(hell, yeah) Scarleteen

Ohio’s Rob Portman made headlines on Friday as the first sitting Republican senator to back marriage equality in the Senate. But like so many other conservative lawmakers before him, the senator didn’t think much about the rights of gays and lesbians until the issue got personal.

For Portman, it was his 21-year-old son coming out as gay that “allowed” him to see the issue as a “dad who loves his son a lot and wants him to have the same opportunities that his brother and sister would have — to have a relationship like Jane and I have had for over 26 years.”

And just like that, Portman joined the ranks of the men and women who only realized that gay rights were important when their absence affected someone they love. Let’s call it the “gay kid convert” club; the Dick Cheneys, the Jon Huntsmans — and yes, even the Barack Obamas — who, after years of silence or fierce opposition, came around to equal rights through a gay child, friend or a close colleague.

Here’s a look at Portman and others who changed their tune when gay rights came home.

Read the rest at Salon here.

Today in Texas, it is yesterday. 

Texas is the future of the past; it is a place where regressive politics and backwards thinking have resulted not in strong families and healthy kids but in 6.3 million uninsured people—the highest percentage of any state—and a consistently rising poverty rate.

Our governor, Rick Perry, makes no bones about the fact that he’d like to make abortion a thing of the past, not by increasing access to contraceptives and thereby reducing the number of unintended pregnancies, but by increasing funding to religious, ideologically- driven crisis pregnancy centers, forcing women to get mandatory trans-vaginal ultrasounds and listen to or read about medically-unfounded claims linking abortion to breast cancer and infertility. 

“In Texas, we’ve worked hard to strengthen our abortion laws to the greatest extent possible under Roe v. Wade,” the governor said in a statement released on Tuesday. This is precisely the tactic, and an effective one, that conservative lawmakers and their religious-right backers have taken in Texas: if abortion can’t be made illegal, it can at least be made so difficult to get that only a very few people have access to it.

Perry claims that this reduction in access to abortion will “empower families and protect our children’s future.”

What it does, instead, is ensure that people have less control over the size of their families because the state government works to diminish access to both the means of preventing unintended pregnancies, and to the one safe, legal and common medical procedure available to women facing them. The result? A state where more and more people rely on public assistance every year. Texas has America’s highest number of citizens on food stamps, sees somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of its population living in poverty, and taxpayers here help fund 223,128 Medicaid-funded births per year (the second highest in the nation).

Read it all From Andrea Grimes here.

Just two years ago, as Roe v. Wade headed into its late thirties, it seemed to be losing its luster. States were hacking away at abortion rights, passing ninety-two new restrictions in 2011 alone—nearly triple the number of any other year on record. Americans appeared ready to tolerate all manner of barriers to abortion access, from parental notification laws and restrictions on late-term procedures to laws crippling the ability of clinics to provide care by subjecting them to absurd requirements (such as having five-foot-wide hallways, as one Virginia law demanded). These new burdens added to the weight of a decades-long and alarmingly successful campaign by the right to stigmatize women seeking abortions and to persecute abortion providers. As a result, 87 percent of US counties lack an abortion provider, and several states have only a clinic or two staffed by a doctor who flies in from another state. “It’s never been this frightening before,” one longtime clinic worker recently told The Washington Post.

What is taking shape looks increasingly like a patchwork system where the right to abortion applies only to women lucky enough to live in a state where the courts and legislature have not whittled it away. How, four decades after women celebrated the Supreme Court’s historic embrace of their privacy rights in Roe, has it come to this?

Read the rest at The Nation here.

Antonin Scalia, you crazy cutup, you. With the Supreme Court currently gearing up to review two cases that have the potential to become watershed moments in the fight for marriage equality, the famously conservative associate justice is facing his old nemesis yet again – the HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA. And he’s doing it in his usual way — by behaving like an arrogant, dismissive tool to gay people, right to their faces.

At a speaking event in Princeton on Monday, the justice was confronted by a gay freshman named Duncan Hosie, who questioned why he has equated laws banning sodomy with those banning bestiality and murder. “It’s a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which is called the ‘reduction to the absurd,’” Scalia sniffed. That’s funny; I thought it was called hyperbole. Or maybe just a steaming pile of wrong.

“If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?” he continued. Exactly. If we do not want anchovies, do we not reject pepperoni as well? Can we truly expect human beings to have different feelings about entirely different things? Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you, is not Team Edward tantamount to Team Jacob? This is what gets you a black robe and a job for life. He then told the student, “I’m surprised you aren’t persuaded.” How dreary and tiresome to be Antonin Scalia, and live in a whole world full of people who are not.

Read the rest at Salon here.

In a Washington Post column headlined “Silence Is Golden on Gay Issues,” my longtime colleague and friend Jonathan Capehart heralds it as “a great thing” that gay issues weren’t discussed in the presidential debates this year. The Human Rights Campaign’s Fred Sainz agrees, telling Capehart, “What we’re seeing is proof positive that gay issues aren’t the wedge they used to be and furthermore, the public has moved on.”

