Perhaps I haven’t being paying close enough attention to New Jersey politics. My understanding was that the state legislature had decided to postpone the debate on marriage equality until after the gubernatorial election, an irritating strategy in light of the fact that it looks as if pro-marriage incumbent Jon Corzine will be upended by his anti-marriage Republican foe, Chris Christie. 

Now I gather that they are planning a vote in November or December in order for Corzine to be able to sign a bill before he quacks his last. Corzine himself told an Atlantic City newspaper this week that he “looks forward to signing marriage equality legislation” and thinks this happy day could arrive before the end of the year.

I hope so too. I hadn’t realized that Garden State activists had the pull to get a marriage equality bill passed in the fading light of the 2009 session, but more power to them if they do. If they don’t, the prospects for New Jersey weddings ride on the narrow shoulders of Governor Corzine, but it doesn’t look as if his 32 percent approval rating (or whatever it is) will carry the day in November. 

Don’t roll your eyes at me. You haven’t been paying attention to New Jersey politics either. How about New York politics? There’s still a chance for a marriage bill to emerge from Albany later this month, but the dynamics of the state senate are still fluid. I see that the GOP minority managed to block ethics reform the other day when one of the Democrats in the 2-member majority was absent. If and when marriage pops up on the agenda, our side needs all the support it can get, including a few GOP votes, in order to pass. 

And in Washington DC, the City Council is expected to take a look at a measure to legalize marriage in the nation’s capital in the next week or so. The measure has the votes to pass, at which point the U.S. Congress would have to flex its muscles in order to stop marriage equality from becoming city law. Earlier this year, Democrats in Congress took no action to block a bill that recognized same-sex marriages from outside the District borders, so with any luck, the federal politicians will also treat marriage equality as a matter for the city to decide.

HRC Gets Its Act Together
Speaking of Congress, the Human Rights Campaign and its allies have at last done something that I can cheer about, They have introduced a bill to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act in the House, sponsored by 87 members and led by Jerry Nadler of New York, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Jared Polis of Colorado. Notably absent from the sponsor list is Barney Frank, the consummate pragmatist who has always seen same-sex marriage as something of a pipe dream. Frank explained that his reluctance to hop on the bandwagon is strategic, not philosophical.

The effort to repeal DOMA, said Frank, “is not anything that’s achievable in the near term. I think getting [the Employment Non-Discrimination Act], a repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ and full domestic partner benefits for federal employees will take up all of what we can do and maybe more in this Congress.”

I think so too, and so does everyone else including the 87 sponsors. So why not just put your name on the damn list anyway? Frank’s disdain for GLBT political idealism has always annoyed me, but that said, I have to thank him for fixing the economy.

The reason we finally introduced the Respect for Marriage Act was not to pass it in a DC minute. As everyone knows, these bills have to be debated year after year. But we will never repeal the Defense of Marriage Act unless we start that process. So thank heaven that HRC finally stopped playing the “Barney Says” game and helped get the show on the road. 

Meanwhile, the Employment Nondiscrimination Act is getting a full hearing in the House Education and Labor Committee on Sept. 23, and I assume we can expect the hate crime bill to emerge from conference committee and hit the president’s desk this month as well. How long has it taken us to pass the innocuous federal hate crime bill? Ten years? Longer? I don’t feel like looking it up but I just hope it doesn’t take a decade to get rid of the Defense of Marriage Act.

Tragedy Strikes Sapphic Celebrity Pet
Hold on. I have to listen to Max Baucus deliver a vague set of platitudes about the Senate health care bill. I have no idea whether this new thing is a mish mush compromise or a solid first start. I must wait for someone I trust to tell me. Oh! Speak of the devil, here’s Barney on MSNBC. Barney’s been working full time on regulating Wall Street, so no wonder he doesn’t have 30 seconds to sign up as a co-sponsor of the Respect for Marriage Act.

He doesn’t have much to say about the health care bill, but I gather no one outside of Baucus’s committee has actually read the latest version.

I am a little sick of the subject, personally. Not that my enthusiasm for health care reform has flagged, only my tolerance for vitriol. And I agree with Jimmy Carter. But it’s not that racism is coloring the health care debate. It’s that the deranged animosity directed at Obama is race-based, and the health care debate is its current vehicle. Do you recall gun-totting lunatics protesting the prescription drug bill? Me neither.

So, did you hear the sad story about Jessica Simpson’s dog? Daisy, a lesbian Maltese poodle mix, was carried off by a coyote the other night as Jessica looked on in horror. According to press reports, Daisy was outed as a lesbian last month on twitter, where Jessica told her followers that Daisy and her “best friend Bella” were back together again, adding “lesbian lovas forever!” 

