Tim Kaine

The only way.

Pam at Pandagon has good entries up on Kaine, just installed this past week as Democratic governor of Virginia, mantle bearer for Warner (he of high hopes). Kaine, who gay baited in his run, supported always the party line dross about what marriage is (or is not!), then tapped for the SOTU response (get it? the party DOES have a message, and Kaine is the bearer...) - and now will sign the gay marriage ban despite being ''uncomfortable'' with the wording.

Gay rights activists embrace under a flag made up of the Spanish and rainbow flags outside parliament in Madrid after same-sex marriages were legalised despite fierce opposition from the Catholic church.
[Photograph: Susana Vera/Reuters]

Washington Blade has a good over view as well. And a troubling over view....

I do believe Mr Israel will be disappointed,

Josh Israel, president of the Virginia Partisans Gay & Lesbian Democratic Club, which endorsed Kaine, said he hopes the newly installed governor will at least work to make the ballot language more reflective of the amendment's wide scope.

"We would certainly hope that the governor will consider using his power to make sure the language and process is fair," Israel said.

I know Kilgore was a horror, I watched (from out in CA) two debates between Kaine and Kilgore, but the party is using the Kilgores of America as an excuse.

Don't let them. The politics and philosophy of non-violent engagement waged by Dr King properly used the violence of the Bull Connors, the whips, the dogs, the water hoses, all of it - to further America and her people.

Don't let the cowards of America use hate to sell hate-lite. They want to take us back and the Democrats, too many of them, have joined with the hard right, the white, christian, male-dominant right.

It is NOT electoral pragmatism. It is hatred and division.

By 1960, four states in the United States had not desegregated their public schools since the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1954 had been handed down. They were South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

But! Not to worry, bigots know best - and they never give up:

"It's unfortunate that those that oppose the marriage amendment are using issues like domestic violence as scare tactics," said Victoria Cobb, executive director of the Family Foundation in Virginia.

But gay rights and domestic violence activists point to other states' interpretations of marriage amendments, as well as the promises of amendment supporters before the referendum.

"What we're expecting is that for all these people that said 'the sky is falling' to reverse their position," Phil Burress, spokesperson for the Ohio Campaign to Protect Marriage, told the Columbus Dispatch after voters approved that state's marriage amendment in 2004. "This is not going to affect the elderly. It's not going to affect private contracts. What it's going to do is stop marriage by a different name."

If the candidate and his or her party doesn't represent your interests, if in another era they would block school desegregation, block the Voting Rights Act, block the Civil Rights Act, block Loving v Virginia, which, so late (1967), undid laws against miscegenation: DON'T VOTE FOR THEM.

Dixiecrats, whether North or South (and they are BOTH places), we don't need them!

Remember what can be, from Zapatero, elected to lead Spain after Aznar:

"We are not legislating, honorable members, for people far away and not known by us. We are enlarging the opportunity for happiness to our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends and, our families: at the same time we are making a more decent society, because a decent society is one that does not humiliate its members.

"In the poem 'The Family,' our [gay] poet Luis Cernuda was sorry because, 'How does man live in denial in vain by giving rules that prohibit and condemn?'

"Today, the Spanish society answers to a group of people who, during many years have, been humiliated, whose rights have been ignored, whose dignity has been offended, their identity denied, and their liberty oppressed.

Today the Spanish society grants them the respect they deserve, recognizes their rights, restores their dignity, affirms their identity, and restores their liberty.

"It is true that they are only a minority, but their triumph is everyone's triumph.

It is also the triumph of those who oppose this law, even though they do not know this yet: because it is the triumph of Liberty.

Their victory makes all of us (even those who oppose the law) better people, it makes our society better. Honorable members, There is no damage to marriage or to the concept of family in allowing two people of the same sex to get married.

To the contrary, what happens is this class of Spanish citizens get the potential to organize their lives with the rights and privileges of marriage and family. There is no danger to the institution of marriage, but precisely the opposite: this law enhances and respects marriage.

