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“As Maine Goes, So Goes The Nation?” Bull. Part One.

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This is Part I. You can read Part II here.

There’s much to be said about the stunning – and it was stunning – defeat of Maine’s gay marriage law. There’s more to be said about its implications on the bigger picture of marriage equality and the overall picture of gay civil rights. And I’m going to say it all. It will take two parts. Come back for part two!

First and foremost, unlike California, Protect Maine Equality did an outstanding job. Regardless of the results, since 2005 these folks have been working towards equality the right way, by going door to door, sharing personal stories, forming coalitions, and even working with religious groups. They should hold their heads up high.

So, we lost marriage in Maine by a five point spread. Many of us had expected to win by just as much. The problem is, what do we do now?

The folks over at The Washington Blade’s offices asked out loud, “Is it time to set aside marriage and make the more pragmatic push for civil unions?” (More on this in Part II.)

In “You want pity because of Maine? You won’t be getting it from me,” Alvin McEwen writes today,

“There will be no deux ex machina descending from the sky making everything right. There will be no addendums or loopholes. It’s a job that will have to accomplished the hard way because there is no other way.”

Cody Daigle, in “The Lesson in Losing,” writes,

“[W]e need to start thinking and acting like a real community. This morning, I saw angry missives and comments online from friends of mine over the results of Maine. But those same people, in the weeks leading up to the vote, weren’t talking about it or thinking about it or caring about it. What happens to gay couples in Maine affects gay couples in Idaho affects single gay men in Mississippi affects gay people, coupled or not, everywhere. We’re a community, and until we really start caring about what happens to each and every one of us, nothing will change for any of us. It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe in marriage or don’t want to be married — act for those in your community who do. Because we’ll stand up for your freedoms when the time comes.”

As usual, I agree with Daigle (full disclosure, Cody is a good friend.) And personally, I am sick to death, as I wrote in “Start Acting Like It,” of our anger when things like losing marriage happen, yet we’re indifferent every other day of the year?

“[D]oes the majority of the gay community really want marriage equality? And if we do, are we going to start acting like it?”

So, one year after Prop 8, my question is this: Were you mad last year after election day? Are you mad today? 365 days in between, what did you do to support the gay marriage cause? Did you donate your time? Money? Did you email your state and federal representatives? Did you write your president? Did you talk to others about the importance of marriage?

What did you do?

Because here’s the deal.

We lost. And this one hurts a lot, because Maine had a gay marriage law that yesterday got repealed. It’s not like there was a bill and it got voted down in the state legislature. It got passed. And a governor who was against it, signed it. So, we lost big.

And we know who to blame. And who not to blame. Do not, do not blame the people of Maine. They were subject to outside forces beyond their control. And, listening to the debate in their Legislature on gay marriage, I think they are a good people who deserve better treatment than they got from the Church and from NOM.

So, blame Maggie Gallagher’s National Organization for Marriage, for starters. She, along with her Executive Director, Brian Brown, poured cash, and hate, and fear, and lies into Maine. As Brian wrote today,

“We are the single largest donor to Stand for Marriage Maine. We gave nearly $1.8 million, emptying our bank account because of the serious needs in Maine… Bishop Richard Malone of the Diocese of Portland provided invaluable leadership…”

Which brings me to my next point.

Blame the Roman Catholic Church. Separation of church and state, while the law in this country, is not enforced. The tax-free status religious organizations get is a trade-off, that requires them to not get involved in politics. Yet, time and again we see them thumb their noses at the U.S. government, and throw their cash at anti-gay measures around the country. It’s illegal, and it’s time something was done about it. America needs to revoke the tax-free status of any religious organization that gets involved in politics beyond the limits of the law.

The Roman Catholic Church’s Portland diocese sunk over $550,000 into this battle, yet is closing its own churches for lack of money. Go figure.

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) supported the Maine effort with between $49,000 (reported here) and $200,000 (reported here.) HRC claims to have “made more than $280,000 in monetary and in-kind contributions.” All told, while the $200,000 figure is more likely the effective number, one has to ask, if THE leading LGBT organization spent only $200,000 in Maine, what did they think they were going to get? Maine, like California one year ago, should have been all-or-nothing. This Rumsfeldian battle-on-the-cheap didn’t work in Iraq, it didn’t work in California, and it didn’t work in Maine. When are we going to put everything we have into one issue and make damned sure we win?

