mcc's Blog

Things you can do to help on LGBT rights

2009-10-19T04:11:01Z

I had a conversation last week with some people who were frustrated that they saw a lot of discussion about lack of progress on LGBT rights, but didn't see the kind of practical, meat-and-potatoes organizing on LGBT issues as they did on things like health care-- things like, call this congressperson and exert pressure on this legislation. I was surprised to hear this, because I could name several groups or bloggers doing such organizing right now. We realized that maybe some of the less flashy but still quite practical activism on gay rights isn't getting the attention it needs, and as a result may not be connecting with potential volunteers.

Let's do something about that. Here, after the jump, is a short list of projects in need of volunteers and phone calls now. My rules for putting a group or project on this list is that it should:

Have real volunteer activities that you can start doing right away-- not just "sign up for this mailing list and we'll ask you for money occasionally".
Direct volunteer efforts toward a specific, immediate goal, preferably something where effort goes directly toward changing a law.

Let's not just talk about equality, let's start making it happen.

]]> BIG THING #1: THE EMPLOYEE NONDISCRIMINATION ACT

At the beginning of the year, Nancy Pelosi laid out a plan for gay rights in Congress, which had each of the major legislative proposals being passed in a single file fashion: The Matthew Shepard / Hate Crimes Bill first, The Employment Nondiscrimination Act sometime before the end of 2009, a repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell after that, and a repeal of DOMA after. Although there have been some new developments such as the introduction of the Domestic Partnership Benefits and Obligations Act, in general congress has stuck very strictly to this schedule all year, both in actions and in the public statements of the leadership: The Hate Crimes bill was voted on in June, ENDA was introduced in each house once Matthew Shepard had passed there, and work on ENDA is now underway as the final version of the Hate Crimes bill is set to be signed any day now. As of this week the word is still that Congress plans to address DADT at the beginning of next year.

So, if you want to make a difference in active legislation, right now ENDA is where the action is. (And if you want to repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell, then honestly at the moment the most effective way to get there is to get Congress to hurry up on ENDA so resources will be freed to work on DADT.)

In the House, passage of ENDA seems pretty much assured, and the only important thing is to get the committee to follow up on their recent hearings and pass a bill. In the Senate things are more complicated, and here work is needed to lock down 60 Senators willing to vote for cloture.

What you can do: The best resource on ENDA I've found is Dr. Jillian T. Weiss's ENDA Diaries at bilerico.com. Dr. Weiss has been blogging every day for months with action items on ENDA, usually taking the form of "legislator of the day" posts singling out a particular House or Senate member to call to pressure to support ENDA. The information for these calls is used to maintain a running whip count. You can see a full list of Dr. Weiss's ENDA diaries here, or a general introduction to the project (posted the day after the National Equality March), with a list of the top "problem legislators" on ENDA, here.

Also, I have received Dr. Weiss's permission to start posting copies of her daily ENDA diaries over at DailyKos. I could possibly post them here on TPM as well, if there is interest. (I'm not sure the daily-post format would work so well here, but I could maybe look into something like posting a weekly digest on fridays?)

BIG THING #2: PHONEBANK FOR MAINE

Proposition 8 basically gets a do-over in Maine this year. Maine's gay marriage law is already a big deal in one way: Maine was the first state to legalize same-sex marriage purely through the legislature. If Question 1, which would overturn that law, fails, Maine will also be the first state where legal gay marriage withstands a public referendum vote. If Question 1 passes, on the other hand... well, that will do a lot to discourage legislatures in other parts of the country from even trying. Question 1 goes up for a vote in just two weeks, November 3, the same day as Washington's Ref. 71 (which decides whether the state's new Domestic Partnership law will stand).

What you can do: There are two groups organizing phone banks to persuade Maine voters on gay marriage. In both cases the phone bank works the same way: You call in at a certain time and are given a brief training session over the phone. After that you are given a script to read and a list of numbers to call. If you can just block off a few hours of time you can make a difference on Question 1 from your own home, regardless of where in America you are.

The first group doing this is Protect Maine Equality/No On 1. Their next training session is Tuesday at 6:30 PM Eastern time.

The second group is the Courage Campaign; they are actually using the same scripts and call lists as No on 1, but their training times (see link) may be more convenient for you, and if you are in California I believe they have infrastructure to allow you to call in without incurring long distance charges.

I also have an offer from Caitlin Maloney at the Courage campaign, who you can contact here:

[I]f someone went through that training and wanted to get a whole group of folks together and phonebank using their laptops and cells to make calls, I could arm that person with the additional knowledge necessary to train the group. The other option would be for me to send a group paper lists to call from. We would need a few days notice on about how many folks you expect and how long you plan to be calling, and of course we would send you all the docs you need to train folks and keep them motivated.

This would be the same work you'd be doing at home, however some people find it easier to stay motivated phonebanking with a group.

LOCAL VOLUNTEER OPPORTUNITIES

California:

Equality California (volunteer signup here) has groups across the state working now for a repeal of Proposition 8. The biggest focus here is on canvassing neighborhoods where equality fared poorly in the election last November, trying to reach voters who might have voted against us before and understand what arguments are effective in flipping them. In my area this meets most every sunday evenings and it's simple, just show up and they'll give you training and a map.

EQCA offices across the state are also doing evening phonebanks into Washington for the Referendum 71 campaign.

Courage Campaign, in addition to the phonebanking program described above, has been organizing Equality Teams with regular volunteer opportunities. Hope Wood, Northern California Field Manager for the Courage Campaign's Equality Program, describes the program as:

The mission of our Equality Teams is as follows:
▪ Establish an active and visible presence in the community for marriage equality.
▪ Develop relationships with local elected officials and supportive organizations to create an opportunity for sharing resources and building local power.
▪ Coordinate regular voter contact actions - including canvasses, phone-banks, tabling at community events, and registering new voters.
▪ Represent your community in important state-wide actions, trainings, and conference calls focused on marriage equality.