"Today, conscious that some people and institutions are in a profound disagreement with this change in our civil law, I wish to express that, like other reforms to the marriage code that preceded this one, this law will generate no evil, that its only consequence will be the avoiding of senseless suffering of decent human beings. A society that avoids senseless suffering of decent human beings is a better society.

"With the approval of this Bill, our country takes another step in the path of liberty and tolerance that was begun by the democratic change of government. Our children will look at us incredulously if we tell them that many years ago, our mothers had less rights than our fathers, or if we tell them that people had to stay married against their will even though they were unable to share their lives.

Today we can offer them a beautiful lesson: every right gained, each access to liberty has been the result of the struggle and sacrifice of many people that deserve our recognition and praise.

"Today we demonstrate with this Bill that societies can better themselves and can cross barriers and create tolerance by putting a stop to the unhappiness and humiliation of some of our citizens.

Today, for many of our countrymen, comes the day predicted by Kavafis [the great Greek gay poet] one century ago:

'Later 'twas said of the most perfect society/someone else, made like me/certainly will come out and act freely.' "

Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Let it be...

It's quite interesting how the folks in favor of criminalizing women's reproductive rights talk about people who are against government meddling in private medical decisions as being "pro-abortion."

As if anyone is pushing anyone to have an abortion. (I mean in this country. In places like China, the government meddles, too -- but in the opposite way. You could say the Chinese government really is "pro-abortion.")

If you question the notion that politicians should be making medical decisions, you're "pro-abortion."

If you consider pregnancy to be a woman's condition, first and foremost, you're "pro-abortion."

If you think women should have unfettered access to birth control, you're "pro-abortion."

If you believe that husbands don't own their wives' bodies, you're "pro-abortion."

Look at this blurb on the Virginia race:

After a close, heated battle in Virginia, voters there chose pro-abortion Lt. Gov. Tim Kaine, a Democrat, over pro-life Republican candidate Jerry Kilgore, the former state attorney general. Kaine received 52 percent of the vote to 46 percent for Kilgore and 2 percent for pro-abortion Republican state Sen. Russell Potts, who ran as an independent.

Kaine supports some restrictions on abortion, such as parental consent and notification laws for minors seeking abortion and a ban on so-called "partial-birth" abortion, but pro-life groups went with Kilgore because of his pro-life position.

In fact, Kaine is against a woman's right to make decisions about her own body, but he's not radical enough for their tastes, so they call him "pro-abortion." A more accurate description would be "not enough in favor of government-controlled human breeding laws."

But hey, if they said that, they'd lose that holier-than-thou image.

If they can't or won't say what they mean, can you trust that they mean what they say?

Amanda, as usual, puts things into perspective:

You abort a pregnancy, not a fetus, a child, an enchilada, a whatever. In the endless manipulation of language by anti-abortion rights folks, it's become de rigeur to ignore that there is a pregnancy or a woman who is pregnant in every abortion situation and instead try to get all attention on the fetus that is being pointlessly killed by a woman out of sheer selfishness, like a kid who kicks over an anthill for fun. Regardless, whenever you see words like "child" or "baby" or "fetus" as the object of the verb "to abort", remember it's misdirection and fill in the proper object of the verb, which is "pregnancy".

But in these days of Orwellian right-wing rhetorical posing, facts are the last thing they're interested in. Their minds are made up: the rest of us are just evil.

It's been something of a mixed bag semi-election day for women in this country who also happen to hold progressive or liberal political views. While the Republicans were handed some pretty tough defeats, women were handed some defeats as well -- sometimes in the same stroke.

Tim Kaine wins the Virginia governor race. Hooray for Democrats. But Tim Kaine is an anti-choice Democrat -- which, with the Alito-wielded axe threatening to drop on Roe in the coming months, suddenly is very important shit indeed.

--And we get the Washington Post declaring that this --THIS -- is the "new model" to which to aspire.

"I think this is an interesting test case for Democrats to see if you can run a faith-based campaign focused on values and do so as a progressive candidate in a Southern state," Rozell said.

It worked, Rozell said, because of Kaine's frequent mentions that he served as a missionary in Honduras while in law school and his familiarity with the language of religion. "It did not come off as calculated," he said.

So while it's promising that people aren't sucking up more smoke from the radical right, it's not an unqualified victory day by any means.

