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Archives – June, 2011
Immigration Chief Counsel halts DOMA-related deportation of Henry Velandia
By Adam Bink
I may have missed this if it was noticed in the comments — apologies if it has been — but catching up after a busy day with this tremendous news. The Immigration Chief Counsel in Newark, NJ decided to halt the DOMA-related deportation of Henry Velandia, whose case many of us here at P8TT and Courage Campaign took up with our friends at AllOut, Stop the Deportations, and many other allies. More background can be found here.
Here’s Josh, his husband, speaking to CNN (bolding mine):
Q: Do you have any idea why the government had a change of heart?
There’s no doubt in my mind that it is the direct result of our hard-fought advocacy over the past year on behalf of our marriage. We stood up and told our story: that as a same-sex married couple our marriage is not treated equally.
Because of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), I am denied the right to sponsor my foreign-born spouse, Henry, for a green card. The reason I’m denied this is because we’re gay. A non-gay couple would never face a deportation like this.
We would simply like our marriage to be treated equally. We have worked tirelessly to spread the word about this law, DOMA, and how it is tearing apart our family and the families of bi-national same-sex married couples around the country.
Thankfully Attorney General Holder said earlier this year that DOMA is unconstitutional and discriminatory. But the deportations had continued after Holder’s decision. That’s why we kept the pressure on the administration and ICE to stop these deportations.
[...]
Our elected officials joined our cause in part because 20,000 people signed our petition to Secretary Janet Napolitano of Homeland Security asking her to stop deporting the spouses of LGBT Americans. And we’ve been joined by some great organizational partners in the struggle for equality including AllOut, GetEQUAL, the Courage Campaign, Marriage Equality USA, and Freedom to Marry.
I think that’s absolutely right. Tens of thousands of Courage members joined other activists around the country to (a) raise awareness of this case and generated press (b) keep the pressure on the Administration. It led to an “extraordinary”, as it was described, decision by Attorney General Holder to vacate the Board of Immigration Appeals’ decision in the case, for the judge to hear the case again, and for this decision to come down this week.
When we take a stand, things really do happen. A big first step, and hopefully more couples will find the same experience.
39 Comments June 30, 2011
Statistics and same-sex marriage ballot initiatives
By Adam Bink
As an interesting follow-up on today’s piece about Maine advocates going back to the ballot on marriage equality, NYTimes resident statistics geek Nate Silver has an incredibly wonky and data geek-y new model taking into account all kinds of voting statistics and demographics. The full piece is here, which I recommend perusing, but the parts I want to pull out (predictions) that can be understood in English are below:
Minnesota. The Minnesota measure, which would ban same-sex marriage but not domestic partnerships, should be considered something of a tossup. Under the Accelerated Model, it would fail with about 49 percent of the vote, while under the Linear Model it would pass with 54 percent — both forecasts well within the models’ respective margins of error.
One additional factor, however, is that Minnesota rules require a majority of all voters to cast a ballot in favor of a constitutional amendment in order for it to pass. So someone who turns out to vote next November and punches her ballot only for the presidential election is essentially a “no” vote. Historically, about 5 percent of Minnesota voters undervote constitutional amendment proposals despite casting ballots for other races, so what this means is that the ban on same-sex marriage will de facto need something like 52 percent of the vote in order to pass. For this reason, I’d conclude that the Minnesota measure is a slight underdog.
In addition, the most recent poll in the state finds that 55 percent of voters oppose the ban on same-sex marriage while 39 percent support it. Polls on this issue have historically underestimated the support for bans on same-sex marriage — but not by such a wide margin to account for this discrepancy. Instead, the rule of thumb is that you should assume that all undecided voters will vote for the marriage ban. But since an outright majority of Minnesotans oppose the initiative in the poll — even after accounting for the undecided — it provides some meaningful guidance.
The ban is certainly not a heavy favorite to be defeated: see this blog post for someone who thinks it will pass, and consider that there are two plausible Republican presidential nominees from Minnesota, which could affect the dynamics of the vote. But I’d set something like 5-to-3 odds against its passage.
North Carolina. The other state that is most likely to consider an initiativeagainst same-sex marriage in 2012 is North Carolina — the only remaining Southern state that does not ban same-sex marriage in its Constitution. A ban on same-sex marriage alone would be a heavy favorite to pass in North Carolina: although the state is becoming bluer, it is still fairly socially conservative, and many of the voters who allowed Barack Obama to win the state in 2008 were African-Americans, who have historically been opposed to same-sex marriage.
