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NY Senate Vote Against Gay Marriage Cost New Yorkers $210,000,000

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bigotry

Protestor at Thursday's Union Square Rally In NYC.

This past Wednesday, in yet another “extraordinary session” – that’s where the Governor tells the Legislature they haven’t done their job and they need to come back to work – the New York State Senate, after finally looking at the huge budget shortfalls the state is facing, took on the issue of same sex marriage.

Of course, we all know the outcome.

Thirty-eight Senators, including thirty Republicans, and eight Democrats – now known collectively as the “Hate 38” – voted against gay marriage. They voted against fairness, equality, and reason.

The New York Assembly, the night before, and for the third time, in an effort to encourage and speed up the Senate’s passage of the bill, voted to allow same sex couples the right to marry. The hope was that, having passed the bill, the Senate would too, and the Governor would sign it into law immediately.

That didn’t happen.

The Senate, in the face of mounting debt and budget cuts, voted against gay marriage, and with it, the two hundred ten million dollars (over three years) that would have come to the state in revenue. That’s right. The New York State Senate, after finally addressing the huge budget shortfalls the state is facing, looked $210,000,000 in the face and said, “No thanks.”

To understand the immense short-sightedness of their decision, it’s important to look at the facts. Let’s start with geography.

us-northeast

As you can see, the state of New York is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. And further east, New Hampshire. All states where same sex couples can marry. Not to mention, Canada to the north borders New York, and same sex couples can marry there as well. In addition to that, the New York Senate knew that (and some say actually had a deal with) New Jersey would be voting on gay marriage right after the November elections.

So, after working for weeks on the budget the Senate went and threw out a guaranteed $210,000,000.

They let $210,000,000 go out the window – and across the border to Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, over to New Hampshire, and probably, after next week, over to New Jersey.

(By the way, gay marriage will bring $500,000,000 to the coffers of New Jersey.)

And here’s the even more ridiculous piece: gay marriage is legally recognized in New York State.

That’s right. Any same sex couple can travel across the state line, get married, and have their marriage legally recognized by the very same state that refuses to allow them to marry within the borders of their home state.

What’s the point?

If you look at it logically, there’s only one conclusion you can draw: ignorance, hatred, and bigotry. OK, that’s three. But they all add up to the same thing: No marriage equality for same sex couples because thirty eight elected officials in New York are motivated by fear and hatred. Or, their ties to special interest groups, like Maggie Gallagher’s National Organization for Marriage (NOM,) which spent a reported $600,000 in New York to fight the gay marriage bill.

Their fear and hatred of New York’s LGBTQ community has now spread over and impacted all New Yorkers – by depriving them of a state where equality, integrity, and fairness are the law of the land, and where an additional $210,000,000 could have been used to support the state’s failing economy. Increased taxes, reduced public services, teacher layoffs, education cutbacks, delayed service improvements: these are the result of budget shortfalls. What could $210,000,000 have prevented?

All this means they are the wrong people to represent us.

While I don’t believe in “majority rules,” it bears keeping in mind that the same day the New York State Senate voted to kill the gay marriage bill, Marist released a poll stating fifty-one percent of New Yorkers approved of the bill – and same sex marriage.

That’s right folks: A majority of New Yorkers favor allowing same sex couples the right to wed.

The message is simple. It’s time to vote out of office the “Hate 38.”

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Right-Wingers’ Latest Chick-fil-A Meltdown Proves They Have ‘Officially Jumped the Shark’: Morning Joe Panel

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MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Donny Deutsch mocked conservatives for running the “woke” hysteria into the ground.

Ron DeSantis and other Republicans have screeched about the so-called “woke agenda,” which they warn will undermine American values and put children at risk from all manner of threats, but the “Morning Joe” host said most voters simply don’t care about that manufactured issue.

“Joe Biden, 350 pieces of bipartisan legislation signed, and Ron DeSantis and everybody else is talking ‘woke, woke, woke, woke, woke,'” Scarborough said. “Again, something that I said on this show and I heard a lot about from liberals, even, in 2021. You’re not hearing it, again, in part because there have been some corrections. You have the head of Berkley Law School, Yale Law School, Stanford Law School going, ‘Hold on, hold on, we’re not going to let these woke mobs get in the way of free speech.’ They’re saying it at the most elite law schools in America, so common-sense Americans are going, ‘Okay, there may still be a problem, but they’re working on it,’ and yet these Republicans are all acting like it’s 2019, 2020 and they just keep freaking out. Well, Joe Biden is talking about job training and signing bipartisan bills.”