Now it's worth noting that, while anti-gay marriage efforts are still garnering much deserved attention in the blogosphere, precious little attention is paid to Governor-elect Kaine's views against women's reproductive rights.

Or it gets this kind of attention:

The presumption is that Alito is primed to rule against Roe. Whether he would or wouldn’t, the Democrats are prepared to oppose him.
But what if they did something utterly unpredictable? What if the Democrats simply decided to walk away from this particular battle, a tactical retreat that no Republican in their right mind (pun intended) expects? What if, yes, the Democrats decided that to let those proverbial chips fall where they may, and allow for the possibility that the Supreme Court just might overturn Roe and declare that there is no constitutional right to abortion.

The Democrats would be far better off.

That is, except for the female Democrats (and female Republicans and independents and Greens and....).

To begin with, let’s once again lay to rest a popular canard: overturning Roe would not, repeat would not, make abortion illegal. That simple truth ain’t so simple. In fact, if you stopped ten people on the streets of New York and Los Angeles, where it’s fair to say support for Roe runs high, high, high, seven, eight, or even nine would say that if Supremes overturn Roe, we’re back to the days of dark alleys and wire hangers.

Not true.

If Roe disappears, very little changes - at first. Roe enshrines a federal, constitutional right to privacy, which in turn bars state legislatures from passing laws making abortion illegal. Before Roe, nothing stood in the way of states making abortion legal. Post Roe, nothing would change in the Blue States.

Where this guy gets this, I don't know. Fact is that over 20 states have standing abortion bans on the books, held in limbo only by Roe.

He then goes on to the tired old argument that having to fight more vigorously for women's right to their own bodies would actually be good because it would put the Democrats on the offensive.

Unfortunately, this issue is a third rail for the left, a cow so sacred that even this mere mention of retreating on Roe triggers, shall we say, sharp reactions.

Yeah, because sacrificing women's lives in the name of cold-blooded political calculus -- especially when it's advocated by a man who will never have to face pregnancy, aborted or not -- is pretty fucking cruel.

And if you don't think it's a big deal, then I recommend you check out tonight's Frontline report (available online in full 5pm EST Wednesday) and see what Republicans and Democrats have been doing to erode women's reproductive rights and options.

At least Proposition 73 is going down in California.

Well, it seems that the Gilliard advertising spat made The Washington Post ... sort of.

While the Kaine campaign's pulling of an ad from Gilliard's site is mentioned, the article focuses more on the huge overreaction by Republican Michael S. Steele to the politically satirical image of him that prompted the Kaine ad withdrawl:

The doctored photo of Steele (R) as a minstrel, and accompanying slurs, prompted Virginia gubernatorial candidate Timothy M. Kaine (D) to pull an ad from the site, stevegilliard.blogspot.com ....

Not surprisingly, the strongest reaction came from Steele, who recently announced a bid for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes (D).

"The Democratic Party has finally reached a new low with the worst kind of racist gutter politics, and it's the kind of racism that people in Maryland reject, regardless of their political party," said Leonardo Alcivar, the campaign spokesman.

Of course the Steele campaign is being disingenuous and opportunistic. I'm sure thanks to his "outrage" Steve is enjoying a modest spike in traffic (though probably more from Kos' front-page story -- web traffic gets the biggest bump from web referrals, in my experience). To say Steve represents the Democrats is quite ridiculous, although that's not stopped Republicans before -- these days they seem to excel at the ridiculous.

The Steele depiction was "extremely offensive and distasteful and has no place in politics or in any other aspect of public discourse," said Derek Walker of the Maryland Democratic Party.

Let me reiterate my position: Steve Gilliard is entitled to free speech as protected by the Constitution. I just think it was bad form to criticize the Kaine campaign for pulling the ad. That was their right.

As for the minstrel image Steve posted, well, it's his take on a campaign I've not been following. But political satire in images is a tried and true political tradition. I can't say I agree with his sentiments -- to be honest, I stopped reading his site months ago -- but the First Amendment exists for just this kind of thing. If the speech weren't offensive, then it wouldn't need the Constitution to be protected.