Marriage Equality Silicon Valley (volunteer information here, although the best way to keep up to date is to follow the Facebook group) has been organizing weekly phonebanks into Maine using the Courage Campaign infrastructure. I'm told there are also groups running similar mass phonebanks in SF and Alameda.

Maine:

No On 1/Protect Maine Equality (volunteer opportunities here), in addition to the national phonebanking program mentioned above, also needs local volunteers for "making phone calls, knocking on doors, talking to voters at community events and helping out in the office".

Washington:

Approve Referendum 71 (volunteer opportunities here) needs state-local volunteers for phonebanking and direct outreach to pass Referendum 71 and make the state's Domestic Partner program law.

(If there are any resources in your state that ought to be on this list but aren't, let me know.)

ONE LAST THING

While I was writing this post I learned about a site called ACT On Principles. It's a collection of tools for coordinating and locating LGBT activism opportunities, and it includes wiki-style whip count pages, similar to the one I mentioned above for ENDA but for every gay rights bill currently under consideration. This is a fairly new site and it seems a little rough around the edges but it looks like it has a lot of promise. You may want to take a look and maybe make a few phone calls for the whip count.

Tiny politics

2009-10-02T22:39:22Z

But challenging as they are, it's not the magnitude of our problems that concerns me the most. It's the smallness of our politics.

-- Barack Obama, 2007, announcing his plans to run for President.

Revelers revealing how small they are.

--TPM commenter BlindBat, today, "Conservatives Revel in America's Olympic Defeat".

Here's the thing about the Republicans.

]]> The thing that interests me about the conservative movement today, really, is that it isn't even anymore that their positions are wrong-- it's just how tiny, irrelevant and alienated from the lives of normal Americans their concerns are. It's at the point that even if every thing they said was correct it still wouldn't any of it be important.

America faces the biggest recession in most of a century, two wars mired in uncertainty, and too many fundamental infrastructure, environmental and social problems to easily list. The GOP thinks that the most important thing to focus on at that moment is an obscure social justice group called ACORN.

America tries to grapple with health care reform proposals that could in the long term fundamentally alter how we approach medicine itself, how Americans allocate 10% of their income, what it means to run a small business. All the GOP can find it in them to care about, when they can be bothered to form a coherent position at all, is how it affects abortions and illegal immigrants.

Obama's presidency goes through a month of complex, dizzying highs and lows, where his signature public policy issue is taken to what is perceived as the brink of failure; the game on Iran and nuclear nonproliferation changes fundamentally, more than once; and one of Obama's closest public political allies dies, briefly throwing into doubt the very ability of Democrats to control the Senate. Then Obama is unsuccessful in a bid to host the Olympics seven years from now, and Rush Limbaugh calls that the "worst day" of his presidency.

And it just goes on and on like this. I remember just a few years ago, back when the Left embraced positions far outside what was at the time the mainstream and sent ourselves into the political wilderness, it was over big things, important things--unjust war and hundreds of thousands of deaths, government surveillance, torture. Things worth making yourself a pariah over. On the other hand look at these things the Republican Party considers important enough to alienate itself from the mainstream over. It's nothing. Their politics are based in nothing. They're destroying themselves over nothing.

Washington D.C. City Council plans to legalize gay marriage

2009-10-01T17:16:53Z

The Washington D.C. City Council now looks set to legalize same-sex marriage in the district, with the first step in the process to be taken on Tuesday.

According to a copy of the bill, the city code would be changed to state 'marriage is the legally recognized union of two people' and 'any person ... may marry any other eligible person regardless of gender.' Catania's bill, which states religious organizations and officials have the right not to participate in same-sex marriages, is expected to pass the council easily when it comes up for a vote around Thanksgiving. Ten of 13 council members will co-introduce Catania's bill Tuesday, and Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) has pledged to sign it.

The Washington D.C. city council floated a test balloon on this subject earlier this year, when they passed a bill under which Washington D.C.. now recognizes as valid same-sex marriages legally performed outside the district (the new bill would add the step of Washington D.C. granting same-sex marriage licenses itself). The first bill passed the council without real incident and failed to make any ripples with the other potential obstacle to marriage equality in D.C.-- the U.S. Congress, which under the "Home Rule" act has the right to veto any local law passed by D.C.'s elected city council by passing a joint resolution of disapproval. Between the ground cleared by that previous bill and the support lined up for this one, the new bill seems certain to pass.

Any marriages performed by the city of D.C. under this bill would of course not be recognized by the federal government, which under the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act does not recognize any same-sex marriage. A bill to repeal the DOMA was introduced this last month by Congressman Jerry Nadler of New York, but this is not expected to come up for a vote before the 2010 elections: Congress has several other gay rights bills under consideration, such as the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, which the Democratic leadership has said must be completed before a bill like Nadler's can be considered.

How to pass the public option

2009-09-02T21:13:35Z

Over the last month, I've seen occasional freakouts from the blogosphere about Obama's position on the public option. Obama keeps saying-- as he has since the health care reform debate began this year-- that he wants, supports, would prefer a public option. But throughout this debate, he has refused to call a public option a necessity for the bill. He has refused to rule out public option alternatives-- he and his surrogates consistently refer to the public option, at best, as the "best way" to achieve their goals. He has refused to say he will oppose a bill that lacks the public option. Leaks about Obama's plans for next week indicate this is not likely to change.

This has lead to some consternation among the blogosphere. Whenever Obama reasserts his position that he will not kill the health care bill just because it lacks a public option, we see a bunch of blog posts and comments talking interpreting this as meaning that the public option is "dead", and that Obama MUST DEMAND a public option or they will never vote for a Democrat again.

I want to take a moment to talk about why Obama is unlikely to do that, why Obama probably doesn't need to do that, and how we get the public option passed anyway.