The proposed text of the amendment would seem to apply to domestic partnerships in addition to marriage, however, which makes its prospects more tenuous. We’d project such a measure to receive about 60 percent of the vote under the Linear Model, but 54 percent under the Accelerated Model, making it a favorite but not a prohibitive one.
New York. New York’s new law is unlikely to be overturned. If a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage were on the ballot next year, we’d project it to receive 40 percent of the vote under the Accelerated Model or 44 percent under the Linear Model, making its passage doubtful but not impossible.
But New York law is quite unfriendly to constitutional amendments, and even groups that would like see the law overturned are unlikely to get a proposition on the ballot before November 2015. Unless the trend toward greater acceptance of same-sex marriage abruptly reverses itself, such a measure would probably be defeated, perhaps by a wide margin.
Iowa. Among the six states where same-sex marriage is allowed today, Iowa is the only one in which the model projects a majority of voters would want to overturn it — either 52 or 58 percent of voters, depending on which model is used.
But Iowa is another state in which the constitutional amendment process is cumbersome. Ballot initiatives must be approved by both chambers of the Legislature for two consecutive sessions, and with Democrats having held onto control of the State Senate, it is likely to be at least 2013 before the initiative passes through the Legislature the first time, let alone the second.
If and when an amendment eventually makes the ballot, Iowans will have lived with same-sex marriage for several years at a minimum, during which time support for marriage equality is likely to increase both within the state and nationally. Therefore, the law is relatively likely to stick, the more promising route for overturning it perhaps being a court challenge.
New Hampshire. New Hampshire is another state in which there are discussions about overturning the new marriage law. Public opinion, however, is more likely than not to resist to such measures. Although the state can be fiscally conservative, it is also highly secular, and the models would project around 60 percent of the voters there to reject a ban on same-sex marriage if one were voted upon next year.
Maine. With the important caveat that the model had incorrectly deemed Question 1 to be an underdog in 2009, the results might be different if a similar measure were voted upon again. Between the growth in support for same-sex marriage over the past three years and the fact that the ballot initiative in 2009 may have benefited from standing alone on the ballot rather than being coupled with other races, the model thinks Mainers are likely, although not certain, to affirm same-sex marriage if given another chance.
California and Oregon. These are the states in which there has been the most discussion about overturning an existing ban on same-sex marriage. The model suggests that these are the right targets: of those states where there is a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, they are by some margin the most friendly toward gay rights.
However, there is not yet a precedent for overturning a constitutional amendment that the voters in a state had previously approved, and the model might or might not be reliable in such cases.
Nevertheless, even the relatively cautious Linear Model predicts that 54 percent of Californians would vote against a measure like Proposition 8 if one were on the ballot next year, while 55 percent of Oregonians would vote against a ban on same-sex marriage like the one the state’s voters approved in 2004. Neither prediction seems too far out of line: Oregon’s marriage ban was rejected by 43 percent of voters seven years ago, and California’s by 48 percent two years ago, and public opinion has shifted meaningfully in favor of same-sex marriage since then.
In short, the future for same-sex marriage looks to be reasonably bright. Most of the states that were fertile ground for passing a constitutional ban on it did so long ago. Minnesota and North Carolina are potential exceptions, but the six states that have gender-neutral marriage laws on the books now are unlikely to see them reversed, while some of those that don’t are in a position for gay rights advocates to go on offense.
On California, where Prop 8 is on the books, it’s interesting because the polling EQCA has been using in town halls around the state show nothing close to 54% of Californians voting our way (and it would probably need to show more, given evidence that the numbers in support of equality end up being much closer at the ballot box than in pre-election polling). Nate’s model seems to assume demographics changing over time much more dramatically.
All of this may be academic, but what’s not academic is that the stories we tell, making ourselves visible, getting media around couples like Ed and Derence all makes a difference here.
22 Comments June 30, 2011
Equality Maine and GLAD announce effort to go back to the ballot on marriage equality
By Adam Bink
The planned ballot language:
Do you favor a law allowing marriage licenses for same-sex couples that protects religious freedom by ensuring no religion or clergy be required to perform such a marriage in violation of their religious beliefs?
Which is an interesting, positive light.
They will need to collect just over 57,000 signatures that are verified by the end of the year.
More from the Bangor Daily News.
37 Comments June 30, 2011
