The Times' Trifecta on Iraq

This past Sunday's New York Times op ed pages offered a brilliant triad of analyses of where the US Iraqi policy is in the wake of congressional testimony by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker last week.

First, Frank Rich in a tough-minded column, "Will the Democrats Betray Us?," got to the heart of the matter:

SIR, I don't know, actually": The fact that America's surrogate commander in chief, David Petraeus, could not say whether the war in Iraq is making America safer was all you needed to take away from last week's festivities in Washington. Everything else was a verbal quagmire, as administration spin and senatorial preening fought to a numbing standoff.... General Petraeus couldn't say we are safer because he knows we are not.

Rich then turned to President George W. Bush's repackaging of the limited 2008 troop withdrawals:

The only troops coming home alive or with their limbs intact in President Bush's troop "reduction" are those who were scheduled to be withdrawn by April anyway. Otherwise the president would have had to extend combat tours yet again, mobilize more reserves or bring back the draft.

Finally, Rich, understanding that there is NOTHING more that can be expected from the Bush administration, challenges the 2008 contenders to offer more and to offer specifics:

New bin Laden tapes and the latest 9/11 memorial rites notwithstanding, we're back in a 9/10 mind-set. Bin Laden, said Frances Townsend, the top White House homeland security official, "is virtually impotent." Karen Hughes, the Bush crony in charge of America's P.R. in the jihadists' world, recently held a press conference anointing Cal Ripken Jr. our international "special sports envoy." We are once more sleepwalking through history, fiddling while the Qaeda not in Iraq prepares to burn.... Mr. Bush, confident that he got away with repackaging the same bankrupt policies with a nonsensical new slogan ("Return on Success") Thursday night, is counting on the public's continued apathy as he kicks the can down the road and bides his time until Jan. 20, 2009; he, after all, has nothing more to lose. The job for real leaders is to wake up America to the urgent reality.

Paul Krugman in "A Surge, and Then a Stab," focuses on Iraq's economic bloodline to diagnosis the surge's failure:

To understand what’s really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money, which already knows that the surge has failed... Without an agreed system for sharing oil revenues, there is no Iraq, just a collection of armed gangs fighting for control of resources. Well, the legislation Mr. Bush promised never materialized, and on Wednesday attempts to arrive at a compromise oil law collapsed. What’s particularly revealing is the cause of the breakdown. Last month the provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central government, passed its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site announced that the provincial government had signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, and that seems to have been the last straw.... Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt is a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body.

Having failed, Krugman writes, Bush has only one option -- to write that failure into the next president's history, not his own:

Here’s how I see it: At this point, Mr. Bush is looking forward to replaying the political aftermath of Vietnam, in which the right wing eventually achieved a rewriting of history that would have made George Orwell proud, convincing millions of Americans that our soldiers had victory in their grasp but were stabbed in the back by the peaceniks back home.

And finally, Thomas L. Friedman, the pundit who of these three has been most credulous about what Bush has attempted in Iraq, in "Somebody Else's Mess," offers the most damning assessment, echoing Rich's view, but going further:

George W. Bush delivered his farewell address on Thursday evening — handing the baton, and probably the next election, to the Democrats. Why do I say that? Because in his speech to the nation the president basically said that on the most important, indeed only, legacy issue left in his presidency, Iraq, there would be no change in policy — that a substantial number of U.S. troops would remain in Iraq “beyond my presidency.” Therefore, it will be up to his successor to end the war he started.

Friedman is clearly prepared to go long on Democratic stock, but also issues a warning to them:

While Mr. Bush’s tacit resignation last week greatly increases the odds of a Democratic victory in 2008, there are several wild cards that could change things: a miraculous turnaround in Iraq (unlikely, but you can always hope), a terrorist attack in America, a coup in Pakistan that puts loose nukes in the hands of Islamist radicals, or a recession induced by the meltdown in the U.S. mortgage market, which forces a stark choice between bailing out Baghdad or Chicago.

And Friedman too argues that the Democrats will have to have a proactive stance on national security, not one based solely on being the un-Bush:

Be careful: despite the mess Mr. Bush has made in the world, or maybe because of it, Americans will not hand the keys to a Democrat who does not convey a “gut” credibility on national security.

That argument is much the same as a warning Rich issues regarding the obsessively cautious signals coming from the Democratic presidential camps not only in their criticisms of Bush, but also in their unwillingness to take on those allies on the left -- specifically MoveOn.org -- who are muddying up the debate and throwing fuel on the fire of political divisiveness (though probably gathering a fair amount of cash in the process) rather than contributing to a national dialogue of clarity and purpose:

Americans are looking for leadership, somewhere, anywhere. At least one of the Democratic presidential contenders might have shown the guts to soundly slap the "General Betray-Us" headline on the ad placed by MoveOn.org in The Times, if only to deflate a counterproductive distraction. This left-wing brand of juvenile name-calling is as witless as the "Defeatocrats" and "cut and run" McCarthyism from the right; it at once undermined the serious charges against the data in the Petraeus progress report (including those charges in the same MoveOn ad) and allowed the war's cheerleaders to hyperventilate about a sideshow. "General Betray-Us" gave Republicans a furlough to avoid ownership of an Iraq policy that now has us supporting both sides of the Shiite-vs.-Sunni blood bath while simultaneously shutting America's doors on the millions of Iraqi refugees the blood bath has so far created.

Read these three pieces.

Intriguing 411 RE Condi Rice

In a new book about the US secretary of state, "The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy," Washington Post diplomatic correspondent Glenn Kessler gingerly broaches the issue of her personal life in writing about her "closest female friend," Randy Kessler, a "liberal progressive" documentary filmmaker who once worked for Bill Moyers. The two women own a home together and have a joint line of credit. Kessler wrote that he was told that Rice offered Bean financial assistance after medical problems put her friend into financial straits. The home was originally purchased by Bean, Rice, and Coit D. Blacker, a gay man who teaches at Stanford, where Rice served as provost prior to joining the Bush administration, and previously worked worked for both Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Rice, Bean, and Blacker are described as a "second family."

Kessler in his book looks at the rumors that have circulated about Rice's sexuality, while noting "she has built a wall of privacy around her that is never breached unfairly," and arguing that single professional women often "unfairly" face speculation they are lesbian.

On his Sirius Q radio program on September 13, Michelangelo Signorile spoke to Kessler, and said he pressed the author/reporter on what he thought all this meant, but to no avail. Signorile notes that Rice has been silent about the Bush administration's hostile policies toward the LGBT community.