Then there’s the DNC – the Democratic National Committee, who sent a blast email campaign to voters in Maine yesterday, asking them to come vote, but conveniently left off asking them to vote “No” on repealing gay marriage. Yes, that’s right. THE Democratic organization, in a Democratic state, with a Democratic Governor, and a Democratic Legislature which voted for and passed and signed an historic gay marriage bill didn’t ask its own members to support it.

Aside from the fact that tactically it’s just stupid – have your elected representatives stick their necks out for gay marriage, which they did – then don’t ask voters to support their decision, leaving them vulnerable? Yes, the DNC is stupid, arrogant, and hypocritical. Same sex marriage opponent, and DNC chairman Tim Kaine, I’m talking to you.

Which is why we need to stop blindly giving the DNC cash.

Now. President Obama. What to say about our “fierce advocate in chief?” (By the way, last night David Gergen said gays have a right to be upset with Obama. That was nice to hear, coming from him.) Well, while Obama is against gay marriage, he supports states rights on the subject. (More on that in Part II, too.) This was a state initiative. This was a Democratic initiative. Obama could have lent his support to this, but he chose not to. (I don’t know how much I can blame him. He’s taken a beating on healthcare, and I do want his attention there.)

But Obama could have mentioned Maine (and Washington) at the HRC dinner he graciously attended (no, that was not sarcastic) the night before the National Equality March. He didn’t. He also didn’t actively oppose Prop 8, so while no one’s surprised, he definitely loses the title of “fierce advocate.” I still support him overall, because he’s doing a better job than anyone else could have in these tough times, but he’s not in our corner. Not now, not then, not ever.

So, as I tweeted last night, “If we lose Maine tonight, what are you going to do about it tomorrow?”

What are YOU going to do about it?

More in Part II.

Editorial note: Originally, this piece included the paragraph below, which I still stand by, based on information reportedly given to the Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices.

Along with the Human Rights Campaign, who swooped in to support the No On 1 campaign with a whopping – ready for this? $49,000. Holy Cow! How’d they scrounge up that much dough? Why, that’s just 14% of Joe Solmonese’s $338,400 salary. Yet, the emails I get from them make it sound like they really supported the effort there. Not with your donations, they didn’t.

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Jeffries Vows Democrats Will Ensure Ukraine Aid Passes as Johnson Defectors Grow

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April 19, 2024

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Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries vowed Friday the majority of Democrats will support Republicans’ Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and Gaza foreign aid legislation as Republican Speaker Mike Johnson lost support of another member of his conference to a faction determined to oust him.

“Democrats will provide a majority of our majority as it relates to funding Israel, humanitarian assistance, Ukraine, and our allies in the Indo Pacific,” Minority Leader Jeffries said. “It remains to be seen what Republicans will do in terms of meeting the national security needs of the American people, but it was important for House Democrats to ensure that the national security bills are going to be considered.”

Despite Republicans having a one-vote majority, more Democrats on Friday voted to move the critical and long-awaited foreign aid bills forward than did Republicans.

READ MORE: ‘Stop Bringing Up Nazis and Hitler’: Marjorie Taylor Greene Smacked Down by Democrats

The 316-94 vote included 165 Democrats and 151 Republicans voting yes, and 55 Republicans and 39 Democrats voting no.

Axios’ Juliegrace Brufke posted the list of Republicans voting against their party’s legislation.

Calling it a “rare” moment in modern congressional history to have to rely on opposition party votes to pass legislation, BBC News reports Speaker Johnson’s “hold on power is tenuous, and the legislators who oppose him – and his bid to provide aid to Ukraine – occupy some key positions within the House’s power structure.”

Amid the procedural vote to move the foreign aid funding bills forward, U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar, a far-right Republican of Arizona, announced he is joining Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), and Congressman Tim Massie (R-KY) in formally announcing their will vote to oust Speaker Johnson.

Gosar, like Greene, is reportedly a Christian nationalist. In 2022 CNN reported his “lengthy ties to White nationalists, [a] pro-Nazi blogger and far-right fringe received little pushback for years.”

RELATED: ‘Repercussions’: Democrats and Republicans Stand Against ‘Pro-Putin’ House GOP Faction

“We’ve been very honest in our assessment of the situation from the beginning,” Jeffries on Friday also declared. “At the appropriate time as House Democrats, we will have a conversation about how to deal with any hypothetical motion to vacate.”

“Moscow Marjorie Taylor Greene, Massie, and Gosar are quite a group. But central to our conversation is to make sure that the national security legislation in totality is passed by the House of Representatives.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

 

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Biden Amps Up Field Offices, Trump to Mobilize Thousands of Lawyers to Monitor Vote Counts

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April 19, 2024

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With less than seven months before Election Day the Biden campaign and the Trump campaign are taking shape, and like their politics they could not be more different.

