At 10 am central time this morning, the Iowa Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Varnum v Brien, a case in which six couples are challenging Iowa's law declaring that "Only a marriage between a male and female is valid." Polk County has appealed a district judge's ruling last year that the statute is unconstitutional. Last night jpmassar published a good overview of the legal issues underlying Judge Robert Hanson's ruling as well as the county's defense of the statute.
If you like, you can watch a livestream of the oral arguments at the Iowa Supreme Court's website as well as at several other media sites. You can download pdf files of the district court ruling and the briefs submitted to the Iowa Supreme Court on appeal here.
My focus in this diary is not the legal arguments, but the political case that will need to be made for marriage equality once the Supreme Court has ruled on Varnum v Brien several months from now. Follow me after the jump for more.
This is really interesting: Hunter College has released a national poll on the 2008 primary season that samples only the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual population of the United States. There are a number of remarkable bits about this poll:
In the Democratic primary, Clinton holds a commanding 63%--22% lead over Barack Obama, with everyone else in single digits. Kucinich actually comes in 4th at 5%.
On the Republican side, the sample size was incredibly small, only 78 people, rendering the results useless. This is because only 13% of those who said they would vote in a primary indicated they were self-identified Republicans. I figured the number would be low, but that is really, really low.
The partisan self-identification was 84% Democratic or lean Democratic, while the ideological self-identification was 61% liberal to only 8% conservative. Those are pretty overwhelming numbers.
Here is the kicker: the demographic will clearly grow in the future. 91% of the population surveyed was under 50 years of age, and fully 30% was under 30 years of age. In a decade or two, as coming out becomes more acceptable among all age cohorts, this should result in the LGB demographic growing from 3-4% of the electorate to 5-6% of the electorate, possibly even 7%. Increasing the size of a demographic that is that heavily Democratic and that heavily liberal will result in a 1% gain for Democrats and progressives for every 2% it increases as a percentage of the overall electorate. So, along with the growth of the non-white and non-Christian population, here is another growing demographic Republicans and conservatives have done everything they can to alienate for another generation or two.
Cool stuff. I love the advancements we have seen in polling techniques and creativity over the past five or ten years. Microtargeting, psychographics, online polling--cool stuff. And it is very hard not to see a bright future for Democrats and progressives when one looks closely at the data.
There has been a significant amount of discussion on the Obama--McClurkin story on the blogosphere. I have been following it mainly at Americablog, which has linked to a wide range of other bloggers discussing the topic. The basic defense from the Obama campaign can be read here. Personally, rather than reading anything too deep into this incident, it strikes me as a standard campaign mistake stemming from inadequate vetting. Obama himself admits as much in an interview with the advocate:
The Advocate: How did this happen? Was Mr. McClurkin vetted?
Senator Obama: Obviously, not vetted to the extent that people were aware of his attitudes with respect to gay and lesbians, LGBT issues -- at least not vetted as well as I would have liked to see.
So, by Obama's own admission, the campaign made a vetting mistake with McClurkin, and then got caught between two groups who wanted different outcomes. Claiming after the fact that this means the Obama campaign is some great big tent where people of all stripes come together and forge new alliances ignores that this only became an issue because of a mistake. The Obama campaign might indeed be such a big tent, but the Obama campaign did not intentionally invite McClurkin to sing in order to have a coalition building conversation between the GLBT community and more stridently homophobic members the African-American clergy. In fact, I think it is pretty obvious that the Obama campaign wishes this discussion never took place and that the issue would just go away.
There was also probably a way out of this mess for the Obama campaign, but instead it made another mistake by inviting a white GLBT member of the clergy to share the stage with McClurkin. Americablog once again has a round-up of why this was a mistake, linking entirely to GLBT bloggers of color. Again, this was a mistake from the Obama campaign that seemed to give the story life for at least another couple of days. Had the campaign made the right move, and invited someone from the African-American GLBT community to share the stage with McClurkin, I bet the issue would have died down sooner.
My question from all of this is whether or not campaign mistakes have a larger meaning about the candidates at the head of those campaigns. The story was caused by a mistake, and perpetuated by a second mistake. The end result of those two mistakes left the Obama campaign with virtually no good solutions to the problem. There was no way to disinvite McClurkin without looking bad to some people, and no way to keep him without looking bad to other people. Does this say 1) something more about the Obama campaign, 2) about Obama's commitment to GLBT issues, 3) Obama's attempts to reach out to people of faith, or 4) the campaign's attempt to build broad progressive coalitions across wide demographic barriers? I am far more prone to think mainly it just says something about the first one: the Obama campaign made a couple of mistakes that resulted in getting caught in a discussion it would rather not have and which no presidential campaign is equipped to handle gracefully. I don't think that this mean's Obama is any less dedicated to reaching out to any of these groups, and I certainly don't think it means Obama's campaign is bridging any major divides within the progressive ecosystem. I think it means that the Obama campaign screwed up with inadequate vetting, and it has justifiably pissed off a lot of members of the GLBT community. Sometimes, a rose is just a rose, and a mistake is just a mistake.
With all of the (deserved) flak that the US congress in general, and the senate in particular, has been receiving around these parts, I just wanted to give the Senate kudos for extending the federal hate crime law to GLBT individuals, and for attaching it to the Iraq spending bill, where it will be less likely to be vetoed. Now let's see if it stays on the house version. Good job for today, dems.