[Continues]

]]> Consider Obama's situation. Don't bother holding any sympathy for him-- just try to understand what his perspective must be.

If Obama does not get the health care reform he promised passed, he is through. This is both his signature domestic issue, and he first "real" test of his ability to pass legislation. If he can't pass this, cannot make progress on this in some form, this implies he cannot do anything ever. The DC internal culture will pick up on this implication and repeat it until it becomes real. The narrative of two Democratic Presidents in a row undone by health care legislation will be too much to pass up. Obama will become, like Clinton, "The Incredible Shrinking President". The media will never take him seriously again. The Congress will never take him seriously as a threat again. He'll probably win reelection in 2012-- who would the Republicans run against him?-- but he'll also almost certainly lose the midterm elections in 2010. It won't be 1994 again exactly, but since (if he can't pass health care) he'll have a newly energized Republican opposition, a newly hostile media environment and progressives abandoning the party in droves, it will probably turn out the same way-- with a radicalized Republican party controlling the Congress, and a President no longer controlling the agenda but at best attempting to shape the agenda the Republicans lay out. Obama's moment to enact change in America will be over.

Now consider what happens if the health care bill passes, but there is no public option. There will be consequences-- real consequences. Progressives will be angry. People will leave the coalition, some never to return. There will be seats lost in the midterm elections: progressive institutions and websites, no longer convinced that Blue Dogs are preferable to Republicans, will shift focus from simply "elect more Democrats" to policing which Democrats deserve to get elected, and although these efforts may not be enough to successfully primary many of the blue dogs it will certainly be enough to get a number of blue dogs out of office. I am certain that Obama would be personally disappointed at the public option's failure.

But nothing would happen even remotely like the fate Obama faces if no bill passes at all. Whatever larger consequences faced him, he would simply move on to the next item on to his agenda-- weakened in popular support, but significantly strengthened in his dealings with the Congress. He would be in a position to be able to deal with those other consequences as they came.

No bill passing-- and if a bill doesn't pass before the midterm elections start in earnest, there will be no bill-- is the worst possible outcome for Obama. No threat we can make, no consequence for either himself, the Democratic agenda or the nation outweighs the cost from Obama's perspective of no bill passing. He can't let that happen. Everyone in DC knows this, which means if Obama makes a threat to kill the bill DC might not even consider it credible.

And so anyone hoping Obama will start making threats to kill the bill if his demands aren't met-- look, Obama supports the public option. He can campaign for it or pull strings for it, he may even find a way to pleasantly surprise us when he "rolls out his new health care reform strategy" this weekend. But threats to kill the bill, that is one thing that just isn't going to happen. This isn't "11-dimensional chess", and it isn't a betrayal. It's just the reality of Obama's political situation.

So if we want the public option to pass, what we have to do is change the reality of that situation.

Obama will not oppose a bill-without-a-public-option. He can not.

We can.

The only reason why we're talking about the possibility of a bill without a public option at this point is the Blue Dogs. The Blue Dogs aren't all that significant in terms of either political power or the percentage of America they represent. But in this one case they have leverage we don't, because they can do the one thing Obama can't let happen: they are the swing votes in the Senate, and they can can kill the health care bill. And so right now the bill is moving in the direction they want (the Baucus disaster was probably never about making Chuck Grassley happy, it was probably just about Ben Nelson), because they are making a credible threat that the bill won't pass with the public option included.

What we have to do is make a credible threat back that the bill won't pass without one. We have to make the only threat that Obama will be legitimately afraid of-- that we control the swing votes in the House, and we can kill the health care bill. We need to make it clear that it is not just some legislators or labor operatives who oppose a bill without a public option, but the progressive community, the grassroots. We have to make it clear our support is not unconditional, that we have a line that we won't let be crossed. And if the Democrats cross that line, we have to campaign against the bill, and we have to kill it. We can do that. We have 64 House members on our side at the last count I saw, and these members are more essential to the bill than the flaky Blue Dogs were to begin with. We have to make sure those 64 house members stay solid and that their numbers swell. We have to make sure that they're serious that they'll hold to that vote up to and including voting down a reconciled House-Senate version of the bill, if the public option is taken out in conference. We have to make enough noise that when Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi stand up and say, look, we can't pass this without the public option, it's clear that they are speaking for an actual movement and not just partisan legislators being difficult.

If we do all this, the bill will not pass without us-- and it won't matter whether Obama has issued a veto threat or not.

Presidents don't write legislation anyway! At best, Obama is a negotiator in this process. Right now that means negotiating between his own goals and the Blue Dogs. But if we're as willing to campaign against and eventually defeat a bill we don't like as the Blue Dogs are, then the landscape changes. At that point there is one group that doesn't want the public option, one group that is demanding it, and Obama is negotiating between these two groups-- and whether you trust him or not, he is a negotiator that, in policy terms, is on our side. At that point the odds are better than not that a health care bill with the public option becomes law.

And if a public-option-free bill actually dies because we opposed it? Well, from our perspective, actually that's not such a bad thing. The thing is that the bill we've got right now, once you pull out the public option, isn't all that great. Most of the good things about it depend on the public option for full effect, most of the rest could have been put in in stronger form if we hadn't negotiated our principles down to the bone so we can keep the public option in. If the public option isn't in, those compromises aren't worth it, and we might as well start over. (Personally, I think I for one might even like the Wyden bill better than I like Healthy Choices Act with the public choice removed!) And if a legislative defeat happens, that's probably what will happen-- they'll rework the bill and try again. It's maybe even the case that if the bill dies because we killed it, we're more likely to like the results next time than if the bill died because Obama, working alone, killed a compromise too far (since in the former case the bill died because it was "too moderate"; in the latter case the narrative will be that the bill died, like Clinton's, because of "democratic overreach", and therefore the next bill and all of Obama's agenda will have to be scaled back).