President Biden is “scooping up record-making donations,” “flush with cash,” “building a behemoth of a campaign,” and “plowing the money into an expanding campaign operation in battleground states that appears to surpass what Donald Trump has built,” NBC News reported earlier this month.

Ex-President Donald Trump, struggling with donations, has “raised $75 million less for his presidential bid than Joe Biden and has 270,000 fewer unique donors now than at the same stage of his run for the White House four years ago,” the Financial Times reported Wednesday.

Now, as the Biden campaign invests in a massive ground game, Trump’s strategy is emerging, and it appears to be built on his “Big Lie,” the false and debunked conspiracy theory that there was and is tremendous election fraud.

READ MORE: ‘Repercussions’: Democrats and Republicans Stand Against ‘Pro-Putin’ House GOP Faction

Politico reports the Trump campaign plans to dispatch “more than 100,000 attorneys and volunteers across battleground states to monitor — and potentially challenge — vote counting in November.”

The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee are calling their plan “the most extensive and monumental election integrity program in the nation’s history.” The RNC is chaired by Trump’s hand-picked elections specialist who worked on the Bush 2000 election Florida recount team, and co-chaired by Trump’s daughter-in-law.

Despite Trump’s claims of a stolen election in 2020, his own Attorney General, Bill Barr, his own FBI Director, Chris Wray, his own Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Chris Krebs, all concluded there was no widespread election fraud and none that would have changed any election results. An independent federal agency, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, came to the same conclusion, all as The Brennan Center for Justice reported more than a month after the 2020 election.

Politico warns, “should Trump once again attempt to overturn the election, he will already have in place tens of thousands of workers who could help with that effort.”

“Having the right people to count the ballots is just as important as turning out voters on Election Day,” Trump said in a statement.

The Trump campaign “plans to deploy lawyers to monitor voter machine testing, early voting, election day voting, mail ballot processing and post-election canvassing, auditing and recounts. The campaign also plans to station lawyers at mail-in voting processing centers and set up a hotline that poll watchers and voters can use to report problems,” Politico adds. “The RNC also stated that attorneys will be stationed at ‘every single target processing center where mail ballots are tabulated.'”

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The announcement of that massive operation comes on the heels of a convention this week hosted by the far-right Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association that “drew a parade of felons, disgraced politicians, election deniers, conspiracy theorists and, in the end, a few sheriffs,” NBC News reports. Also among attendees were “MAGA celebrities.”

“The group sees sheriffs as the highest authority in the U.S., more powerful than the federal government, and it wants these county officers to form posses to patrol polling places, seize voting machines and investigate the Democrats and foreign nations behind what they claim is a criminal effort to rig the vote by flooding the country with immigrants who vote illegally.”

David Gilbert at Wired reported: “Far-Right Sheriffs Want a Citizen Army to Stop ‘Illegal Immigrant’ Voters.”

Their plan perfectly dovetails with Donald Trump’s campaign push.

Gilbert writes, “election deniers and conspiracists have coalesced around a narrative they plan to push ahead of November: Blame the immigrants.”

Richard Mack, founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association told Wired that immigrants “have already disrupted the election because they are getting registered to vote.”

“That is election fraud,” Mack added, “these people are not qualified to vote. They are going to vote for whoever got them here and gave them a bunch of free stuff to get here, and of course that’s the Democrat Party, who are complicit in all of this.”

There are no reports of undocumented immigrants registering to vote in any substantial number. NBC News last week reported, “noncitizen voting” is “already illegal and very rare.”

READ MORE: ‘They Want Russia to Win So Badly’: GOP Congressman Blasts Far-Right House Republicans

Those claims, however, echo some made by the Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson one week ago in his joint press conference with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

“We only want U.S. citizens to vote in U.S. elections,” Johnson said, standing next to Trump, “but there are some Democrats who don’t want to do that. We believe that one of their designs, one of the reasons for this open border, which everybody asked all around the country, why would they do this? Why would they allow all this chaos? Why the violence? Because they want to turn these people into voters.”

“Right now the administration is encouraging illegals to go to their local welfare office to sign up for benefits,” Johnson, one of the top election deniers in the country, claimed as he explained his conspiracy theory. He did not state how the Biden Administration is communicating with undocumented immigrants, nor did he offer proof of these communications. He also did not state that the vast majority of undocumented immigrants are ineligible for any government welfare program.