Conservatives have turned against Chick-fil-A for hiring a vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion — which actually happened over a year ago but largely escaped notice until recently — and Deutsche said that was a nadir for “woke” hysteria.

READ MORE: ‘Cowards’: Soledad O’Brien rips former CNN colleagues for silence as Chris Licht wrecks the network

“The ‘woke’ movement officially jumped the shark,” he said. “Joe, you touched on this earlier with the Chick-fil-A move. Right-wing company, I don’t say that negatively, very family values, closed on Sundays, the head of the — [company chairman] Dan Cathy came out against same-sex marriages. They’re very conservative. Now, all of a sudden — you’re right, very conservative, obviously a great company, and they came under fire they have a DEI initiative, diversity, coming under fire from right-wing groups. That’s the official moment that ‘woke’ officially jumped the shark and put Fonzie on skis in Honolulu.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

Image by Hector Alejandro via Flickr and a CC license

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RIGHT WING EXTREMISM

Fox Host Says Democrats Don’t Believe in Heaven So They Play ‘Hard’ to ‘Perfect’ Earth

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Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy blamed the differences between Republicans and Democrats on religious beliefs about Heaven.

On Sunday’s Fox & Friends program, co-host Pete Hegseth argued religion was liberating because people could realize they aren’t perfect. A video clip of the moment was shared on social media.

“It changes the way you look even at politics,” Campos-Duffy agreed. “And sometimes, you know, we look at how hard on the left they play. They really play for keeps. They play in a way that’s very, you know, a lot of times conservatives look at it and go, why don’t we play as hard as them?”

The Fox News host said Democrats were trying to perfect the Earth because they did not believe in Heaven.

“Well, for them, where we live right now, this place, Earth is it,” she opined. “So everything’s on the line here for them. They think, as you said, they can perfect this Earth. Those of us who have faith don’t believe that. And we believe how we act here determines where we go after. And so we had to behave.”

“And so even in politics, we don’t, you know, we act within those moral limits,” Campos-Duffy insisted. “And you know, the ends justify the means is sort of the rules for radicals. That’s not how Christians act.”

Watch the video below from Fox News or at the link.

 

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Extremist Group Targets Florida High School’s Yearbook Over Inclusion of LGBTQ Students Section

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The publication of a Florida high school yearbook that included an LGBTQ section has drawn rebuke from a conservative group, The Orlando Sentinel reports.

Lyman High School’s 256-page yearbook includes two pages that highlight the school’s LGBTQ students and features gender identity terms such as “genderfluid” and “nonbinary.”

The Seminole County Public Schools in response to the criticism is offering to issue refunds or reprint the yearbook without the LGBTQ section that the conservative Seminole County Moms for Liberty claims is offensive.

“They shouldn’t have any sexual definitions in a yearbook,” the group’s chapter chair Jessica Tillmann told The Sentinel.

“This is a yearbook that goes to every student as young as 14.”

The school’s yearbook is stirring controversy for a second straight year after the district in 2022 considered putting stickers over photos of a student walkout protesting the so-called “don’t say gay” law, the report said.

The Sentinel’s Skyler Swisher reports that “An LGBTQ+ section in this year’s yearbook includes a picture of members of the student’s Gay-Straight Alliance, definitions of key LGBTQ+ terms, a passage on the evolution of pronouns and a profile of a student who advocates for the LGBTQ+ community.”

Danielle Pomeranz, the school yearbook’s faculty advisor, isn’t on board with the district’s decision to remove the LGBTQ content.

“They are definitions,” Pomeranz told The Sentinel.

“They are not teaching anything about sex at all. … Nobody is teaching anybody about sex acts. It is ridiculous.”

Pomeranz has since resigned from her position in the district, citing in part the Sunshine State’s political climate and an unsupportive district, the report said.

“We’ve always had the LGBTQ+ spread in there,” she said.

“Our job as journalists and members of the yearbook staff is to provide coverage of the entire school and that includes all of the communities, including the LGBTQ+ community.”

Read the full article here.

Image via Shutterstock

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