Is there a difference between liberty and equality? Put another way, can there be liberty without equality. I'm handle payroll and benefits in my firm. We provide health insurance for domestic partners. Even if a gay employee were to legally marry in another state, we are required to report the premiums paid for the spouse as income and withhold income taxes. Health benefits for a heterosexual spouse is not taxed (although spousal benefits for a heterosexual domestic partner is). Seems like a small thing, but doesn't this inequality infringe on the liberty of a gay couple? How about adoption, hospital visitation, inheritance? Those are much bigger issues. Doesn't the absence of gay marriage infringe on the liberty of gay couples, i.e. the liberty to avail themselves of the economic benefits and familial protections of marriage afforded by the state?
Yes, there's a difference between liberty and equality.
Let's suppose that in the South before the Civil War in the U.S., only white male property owners with wives had been allowed to vote. Then the rest of the white male property owners decided they wanted to be able to vote, too, and managed to win the fight. They would then have equality with the group that could already vote, but it wouldn't have been liberty, because there would still be all the married men with no property, and all the single white men, to say nothing of the women and blacks.
In other words, if you leave someone out, you're not fighting for liberty, but for privileges.
Guys, watch here...especially where Hilary Rosen talks. What wasn't mentioned is that she is one of the chairs or big wigs of the HRC. Watch especially the 2nd vid.
She sounded like a politician who has lost all passion for the cause she supposedly supports.
I think I grasped where she's coming from, but I also think she's wrong. She wasn't saying to delay, or to not put pressure on the President, she was saying it has to be organized and orderly and respectable and all, not radical and grassroots. She seemed to be suffering from what most of Congress does: being too removed from real people to have a clue.
Maybe Obama is working behind the scenes to put pressure on Pelosi and others. But I'd rather he had the rude up-front "Get it done!" manner of an LBJ, the brusque "They'll take orders" of an Ike, the desire to make an end run around Congress by going to the people of an FDR, and wrestle Congress to his will on this.
If Dan Savage is right, and 84% of Americans support ending DADT, Obama has the leverage to just tell any uncooperative Democrats, "You do this, or I campaign for someone to replace you". He's still popular enough that if he showed up and said, "Rep. Joe Q here just can't do the job. He can't cut it. He won't grit his teeth and get to work. So I'm asking that you, the good people of <place> replace him, and send to Congress someone who will work together with me for change we can believe in", that would be it: election over, seat changed.
And he'll need that kind of Congress anyway when he tackles DOMA... if he really means to.
) in the House is nice but only marginal while the difference between 56 and 60 Dems in the Senate is monumental, and if you don't understand the difference between winning a plurality and winning with a strong mandate the likes of which Dems haven't seen in 35 years, or the difference between the strength Republicans had still in the wake of Reagan in the early 90s compared to their pathetic post-Dubya weakness, there is no way to explain to you what's going on.