 

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‘Repercussions’: Democrats and Republicans Stand Against ‘Pro-Putin’ House GOP Faction

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April 18, 2024

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Some House Democrats and House Republicans are coming together toward a common opponent: far-right “pro-Putin” hardliners in the House Republican conference, who appear to be led by U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).

Congresswoman Greene has been threatening to oust the Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. Last month she filed a “motion to vacate the chair.” If she chooses to call it up she could force a vote on the House floor to try to remove Speaker Johnson.

House Democrats say they are willing to vote against ousting Johnson, as long as the Speaker puts on the floor desperately needed and long-awaited legislation to fund aid to Ukraine and Israel. Johnson has refused to put the Ukraine aid bill on the floor for months, but after Iran attacked Israel Johnson switched gears. Almost all Democrats and a seemingly large number of Republicans want to pass the Ukraine and Israel aid packages.

RELATED: Marjorie Taylor Greene, ‘Putin’s Envoy’? Democrat’s Bills Mock Republican’s Actions

Forgoing the possibility of installing Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries as Speaker, which is conceivable given Johnson’s now one-vote majority, Democrats say if Johnson does the right thing, they will throw him their support.

“I think he’ll be in good shape,” to get Democrats to support him, if he puts the Ukraine aid bill on the floor, U.S. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) told CNN Thursday. “I would say that there’s a lot of support for the underlying bills. I think those are vital.”

“If these bills were delivered favorably, and the aid was favorably voted upon, and Marjorie Taylor Greene went up there with a motion to remove him, for instance, I think there’s gonna be a lot of Democrats that move to kill that motion,” Congressman Krishnamoorthi said. “They don’t want to see him getting punished for doing the right thing.”

“I think it is a very bad policy of the House to allow one individual such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is an arsonist to this House of Representatives,” U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) told CBS News’ Scott MacFarlane, when asked about intervening to save Johnson. He added he doesn’t want her “to have so much influence.”

U.S. Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, one of several Republicans who won their New York districts in 2022, districts that were previously held by Democrats, opposes Greene’s motion to vacate – although he praised the Georgia GOP congresswoman.

CNN’s Manu Raju reports Republicans “say it’s time to marginalize hardliners blocking [their] agenda.”

D’Esposito, speaking to Raju, called for “repercussions for those who completely alienate the will of the conference. The people gave us the majority because they wanted Republicans to govern.”

U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler, like D’Esposito is another New York Republican who won a previously Democratic seat in 2022. Lawler spoke out against the co-sponsor of Greene’s motion to vacate, U.S. Rep. Tim Massie (R-KY), along with two other House Republicans who are working to block the Ukraine aid bill via their powerful seats on the Rules Committee.

U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ), a former Navy pilot, blasted Congresswoman Greene.

RELATED: ‘They Want Russia to Win So Badly’: GOP Congressman Blasts Far-Right House Republicans

“Time is of the essence” for Ukraine, Rep. Sherrill told CNN Wednesday night. “The least we can do is support our Democratic allies, especially given what we know Putin to do. To watch a report and to think there are people like Marjorie Taylor Greene on the right that are pro-Putin? That are pro-Russia? It is really shocking.”

U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), as NCRM reported Thursday, had denounced Greene.

“I guess their reasoning is they want Russia to win so badly that they want to oust the Speaker over it,” he said, referring to the Ukraine aid bill Greene and her cohorts want to tank. “I mean that’s a strange position to take.”

The far-right hardliners are also causing chaos in the House.

“Things just got very heated on the House floor,” NBC News’ Julie Tsirkin reported earlier Thursday. “Group of hardliners were trying to pressure Johnson to only put Israel aid on the floor and hold Ukraine aid until the Senate passed HR2.”

HR2 is the House Republicans’ extremist anti-immigrant legislation that has n o chance of passage in the Senate nor would it be signed into law by President Biden.

“Johnson said he couldn’t do it, and [U.S. Rep. Derrick] Van Orden,” a far-right Republican from Wisconsin “called him ‘tubby’ and vowed to bring on the MTV [Motion to Vacate.]”

“No one in the group (Gaetz, Boebert, Burchett, Higgins, Donalds et al.) were threatening Johnson with an MTV,” Tsirkin added. “Van Orden seemed to escalate things dramatically…”

Despite Greene’s pro-Putin and anti-Ukraine positions, her falsehoods about “Ukrainian Nazis,” and Russians not slaughtering Ukrainian clergy, reporters continue to “swarm”:

Watch the videos above or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Afraid and Intimidated’: Trump Trial Juror Targeted by Fox News Dismissed

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