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Our Wizard Behind The Equality Curtain

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Unless you have been living under a rock for the last 7 months, you undoubtedly have seen the lawsuits and court cases to advance equality that have sprung up throughout the United States. One by one, states are coming in on the right side of history and accepting all families, allowing them to join their love together in legally recognized marriage.

What you may not have seen, or what tends to get overlooked, is the magic that happens behind the equality curtain and the names of those who are working to make these cases successful. From drafting complaints to the never ending responses and appeals, there are many long hours that are given to advance equality in the courts. There is a whole list of people shepherding these cases down the road to equality. Lawyers who work without pay, keeping long hours, away from family, giving up their personal time, pushed to the limit. One such lawyer is Scott J. Spivey. (Photo above)

Scott is a local New Orleans lawyer who was born in Orlando. Scott moved to Alexandria in 1976, and graduate from Alexandria Senior High where he was a nationally ranked swimmer. He was offered scholarships by both Tulane and Dartmouth and appointments to all of the service academies except West Point, (They said that he was not physically fit because he couldn’t do the long jump.) He accepted the appointment to the US Coast Guard Academy in 1985, and graduated in 1990. He was commissioned as an ensign  in the Coast Guard and served on board the USCG Cutter BEAR WMEC 901.

In June 1992, Scott transferred to Coast Guard Command District 8, here in New Orleans.  In August of the next year, he began law school at Loyola Law School in the evening program, while serving as detachable law enforcement duty officer and on-call law enforcement duty officer with Operations . In January 1996, he resigned his commission and began clerking with local law firms and practicing criminal law as a law student under the now Judge Darryl Derbigny.  He graduated December 1996 and was licensed in 1997.

Scott practices multiple areas of law, including general civil practice with concentrations in business, commercial and real property transactions and litigation, contract preparation, business formation and dissolutions; federal and state workers’ compensation; property tax and business personal property tax appeals and sales; family business planning and litigation, wills and successions; immigration and customs enforcement defense; and traffic and criminal defense.

In July 2012, when my husband and I were contemplating the idea of suing the state of Louisiana to have our legal marriage recognized by the state, we didn’t know at the time that Scott would take on this fight singlehandedly. After putting out feelers to several lawyers, we got a response back. It was from our friend Scott, informing us that not only would he gladly take on our case, but much to our surprise, take it on PRO BONO.

There is much to be said about Scott, and still it would not be enough. Whether you needed a will, someone to represent you in court, or any other area that he can help in, Scott has always helped the LGBT community.

As Scott told us:

“I resigned my commission and became a lawyer because I wanted to advocate for those in need.  I wanted to provide the last line of defense to an individual’s rights and freedoms.  That can only be found in a court of law or with zealous legal advocacy.”

So it came as no surprise that he would risk his neck and reputation for our cause. (At the time, we were getting a lot of pushback from different organizations and public opinion, saying that it wasn’t the right time here in Louisiana to attempt this.)

Just this week, our original complaint and motion to amend was denied, forcing us to re-file a new case, naming as defendants those the judge considers are the “proper parties”. When this happened, two days earlier than expected, Scott did not waiver in his dedication, nor did he flinch at the court’s decision. He woke up the next morning and filed the appeal for the original motion to amend, then immediately filed a new complaint with the “correct” defendants, adding more work to his already full plate.

We, as Scott’s friends and plaintiffs, are grateful for the work that he is doing. Not just anyone would take on this colossal work load without anything in return. The payoff he sees in the distance goes far beyond money. It is the betterment of the LGBT community that he considers as his reward, someday being able to marry his partner legally.

Most of the praise that gets dished out by the media in these cases, talks about the brave and heroic plaintiffs who expose themselves to the world. But in my opinion, the praise should also fall upon the lawyers and their families, who endure just as much exposure.

I cannot begin to tell you how proud I am of what Scott is doing for us. He has reached out to several more organizations, and we are proud to say, is on the cusp of joining us with resources for our case. With the trend that is being set in red states like Utah and Oklahoma, Louisiana doesn’t seem like that far of a stretch for marriage equality any longer and people are taking notice. Finally we are starting to see support from some of the bigger guns in our nationwide community.

