Today the California Supreme Court issued its ruling to uphold the hateful Proposition 8 banning same sex marriage. The Court also held that the 18,000 marriages that occurred between the time of Court’s ruling that gay marriage was protected under the California Constitution and when the electorate voted to amend the Constitution to ban same sex marriages. My marriage occurred in September 2008 and thus will remain legal. However after Prop 8 was successful in the election, my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters cannot marry. That makes me feel very odd and rather uncomfortable.

But today’s decision isn’t the end of this issue and I don’t believe that the discrimination inherent in the bigoted and homophobic Prop 8 is the Court’s doing. The Court was bound by the Constitution which allows for easily amending the Constitution. It is the people of California that voted to take away the rights of gays and lesbian and it is up to those of us in the gay and lesbian community to educate Californians about this issue. We should not focus our anger on the court , but instead on educating our fellow Californians. Were those that voted for Prop 8 bigoted, homophobic or ill educated about the issue? It’s probably a mix of all three. We’ll never be able to change the bigots or the homophobes but we can educate the ill educated.

Californians voted for Prop 8. It is those people who voted for Prop 8 that voted to discriminate.

The Court was painstaking in addressing the fact that they believe that same sex couples should have the right to marry, but the question before them was about the process- is a proposition that requires a simple majority enough to amend the Constitution as Prop 8 did.

In their decision the Court stated “The principal issue before us concerns the scope of the right of the people, under the provisions of the California Constitution, to change or alter the state constitution itself through the initiative process,” the court wrote, “not to determine whether the provision at issue is wise or sound.”

The Majority Opinion stated: “In addressing the issues now presented in the third chapter of this narrative, it is important at the outset to emphasize a number of significant points. First, as explained in the Marriage Cases, supra, 43 Cal.4th at page 780, our task in the present proceeding is not to determine whether the provision at issue is wise or sound as a matter of policy or whether we, as individuals, believe it should be a part of the California Constitution. Regardless of our views as individuals on this question of policy, we recognize as judges and as a court our responsibility to confine our consideration to a determination of the constitutional validity and legal effect of the measure in question. It bears emphasis in this regard that our role is limited to interpreting and applying the principles and rules embodied in the California Constitution, setting aside our own personal beliefs and values. “

The Court said they felt that the basic argument is that the California Constitution is just too easy to amend. They are right. The Court said “it is not a proper function of this court to curtail that process; we are constitutionally bound to uphold it. If the process for amending the Constitution is to be restricted — perhaps in the manner it was explicitly limited in an earlier version of our state Constitution (— this is an effort that the people themselves may undertake through the process of amending their Constitution in order to impose further limitations upon their own power of initiative.”

In 1911 California law added “The first power reserved to the people shall be known as the initiative. Upon the presentation to the secretary of state of a petition . . . signed by [the requisite number of] qualified electors, . . . proposing a law or amendment to the constitution, . . . the secretary of state shall submit the said proposed law or amendment to the constitution to the electors at the next succeeding general election . . . . [¶] . . . [¶] Any act, law or amendment to the constitution submitted to the people by . . . initiative . . . petition and approved by a majority of votes cast thereon, at any election, shall take effect five days after the date of the official declaration of the vote by the secretary of state.” (Italics added.) By virtue of this provision, an amendment to the California Constitution could be proposed either by legislative action or by the people directly through the initiative process.” The Court listed the amendment process of some of California’s sister states and the much more onerous process that they require. This Court’s argument makes sense to me as a matter of structural analysis: the California Constitution allocates the California People large powers of self-governance, and (as opposed to the federal constitution) they have a large and powerful role to play in an ongoing conversation with the courts, the legislature and the Governor in the shape of constitutional governance.

The whole point of having rights safeguarded by a Constitution interpreted by an independent judiciary is that some things are so fundamental that they ought not be left to the caprice of a fleeting majority vote — if the People wants to amend the Constitution (at least, insofar as most of us understand what a “constitution” is supposed to do), it ought to be a more serious and onerous process than a one-day 50%-plus-one vote.  One wonders what makes it a constitution if it is so easily amendable.

