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[Gay Rights] Wyoming: What Republicans SHOULD be.
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Some years ago, a transgender woman I know announced that if a same-sex marriage ban passed in her state, she was going to find "the biggest, butchest, baddest bulldagger around" and run down to get married.
Because, after all, she'd been born 'male', so clearly in the eyes of dumbfucks like these legislators in Idaho, it was totally legal for her to marry somebody born 'female', right?
The fact that this person was a lesbian just made it even more awesome.
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But has it ever been floated that he has the ability to remove the underlying sodomy statutes in the UCMJ or whatever that are the cause of DADT? I mean, I seem to recall that it isnt being gay that is getting them discharged, but the non missionary non penis+vagina sexual acts that get them discharged. Without those on the books, DADT loses all of its teeth doesnt it?
And I'm pretty sure congress isnt in charge of the UCMJ or whatever, and that is something the POTUS should have direct say on due to him being the CIC or whatever.
MWO: Adamski
People being kicked out under DADT can certainly be kicked out for 'sodomy' - that happened before DADT - but simply violating DADT is enough.
I'm told by a former JAG friend that they did indeed expel heterosexual soldiers for sodomy, but that was only as an additional charge when they were already charging someone with a crime. For example, it got used a lot in sexual assault cases. Consent is not a defense to a charge of sodomy. They'd also throw it in as a possible charge for other crimes, as my friend put it, "if we were charging some guys with getting into a fistfight over a woman, and we had a report that she called one of them a cocksucker, that was enough to at least add the charge."
ETA: the UCMJ exists as part of federal law so it's on Congress to change it.
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Justice at work.
Years of expanding executive power have given the populace a weird view of just what the president is supposed to be doing.
Say what you like about his policy, but the man deserves respect for at least acknowledging a separation of powers.
Whether a finding is made or even pursued is up to the Executive, via the Secretary of Defense, along with all discretion in conducting any preceding investigation and/or prosecution.
So Obama could easily stop all investigations without overstepping any separation of powers. All he would be doing is exercising the discretion explicitly granted to him by Congress in the DADT statute. If Congress doesn't want the Executive to exercise that discretion, then they can pass another law revoking that discretion.
The fact that Congress hasn't yet revoked said wide-ranging discretion, combined with the fact that it was Congress who granted said wide-ranging discretion to begin with, suggests that Congress is quite comfortable with the breadth of discretion currently enjoyed by the Executive.
He doesn't have the authority to take the anti-sodomy statutes out of the books, only Congress can do that (or the courts can strike it).
He does have the authority to order that no sodomy allegations are to be investigated or prosecuted. All he'd have to do is the same thing he did with effectively ending DADT discharges - make it so that every single sodomy investigation/prosecution must first be approved by himself or a limited number of senior Pentagon officials before it can proceed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f9Wlj9hEr4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8qTe97lCtE
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
No one gets charged for sodomy alone. It just doesn't happen. Or at least not after Lawrence. The people who are kicked out under DADT are administratively discharged, not court-martialed.
Governor vetoed the bill.
Protesters sat down in the middle of Broadway to protest, and were arrested. Duane was among them.
Why doesn't NY charge him 80% of his income as rent for the Governor's Mansion?
The state's coffers are bare and he couldn't afford to authorise any more social programmes.
That's actually a pretty fair reason.
I'm sure it does what it's intended to accomplish in making life suck less for people with AIDS, but it just seems like the wrong way to go about doing it.
Low-income housing is supposed to be subsidized, it's not a penthouse for landlords to maximize their profit margins with.
There's already a federal cap of 30% of income for rent. That means landlords can't charge tenants on federal housing programs more than 30% of the tenant's income. However, since the tenants in question here get their assistance from the state and city level and not the feds, they aren't protected by the 30% federal cap.
All the NY law was meant to do was to bring the rent cap for the AIDS tenants into line with the rent cap that already exists for every other person on housing assistance in New York.
http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2010/09/20/NY_Governor_Vetoes_HIV_AIDS_Rent_Bill/
It blows, but at the state level thats the way it is too often.
Of course, budgets are never too tight to justify putting a dent in the governor's $180k annual salary (along with the accompanying assload of taxpayer-funded perks and benefits), though.
Cut out all his benefits and pay and I doubt its going to cover this bill.
Just as capping the rent for any individual AIDS tenant won't close the budget gap. Every little bit helps, right?
Its just that countering the governor's veto of a bill they can't afford with "well he makes a lot of money lets use some of that!" is really sort of silly.
Its tea party logic man, lets cut politician's wages that'll do it!
I mean wages aren't even the governors area of authority, don't hold vetoing a law they can't afford against him because another house of government didn't cut his wages.
I mean, don't states and national governments run debts because they technically allocate funds to programs they can't afford? isn't that the m.o. of like ... every town, county, state, and then the federal government?
I don't understand how the burden happened to fall on this single bill and how the burden came to be in the first place considering how fucking heinous the underlying situation is
Most states require a balanced budget. I believe New York is no exception.
this whole process just boggles my mind, I don't understand why something that costs money would be brought to the governor's desk if it was objectively impossible for him to ratify it ... so my gut tells me that, still, at the end of the day, he made a choice in vetoing it
until someone explains it to me! :V
Paterson is the one saying the budget deficit is such an overriding crisis that it justifies forcing these tenants onto what is basically a subsistence lifestyle.
I'm saying that if Paterson is right, and the budget deficit is really that huge of a crisis, then why doesn't it also justify a reduction in the governor's 6-figure salary?
In terms of importance:
If A) Budget deficit > AIDS tenants having to choose between shelter and food/medicine
And
Then C) Paterson's salary > AIDS tenants having to choose between shelter and food/medicine
I'm just arguing for some shared sacrifice among both the rich and poor to help win the war against the budget deficit. And even if Paterson can't cut his own salary on his own authority, he can still write a check. And so can State Senator X, and Mayor Y, and Police Commissioner Z, and me, and so on. Eventually it adds up. The March of Dimes funded Salk's polio vaccine by asking people for no more than one measly dime as a donation. Obama's 2008 war chest was built largely by small donors.
The comparison doesn't work though. The Federal Government, by it's nature and the fact that it prints and controls it's own money and such, is perfectly able to run a reasonable debt with no real downsides.
For a state or a city or the like, it's not the same deal. They can run a debt (and should at times like ... well, now) but they aren't free to just ignore it the way a federal government can.
If they really don't have it then hell, raise the tax on cigarettes by another 10 cents that would free up $20 million by their estimates.
I don't know about you, but personally, I would like elected officials to be making enough money that the incentive to sell out to nefarious interests is sufficiently counterbalanced. $180,000 is basically nothing, especially in a state that actually matters (like New York).
This populist "let's cut the politicians' pay!" bullshit sounds great on paper, until you're actually confronted with a group of people who are in fucking charge of you who now have to figure out how to pay for their day-to-day lives, while being surrounded by people who want nothing more than to buy influence from them.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying he shouldn't have signed a bill, but this is a bullshit non-sequitur.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
Duane became somewhat unhinged after the marriage bill was shot down in the Senate by his own party.
To continue that train of thought many state legislatures aren't in session for the whole year and they get crappy pay. For example Colorado's state legislature is open for 3-4 months and doesn't pay well. So the only people that can run are those who are affluent enough to not work or can have a nice job flexible enough to let them take off 1/4-1/3rd of the year.
As for the pelosi thing, I won't hold my breath.
If it was the easiest, why didn't they do it during the first year. Hell, the first month?
Good luck to her getting Republicans to do anything.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
The House passed it back in 2007 but the Senate shot it down, the difference with this bill is that it includes transgender protections.