Our cases have a long way to go, and we know that Scott will work hard all the way to what we hope will be a victory for all families here in Louisiana. We knew when we started the journey, that it would not be a smoothly paved nor a short path; we will see it to the end

If you would like to follow our cases you can like us on Facebook and visit our website.

We appreciate your support and vow to continue our fight no matter where or how long it takes us!

 

Photo via Facebook

Catch up on Derek’s previous posts on his lawsuit against the State of Louisiana:

The Benefits Of Marriage
Robicheaux vs. Caldwell – Why We Are Suing To Be Married In Louisiana
A Blanchard Family Christmas

 

derek penton Derek Penton, 35, is a native of Mississippi and a longtime resident of New Orleans.  He holds degrees in computer information systems and paramedicine.  After more than five years together, Penton and his husband, Jonathan Robicheaux, were legally married in Iowa on Sept. 23, 2012.

 

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Election Denialism Embraced by ‘Large Proportion’ of Trump’s Followers: Report

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Since at least 2012 Donald Trump has been engaging in election denialism. Now, a tenet of the Republican Party, the refusal to accept official election results they don’t like is ingrained in a large number of his followers.

“I think that the powers that be on the Democratic side have figured out a way to circumvent democracy,” Darlene Anastas, 69, of Middleborough, Massachusetts, told NBC News. The network “spoke to more than 50 Trump supporters, most of whom said they don’t believe Biden can win legitimately in November.”

Poll after poll,” NBC also reported, “has found that a large proportion of the Republican electorate believes the only reasons Joe Biden is president are voter fraud and Democratic dirty tricks, buying into former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election.”

NBC spoke with 72-year old George Crosby, from Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, who said, Democrats “cheat like crazy” (video below).

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“I think they cheated before, and I think they’re going to try to do it again, because they’re a bunch of communists,” Fitzwilliam added.

38-year old James Russon of Eagle Mountain, Utah told NBC, “There’s no way Biden could legally … win without unfair means.”

“He added that the only way Biden could prevail would be through ‘cheating’ or ‘a lot of deceased people voting.'”

62-year old Randall Minicola of Las Vegas said it would be “impossible” for Biden to win. “I don’t think he’s got a following. I mean, you look who’s behind him — the only thing he’s got is ghosts behind him. That’s what I believe. Where’s the supporters then? Are they in the basement with him? I don’t think so.”

NBC News did not report on where these particular GOP voters got their information or how they came to believe these claims, but it did note the “possibility of another election in which large numbers of Republicans refuse to accept a Biden victory has also been stoked by influential conservatives.”

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Trump’s election denialism is so strong that in 2020 CNN published “A list of the times Trump has said he won’t accept the election results or leave office if he loses.”

Election denialism continues to be spread throughout the right.

“A senile man is not going to get elected in the most powerful country in the world unless there’s fraud,” former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in March, NBC noted. Carlson, a purveyor of conspiracy theories, has spoken very positively about Russia and its authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin, and against Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Numerous studies and fact checks have found mail-in voting to be safe and secure, with little opportunity for fraud, yet just last week Carlson, like Trump, was claiming massive election fraud. Undermining Americans’ faith in democracy was a main goal of Russian President Putin’s 2016 attack on the U.S. elections, according to a 2017 report issued by a group of U.S. Intelligence agencies.

But just last week Carlson claimed, “About one in five mail-in ballots in the last election was fraudulent, handing Biden the presidency. We know this because the people who committed the fraud have admitted it in a new poll.”

A portion of NBC’s report from Thursday also appears in this January 2024 NBC News video.

Watch the video below or at this link.

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Trump Won’t Commit to Accepting Election Results if He Doesn’t Win State He Falsely Claims He Won

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Falsely claiming he won the state of Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election Donald Trump is now refusing to commit to accepting the 2024 results for the Badger State this November.

In an interview with Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Trump appeared to dance around the issue, declaring he would only accept the official results “if everything’s honest.”

