Welcome to the Thursday edition of your open thread. The floor is yours…try not to leave a mess.
Former Vice President Dan Quayle’s son Ben is running for Congress in Arizona. He’s looked like a sure thing until lately. First he got caught using other people’s children in his campaign literature (the children were his nieces). Now’s he’s been outed as a former writer for a gossip rag called Dirty Scottsdale.
But Quayle, 33, has had to confront a much bigger credibility issue this week after a blogger revealed that he had once been a contributing writer for Dirty Scottsdale, a raunchy, sex-themed website that covered the club scene in his adopted home town before morphing into the national gossip site TheDirty.com.
At first, Quayle denied the claim, telling POLITICO Tuesday that he “was not involved in the site.” But hours later, after blogs, news websites and other media picked up the story, Quayle told several Phoenix TV stations that he had posted on the site “to try to drive some traffic.”
He continued to maintain, however, that he did not post under the pseudonym “Brock Landers,” a reference to the name of a porn star in the 1997 flick “Boogie Nights.”
Most of us don’t care if he wrote naughty pieces in Scottsdale. However he’s running on “family values” and is just another GOP family values hypocrite.
Today we’re waiting to hear whether Judge Walker will lift the stay on his Prop 8 ruling, allowing same sex marriages to begin again in California. Already the ruling has had huge consequences. A new CNN poll found a majority of Americans support the right of same sex couples to marry. Now the American Bar Association has issued a resolution supporting same sex marriage.
Gays and lesbians should have the right to marry in civil ceremonies, the ABA’s policy-making House of Delegates declared on Tuesday. The measure passed on a voice vote.
A lineup of ABA leaders, both past and present, spoke in favor of the resolution. Incoming ABA President Stephen Zack asked “Why would anyone in this country not want two people who love each other to enjoy the blessings of marriage and the protections of law?”
Former ABA President Tommy Wells told the House that “our citizens of the same sex who are being denied the right to a civil marriage are only seeking to participate in an equal basis in a foundational institution of our civil life. They simply want to share in the legal blessings that we give to married couples. It can only strengthen marriage.”
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Resolution 111 (PDF) had been gaining momentum in the House since a U.S. district court judge ruled last week in Perry v. Schwarzenegger that California’s Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage violated the U.S. Constitution. On Saturday, Laurence Tribe, the U.S. Justice Department’s senior counselor for access to justice, speculated during a program at the annual meeting that there is a good chance the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold the district court ruling, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy likely providing the swing vote.
Good for the ABA. The Prop 8 ruling is turning out to be quite a watershed and the opponents of same sex marriage are being left behind.