Last fall, however, Rice oversaw the swearing-in of Dr. Mark Dybul, the administration's global AIDS coordinator (attended by Laura Bush), and raised Christianist right eyebrows by referring to the mother of Dybul's gay partner as his mother-in-law.

John Byrne looked at the Rice matter on Raw Story.

Be Careful Who You're Calling Dear

When the Brooklyn Democratic machine and the often-gay friendly borough president Marty Markowitz got behind the candidacy of Noach Dear -- a harsh foe of gay rights in his years on the City Council who was handed a post on the City Taxi and Limousine Commission by former Mayor Rudy Giuliani just as the pair were leaving office due to term limits -- critics sprang into action.

Tom Robbins in the Village Voice took a look at Dear's history of corruption, his collusion with the former apartheid government of South Africa, and his use of his influence on the Taxi and Limo Commish to raise $$$ for his judicial run (thank you, Mr. Giuliani).

Allen Roskoff, president of the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club, an LGBT group, did a nutrition content send-up of Dear's career, at the same time ripping into Markowitz for his two-faced embrace of the homophobic judicial hopeful, and Brooklyn's Lambda Independent Dems, also a gay club, ripped into Dear as well.

And then WCBS' Andrew Kirtzman, one of the fraternity of out gay reporters in town, tried to talk to Dear, only to find the candidate backing his car down a one-way street to avoid having to meet the press. Kirtzman's report focused largely on Dear's failure as well to appear before the judicial screening committees of the New York and the Brooklyn Bar Associations.

Finally, in a September 14 story in the newspaper City Hall, John DeSio writes that Democrats in Brooklyn support Dear in this race to keep him from an expected primary contest between State Senator Kevin Parker, an African American who will likely be challenged next year by City Councilman Kendall Stewart, who is also black. The thinking, at least in the analysis of Rock Hackshaw, a blogger at Room Eight, on whose reporting DeSio relies in part, is that Dear could enter the race and win if the African-American vote is split.

The most remarkable revelation from DeSio's story, however, is a comment from Matt Carlin, president of the gay Stonewall Independent Democrats, who seems willing to give Markowitz a pass for the most part: "Markowitz has a great record on LGBT issues. This is definitely a smudge on that record, but it's still a great record."

Question for Markowitz: How do you justify co-signing Dear's homophobia -- especially for a civil court seat -- when you have spent so much time in years past courting gay voters? Do you think it's okay to have a different set of principles depending on the community you are addressing? Would you possibly even think of pulling a stunt like this with a candidate with a racist or anti-Semitic history?

Por Favor, Habla Ingles Solamente!

Seven of the eight Democratic White House hopefuls gathered at the University of Miami last night for the first of its kind Spanish-language debate sponsored by Univision. That is, the questions were in Spanish, and were translated into English, for English-only responses.

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who is Hispanic, complained that Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama prevented him from answering in the language that he learned as a child and is spoken by the 43 million voters the debate was intended to court. He charged that the format amounted to an English-only policy. (A Clinton spokesperson said the candidates did not set the rules, and in fact it was the Univision moderator who appeared irritated that Richardson and Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd managed to sneak a few palabras into their answers.)

"A lot of Hispanics don't even know I'm Hispanic," Richardson told reporters, perhaps getting to the real source of his pique. "Hey, my name's Richardson."

According to Newsday, both Clinton and Obama "sidestepped" a question about why they voted to construct a border fence between the US and Mexico.

Delaware Senator Joe Biden was the no-show, begging off he said to prepare for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings with General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker today. It is unclear how much Biden, already struggling in the polls, might be punished for doing the business voters elected him to do.

Fred Hurts Rudy

A new CBS News/ New York Times poll holds bad news for Republican front-runner Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor. In the past month, his support among GOP primary voters has fallen from 38 percent to 27, while numbers for Fred Thompson, an ex-Tennessee senator and thoroughly unconvincing Manhattan DA on "Law and Order" virtually untested on the campaign trail or in anything approaching a policy platform, rose from 18 to 22. John McCain has regained some ground, rising six points to 18 percent (ALERT: expect a spate of McCain on the mend stories, first because of his showing in the New Hampshire debate last week and second because that's all that can be written about the Arizona senator at this point). Mitt Romney, the former one-term governor of Massachusetts, is steady at 14 percent, despite persistent reports that he has comfortable leads in Iowa and New Hampshire.

One finding the poll touts is that respondents don't look at being a big city mayor as providing the same level of experience that serving as a governor or US senator does. Likely GOP primary voters also appear fuzzy on Rudy's views on abortion, his record on crime, and his relations with New York's people of color communities (though that last measure, if better known, seems doubtful to hurt Giuliani in a big way in the primaries). With uncharacteristic pragmatism, respondents by a two to one margin said they would support a less conservative candidate if that helped the Republicans hold onto the White House, a feeling Rudy is likely to do his best to exploit.

Hillary Rodham Clinton's nearly 20-point lead over Illinois Senator Barack Obama (and more versus North Carolina's John Edwards) remained steady from last month. What factors, if any, might shake up the Democratic contest remain unclear.

Poll: Giuliani Tumbles; GOP Race Tightens

A Decidedly Half-Hearted Deeper Look Into Rudy

On the sixth anniversary of the eve of 9/11, Jeff Greenfield, writing on CBS.com in a piece called "The Giuliani of September 10th," joins the growing chorus of pundits acknowledging that Rudy's highly visible response to the attack on the World Trade Center salvaged a political reputation well past its prime:

If you ask a lot of New Yorkers, "What did you guys think of Rudy Giuliani the day before September 11th," you may well get an answer along these lines: "We were ready to say goodbye; we liked the job he'd done in making the city safer, cleaner, more confident, but we'd had enough." If you pursue the idea a little further, and ask those who cover politics about the Mayor's approval rating, they're likely to guess that it was somewhere in the mid-30s or low-40s.

But after touching on that that point, Greenfield goes on to assert that the situation was "more complex" than that. The only evidence he is able to point to on that score, however, is that the former mayor's approval rate was back above 50 percent by early September 2001. On that basis, he concludes Giuliani could have been re-elected in November 2001 had it not been for term limits.

