A Curious Eye

For backers of legalized marijuana in Washington and Colorado, it isn’t what President Obama said — it’s what he didn’t say.

In an interview with ABC News, Obama said that recreational pot smoking in the two states that have legalized it is not a major concern for his administration.

“We’ve got bigger fish to fry,” Obama said. “It would not make sense for us to see a top priority as going after recreational users in states that have determined that it’s legal.”

Proponents of recreational marijuana use welcomed the president’s comments, but they stress that he didn’t address the bigger question: Will federal prosecutors and drug agents also look the other way?

Keep people reading at SeattleTimes.com

How activists rewrote the political playbook, reversed decades of defeat, and finally won over voters.

Keep reading at TheAtlantic.com

Forget Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. Forget Maggie Gallagher of the National Organization for Marriage. Forget even the American Family Association’s bilious Bryan Fischer. The most potent force pushing anti-gay bigotry in America is Frank Schubert, a man whose name is relatively unknown but who has empowered each of those individuals and many more in their anti-gay crusades, a man who stripped his own lesbian sister and her children of their rights in exchange for big money.

Schubert clearly knows he’s peddling distortions and is demonizing gays in his own lucrative cottage industry of homophobia, and now he also seems to sense that he’s on the losing side of a civil rights battle. This week that became more evident than ever in a lengthy interview with me in which he couldn’t adequately answer basic questions about his mission, becoming frustrated and agitated.

Schubert is the strategist who ran the campaign that convinced voters to pass Proposition 8 in California in 2008, using ads that, among other things, framed gay marriage as dangerous to children. He moved on from there to other states and helped in the campaign that got three judges who had ruled in favor of marriage equality removed from the Iowa Supreme Court in retention elections in 2010. He successfully beat back marriage equality in Maine at the ballot box in 2009, and he got the marriage amendment passed in the brutal battle in North Carolina last May, a battle that inspired anti-gay preachers to call for violence and even death for gays.

Keep reading at HuffingtonPost.com

aglitteryfool:

In response to a question put forth by a member of the Western community, University President Bruce Shepard posted this statement to his official blog.

The following exerpt is from a letter he sent out back in January:

While our faculty, students and staff may take positions on matters of pending legislative action as they see fit, Western Washington University only takes positions when there is a direct connection to Western’s capacity to fulfill it’s publicly purposed mission.  That mission, of course, is to apply our considerable strengths to address areas of critical importance to the state of Washington.

Where we see a clear link between pending legislation and that commitment to serve Washington, it is our obligation to take a position and inform you of it.  We believe it self-evident that passage of the Marriage Equality legislation will improve Western’s capacity to fulfill its mission of service to the State of Washington.

This is really cool, but the part of his post that I find most interesting is the ending:

And, to conclude this blog, please do note, again because it is the law and a law we take very seriously, that the statement above (and this blog posting) does not advocate that you vote in any particular way. It restricts the content to consequences as we see them for Western and explicitly acknowledges both that there are any number of other dimensions for folks to consider and that we at Western are not of one mind on the matter.

In a university setting, while I’m a strong advocate of free speech and taking a stance on an issue with valid reasoning, the fact that President Shepard maintains and reminds us that people disagree is hugely important to me. Marriage equality is not a simple issue and I don’t think either side is necessarily “right” in their stance.

I love going to such a supportive university.

Mayor Keith McGlashan, who is openly gay and single, pointed out that the 2010 Census shows that more and more gay couples are moving from big cities like Seattle in suburbs like Shoreline. He also noted his work on the issue as a member of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Local Officals Committee with the National League of Cities and the fact gay marriage is part of the Democratic Party platform this year.

“I didn’t think this would happen in my lifetime,” he said.

Read more at Shoreline.Patch.com

On paper, it has every appearance of a mismatched fight: The campaign to legalize same-sex marriage in Washington state has out-raised its opponents by about 13 to 1.

Washington United for Marriage, which is seeking to affirm the state’s same-sex marriage law through approval of Referendum 74, has nearly $6 million in a campaign war chest — more than half of it from a few prominent local donors with deep pockets.

Its opponent, meanwhile, Preserve Marriage Washington, has so far raised $438,000, about 10 percent of its campaign goal of $4 million. Mostly in increments of $50 and $100, the donations are coming from folks you’ve probably never heard of, many of them retirees and most in far-flung areas of the state.

But it might well be what’snoton paper that influences how this fight will end.

What has so far been a game of wait and see between the two camps is expected to explode over the next 11 weeks into a fierce clash for the hearts of Washington voters.

Keep reading at SeattleTimes.com