Tag Archive for 'gay marriage'

Recent civil rights news…

• Peter Funt of the Boston Globe complains that profiling isn’t just racial, and while he makes some points that diminish the fact that the racial profiling of African Americans is bound up in a long history that begins with kidnap and enslavement (”I know a successful golf pro who insists he can profile a player’s handicap index within three points, just by watching him take his clubs from his car and walk to the driving range.”), his column highlights the fact that in our ever-diversifying nation, tolerance does not always advance hand in hand with diversity.
• The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has hired Matt Nosanchuk to act as liaison to the gay community. Nosanchuk will handle a portfolio of cases and spend “the remainder of his time reaching out to … the LGBT community.”
• In other news along those lines, the New York Times did some reporting on Ted Olsen’s challenge to California’s same-sex marriage ban, an unlikely position for someone who, in successfully arguing Bush v. Gore on behalf of George W. Bush, probably did a good deal to undermine the kind of freedoms he now advocates. A bunch of people talk more about Olsen and same-sex marriage here.
• The first stop of the Birmingham Civil Rights Heritage Trail has opened. Also in Birmingham, the mayor has pardoned those arrested and convicted during the civil rights protests of the 1960s. The move has wide support, but some worry that accepting a pardon means accepting that they committed a crime …
• And in health-care-is-a-right-not-a-privilege news, Desiree Evans of Facing South contemplates whether it’s too late to reframe the health care debate.