Really? Though LGBT rights now have the support of a big majority of Democrats and independents, they’re far from a non-issue for the vast majority of Republicans, who oppose same-sex marriage, and certainly for the evangelical base of the GOP, which helped keep Rick Santorum competitive during the primaries.

The only reason these issues weren’t discussed in the debates is that the moderators — members of the media — didn’t ask about them. And far from being a “great thing,” right now that helps Mitt Romney, who is racing to the center and would rather not talk about how he’s in favor of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would make gays second-class citizens, or about how he signed a pledge from the National Organization for Marriage vowing to appoint federal judges who would rule against gay marriage.

Read the rest at HuffPo here.

Mitt Romney’s “close” relative died of an illegal abortion (which is why he used to say he wouldn’t force his beliefs on you).

In 1963, Mitt Romney lost a “dear” and “close” relative to an illegal abortion. Ann Keenan was the sister of his brother-in-law, Loren “Larry” Keenan, husband to Mitt’s sister, Lynn. By all accounts, her death at age 21 “deeply impacted members of the family.” Romney’s sister, Jane, explained, “‘She was a beautiful, talented young gal we all loved. And [her death] pretty much ruined the parents - [she was] their only daughter. You would do anything not to repeat that.” The Keenan family asked for donations to be sent to Planned Parenthood in her name.

Ann Keenan apparently “was very close” to Mitt personally and he, too, appeared moved by the loss explaining, it “obviously makes one see that regardless of one’s beliefs about choice, that you would hope it would be safe and legal.” During a debate with Senator Ted Kennedy in 1994, Romney pledged, “It is since that time my mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter. And you will not see me wavering on that.”

But Romney’s dear young relative seems to have disappeared from his memory (as has his promise to not waiver.) He no longer “exhumes” her body to serve as proof of his pro-choice credentials as he did routinely when running for governor of Massachusetts. These days, he’s promising to overturn Roe v Wade. Indeed, he seems eager to reinstate those laws that drove his close relative to fatally take matters into her own hands.

Read the rest from Christina Page here.

We like to issue some reminders now and then about some common discourses regarding teen pregnancy.  We often have a LOT to say about those, but one of the core issues that comes up is the idea that high rates of teen pregnancy are largely due to ignorance about contraception.

Setting aside the matter that teen pregnancy is often assumed to be exclusively unplanned or unwanted (it’s not), in reality, while lack of understanding about proper contraceptive use is certainly one factor, access to contraceptives in the first place, and consistently, is another huge one, so is sexual agency (and youth rights and agency more broadly), and certainly access to abortion.

For that reason we always encourage you to look into the stance on support for all reproductive choices at any site or organization you link or refer others to for information about pregnancy or contraceptives. Some very visible sites and orgs are not fully pro-choice and do not include or even mention abortion in their information, or, if they do, like the American Pregnancy Association, for example, include misinformation about abortion and links to “information” or “help” are links to CPCs.

As well, sound, broad research done about teen pregnancy (we really like Kristen Luker for this topic, a nearly flawless researcher who has done a great job avoiding the usual biases) has shown that socioeconomic factors and the impact of those factors — read: poverty — are really the biggest player here. Far more so than knowing about or knowing how to use contraception.

So, by all means, having accurate, in-depth information about how to prevent unwanted pregnancy or parenting is vitally important: we obviously think so as an organization.  But so is being careful none of us obscure the larger picture here or unwittingly support anyone or any initiative that may be acting counter to helping young people who do not want to become or remain pregnant.

Pro-tip: Abortion is — literally — birth control. If and when sites or orgs with birth control information and apparent support for birth control or preventing unwanted pregnancy don’t include or mention it? Look deeper and ask questions.

Florida’s Lt. Governor Jennifer Carroll has been accused by Carletha Cole, a former administrative assistant to Carroll, of being involved in an inappropriate sexual encounter with a female subordinate. Cole is a grandmother and a minister, who took a lie detector test regarding the accusations and passed.

When Carroll decided that she was going to defend this matter publicly, she stated that her accuser is not only attacking one person but is attacking her entire family. Her actions that followed demonstrated that she needed to transfer her pain.

In an attempt to seek public sympathy for her personal and professional matter, Carroll decided to insult every black woman who is a lesbian, bisexual and/or single. She decided that her personal status as a wife and mother with a long-lasting marriage to her husband was somehow superior and above reproach for inappropriate, extramarital relations. She further decided to insult my beautiful black sisters by comparing her life situation to those of longtime single women, and imply that women who engage in sexual relations with other women could not possibly look like her.

I am so furious and frustrated by a black woman of power trying to bring other black women down to save face. Jennifer Carroll, the core of your character is at stake, and you are showing your true colors. Leadership requires grace and dignity under fire, and you are showing that your character includes misguided superiority and poor judgment.

Read the rest at HuffPo Gay Voices here.