“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results,” Trump told the paper’s Alison Dirr and Molly Beck in an interview Wednesday. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

“But if everything’s honest, which we anticipate it will be — a lot of changes have been made over the last few years — but if everything’s honest, I will absolutely accept the results,” he said.

The Journal Sentinel reports Trump “offered similar conditions when asked the same question by news outlets in 2016 and 2020.”

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“I’d be doing a disservice to the country if I said otherwise,” he said.

In that interview Trump once again falsely claimed he won Wisconsin in 2020, a state President Joe Biden actually won by more than 20,000 votes.

“If you go back and look at all of the things that had been found out, it showed that I won the election in Wisconsin,” Trump told the newspaper. “It also showed I won the election in other locations.”

Trump’s “Big Lie,” that the 2020 election was “rigged” against him, along with his support for the January 6, 2021 insurrection, have been central to his 2024 campaign.

“Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the last presidential election in Wisconsin and his new comments placing conditions on when he would accept the results of the next election come as Republicans are seeking to persuade GOP voters to restore their trust in the state’s system of elections and embrace absentee voting,” the Journal Sentinel reported. “There’s no evidence to support that Wisconsin’s election was tainted by cheating or fraud in 2020. The results have been confirmed by recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties that Trump paid for, court rulings, a nonpartisan state audit and a study by the conservative legal firm Wisconsin Institute of Law & Liberty, among other analyses.”

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In October of 2016, weeks before Election Day, during the final presidential debate, Trump was asked if he would make the commitment “that you will absolutely accept the results of this election?”

“I will look at it at the time,” Trump replied. “I’m not looking at anything now, I’ll look at it at the time.”

He then went on to sow doubt about the credibility of the election.

Trump’s refusal to accept election results stretches back more than a decade, even before he ran for president.

After he refused to accept his loss in 2020, ABC News reported “Trump has longstanding history of calling elections ‘rigged’ if he doesn’t like the results.”

“On election night in 2012, when President Barack Obama was reelected, Trump said that the election was a ‘total sham’ and a ‘travesty,’ while also making the claim that the United States is ‘not a democracy’ after Obama secured his victory.

“We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!” Trump wrote on Twitter

One month later, in December of 2012, Trump tweeted, “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.” Ironically, four years later he became president after losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, but winning the Electoral College.

Watch the video above or at this link.

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‘No Place for Antisemitism’: Biden Denounces Violent Campus Protests, Hate Speech and Racism

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President Joe Biden made rare, unscheduled remarks from the White House Thursday morning, denouncing the recent violent protests on college campuses, and telling Americans there is “no place” for antisemitism anywhere across the nation. He also denounced “hate speech” and “racism,” while declaring his support for the right to peacefully protest.

“There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students,” President Biden declared. “There is no place for hate speech, or violence of any kind, whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans. It’s simply wrong. There’s no place for racism in America. It’s all wrong. It’s un-American.”

“Violent protest is not protected,” Biden said strongly. “Peaceful protest is.”

Stressing “the right to free speech,” and the people’s right “to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard,” President Biden also declared the importance of “the rule of law.”

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“We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent,” the President also said, praising the ideal of peaceful protests, which he said are in the “best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues.”

“But,” he added, “neither are we a lawless country. We are a civil society and order must prevail.”

America is a “big, diverse, free thinking and freedom-loving nation,” Biden said, denouncing those “who rush in to score political points.”

“This isn’t a moment for politics, it’s a moment for clarity.”

“It’s against the law when violence occurs. Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations. None of this is a peaceful protest,” he warned. “Threatening people, intimidating people. instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Dissent is essential to democracy but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish a semester and their college education.”

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“Look. It’s basically a matter of fairness. It’s a matter of what’s right. There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos. People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.”

“I understand people have strong feelings and deep convictions in America. We respect the right and protect the right for them to express that. But it doesn’t mean anything goes. It needs to be done without violence. Without destruction, without hate, and within the law. And I’ll make no mistake. As President, I will always defend free speech. And I will always be just as strong standing up for the rule of law. That’s my responsibility to you the American people. My obligation to the Constitution.”

The President also responded to reporters’ questions, including saying he saw no need to call up the National Guard.

Watch the videos above or at this link.

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