I've been monitoring The Burnt Orange Report pretty regularly, and have been pretty impressed with the quality of supporting news links they present. While obviously quite lefty leaning, it hasn't sunk to the whining common on a few other political filters. A couple of my other regular sites, including Hightower & Andrew Sullivan have made their blogroll as well.
It's worth a glance or two.
The Supreme Court of the United States, in a 6-3 decision handed down on Thursday June 26, invalidated the 13 remaining sodomy laws in the US, and overruled the state of Texas in a decision involving two men having consensual sex in their own bedroom. Almost exactly 34 years earlier, on June 27, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in NY's Greenwich Village; the ensuing riots, as gay patrons fought back in force for the first time, started the modern gay rights movement. This was a wonderful capstone for Gay Pride Month. The NY Times said:
WASHINGTON, June 26 — The Supreme Court issued a sweeping declaration of constitutional liberty for gay men and lesbians today, overruling a Texas sodomy law in the broadest possible terms and effectively apologizing for a contrary 1986 decision that the majority said "demeans the lives of homosexual persons." The vote was 6 to 3.
Gays are "entitled to respect for their private lives," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said for the court. "The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime."
Justice Kennedy said further that "adults may choose to enter upon this relationship in the confines of their homes and their own private lives and still retain their dignity as free persons."
I say: It's about f*ing time. This is not about morals. It's not about religious beliefs. It is not about whether or not you think oral sex or anal sex is right or wrong, between men and women, women and women, or between men and men. That's not the point. It's about laws unfairly applied to one group of American citizens and not to another, using sexual orientation as the sole basis for the unequal treatment.
In other words, until Wednesday, a woman could suck a dick in Texas and I couldn't.
If I did, I was a criminal. And the ham-fisted narrow-minded backwater Neanderthals who populate our state house and legislature routinely use that "criminality" as the unstated or overt basis for laws designed to exclude gay people from foster care, adoption, child custody, and jobs. It was used by religious leaders to condemn me for whom I love, since that love was "criminal" in the eyes of the state. It was used as a fund-raising cudgel by right-wing extremist groups trying to prevent the "criminal sodomite agenda" from corrupting America. The taint of criminality was often worse than the prosecution itself here in Texas, though in some states violating a sodomy law required registration as a sex offender.
That's not equality. Justice O'Connor said "A law branding one class of persons as criminal solely based on the state's moral disapproval of that class and the conduct association with that class runs contrary to the values of the Constitution and the Equal Protection Clause."
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said that gay people "are entitled to respect for their private lives," adding that "the state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime."