Curiously, Greenfield goes on to quote three New York observers who know Giuliani well -- longtime critic Wayne Barrett from the Village Voice, WCBS' Andrew Kirtzman, and Fred Siegel, a Rudy cheerleader from Cooper Union. All three, who share precious little common ground in their view of Giuliani, essentially substantiate the simpler explanation -- New York's romance with Rudy was pretty much spent by mid-2001.

Crises, the three said, are when Giuliani is able to shine, and if he needs to create enemies to go after to rally his base he can and will do so. Osama Bin Laden, of course, he did not need to conjure.

Having promised a complex analysis, Greenfield brings his musings to a rather abrupt close by making only glancing reference to the most commonplace of chinks in Giuliani's 9/11 armor -- the placement of the city's emergency command post in the World Trade Center complex, despite the first attack in 1993, and the mayor's negligence in protecting the health of recovery workers at Ground Zero, and then rushing to restore Rudy's bona fides:

But for most New Yorkers, the doubts that had grown up around Rudy Giuliani by September 10th, were overwhelmed by their reaction to what he said and did the next day.

We are still in the first half of a presidential contest that will have gone on, when it's all over, for 23 months. The nation deserves serious pundits who will dig a whole lot deeper in examining the credentials and claims of the leading hopefuls.


Jeff Greenfield's "The Giuliani of September 10th," on cbs.com.

Answering Petreus and Crocker

In Manhattan today, the anti-war group United for Peace and Justice issued the following release:

With General Petraeus claiming significant progress in Iraq, United for Peace and Justice, the largest national coalition of peace organizations with some 1,400 member groups, deplores his misleading and cynical report to Congress. The "surge" of U.S. forces in Iraq has not led to security, stability or peace. In fact, this past summer was the deadliest since the war began in 2003. General Petraeus' recommendation to withdraw one Marine unit this month and a bridge combat team sometime in December comes nowhere near ending the U.S. military engagement in Iraq.

United for Peace and Justice has produced an assessment of the situation on the ground in Iraq that contrasts sharply with the comments from General Petraeus, which barely mention the impact the U.S. war and occupation has on the lives of the people of Iraq.

Leslie Cagan, National Coordinator of UFPJ, says, "We feel it is essential to provide a true picture of what the shattered lives of the 25 million Iraqis look like today. For four years now we have been hearing the same false claims that the U.S. is making important gains, but they have never been true. Prepared by Phyllis Bennis and Erik Leaver, researchers at the Institute for Policy Studies, Iraq: The People's Report, takes an honest look at what this war has cost the people in Iraq and our communities here in the U.S."

Iraq: The People's Report notes that:

Two million Iraqis have fled the war to seek hard-to-find refuge in neighboring countries, and an additional two million Iraqis have been forced by war fueled violence to flee their homes and remain displaced and homeless inside Iraq.

Most Iraqis have electricity for only about five hours a day, clean water remains scarce for most and unobtainable for many, and Iraq's oil production remains a fraction of what it was before war.

Occupation, war and violence have so decimated the Iraqi economy that unemployment has reached up to 40% and higher, and underemployment an additional 10% or more.

In spite of the appalling conditions that most Iraqis now find themselves living in, General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker are trying to convince Congress that the situation is improving. "We hope that Congress will remember that these small improvements in a horrific situation have cost U.S. taxpayers over $480 billion so far, with no end in sight," remarked Sue Udry, Legislative Coordinator of United for Peace and Justice. "That is $480 billion that we could not spend here at home to rebuild the Gulf Coast, improve education or healthcare and more."

The People's Report also notes that:

The failure of the Iraq War has also meant a huge cost to our democracy at home. We have paid an enormous price: in the deaths and shattered minds and bodies of our young soldiers; in the threats to an economy ravaged by billion-dollar bills to pay for an illegal war; in the destruction of so much of our infrastructure, security and social fabric because of human and financial resources diverted to Iraq; and in the shredding of our Constitution and civil rights as fear becomes a weapon in the hands of the Bush administration aimed at Congress, the courts and the people of this country.

United for Peace and Justice has been working throughout the summer to pressure members of Congress to take a firm stand against the White House. "General Petraeus' testimony today illustrates once again the urgency of congressional action," observed Leslie Cagan, UFPJ's National Coordinator. "Congress has the constitutional right and moral obligation to use the power of the purse to force a complete withdrawal from Iraq. The people of this country are looking to them to take leadership in this effort."

Sue Udry, UFPJ's Legislative Coordinator, said, "In the weeks ahead, the pressure on Congress to rein in the White House will accelerate. The public knows this policy is a failure and wants a rapid change of course."

The full report from United for Peace and Justice is available for download:

http://www.unitedforpeace.org/downloads/peoplesreport.pdf

Corzine: Jersey Gay Marriage Inevitable -- After 2008

In a one-hour session that included brief remarks to gay journalists as well as answers to questions they posed, New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine made clear that he sees full marriage equality for same-sex couples as inevitable in the Garden State, but also believes that, from a strategic political perspective, achieving that milestone is best left to a time after the 2008 presidential election.

“I think we’re in the process of evolution,” he said at the September 9 event. “I don’t know whether it’s three years or five years, but in some time frame in the not so distant future I suspect that New Jersey will embrace the moniker of gay marriage or same-sex marriage.”

The issue was the key focus of Corzine’s informal gathering with roughly two-dozen members of the New York chapter of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark.

Read Paul Schindler's full story.

Frank Rich on the Return of the Whigs

In his September 9 New York Times op ed, Frank Rich, looking at this week's reports to Congress from General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, warns that what he calls a "24/7 Pentagon information ' war room'" will do work to do for the surge what the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, did for the new product launch of a war on Saddam five years ago this month.

White House "facts" about the surge's triumph are turning up unsubstantiated in newspapers and on TV. Instead of being bombarded with dire cherry-picked intelligence about W.M.D., this time we're being serenaded with feel-good cherry-picked statistics offering hope. Once again the fix is in. Mr. Bush's pretense that he has been waiting for the Petraeus-Crocker report before setting his policy is as bogus as his U.N. charade before the war. And once again a narrowly Democratic Senate lacks the votes to stop him.