As was asked in an excellent post on the Daily Kos: Would the Miranda decision have survived a citizen initiative vote in its wake?  Brown v. Board of Education? I despise the impact of today’s decision, but what is flawed is California’s amendment process. Same sex marriage will eventually come to California- it will take some effort and money and tenacity. But California’s Constitution is as broken as its budget.

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Not to minimize the horror of waterboarding, but the other approved techniques are as vile, and mentally and physically crippling as the waterboard.  Look no further than Senator John McCain for evidence that the use of stress positions will have long term crippling effects on detainees.

Jeff Tietz at True/Slant has a chilling piece on one teenage detainee’s experiences at Guantanamo.  For 15 year old Canadian citizen, Omar Khardr, avoiding waterboarding was no less horrifying.

The government accuses Khadr of killing a U.S. soldier with a grenade during the battle, but in 2008 the Pentagon accidentally revealed that it had no evidence of this; it had evidence only that Khadr was present at the time. Khadr was far too young to have any useful knowledge of al Qaeda activities. Still…he was treated as a dangerous, savvy enemy combatant.

A few months after Omar Khadr arrived at Guantanamo, he was awakened by a guard around midnight. “Get up,” the guard said. “You have a reservation.” Reservation was the commonly used term at Gitmo for torture session.

…the MPs uncuffed Omar’s arms, pulled them behind his back, and recuffed them to his legs, straining them badly at their sockets. At the junction of his arms and legs he was again bolted to the floor and left alone. The degree of pain a human body experiences in this from of “stress positioning” can quickly lead to delirium, and ultimately to unconsciousness. Before that happened, the MPs returned, forced Omar onto his knees, and cuffed his wrists and ankles together behind his back. This made his body into a kind of bow, his torso convex and rigid, right at the limit of its flexibility. The force of his cuffed wrists straining upward against his cuffed ankles drove his kneecaps into the concrete floor. The guards left.

An hour or two later they came back, checked the tautness of the chains between his hands and feet, and pushed him over onto his stomach. Transfixed in his bonds, Omar toppled like a figurine. Again they left. Many hours had passed since Omar had been taken from his cell. He urinated on himself and onto the floor. The MPs returned, mocked him for a while, and then poured pine oil solvent all over his body. Without altering his chains, they began dragging him by his feet through the mixture of urine and pine oil. Because his body had been so tightened, the new motion racked it. The MPs swung him around and around, the piss and solvent washing up into his face. The idea was to use him as a human mop. When the MPs felt they had sucessfully pretended to soak up the liquid with his body, they uncuffed him and carried him back to his cell. He was not allowed a change of clothes for two days.

As I read Mr. Tietz’s article I wondered how it is that waterboarding has taken center stage in terms of the torture debate.  Certainly the treatment of this 15 year old Canadian kid, even without waterboarding, would be considered torture by any reasonable person.

So, why all the discussion about waterboarding only?  Perhaps it’s that the U.S. has prosecuted both foreign and U.S. military forces for waterboarding, or that folks like Christopher Hitchens, Playboy magazine reporters, and radio commentator Erich “Mancow” Muller have, with the intent of proving waterboarding as no big deal, famously found waterboarding to be torture indeed.

But there may be another reason as well.  Vice President Cheney, in his speech on national security the other day, derided those who have coined euphemisms to describe interrogation techniques.  Put aside, if you can, Mr. Cheney’s obvious hypocrisy of, on the one hand, criticizing the use of euphemisms while, on the other hand, coining terms like “enhanced” interrogation, but waterboarding has been euphemism central for torture advocates.

It’s just a little “splash of water in the face”, after all.  Kinda like swimming, right?  All one has to do has hold their breath.  No big deal.  But Christopher Hitchens, the Playboy reporter and Mancow can provide video evidence it’s nothing at all like swimming or just a splash of water in the face.  But the extent to which advocates can minimize waterboarding will, to a great extent, determine how much or how little public outrage there will be against it.

So, I suspect torture advocates are happy to concentrate on the false debate of whether waterboarding is, indeed, torture.  Heck, it’s easy to come up with swimming metaphors to describe waterboarding.

Imagine trying to come up with euphemisms to describe using a 15 year old detainee, with his wrists bound to his ankles behind his back, as a human mop to soak up his own piss.