We can do this. And if we want the next seven years to go any different from the last two months, we have to. We have to stop waiting for Obama to do everything for us, and start participating in the process ourselves.

House to vote on Hate Crimes bill as early as Wednesday-- contact your Congressperson [Updated]

2009-04-29T00:47:47Z

Today the House adopted a rule on H.R. 1913, known as the Hate Crimes bill or, in previous Congresses, as the Matthew Shepard Act. This means they can be expected to take up and vote on the bill within the next few days-- and according to the Advocate will vote as early as tomorrow, Wednesday. (The Senate version of the bill was also introduced today but may take longer to come to a vote.) If this is an issue you're following, the time to contact your Congressperson is now. You can do this easily by calling 866-346-4611, the House switchboard.

If you haven't been following this bill, you can find its text here. It does two simple things:

Expands the existing definition of a "hate crime" to include gender identity, sexual orientation, and disability . (Under existing law, if someone commits a violent crime against someone which is motivated by the victim's race or religion, then that crime receives a harsher sentence than it would otherwise. HR 1913 simply expands the classes protected by this rule.)
Gives federal law enforcement greater leeway and resources to investigate and prosecute hate crimes, in case local law enforcement lacks the resources to, or chooses not to, investigate.

And just to be clear about this, because there's been a lot of misinformation about this bill: Yes, it has to be a violent crime-- assault or murder, or attempted assault or murder-- to fall under the classification of "hate crime". Nothing is illegal under H.R. 1913 which wouldn't have been illegal already.

H.R. 1913 is a big deal not just for what it does, but because it is the first salvo in a larger upcoming struggle over LGBT equality at the Federal level. The White House has laid out an aggressive agenda on LGBT rights, but up until this last week there has been silence from the Democratic leadership on implementing that agenda. That agenda is now finally being put into practice. Nancy Pelosi this week explained the schedule for this year, rephrasing a comment she has made several times this year, "we have the hate crimes legislation first and the ENDA [Employment Nondiscrimination Act] bill the next step after that". The other two big issues on the White House's gay rights agenda-- federal recognition of same-sex marriages and civil unions, and a removal of the ban on gays in the military-- are, according to both Pelosi and Barney Frank, on hold until next year.

This is a realistic schedule-- ENDA and Matthew Shepard are both bills with known support, both of which very almost passed into law in the last Congress and were stopped only due to maneuvering from the Bush White House and procedural errors by the House leadership, so it makes sense to prioritize those first. Still, it's going to take a lot of work to get these bills into law, especially given that the version of ENDA coming up in this Congress is more aggressive (i.e. trans-inclusive) than the one considered last Congress; and anyone who supports LGBT equality will need to keep on the Democrats in specific and the Congress in general to harness the momentum from these two bills into the more difficult fights over DADT and recognition of relationships next year.

UPDATE: C-SPAN is showing the house vote at 247-175 and completed. HR 1913 passes the House. Next hurdle is the Senate...

I got [tempbanned] from Open Left for making this post

2008-12-19T09:15:07Z

Earlier today Open Left made a post about Barack Obama and gay rights, I made this post in the comment section, essentially disagreeing. Trying not to get too tied up in specifics, the goal of their post was for some reason to argue that Barack Obama agrees with and is identical to Rick Warren on the specific subject of gay marriage, even though they may disagree on other gay rights issues. My comment attempted to respond that even given that he won't say the magic words "I support gay marriage" Obama is an ally on gay marriage in several specific objective ways, including that for example Obama supports federal recognition of same sex marriages where they exist. You can read the posts yourself if you like but the nastiest thing in my response, as far as I can tell, was the line:

Chris, Matt, this is why you have no allies: Because you throw them all away.

A couple minutes after making this post, Open Left showed me as logged out, and my ability to log back in was gone. (Attempts to log back in were met with a password error; attempts to use the "lost password" feature resulted in a new password mailed to me, which also met with a password error.) An email asking for verification as to whether I had been banned was not responded to. I am, apparently, now banned from Open Left.

I have some thoughts about this, and what I am taking away from this incident about the current state of the blogosphere in general.

----

EDIT: I should note that as of this writing Chris at Open Left put up a post responding to this one (and after some discussion in the comments chose to undo the ban). Also probably worth noting is that as Chris describes things the precise reason for the issuing of the ban was not the one I assumed it was in writing the post below. I am leaving the post as is because I think it stands as a general analysis on certain parts of the blogosphere right now, but I changed the title.

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]]> within rather than against the system. That is to say, Open Left's main goal as I understand it is to create transformation in America's left wing, but they want to use the existing Democratic Party structures to do it. They are opposed to the Democratic Party status quo and believe the Democratic Party, operating under the umbrella of "centrism", has largely served as a tool to service the right, but they reject third party challenges or abandoning the Democratic Party as a response to this problem; they take the tack of insisting progressives need to embrace the Democratic Party while working to change it from within.

The Open Left guys, as I understand, started out as part of what we might call the Dean Revolution and so they have been working toward this particular goal for a long, long time: Make the Democratic party dominant, and make it progressive.

And now: They've won. The Democrats have just won two wave elections in a row, and the party that has resulted is dramatically to the left of the one we started the decade with. The DLC is so discredited as a movement that they had to shut down and reform under a different name. "Progressive" is no longer a dirty word, in fact it's a word that's so desirable that it's lost all meaning from all the disparate people trying to claim it. We have just elected with an enormous mandate a President unthinkable a decade ago, both because of his background and because he is notably to the left on any number of issues of the Democratic Party status quo on the day John Kerry or even Al Gore won the nomination. In addition to the Presidency, the Democrats control both houses of Congress with margins approaching supermajority.

And Open Left's miserable.

The entire left-wing blogosphere's miserable, really. I don't need to point this out to you; you read it.