And Rich points fingers at those responsible for the credulity with which the new Bush PR initiative is being received:

But this has not impeded them from posing as quasi-journalistic independent observers elsewhere ever since, whether on CNN, CBS, Fox or in these pages, identifying themselves as experts rather than Pentagon junketeers.... Katie Couric seemed to be drinking the same Kool-Aid (or eating the same lobster tortellini) as Mr. O'Hanlon. As "a snapshot of what's going right," she cited Falluja, a bombed-out city with 80 percent unemployment, and she repeatedly spoke of American victories against "Al Qaeda." Channeling the president's bait-and-switch, she never differentiated between that local group he calls "Al Qaeda in Iraq" and the Qaeda that attacked America on 9/11. Al Qaeda in Iraq, which didn't even exist on 9/11, may represent as little as 2 to 5 percent of the Sunni insurgency, according to a new investigation in The Washington Monthly by Andrew Tilghman, a former Iraq correspondent for Stars and Stripes.

"As the Iraqis Stand Down, We'll Stand Up," by Frank Rich, September 9.

Straw Horse in Rudy the Crusader Profile

Matt Bai in the September 9 New York Times magazine looks at Rudy Giuliani's appeal to voters as the anti-terrorism crusader. The piece is probing and perceptive, and asks the critical question whether the former New York mayor's reputation as the tough guy ready to take on Bin Laden is deserved (though it largely accepts the celebratory view of his campaign against crime in New York).

But at a key point in the article, Bai sets up a contrast between Democrats and Republicans on their approach to the terror threat for which he provides no solid evidence -- and it's a comparison that that works to the advantage of the GOP in arguing that it remains the US's daddy party. It's difficult to discern what led Bai to his paradism, and he really needs to flesh his thinking out in some reasonable degree of detail:

Democrats now openly question the entire premise of a “war on terror” (or, as Giuliani likes to call it, a “terrorists’ war on us”), and, privately, at least, they are increasingly willing to argue that Islamic radicals do not represent the same kind of existential threat that the Stalinists did, with their vast military machinery. There is a growing, though not unanimous, feeling in liberal policy circles that remaking the nation’s entire foreign policy around terrorism is an overreaction to what is, essentially, a serious but manageable threat. As one senior Democratic policy aide put it to me recently, the terrorist attacks that claimed some 3,000 innocent American lives were indescribably tragic, but if you had gone to sleep on Sept. 10, 2001, and woken up sometime in 2006, surely you would have thought, to hear the political rhetoric, that several American cities had been wiped off the map. In this view, Al Qaeda is not a defining ideological adversary so much as a stateless, lethal criminal enterprise without any real historical antecedent, and Bush’s war in Iraq has nothing to do with the campaign against organized terrorists — except perhaps to swell their ranks by recklessly throwing around America’s military might.

The Crusader, by Matt Bai, New York Times Magazine, September 9.

Times' Gail Collins Smacks Down Rudy

Gail Collins, the former editorial page editor of the New York Times, now back in the paper's regular op-ed columnist rotation, took direct aim at former Mayor Rudy Giuliani's record at Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan, not for how he handled himself on 9/11 or how well prepared his administration was for such a catastrophe in the first place, but rather for lethal missteps in protecting the health of those who spent months doing recovery work there.

The degree to which recovery workers, including firefighters, will inject their views into the 2008 presidential race, remains uncertain, but it is not inconceivable that a Swift Boat-style attack could be unleashed on Giuliani. He might well, of course, have better instincts for responding than did John Kerry in 2004.

On September 8, Gail Collins wrote:

Rudy Giuliani is going to be at ground zero next week, taking part in ceremonies to remember the victims of Sept. 11. That was inevitable — the man has so identified himself with 9/11 that it’s amazing he hasn’t tried to patent it.

It’s also a terrible idea.

After the attacks, Giuliani did his best work in front of a microphone, speaking simply and honestly to the city and the nation. Ground zero, on the other hand, is the site of his worst failure.

Read "Giuliani's Ground Zero Legacy" in full.

Absorbing Gay Pain & Praise, Clinton Says She's Evolved

Originally published in Gay City News, October 26-November 1, 2006:

In an appearance early Wednesday evening in front of roughly three-dozen LGBT leaders, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton indicated that she would not oppose efforts by Eliot Spitzer, the odds-on favorite to become the new governor, to enact a same-sex marriage law in New York.

She also suggested that language she used when she first ran for the Senate in 2000 explaining her opposition to marriage equality based on the institution's moral, religious, and traditional foundations had not reflected the "many long conversations" she's had since with "friends" and others, and that her advocacy on LGBT issues "has certainly evolved."

On Wednesday, Clinton presented her position on marriage equality as more one of pragmatism.

"I believe in full equality of benefits, nothing left out," she said. "From my perspective there is a greater likelihood of us getting to that point in civil unions or domestic partnerships and that is my very considered assessment."

Clinton addressed a gathering organized by the Greater Voices Coalition made up of LGBT Democratic organizations citywide. Leaders of those clubs, along with out elected officials, including Democratic district leaders and state committee members, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, state Senator Tom Duane, and Assemblymembers Deborah Glick and Daniel O'Donnell, were in attendance. The meeting, which was held at the Upper East Side home of a Clinton supporter, ran for more than an hour.

Representatives of the gay press were invited to the meeting, which was on the record.

The session included both warm, enthusiastic praise for New York's junior Democratic senator and sharp questioning about her posture on marriage equality.

Quinn opened the meeting recalling a number of issues-LGBT-related and not-which she had worked with Clinton on in the 10 months since she's been the Council leader. She focused in particular on their efforts to strategize about the Senate Democrats' response to this summer's efforts by Republicans to revive a federal constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage beaten back in 2004.

"Every single time since I've been elected speaker, I ever time I've picked up the phone to ask Senator Clinton to help the LGBT community, she has said yes," Quinn said. "She's assigned staff, she's taken her own time and political capital to put in on the deal."

Ethan Geto, a long-time gay activist who described himself as an advisor to the senator on LGBT issues, introduced Clinton, addressing what he called "the elephant in the room."

"We're engaged in a dialogue with someone who has the stature, who has the credibility, the viability to be the party's standard bearer in 2008," he said. "I think when you look at Senator Clinton's record, she may not agree with us on every last policy issue, but when you look at the totality of the record, there is no one in this country who may be the president of the United States with whom we have a warmer, a stronger, a closer productive working relationship."

But once the meeting moved from introductions to questions, Clinton faced a considerably more varied reception-and, hands down, the most challenging issue she faced was marriage equality.

Doug Robinson, the co-president of the Out People of Color Political Action Club who with his partner of more than 20 years has raised two sons, spoke about the pressures his family faces in sending both to college without the benefits of marriage's economic advantages. In what began as a strong challenge to Clinton, Robinson said, "We need your support on marriage, we need you to look at that."

