Equality Takes The Cake

"Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law - for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well. " – President Barack Obama 

With the President in Israel, and Congress potentially about to actually get something done, before they go on vacation for another two weeks, we’re looking ahead today – both to this weekend, and to the upcoming Supreme Court arguments next week, on DOMA, Prop 8, and the overarching topic of same sex marriage in America.

One of the most joyous - and historical - moments in President Obama's second inaugural address may have been his call for equal rights for LGBT Americans. By mentioning Stonewall in the same breath as Selma and Seneca Falls, he stated clearly to the world that gay rights are civil rights, that gay rights are human rights. Unfortunately, there are many places in the world where LGBT people are fighting an even more difficult fight for their very right to exist.

In Uganda, sexuality and sexual identity can literally be matters of life and death.

In 2009, the Anti-Homosexuality Bill – better known to many as the “Kill The Gays” bill – was introduced before the Ugandan Parliament. Contrary to some reports, the proposed bill still mandates the death penalty for homosexual acts, and prison sentences for persons who fail to report known homosexuals to the authorities within 24 hours.

Into this dangerous nation, playwright Beau Hopkins introduced The River and the Mountain,  the first play ever produced in Uganda that featured an openly gay character. Its run in Kampala last August was successful, though not without hardship. The play’s run was cut short by Uganda's Minister of Ethics. David Cecil, the play's producer, was arrested and deported. Keith Prosser, an actor who performed in the show, has been arrested multiple times because of the show, and is also currently facing deportation.

These attacks on civil rights and the play itself caught the attention of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in 2012, and in turn, caught the attention of Sarah Imes Borden, an adjunct professor of theatre at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln and a personal friend of our staff. Sarah felt that the play and its message was too important to be allowed to die, so she decided to bring the play to the United States.

After obtaining funding through a Kickstarter campaign, and a practice run in Lincoln, Sarah is producing the show for a series of staged readings in the Washington, D.C. and Baltimore area this weekend, hopefully just the first stop on a national tour. Sarah even obtained a visa for Ugandan actor Okuyo Joel Atiku Prynce to come to the D.C. area and reprise his history-making leading role.

Unfortunately, just as Mr. Prynce was to have left for the United States, he was denied permission to leave the country of Uganda. Thankfully, a last-minute replacement will allow Borden to work around the absence of her lead actor, and the show WILL go on. However, our thoughts are with everyone involved in the Kampala production, as are our hopes for their continued safety.

The main plot of the play concerns the problems that the main character, Samson, must confront after he comes out as gay to his best friend and mother. Corrupt characters in the play do not hesitate to capitalize on religion and anti-gay bias in order to further their own ends and hide their corruption.

This is an interesting parallel to the actual situation in Uganda. Jocelyn Edwards of The Daily Beast suggests that it is no accident that the “Kill The Gays” bill has remained in legislative limbo for so long. Edwards claims that the decision to keep the bill perpetually pending but never passed is a deliberate smokescreen to distract from the very real corruption that continues to plague Yoweri Museveni's government - corruption that has direct links to American right wing politics and media. Meanwhile, gay people continue to be scapegoated, high-level government officials continue to profit at the expense of their own people, and the Ugandan people pay the price.

If you are in the Washington, D.C. or Baltimore area this weekend, we invite you to come see this play in all its poignancy, power, and - yes - humor.

Wherever you are this weekend, if you're fortunate enough to be able to kiss the one you love, or hold hands, or simply share a hug in public without fear of reprisal, we think you should take a moment to consider whether that should really be a privilege rather than a right.

That’s the type of choice our own Supreme Court will be deciding for all of us in America, very soon.

Hitting The Real Target

Since the mass shooting in Connecticut, one of our favorite media colleagues, Greg Sargent, has been targeting a single point about the gun safety laws before Congress, often. Many of our fellow members of the media haven't been getting the point though.

Greg's point has been simple: While Democrats and left-leaning Americans would love to see a new assault weapons ban pass, the real goal has always been to pass universal background checks. As of yesterday, one of Greg's Washington Post co-workers, Chris Cillizza, finally seems to have understood that Greg was right.

Mr. Cilizza's epiphany may have to do with actions by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who on Tuesday removed the previously proposed assault weapons ban from a comprehensive gun violence reduction bill. Frankly, we're not surprised that the assault weapons ban was jettisoned from the comprehensive bill.

As Cilizza himself notes, the politics of reauthorizing an assault weapons ban simply aren't on the pro-safety side in this Congress. When you've got a Congress being held hostage to its minority, forcing virtually every action to pass with no less than 60 votes, everything from confirming appointees to passing sane legislation - or almost any legislation at all - is going to be nearly impossible most of the time. The rediculous - and powerless - hold that the NRA has over politicians at almost every level certainly won't help sane gun safety reforms pass.