There are reasons for this. The Congress didn't use that first Democratic wave election to actually accomplish anything noticeably liberal, and some of that can be laid at the feet of leaders who will remain in power next year. The team Barack Obama has been assembling does not line up with the progressive change-the-world rhetoric he used to get elected. Overall it would be unreasonable to absolutely assume the people who we have just handed power to are going to follow through on anything we want, and as of yet we do not know if the "progressives" we just elected will be any more progressive than the DLCers who they took the party from.

At the same time it's kind of weird to see people so despairing over an administration that, technically, has not existed for even one second yet. We don't have the evidence to call Obama's administration a success yet or even anything as positive as a wash, but nor do we have anything to call it a failure. In favor of hope, we have a large number of campaign promises and a number of intended Congressional bills, some of which are just promises but some of which are things actively being lined up to be passed almost immediately after inauguration; against, we have some ambiguous cabinet picks and the assumption that everything is going to go wrong somehow. This isn't enough to draw conclusions. Entire sectors of the left blogosphere are doing that anyway.

The thing I'm considering weird here, mind you, is not people being angry at Obama. That's reasonable: Obama has, you know, done some things over the previous month, and some of these are things that people disagreed with, and anger is sort of something that happens when you disagree with someone about something they did. But what's happening here goes beyond that, and here's where things get squirrelly. It doesn't seem to be enough to disagree with Obama, or to be upset over his actions. There seems to be some kind of compulsion to not just disagree with Obama, but to make him the enemy, and maybe to make anyone who won't make Obama the enemy an enemy, too. The things that are negative about Obama have to become the defining elements of his personality, his presidency. The things that are positive about him have to be washed away, erased even if these are things that two months ago the same people were specifically arguing were reasons to select him over McCain.

Some of the people doing this just legitimately had a beef with Obama to begin with; I.E. some of these people were Clinton or Edwards supporters at some point, have never trusted Obama even if they considered him a superior alternative to McCain, and so are not doing an about face so much as an "I told you so". Others seem to be simply losing the ability to disagree with someone without hating them.

For example: I got banned from Open Left this morning. I got banned from Open Left for, at least as a proximate cause, attempting to argue that on gay marriage Barack Obama is further left than an evangelical preacher-- not so to speak, literally that was the question at hand. I didn't try to specifically argue Obama's position on gay marriage as a good or right one; I wouldn't have, since I think Obama, who prefers "separate but equal" civil unions to real marriage, is wrong on gay marriage. I just tried to argue there are ways in which he is not our enemy on the specific issue of gay marriage, in response to a post which seemed to me to be willfully ignoring specific things he's doing right on the issue just in order to help sharpen the anger on something he had done wrong.

This is where significant [though not, to my mind, representative] blocks of the left blogosphere are going: it is literally unacceptable to attempt to promote reconciliation between a person and a man they voted for for President barely a month before. (And this particular incident happened on a site which not only endorsed Obama in the primary but a site where, as I understand, you could also conceivably get banned for rejecting the Democratic party and going Nader; so you're not allowed to oppose Barack Obama, but you're not allowed to support him either, or maybe you can support him but only as long as you agree not to like him? I don't know.)

Here's what I think's happening here.

This, I think, is the problem: The left does not know how to win. It is a completely foreign feeling to us. We do not know what we'd do if we ever caught the roadrunner. Similarly, the idea of allies are foreign to us. We don't know how to work with allies; we've never had anything but enemies. Allies are not things that work with you toward a common goal. Allies are those things that stab you in the back.

Moreover, we have gotten some very strange neuroses from the long period during which we've lost at everything. Like, for quite a lot of years, the Democrats have been a long procession of people who've given lip service to groups like progressives, but never follow through on actual policy. Everybody's noticed this. Nobody likes this. But we've also become, to some extent, dependent on that lip service. Since it's all we've had for so long it's what we've learned to respond to in politicians.

So what happens if we ever get allies? People who aren't part of the movement, who aren't us so to speak, but do have common goals with us and intend to work on them. Well, obviously we'd work on those common goals with them. But what happens when the goals diverge, as is inevitably going to happen at some point? What do you do with allies that disagree with you? I don't think we really know. But we do know what to do with enemies: you attack them. One thing we could do is assume that the disagreement is in fact the allies stabbing us in the back, and attack them back for it. And if we're going to attack them, we have to turn them into enemies.

----- ----- ----- -----

Why does any of this matter? Well, it matters because we don't know what Barack Obama is going to do. Barack Obama is, somewhere between "on occasion" and "always", going to get things wrong. And when that happens, we need something in place to pressure him back into doing the right thing. In fact, given that Obama, although he's committed himself to trying to move the center leftward, also has committed himself to appeasing that center, Obama can't function without this outside pressure dragging the Overton window where he wants it.

I am not sure this is something we have right now. What we have are a bunch of people who are trying to establish Obama as the Enemy. At times I'm not sure how this is meant to improve his behavior. You can't pressure someone who you have nothing in common with; if you try to start with the premise you disagree with someone on everything, then you have no grounds on which to bring them into agreement. Someone without common ground isn't someone you influence, it's someone you defeat. Sometimes there are people you really don't have common ground with, and the only thing you can do is try to defeat them. But a lot of us have stopped looking for common ground at all, even among our allies, and now we're trying to defeat the exact people who we very badly need to achieve our goals.

What we've wound up with isn't pressure, just undirected anger. An amazing amount of the response to Obama's recent actions has come with no remedy, stated or implied, attached (though this has varied from commentator to commentator). The obvious remedy in any of these cases would be "stop doing the thing that upset me"; but some of these actions being responded to are either essentially symbolic or unwinnable battles, and while symbolism can matter and unwinnable battles are sometimes worth fighting just to say you tried, neither of these things are worth it if opportunities to actually have some meaningful influence are in the process falling through the cracks. For example, Obama stood up today and said that he is a fierce advocate of equality for gays and lesbians. We have the opportunity to send back the message, "prove it". Instead the message we are sending back at the moment is "no you're not".