Yet, just as Robinson was about to yield the floor for Clinton's response, he offered her a bit of wiggle room.
"Even if you say civil marriage isn't as important as equal benefits, in my mind I don't care what you call it," he concluded. "But I need the same things that everyone does so I can sustain my family."

It was at this point that the senator stated her support for "full equality of benefits, nothing left out," before saying that civil unions offered the more certain route to that goal.

"If you go the next step and say, 'But I want what is called marriage,' you're going to have a problem."

Following up, Allen Roskoff, the president of the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club, worked to hold Clinton's feet to the fire. Recalling a conversation he had with her during her first Senate campaign, Roskoff said, "It was right after you said that you were against same-sex marriage on moral, religious, and traditional grounds and I found that incredibly hurtful." He also criticized the senator for volunteering her support for the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, even if not asked, and for not speaking during the Senate marriage amendment debate in June regardless of the work she did behind the scenes.

Clinton offered Roskoff some consolation regarding her earlier characterizations of marriage's history as an exclusively heterosexual institution, an argument that she made in an interview with this reporter as well during the 2000 campaign.

"Obviously my friends and people who spoke to me-we've had many long conversations and I think-and which I believe-that the way that I have spoken and I have advocated has certainly evolved and I am happy to be educated and to learn as much as I can," she said.

Clinton went on to defend both DOMA and her decision not to speak during the marriage amendment debate this past June, and in fact linked the two. She said that without being able to point to the U.S. law which bars federal recognition of gay marriage and allows states to similarly refuse to acknowledge such unions from other states, many more members of Congress would have voted to amend the Constitution, especially when that effort had its first vote two years ago.

She explained that her choice not to speak on the Senate floor about the amendment this year was strategic.

"Very few Democrats spoke, because maybe you thought one way, which is that you want people out there speaking for us. We thought as-force the Republicans out there, make them look like they're trying to enshrine discrimination in the Constitution. We don't even want to dignify it."

Later in the discussion, Larry Moss, who as a Democratic state committeeman led the charge for the state party's endorsement of marriage equality, raised the issue with specific reference to politics in Albany. Noting that Spitzer, if elected governor, plans to introduce a "program bill" legalizing gay marriage as a sign of his commitment to the issue, Moss asked, "How do we keep your words from being cover for conservative Democrats who want to compromise with Eliot and say, 'Just do civil unions?'"

Clinton's response was probably the evening's most newsworthy moment.

"My position is consistent," she said. "I support states making the decision. I think that Chuck Schumer would say the same thing. And if anyone ever tried to use our words in any way, we'll review that. Because I think that it should be in the political process and people make a decision and if our governor and our Legislature support marriage in New York, I'm not going to be against that... So I feel very comfortable with being able to refute anybody who tries to pit us or pit me against Eliot."

Asked several moments later by Gary Parker, the Greater Voices leader who chaired the meeting, to clarify that point, Clinton reiterated, "I am not going to speak out against, I'm not going to oppose anything that the governor and the Legislature do."

No other issue raised during the gathering garnered the heat that marriage did. Clinton spoke passionately against what she said was the injustice, waste, and stupidity of the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy that has led to 10,000 discharges in the past 13 years, including some involving personnel with specialized skills such as language translation. The senator won praise from several at the meeting for her work in blocking Senate approval of a Ryan White AIDS Care Act reauthorization that would mean the loss of millions in federal dollars to New York each year.

Asked by Melissa Sklarz, a transgendered activist who is a former president of the Gay and Lesbian Independent Democrats, if she would support the inclusion of gender identity and expression protections in the long-stalled federal employment nondiscrimination act, or ENDA, Clinton noted that the federal hate crimes measure also lacks such language, but said only, "We are very aware of that and we are raising that."

Asked about a measure authored by West Side Democratic Congressman Jerrold Nadler that would allow immigrant partners of Americans to gain citizenship just as foreign-born married spouses can, Clinton said movement on that awaits a comprehensive solution to the immigration issue that moves beyond the current Republican emphasis on penalties and border fences. With a Democratic Congress, Clinton said, much more is possible "and I think that will be included in it."

Only at the very end of the meeting did Clinton get around to foreign policy, the Iraq War, and what she called the Bush administration's "abuse of power."

"I think they put Nixon to shame," she said, in what was an indisputable crowd-pleaser.

©GayCityNews 2007

Hillary Clinton Talks to Paul Schindler, 2000

In an exclusive interview with lgny's editor in chief Paul Schindler on October 4, 2000, subsequently republished by out.com, Hillary Rodham Clinton made her strongest statement to date about the role the federal government ought to play in recognizing civil unions such as those sanctioned by recent legislation in Vermont. She also broke new ground beyond the policies of her husband's Administration by declaring her support for federal funds earmarked specifically for state and local needle exchange efforts.

In a wide-ranging 25-minute interview held October 4 on the campus of the Brooklyn College Law School in Brooklyn Heights, Rodham Clinton also responded to questions about the distinction she draws between civil union and marriage, her views on the Clinton Administration's failed Don't Ask, Don't Tell military policy, hot button inclusiveness issues such as the Boy Scouts and the annual St. Patrick's Day Parade, the political realities surrounding gender identity issues, and her political education on gay and lesbian issues.

Since launching her U.S. Senate campaign more than a year ago, Rodham Clinton has several times spoken generally about her support for extending the full benefits of marriage to lesbians and gay men through domestic partnership. Her response on the issue of federal recognition of Vermont civil unions represents her most specific comments about the role the federal government might play in bringing about these changes. The candidate continues to draw a distinction between civil unions and marriage, which she said has "historic, religious, and moral content that goes back to the beginning of time," open only to a man and a woman. Rodham Clinton dismissed any Church/State separation issues that a "religious and moral" perspective on a civil institution might pose.

Rodham Clinton's statement endorsing federal funding of needle exchange programs marked an important break with the President's policy. Throughout his Administration, Clinton sided with drug czar General Barry McCaffrey who successfully fended off health and scientific officials who pointed to the clear benefits of clean needles in preventing HIV transmission. Housing Works, the AIDS advocacy group, in a press release about a recent AIDS white paper released by Rodham Clinton's campaign, criticized the Senate candidate on this issue. In fact, as Rodham Clinton spoke to lgny, activists from Housing Works were protesting at her midtown campaign headquarters resulting in several arrests.