In a poignant note, Simpson has put up a poster of her pet, captioned “I miss my Mommy,” and tweeted that she is still hoping beyond hope to be reunited with the pup. Under the circumstances, that seems an unlikely prospect, I’m sorry to say.

Bar Raid in Atlanta Rivals Ft. Worth
I’d like to skip the news of the latest Stonewall redux police raid, this time at a bar in Atlanta. But I skipped last week’s raid on a Memphis club, so I can’t ignore two of these stories in a row. 

The Memphis club story was complicated. Maybe there was gambling going on there. (I am shocked, shocked!) But I didn’t read about innocent patrons being manhandled as was the case in Ft. Worth last summer.

In Atlanta, however, cops barged into the Eagle and forced many people to the ground, face down in broken glass and whatever other disgusting material is common to the floor of your average bar. Everyone was searched for drugs, a seeming violation of police procedure. Amazingly, no one had anything, which just goes to show you how much things have changed from my salad days. Finally, after rampaging around for no apparent reason, the cops arrested the paid dancers who were performing in their underwear and charged them with a permit infraction of some sort. Everyone is furious, although at least no one wound up in the ICU this time. 

According to the Southern Voice, several witnesses have now lodged complaints about the behavior of the police on September 10. 

“One man said officers grabbed patrons who didn’t immediately lie down by the neck and forced them to the ground. The man said he was kicked in the ribs while lying down. ‘Then I heard laughing and giggling and saying this is more fun than raiding niggers with crack. They also told us to shut the fuck up unless we were spoken too [sic].’ The man said he heard one person told that if he spoke again he would be hit by a chair. He also reported that one officer ‘said to everyone in general that all you all do is flash your asses and show your cocks.’”

Another customer who complained he was lying in broken glass was told “shut the fuck up”. 

Yet another who was told to get on the floor by a man in civilian clothes with no badge thought he was being robbed.

A staff member said the officers “started high fiving and jumping up in the air bumping into each other like they were at a football game.”

Another employee who lives in an apartment above the bar heard pounding on his door. As the Voice reports: “He opened the door to two cops who asked if anyone was having sex there. They asked why there was a bed and he said it was because he lives there. He was made to come downstairs and was arrested with the other employees. He recalled hearing comments like ‘You people are despicable.’”

It’s hard to believe that yet another major city police force has been allowed to run roughshod over the clientele of a gay bar, and I hope they suffer the same fate as the officers from the Texas Alcohol and Beverage Commission, who were rightly fired for their role in the debacle at Ft. Worth. 

But I can’t help feeling that these bizarre incidents, both a step back into time, have some connection with the current of anger and violence that seems in recent months to have broken a dam and roiled into the American mainstream. Calling people Nazis and Communists, waving guns in public, screaming at the President at a formal address to the nation, police officers pushing civilians to the ground without cause and spewing anti-gay comments at men and women who have broken no law. “Loss of civility” doesn’t quite tell the whole story in my book.

Welsh Rare Bit
Finally, newshound Rex Wockner has tipped me off to a court case out of Wales, where Lee Barnard was found guilty of “unlawful wounding” of his partner of three years, Mark Baigrie.

The incident took place on May 6, a Wednesday, when the two men had spent the afternoon sitting around the kitchen table drinking “strong white cider,” Walesonline reports. Barnard later fell asleep on the couch while Baigrie did chores.

Around one am, Baigrie went downstairs to cut some chilies with a meat cleaver, when for some reason not shared with readers, Barnard threw a cell phone at him and hit him in the back. Then (the court was told) Bernard wrested the meat cleaver out of his lover’s hand and smashed him in the head. Baigrie pretended to be dead, while Bernard called the Welsh equivalent of 911:

“I’ve hit my boyfriend,” Bernard told the emergency dispatcher. “He’s bleeding from the head. He’s so good to me. Oh my God, I’ve really hurt him. It’s all gone bizarrely wrong.”

Baigrie eventually pulled himself into a chair and then changed clothes because he was covered in blood. His injuries were later treated at hospital with 13 staples and some glue. Baigrie, a 34-year-old father of two, told the court that his relationship with Bernard was “lovely, caring, kind and generous.”
His remorseful partner, for his part, called the cleaver attack “an overreaction.”

This is it, folks. There’s no further detail online, so I cannot fill in the several large gaping holes in the narrative. I’m sorry. The only lesson I can extract from the disjointed tale is to avoid strong white cider. Perversely, now I want to try some.

—-arostow@aol.com