I think it is possible to pressure Barack Obama without specifically being his enemy. It's not exactly necessary, but it's something that should be tried. And if on the other hand we are going to have to approach Obama from an adversarial standpoint, and maybe we are going to have to do this, then we at least need to have some clear idea of what our goals are in attacking him-- what effect we expect those attacks to have, and based on what common goals we think those effects might happen.

I realize this is all kind of abstract. I do have specific opinions concerning how and within what limitations these sorts of things relate to gay marriage and Rick Warren, which aren't really getting expressed here because this post is already too long; and because the post itself came about because, well, I got kicked out of the discussion where we were talking about Rick Warren and gay marriage. But that's the problem in the first place-- we're not willing to listen enough, even within our own side, for these kinds of discussions to even meaningfully take place. We've got some section of the progressive movement which is not only unwilling to listen to our enemies, but also unwilling to listen to allies who are willing to listen to our enemies, plus apparently allies who are willing to listen to those allies who are willing to listen to our enemies. What the hell? Where can we even go from there?

Why Bristol Palin Matters

2008-09-01T21:38:37Z

I've seen suggestions that the just-revealed pregnancy of Sarah Palin's daughter doesn't matter. I think it does. This is why:

Q: Will you support funding for abstinence-until-marriage education instead of for explicit sex-education programs, school-based clinics, and the distribution of contraceptives in schools?

[Sarah Palin]: Yes, the explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support.

The thing that's important about Palin's daughter's pregnancy is not that a 16-17 year old got pregnant out of wedlock and the family chose to support it. If that's their choice, that's their choice. The thing that's important is that Palin wants to create a situation that will tend to leave everyone else's 16-17 year olds pregnant as well, with choice nowhere in the equation.

Palin wants to prevent teenagers from learning what they need to know about sex, and instead replace that teaching with filler that moralizes and preaches but doesn't do anything. She wants to prevent abortions even in cases of rape or incest. She wanted to amend the Alaskan state constitution to require parental consent for teen abortions, ensuring that the choice in cases like Bristol Palin's will be made by the mother's parents and not the mother. She was put on the Republican VP ticket more or less explicitly as a representative of the American evangelical subculture which believes all these things and wants to write them into our laws.

The Bristol Palin situation matters because of what it tells us about why Sarah Palin, and the subculture she represents, is doing all these things.

A drive-by commenter at 538 says:

Sarah and Todd Palin have issued the following statement: "We're proud of Bristol's decision to have her baby..."

Interesting. I see that this was Bristol's DECISION and they are proud of her DECISION. They are glad that she exercised her CHOICE.

They are in deed (if not in word) pro-choice.

A thread-starter at FreeRepublic says this:

Mary, Unwed Mother of Jesus, Did Not Abort the Baby
Bible ^ | 1 AD | Bible

Posted on 09/01/2008 12:03:15 PM PDT by xzins

Mary, unwed mother, did not abort the baby Jesus.

She did the right thing.

Joseph had his concerns, but he came around when God spoke to his heart about what he really believed.

Sarah Palin says she's "proud".

What we see here is the intellectual bankruptcy of the "pro-life", anti-contraception, anti-sexual-freedom crowd: that they don't and probably never did care about the sex, that they don't care so much about marriage as long as you get that in place retroactively, that their morality begins and ends with creating babies. This is what the "culture of life" is about, where its endpoint goes: Teen pregnancy isn't a bad thing or something to be concerned about, it's essentially neutral. The only point at which teen pregnancy becomes a practical or moral problem is if you try to prevent it.

Using my.barackobama.com to organize for marriage equality on California Proposition 8

2008-07-20T21:55:26Z

So thinking about the fight ahead of us in opposing the California same-sex marriage ban Proposition 8, there are two things I keep returning to:

1. It is sometimes a little difficult for the average anti-8 volunteer to know exactly what the opportunities for activism are in one's particular area.

2. Since Barack Obama opposes Prop. 8, and I find it likely there is some decent overlap between Obama supporters and Prop. 8 opponents, I'm curious whether there's some way to build synergy between the Obama and anti-8 volunteer efforts.

In an attempt to help with these two things, I have created a group on my.barackobama.com: Obama Supporters Against California Proposition 8:

http://my.barackobama.com/page/group/ObamaSupportersAgainstCaliforniaProposit

The purpose of this group is to use the MyBo tools to track volunteer opportunities opposing Prop. 8 and supporting marriage equality. At the moment, I am using it to catalog emails and events from Equality for All, the California statewide effort to oppose Proposition 8; and BAYMEC, the LGBT election committee for the San Francisco Bay Area). At the moment there is a single event listed there (the ongoing EFA phonebanking in San Francisco against Prop. 8).

I hope that people find this useful. I think recent events have demonstrated the movement Barack Obama has not been building is not just a movement to get Barack Obama elected, but a movement to change America; and that movement can be a vehicle for real progressive change above and beyond Obama's election itself.

If you are a MyBo user, you can join the Obama Supporters Against California Proposition 8 group just by going to the link and clicking "Join Group" while logged in. The group is set up so anyone can add events, and if anyone else has any suggestions for activist groups besides EFA and BAYMEC that I should be watching for events to add-- or suggestions in general-- I'd appreciate it. Thanks!

Never mind the election, let's talk about GIANT LASERS

2008-05-03T06:52:02Z

Over the last few days I have seen several posters at TPM comment that they're getting burnt out on all election news, all the time, and a couple people have commented they'd even be interested in hearing about something other than politics for once.

The obvious solution to this, as I see it, is to talk about GIANT SCIENCE LASERS.

So let's do that for a minute. This is actually the perfect time to talk about giant science lasers, because we are very close to the completion of something called the Large Hadron Collider, an enormous science experiment that thousands of people have been working on for years and which finally-- after years of delays-- appears to be on track to get the "on" switch flipped sometime in July.