Rodham Clinton told lgny that the campaign had allowed her the chance to meet with advocates for transgender rights, but she discounted the political viability of trying to amend pending legislation before Congress, such as the Employment NonDiscrimination Act, to address issues of gender identity and expression at this time. In fact, she said, "No one who's a leader in the gay and lesbian community has asked me to do that."

Rodham Clinton also spoke at length about what she described as the "difficult decision" she faced on thorny issues of inclusiveness posed by events such as the annual St. Patrick's Day Parade on Fifth Avenue, which bans openly gay and lesbian marchers. She said she felt constrained by "relationships" and "ongoing commitments" to the Northern Ireland peace process.

In addressing her decision last year to break with the Clinton Administration's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy and her political education on gay issues generally, Rodham Clinton described a "revolutionary journey to understanding that took 30 years." In 1969, Hillary Rodham gave a commencement address at Wellesley College in Massachusetts where she talked about the "challenge… to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible." She now has five weeks to find out whether she will be given that chance, and perhaps then six years to prove whether she has the will to do so.

lgny: Since the Vermont civil union decision last December, you have strongly supported the court decision. You've also said you think it's going to come to pass everywhere in time, and also that you would support such a measure in New York State.

Hillary Rodham Clinton: Right.

lgny: Would you support a federal effort to recognize and confer the federal portion of benefits that these state civil union measures are not able to convey?

Clinton: Yes.

lgny: In recent decades a lot of voters have looked to the Democratic Party as a guarantor of a clear distinction between Church and State. In one of the comments you made about the possibility of gay marriage I believe you said there were "historic, religious, and moral content that goes back to the beginning of time." Is that kind of position -- which is similar to that taken by other Democrats otherwise strong supporters of gay rights -- is that kind of distinction one that possibly breaches the Church/State distinction that some voters find so important?

Clinton: I don't think so. I think traditional marriage has been vested with a meaning and an interpretation that has an extraordinary strength within, certainly, our society and I don't see that there's any breaching of that in the sense that people have the choice between religious ceremonies and civil ceremonies, but their ceremonies or their marriages need to be legally registered with a marriage license. I don't see that as any breach.

lgny: But not extending that licensing to gay couples?

Clinton: Well, for civil unions.

lgny: On the Don't Ask, Don't Tell military policy, you came out with a very strong statement I think it was early in December of last year. And since that time you have said that you believe that you in part changed the terms of the debate on this issue. In fact, within a week or two, the Vice President separated himself from the policy and even the President said, I believe, "The policy is out of whack." Can you tell me when and how you came to the conclusion that the policy was in need of repair?

Clinton: I think as I watched it being implemented and some of the problems that were obviously arising from the enforcement struck me as untenable. There didn't seem to me to be a way for the military to play that kind of role. Therefore I think that people who wish to serve their country should be permitted to serve their country and that all people should be governed by the same code of military conduct and should be evaluated for their fitness and performance with respect to their duties that they are asked to carry out and their behavior in the military context. I just think that makes tremendous sense. I believe that we should move toward that.

Now, I know that there's been a good faith effort on the part of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs and others to try to go back and provide better education and accountability for line officers in the enforcement of Don't Ask, Don't Tell and I appreciate that because I think its important not to be harassing people and subjecting people to torment and even potential danger as we've seen in the past. But I just concluded in my own mind that it's time for us to let people serve based on their desire to serve and on the ability to perform their service-related jobs.

lgny: Your statement came at the time when the murder trial in the case of Barry Winchell was winding down.

Clinton: Right.

lgny: Were you concerned at that point that in fact the policy might be encouraging more harassment of gay soldiers?

Clinton: Well I think there's evidence of that, it wasn't just my concern. There is evidence and it's what caused, I think, the President and the Secretary to go back to the drawing board and try to raise the level of awareness and understanding. And certainly his death, the increased discharges of people because of off-base activities and honest declarations of sexual orientation that had nothing to do with their service record ... that was all disturbing to me. And then I learned that the military had permitted a lot of people to serve in Desert Storm and only discharged them after they'd made use of their service, which struck me as unfair and hypocritical. So I think that its going to be very difficult to fix what is essentially a contradictory policy that I believe we should move beyond.

lgny: Going back to 1993 when the compromise was first struck I think there was a lot of disappointment within the Administration that it was the best result that was able to be achieved. Certainly there was a lot of disappointment in the lesbian and gay community about what was called a compromise at the time. Did you learn anything in particular that was interesting at that point about gay rights issues and the way in which the public views them and the way in which they can be moved forward?

Clinton: Well I think we've learned since then that there was a tremendous amount of misinformation and bias and stereotyping that was driving decision making and that much of the reason for that was a lack of personal experience and awareness. There were people in the United States Congress as well as in the larger community who believed that they didn't even know gay people -- with very few exceptions, maybe Barney Frank or somebody like that -- but otherwise they had no basis for experience and it was a tremendous obstacle to overcome on the part of the Administration and the advocates. I think we've seen a lot of change in the last seven years. I give much of the credit to the advocacy community because I think there's been a really effective public education campaign that has raised people's awareness. We're not the same country we were in '93 that we are today. But we still have a lot of work to do.

lgny: You issued a white paper on AIDS and HIV a week and a half ago or so and you gave a speech up at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx about AIDS issues. Housing Works is a vibrant community group that has actually had a lot of success in the courts holding Mayor Giuliani's feet to the fire on the delivery of AIDS services here in New York City. They've also played a pretty vigilant role in terms of commenting on your record and positions and on Congressmember Lazio's. They came out with a statement about your white paper and the key issue that they zeroed in on was IV drug use and I'll read from their statement: "Intravenous drugs are now the biggest category of HIV infections and AIDS cases in our state. To have a big impact in the areas of prevention and care we need new federal funds for needle exchange." Do you have a position on federal funding of needle exchange?

Clinton: I believe that New York, with its recent launching, has taken a big step forward to permit state-funded health clinics, which are often jointly or mutually funded in the federal budget, they're not just stand-alone state money, to use funds for needle exchange. I think it's a big step forward. I think that we should go with the science and the science has been pretty clear on this. If we can prevent IV drug use we ought to do it. Recognizing the political realities, I think it has to be an option. I think that we need to say that if the states and localities are willing to do it, the federal government will support it. But I don't know that we're yet at a political critical mass where we can mandate it. But I think we ought to get everything we can done legislatively to provide what ever federal support we could.

lgny: Would that federal support include specific federal dollars earmarked for needle exchange?

