country fully governed by Sharia law, and yet is fully engaged in the global economy. Its liquor laws are pretty restrictive, but treat Muslims more strictly than non-Muslims.

So, if anything, the people of Qatar are already more grown-up than Brown is. When they buy coffee from Starbucks, or attend branch campuses of U.S. universities in Qatar, they’re fully aware of differences in belief. Northwestern University, which has offered domestic partnership benefits to employees since 1995, has a campus in Qatar, and its students aren’t throwing temper tantrums about treating gay people fairly.

“Washington has a very high percentage of voters who never attend church, and polling showed that 80 percent of unchurched voters approved of Referendum 74.”

Translation: PMW failed because not enough religious voters wanted to force their beliefs on the “unchurched” heathen.

Yikes.

I’m looking forward to watching NOM’s funders walk away as time goes by.

It’s one thing to pour millions of bucks into campaigns when those dollars might achieve something. As Karl Rove is also discovering now, though, big-money donors won’t be so hot on dumping cash into losing campaigns.

Ignoring NOM’s protests that this week didn’t change history, Brown and the rest of NOM have got to be recognizing this as the last nail in the coffin of the federal marriage amendment. They love promoting their 30+ anti-gay state-level votes and have been itching for that to become 38 states ratifying a federal amendment, however undoable and unlikely that has been.

Now with marriage equality in 9 states, an equality-friendly vote by Minnesotans and same-sex couple recognition in a few more, the path to 38 states simply does not exist. It would be much more difficult to get the amendment through the House and Senate than the failed attempts under Bush.

So, have fun with your book sale, NOM! And, congrats on flipping control of the NY Senate to Democrats, blocking your hopes of repealing marriage equality. Stay classy!