That said, no one can say gun safety laws can't pass in this country - even in "gun country."

Today, Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper - a Democrat with whom we've had some policy disagreements in the past - is signing three new gun safety measures into law. Hickenlooper will authorize an ammunition magazine limitations bill, a universal background check bill, and a bill that requires gun buyers to pay for those background checks, all efforts that have passed through heavy debate and review under the "Golden Dome" of the Colorado state capitol in Denver.

We understand the gun culture in Colorado well, having had both staff members and their families who've lived in the Mile High State over the last twenty years. We're well aware that just because someone in Colorado owns a gun, likes to shoot, or is an NRA member doesn't mean they're a far right-wing nutjob by any stretch of the imagination.

Of course, there are those kinds of extremist right-wing gun owners in Colorado too, including Weld County Sheriff John Cooke, who insists he won't enforce Colorado's new gun safety laws. We hope that Sheriff Cooke realizes, if he's only going to enforce the laws he agrees with, he likely won't be employed as a law enforcement officer for much longer.

Universal background checks - the key gun safety law both at the state level in Colorado and nationally, in Congress - have always been the real bullseye for pro-safety gun legislators since the massacre in Connecticut. That many of our associates in the greater media industry have continually missed the real target on this issue simply drives home the point made by this year's Pew State Of The Media Survey.

The Pew Survey made it clear: Many media customers today are being driven away from old- fashioned news outlets because a lack of proper high-quality staffing has driven the caliber of the those media outlets' products so sharply downwards.

In other words, many of our colleagues aren't hitting what they're aiming at, in part, because their media organizations have chosen to not properly pay and prepare them.

At least on the issue of gun safety, maybe a few more journalists and pundits should follow Greg Sargent on this issue, since he's been on target all along.

Ten Years Gone, The Real Costs Of War

There are days when it all seems to be too much.

We're not just talking about the massive pile of news stories that came pouring in like a flood as this week began. The CPAC recap. The GOP "autopsy" of why they failed in 2012. The banking debacle in Cyprus. The Stubenville rape trial verdict. The media failing to ethically cover the Stuebenville trial. Hillary Clinton announcing her support for same sex marriage. The majority of Americans - nearly six in ten - agreeing with Hillary Clinton on same sex marriage. The release of the Lyndon Johnson tapes that revealed the 1968 "October Surprise," where Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon sabotaged Johnson's peace deal to end the Vietnam War, four days before the election.

Did you miss that last one? You're not the only one. Millions of Americans did. Which is, sadly, the problem.

Americans have purposely ignored the fact that at least two American presidents in the last fifty years have lied us into war. Now, it's been revealed that a presidential candidate actively sabotaged peace in order to prolong the Vietnam war and guarantee his election to the Presidency.

These are the real costs of mad men's dreams - and of the laziness and denial that keep us all from preventing those dreams from becoming reality.

As we stated in our commentary on December 19, 2011, the day after the Iraq War officially ended, 4,474 Americans died in America's war of choice in Iraq. The numbers of American deaths related to PTSD and other post-battlefield trauma are unknown, though estimates range from a few more thousand Americans, to potentially as many as 10,000 Americans dying as a result of the Iraq War. As we noted in that commentary, the estimated Iraqi deaths from that conflict - both military and civilian - range from 60,000 to one million.

The final cost of war operations in Iraq is estimated to be $800 to $900 billion, when all is said and done. Because we're not entirely done in Iraq yet. We still have 220 American service members at the American consulate in Iraq, in what used to be the Green Zone. In practical dollars, the estimates of the total cost of George and Dick's misadventure in Iraq will eventually end up somewhere between $1.7 and $6 trillion dollars.

Those cost figures are staggering, but in the end, those numbers only represent money. The lives that were lost unnecessarily in Iraq can't possibly be counted in dollars and cents. The Iraq war also cost us lives in Afghanistan, since Iraq was a diversion from our original goal of destroying the leaders of Al-Qaeda.

As we said back in 2011, at the end of the war, "No matter how the final tally is collected, we know the cost of the Iraq War was too high."

President Eisenhower warned us all about the creeping danger of the military industrial complex, and he was right to do so. But, sadly, we didn't listen to him any more than we're likely to listen to the warnings of modern scholars.

It's true that there's no one universal solution to ending our macabre American fascination with perpetual war. There are several things that would help, though. Yes, Americans have to pay attention to our politics more. We also can't allow just a small number of our fellow citizens to fight any future wars we might get involved in. Drastically cutting down the size and cost of our military would help America too. Paying attention to the advice of those who've deeply studied why we go to war would also help greatly.

Most importantly, though, we need to remember that the real cost of war is not measured in dollars and cents, but in the numbers of our fellow Americans unnecessarily and senselessly gone.