Clinton: Yes, so long as the local community or the state accepted that. You wouldn't mandate it on a local community that for whatever reason wouldn't do it or didn¿t want it.

lgny: That's a shift from existing Administration policy.

Clinton: It is.

lgny: Can you tell our readers a little bit about the political education that you had on gay and lesbian issues? You've been a lawyer, you've been a children's activist, a women's activist for many many years. When was it that you began to become informed on gay and lesbian issues and who were some of the people who helped your thinking on that score?

Clinton: Oh gosh. Well one of the people was David Mixner, who has been a friend of mine for a very long time, who I saw last week when I was in L.A. We had been active with David in politics and campaigns before he was, I think, even aware of -- certainly before he was out as being gay. So we kind of lived through David's transition, which was a very important personal experience because we knew his family. His sister is a friend of ours. So we could see what that meant to him. Likewise, there were other personal friends of mine who had the same kind of journey and faced the same kinds of difficulties -- David had a less difficult time in some respects because his sister was really his major family and she was very supportive of him. Other friends of ours faced a much more difficult challenge. I remember a good friend who I went to law school with who had a very hard time. I was close to him. He ended up actually moving to Arkansas and Bill and I spent a lot of time with him. I think you look at these individual experiences of people you care about, who you love -- it's not so dramatic in many instances today as it was 20 years ago -- who are struggling to be who they are and to be acknowledged for who they are as human beings. I think it was one of those revolutionary journeys to understanding that took 30 years.

lgny: But began as early as friends from law school?

Clinton: Yeah, in the '70s. Yeah, the early '70s.

lgny: Your speech at Wellesley in 1969 you talked about making politics the art of the making the impossible possible and clearly there was a strong feminist thrust to the talk you gave. When you were at Wellesley was there open discussion at that time about gay and lesbian issues among the students?

Clinton: Not that I recall. There may have been. But I was so obsessed by the Vietnam War and Bobby Kennedy being killed and Martin Luther King being killed, that it wasn't really part of the general discussion. But this is back in the late '60s.

lgny: So this is really something that came around for you as a discussion in your early adulthood?

Clinton: Yes, that's right.

lgny: One of the challenges that the gay community faces today as we try to get a hate crimes bill passed, and the employment nondiscrimination act, is a challenge from other members of our community, transgender people and people with gender variations, pushing to try to make some of the language in these proposals more inclusive, so we're not strictly talking about a gay person or a lesbian, but a range of people. In your campaign you've had a lot of contact with gay leaders throughout the state. Have you the opportunity to get feedback from members of the transgender community?

Clinton: Yes, we have. Not as much or as frequently but some. I have a few transgendered contributors of some significance. So yes, we have gotten feedback.

lgny: Do you think the goal of broadening the language for ENDA or broadening language in the hate crimes protection act to include gender expression and gender identity, do you think that's a practical goal at this point politically?

Clinton: I think we need to try to move ENDA forward. I think ENDA is such an important legislative goal. I think it's within reach and I think it's a vehicle for widening the circle of rights and freedoms and responsibilities and I would really focus on trying to get that passed.

lgny: In other words, no effort at this point at amending?

Clinton: I don't see at this point that that would be in the best interest of moving the agenda forward.

lgny: What I understand your answer to be is that laudable as that goal might be it might slow the political process down.

Clinton: Well I think that's probably accurate. It may not be the answer people want to hear, but I think it's accurate. We should do everything we can to get ENDA to pass. Legislation is often imperfect at best, and not as inclusive as it needs to be, but you have to build on your victories. Right now we don't have ENDA. I think about the fact that we don't have the hate crimes legislation.

lgny: One of the things that the transgender community points to is that, for example, on hate crimes in New York State, the entire coalition for hate crimes held out to have gays and lesbians included in it. We would have had a hate crimes bill in New York long ago if it had only been for religion and so forth. But everyone hung tough on that. But what the transgender community is saying now is "Wouldn't that approach be appropriate for them as well?" In other words, don't do it piecemeal, include everybody and then move forward.

Clinton: Well no one who's a leader in the gay and lesbian community has asked me to do that. I think there's an understood recognition of the political reality. So for me it's a priority to try to get ENDA passed, which is what I will work on.

lgny: There have been a number of issues that have come up in recent months about inclusion, gay people's inclusion in things, the most recent of course being the Supreme Court ruling on the scouting issue. One of your campaign spokespeople told me that you were opposed to the Supreme Court decision that came down in the scouting case. Once those decisions come down, there are a whole range of other issues that come up -- public school support for the scouts, the President serving as honorary chairperson of the Boy Scouts of America, and earlier this year, you faced a similar but different issue in terms of the Saint Patrick's Day Parade. How do we navigate those kinds of inclusion issues?

Clinton: It's very tough. I'm not going to sit here and tell that there's an easy answer on this issue. You know on Saint Patrick's Day, I marched in two parades, one that was the first all-inclusive parade in Queens that I hope will become an annual tradition But I also have a great deal of history with the Irish community from the work I've done in Northern Ireland and the commitment I've made to peace in Northern Ireland. I felt that I should try to do both, in so far as possible I should try to influence the parade -- and I don't know what my decisions will be in the future -- but for this year being the first time I ever faced it I thought I should make it clear that those who organize the parade should be inclusive, that they should follow the lead of their colleagues in Dublin and be willing to include anyone who is committed to Irish history and traditions and Irish-American relations. But that I would march as a show of respect for particularly the work I had done. So these are not easy issues, they're difficult issues sometimes.

In the Boy Scouts case, freedom of association is a very important fundamental and bedrock principle in our constitution and our way of life. The Supreme Court basically said the Boy Scouts are free to discriminate. That may be the case constitutionally, but I would call on them not to discriminate. I would certainly urge them to think of ways that they could fulfill their mission without being exclusionary. So the're difficult decisions.

lgny: Were you concerned at the time of St Patrick's that some other prominent Democrats in the past, Senator Schumer among them, had made the decision to opt out of that parade. Were you concerned that in some respects you might be breaking ranks on that issue?