The experiment works like this: Dig a 17-mile-long circular concrete tunnel under a mountain in Switzerland. Pump all the air out and freeze the insides to 1.9 degrees above absolute zero, colder than deep space. Then, put two giant particle beams inside, and fire them at each other.

Why on earth are they doing this? Well, the LHC is a kind of experiment called a "particle accelerator", which works on the principle of blowing things up and seeing what comes out. This isn't a very accurate way of describing how it works, but: you know that "E = MC^2" equation, the one that explains energy and mass are really the same thing? Well, the basic idea is that if you put enough energy in one place, that energy can slosh over to the right side of the equation and turn into matter. A slightly more accurate way of putting this is that everything in the universe-- matter, light, everything-- is made of particles, and each particle has a certain energy (which is the same thing as mass) associated with it. When you put a bunch of energy in one place, this energy turns into a collection of randomly picked particles, whose combined energies are equal to the energy you put in.

This is incredibly useful for physicists, because it means that if you want to know what kinds of particles exist in the universe, all you have to do is do something that releases a bunch of energy, and you'll get a randomly selected batch of particles flying out of nowhere. Then all you have to do is catch the particles and see what they were. This simple trick has basically been the driving force behind particle physics for seventy years: the experimentalists keep building more powerful particle accelerators, giving them the ability to see particles with higher energies than they could before; then the theorists try to come up with a theory that explains why that set of particles exists; and the theories they come up with usually wind up predicting other particles, particles that haven't been seen yet, which means the experimentalists have to go back and build another particle accelerator to look for them. This game of experimentalist/theorist leapfrog has become so central to physics that physicists barely know what to do without it-- so much so that after the particle accelerator that was supposed to have been built in the 90s, the Superconducting Supercollider, got cancelled, the theorists all started getting cabin fever and raving about "11-dimensional membranes" and "the anthropic multiverse".

But now we've got the Large Hadron Collider, so that's okay. The LHC has about 7 times more energy than the last particle accelerator to get built (the "Tevatron" in Illinois, finished in the early 80s) and about 100 times the "luminosity". The LHC makes its energy by taking protons-- which, by the way, are "Hadrons", large ones-- accelerating them to incredible speed, and then smashing them into each other; so here "energy" refers to how much energy released is in each collision, and "luminosity" refers to how often the collisions occur. Luminosity is important because the higher your luminosity the more quickly you can gather lots of data.

And you need lots of data, because the collisions in particle accelerator don't necessarily spit out the particles you want to see: the particles that come out are, again, random. Worse, you don't actually get to look at the particles themselves, because most of the interesting particles are horribly unstable and only exist for incredibly short amounts of time before falling apart or turning into something else (which kind of makes sense, because if the particles were stable and long-lived they'd just be hanging out all over the place and you wouldn't need a particle accelerator to look for them, right?). So the particle detectors that analyze the aftermath of the collisions don't actually get to look at the particles that were generated, just their aftermath-- the unstable interesting particles instantly fall apart into slightly less interesting but still unstable particles, which then fall apart into boring stable particles. The detectors then pick up the shotgun spray of thirdhand boring particles that are left over.

So let's say that you get this spray of particles, and the spray of particles is consistent with the spray of particles you'd get from the decay of, I don't know, a top quark. You're then left with the question: Is this the aftermath of a top quark? Or is it just a random spray of particles, noise that coincidentally happens to look like the remnants of an exploding top quark? You can't really tell. The only way to figure out what you're looking at is to gather lots and lots of these little particle sprays and do statistical model fitting to shake the coincidences out.

The main thing the LHC is hoping to detect in its statistical model fitting is something called the "Higgs Boson". The Higgs Boson is the one outstanding item in the physicists' eternal game of leapfrog, the very last thing that the theorists are certain exists but the experimentalists have never found. The Higgs is part of what's called the "Standard Model", which is a collection of different known "fields" that show up in nature and are what particles are made out of-- like there's a field for electrons, and a field for each kind of neutrino and quark. There's one field, though, the Higgs field, that doesn't normally make particles-- instead it's just kind of this flat ocean of Higgsness, identical everywhere. Although the Higgs field doesn't ever do anything itself, though, the fact it's there has a huge impact on things-- particles would act completely different, and in fact wouldn't even have mass, if it wasn't for the Higgs field permeating everything and interfering with how all the particle fields operate.

Although the Higgs field doesn't normally form particles, one of the possible outcomes of a particle collider collision is that the collision could cause a ripple in the normally flat ocean that is the Higgs field, and that ripple would look just like a particle. This ripple is the "Higgs Boson" physicists at the LHC want to find, and if they can trap the Higgs Boson and measure what it's like then a lot of stuff about the Standard Model will start to make a lot more sense. There's also some other, speculative stuff that people are hoping the LHC might find-- like "supersymmetric superpartners" (don't ask) or "WiMPs" (which are the particles that a lot of people think are the cause of "dark matter"). But nobody's sure whether the other stuff even exists, so the Higgs is target #1.

All this LHC stuff is being done by CERN, who are incidentally the people who invented the World Wide Web (which just in case the giant concrete fortress under a mountain in switzerland didn't tip you off, that should prove-- yes, they are supervillains).

So, when's all this going to happen? Well, everything's actually ready to go already except the particle beams. The detectors have actually been running since the end of last year; since there aren't any collisions going on, they've just been sitting there measuring the cosmic rays from outer space that sometimes pass through the LHC's mountain. (Incidentally, if you hear anyone in the news claiming the LHC might somehow create tiny black holes or strangelets or something and destroy the earth, this is how you know to ignore them-- cosmic ray collisions are actually more energetic than the LHC, and those happen all the time in the upper atmosphere. If anything that could happen at the LHC was capable of destroying the earth, it would have happened millions and millions of years ago.)