Clinton: I was concerned, you know. But I've had a personal involvement in Ireland that Senator Schumer has not had. I've been to Belfast three times. I raised money for a project that I call Vital Voices to involve women in the efforts to end the Troubles there. I've been an active participant with the Prime Minister of Ireland in promoting relations and the like, so for me it was a much more difficult decision, because I have a history, I have these relationships and I have ongoing commitments. But I certainly respect the decisions of any one else to decide differently and as I say I don't know what my decision will be in the future. I keep hoping that the Ancient Order of Hibernians, that they will, you know, see that this will be a better way to honor the full diversity of the Irish experience.

As Iowa Supreme Court Steps In, What Next?

Appeared in Gay City News, September 6-12, 2007

For roughly 18 hours last week in Des Moines, gay and lesbian couples felt the pulse of freedom that their New York City counterparts had yearned for in the spring of 2005, when Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Doris Ling-Cohan ruled in favor of same-sex plaintiffs here in a marriage equality lawsuit at the district court level.

Polk County, Iowa, Judge Robert B. Hanson, like Ling-Cohan, ruled for six plaintiff couples, and when he announced his decision on August 30 he issued no delay pending appeal. Ling-Cohan stayed the effect of her ruling for 30 days, and when Mayor Michael Bloomberg promptly appealed, that delay became permanent until the matter was resolved at New York's highest c

In Des Moines, the County Recorder and Registrar was under order to begin issuing marriage license applications immediately. As Polk County filed a motion to stay Hanson's ruling pending appeal to the Iowa Supreme Court, it became a race between gay and lesbian couples rushing for licenses and the timing of a judicial response to the motion.

Polk County officials assumed they had a three-business-day leg up, in light of the waiting period mandated in law before couples with a license can wed. But they did not count on the resourcefulness of Sean Fritz, 24, and his 21-year-old boyfriend Tim McQuillan, both students at Iowa State University in Ames, who had met via Facebook.com.

According to the Des Moines Register, Fritz moved fast Thursday afternoon once he learned of Hanson's ruling. After calling McQuillan's mother to ask for her son's hand, he dashed over to the campus computer lab and proposed to Tim, who had not yet learned of the legal victory.

Arriving the next morning at the Polk County offices before 8 a.m., the couple got their license and shrewdly spent an extra $5 on a waiver form that would free them from waiting three days. But, they still needed a judge's signature, so they next headed to the County Courthouse, where another district judge, Scott Rosenberg, agreed to their request.

The couple's next several hours, according to the Register, were spent hotfooting around Des Moines looking for a member of the clergy to officiate at their wedding. Though neither man is Jewish, they first tried a synagogue, but upon learning the rabbi was out, they quickly settled on a Unitarian minister, who married them in his back yard. With TV cameras in tow by this time, Fritz and McQuillan headed back to the County building and filed their marriage certificate at around 10:45.

Roughly 45 minutes later, Hanson acceded to the Polk County motion to stay his own ruling. Twenty-six other gay and lesbian couples applied for marriage licenses in a window that last less than a full day, but none will have the chance to wed legally at least until the issue is resolved in the state Supreme Court, a process that could last until 2009.

Thousands of weddings performed in San Francisco after Mayor Gavin Newsom gave the go-ahead in 2004 were later overturned by the California Supreme Court, and Bloomberg, in appealing Ling-Cohan's ruling, said high court resolution of the issue in New York State was necessary before any weddings took place to avoid the same "confusion" from taking place here.

For now, Fritz and McQuillan have a legally registered marriage, and when queried this week on the status of their union, Lambda Legal, which represented the plaintiff couples in Iowa, responded flatly, via e-mail, "Sean and Tim are married. Period."

For all the other same-sex couples who wish to get married in Iowa, the near-term future is less certain. Polk County's appeal of Hanson's August 30 decision goes to the Iowa Supreme Court, which can either hear arguments itself, or first assign the case to an intermediate level appellate court. In New York and New Jersey, marriage cases went through all three levels of state courts. In contrast, in Massachusetts, where the lawsuit failed at the district level, the appeal went immediately to the Supreme Judicial Court, where gay marriage won.

The other great unknown involves the politics of the issue.

Hanson, in ruling for the plaintiffs, overturned a 1998 Defense of Marriage statute passed in the wake of the 1996 federal DOMA. The issue of same-sex marriage has never been the subject of a constitutional amendment fight in that state.

As in Massachusetts, where the effort to overturn the 2004 marriage victory through amendment has been rebuffed several times, the Iowa Constitution can only be amended if the State Legislature approves a ballot question by a simple majority in each of two successive biennial sessions. So, even if an amendment got legislative approval in the session that runs through the end of 2008, it would need to be approved again in the 2009-2010 session and would only reach voters in November 2010, presumably after the state Supreme Court rules.

The Legislature's mood is uncertain.

The Democrats hold narrow majorities in both the Senate and House, and the governor, Chet Culver, is also a Democrat. Not surprisingly, it was the Republicans who moved to heat up the debate.

"I can't believe this actually happened in Iowa," said the House minority leader, Chris Rants, a Sioux City Republican, as he vowed to press the case to protect the state DOMA in the Iowa Constitution. "What it means is that one person has decided they know better than the whole Legislature."

Meanwhile Culver acted quickly to douse any immediate wildfire, pledging "to follow this matter closely as it continues through the judicial system before determining whether any additional legislative actions are appropriate or necessary." Des Moines Democrat Kevin McCar­thy, the House majority leader, urged his fellow legislators to "take a deep breath and calm down."

The Democrats are the ones in the trickier political spot. While Culver last week reiterated his view that marriage is between a man and a woman, the state party itself is on the record in favor of marriage equality. So Democrats are likely to use their control of the Legislature to block any vote from happening at all, seeing it as a no-win proposition for themselves.

One Iowa, the state's marriage equality advocacy group, however, was unwilling to handi­­cap the landscape in the state capital so soon after the Hanson ruling. As the group works to gauge the current temperature, it continues its efforts with Lambda on a series of community briefings designed to educate members of the LGBT community on the marriage drive while drawing media attention across the state.

That strategy proved effective in mobilizing the community and winning editorial support when Lambda employed it in advance of last year's New Jersey Supreme Court ruling. According to Steven Goldstein, who heads up Garden State Equality, that groundwork was invaluable in keeping the push for full civil marriage alive in the wake of the Legislature's decision to opt for only civil unions when faced with a high court mandate last fall.

In the next week alone, One Iowa and Lambda plan meetings in Des Moines, Sioux City, and Iowa City.

©GayCityNews 2007