The particle beam, according to the most recent reports I'm aware of, is set to switch on for the first time in early July; but once they turn it on, the first few months are going to be spent just testing it. So the assumption would be that the first "physics collisions" will be happening in September; again though they have to gather a lot of data before they can actually understand what any of it means, so we probably shouldn't expect published results for at least a year after the data starts coming in, probably even longer. But, nevertheless, after years of waiting, the collisions themselves are not far away.

So as the marathon primary finally winds to a close and the general election begins in earnest, as the election itself approaches and we move deeper and deeper into "silly season", remember this, and perhaps it will provide some comfort: Somewhere on the France-Switzerland border, underneath a mountain, things are blowing up.

FURTHER READING: IF ANY OF THIS ACTUALLY INTERESTED YOU, YOU MAY WANT TO TRY FOLLOWING THESE:

The USLHC blog -- This is a group blog where the U.S. contingent among the scientists at the LHC intermittently post about their experiences there

Not Even Wrong -- This blog normally exists just for this guy who works at Columbia University to complain about String Theory, but sometimes he gets distracted and writes startlingly in-depth analyses of up-to-the-minute science news instead

Dorigo -- This is actually a blog by a scientist working at the Tevatron, the LHC's predecessor in Illinois. Although it's not about the LHC, the author's experience with the particle accelerator he works for often allows him to give useful (although perhaps a bit pessimistic) insight into what to expect of the LHC

Never mind the election, let's talk about GIANT LASERS

2008-05-03T06:46:35Z

The obvious solution to this, as I see it, is to talk about GIANT SCIENCE LASERS.

Why on earth are they doing this? Well, the LHC is a kind of experiment called a "particle accelerator", which works on the principle of blowing things up and seeing what comes out. This isn't a very accurate way of describing how it works, but: you know that "E = MC^2" equation, the one that explains energy and mass are really the same thing? Well, the basic idea is that if you put enough energy in one place, that energy can slosh over to the right side of the equation and turn into matter. A slightly more accurate way of putting this is that everything in the universe-- matter, light, everything-- is made of particles, and each particle has a certain energy (which is the same thing as mass) associated with it. When you put a bunch of energy in one place, this energy turns into a collection of randomly picked particles, whose combined energies are equal to the energy you put in.

This is incredibly useful for physicists, because it means that if you want to know what kinds of particles exist in the universe, all you have to do is do something that releases a bunch of energy, and you'll get a randomly selected batch of particles flying out of nowhere. Then all you have to do is catch the particles and see what they were. This simple trick has basically been the driving force behind particle physics for seventy years: the experimentalists keep building more powerful particle accelerators, giving them the ability to see particles with higher energies than they could before; then the theorists try to come up with a theory that explains why that set of particles exists; and the theories they come up with usually wind up predicting other particles, particles that haven't been seen yet, which means the experimentalists have to go back and build another particle accelerator to look for them. This game of experimentalist/theorist leapfrog has become so central to physics that physicists barely know what to do without it-- so much so that after the particle accelerator that was supposed to have been built in the 90s, the Superconducting Supercollider, got cancelled, the theorists all started getting cabin fever and raving about "11-dimensional membranes" and "the anthropic multiverse".

And you need lots of data, because the collisions in particle accelerator don't necessarily spit out the particles you want to see: the particles that come out are, again, random. Worse, you don't actually get to look at the particles themselves, because most of the interesting particles are horribly unstable and only exist for incredibly short amounts of time before falling apart or turning into something else (which kind of makes sense, because if the particles were stable and long-lived they'd just be hanging out all over the place and you wouldn't need a particle accelerator to look for them, right?). So the particle detectors that analyze the aftermath of the collisions don't actually get to look at the particles that were generated, just their aftermath-- the unstable interesting particles instantly fall apart into slightly less interesting but still unstable particles, which then fall apart into boring stable particles. The detectors then pick up the shotgun spray of thirdhand boring particles that are left over.

So let's say that you get this spray of particles, and the spray of particles is consistent with the spray of particles you'd get from the decay of, I don't know, a top quark. You're then left with the question: Is this the aftermath of a top quark? Or is it just a random spray of particles, noise that coincidentally happens to look like the remnants of an exploding top quark? You can't really tell. The only way to figure out what you're looking at is to gather lots and lots of these little particle sprays and do statistical model fitting to shake the coincidences out.

The main thing the LHC is hoping to detect in its statistical model fitting is something called the "Higgs Boson". The Higgs Boson is the one outstanding item in the physicists' eternal game of leapfrog, the very last thing that the theorists are certain exists but the experimentalists have never found. The Higgs is part of what's called the "Standard Model", which is a collection of different known "fields" that show up in nature and are what particles are made out of-- like there's a field for electrons, and a field for each kind of neutrino and quark. There's one field, though, the Higgs field, that doesn't normally make particles-- instead it's just kind of this flat ocean of Higgsness, identical everywhere. Although the Higgs field doesn't ever do anything itself, though, the fact it's there has a huge impact on things-- particles would act completely different, and in fact wouldn't even have mass, if it wasn't for the Higgs field permeating everything and interfering with how all the particle fields operate.

So, when's all this going to happen? Well, everything's actually ready to go already except the particle beams. The detectors have actually been running since the end of last year; since there aren't any collisions going on, they've just been sitting there measuring the cosmic rays from outer space that sometimes pass through the LHC's mountain. (Incidentally, if you hear anyone in the news claiming the LHC might somehow create tiny black holes or strangelets or something and destroy the earth, this is how you know to ignore them-- cosmic ray collisions are actually more energetic than the LHC, and those happen all the time in the upper atmosphere. If anything that could happen at the LHC was capable of destroying the earth, it would have happened millions and millions of years ago.)

FURTHER READING: IF ANY OF THIS ACTUALLY INTERESTED YOU, YOU MAY WANT TO TRY FOLLOWING THESE:

The USLHC blog -- This is a group blog where the U.S. contingent among the scientists at the LHC intermittently post about their experiences there