Or just think how difficult it would be to invent a nice little euphemism for slicing detainees genitals with a scalpel.

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Former Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, is also disputing the CIA’s version of the briefings that he received at the time. Graham was then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, while Pelosi was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

Graham is known as a meticulous note-taker and has maintained a daily log that fills hundreds of spiral notebooks, which now reside at the University of Florida Library of Florida History.

“Several weeks ago, when this issue started to bubble up, I called the CIA and asked for the dates in which I had been briefed,” Graham tells Robert Siegel. “They gave me four: two in April of ‘02, two in September.”

Graham says he consulted his logs “and determined that on three of the four dates there was no briefing held.”

He adds: “On one date, Sept. 27, ‘02, there was a briefing held and, according to my notes, it was on the topic of detainee interrogation.”

Graham says the CIA was initially reticent when he told the agency what he had found in his notes.
“They said, ‘We will check and call back,’” Graham recalled. “When they finally did a few days later, they indicated that I was correct. Their information was in error. There was no briefing on the first three of four dates.”

Graham says the agency offered no explanation regarding how it came up with the other dates.

The Sept. 27, 2002, briefing occurred about three weeks after the briefing in which the CIA says it told Pelosi about the use of waterboarding, a technique also described as simulated drowning. Graham, like Pelosi, says waterboarding was not mentioned during his briefing.

“There was no discussion of waterboarding, other excessive techniques or that they had applied these against any particular detainees,” he says.

Pelosi has charged that she was misled by the CIA. Graham puts it another way.

“Nothing that I can recall being said surprised me or has subsequently proven to be incorrect,” he says. “It was a matter of omission, not commission.” Graham says he is not surprised at the CIA’s claims, noting that within a week of its Sept. 27 briefing, the agency presented to the Senate Intelligence Committee its National Intelligence Estimate of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which was later shown to be flawed.

“I’m not impressed with the credibility of the CIA as it was being led in 2002,” Graham says. “I think it had become an agency that instead of following the admonition to speak truth to power, it was trying to speak what it thought power wanted to hear.”

Speaker Pelosi’s House colleagues are standing behind her as she takes incoming fire from the CIA and Republicans on the interrogation briefings flap and are ready to fight back.

House Democratic Caucus Chairman, Rep. John Larson (D-CT), said Friday that he agrees with Pelosi’s assertion that the CIA misled Congress and Democrats will stand with the leader.

“I will stand by her integrity any day of the week,” Larson said, casting the dispute with the CIA as more of a debate between the Speaker and Bush administration officials.

“Nancy Pelosi has more integrity in her pinky than Karl Rove and Dick Cheney possess in their entire body,” he said.

Larson called the question of what Pelosi learned at a September 2002 intelligence briefing on interrogations a “distraction” created by Republicans who want to deter Congress from investigating whether the Bush administration condoned and used torture.

“It’s clear what the other side is up to. They are saying no. They are providing subterfuge and they are not working to get what’s in the best interest of the American people accomplished,” Larson said in an interview with Fox News Channel.

Additionally, in addressing Pelosi’s argument that the CIA misled Congress, Larson tried to draw a distinction and added that what she is talking about is the “Bush-era CIA,” which he says President Obama has since tried to reform.

Larson said that while he is not sure whether a truth commission exposing intelligence community action during the Bush administration is in the best interest of the country, he is confident it will show Pelosi did nothing wrong.

“Anytime you want to shine the bright light of character…we will welcome that test,” he added.

I’ve personally worked with Speaker Pelosi’s office since the mid 1990s and I can unequivocally say that this woman is not a liar and she is a woman of high integrity. Yes she is a fierce and astute politician and she is a staunch Democrat. When Mrs. Pelosi says something she means it and she doesn’t make it up.

She is a woman of great passion and insight – she spoke against the war in Iraq early and has been an unyielding advocate for a free Tibet- to the consternation of many an administration not wanting to ruffle Beijing’s feathers.

My own experience with the Speaker is on HIV/AIDS issues. She is loyal, she is committed and she is fierce. Speaker Pelosi’s first words from the floor of the House were that she came to the House to solve the problem of AIDS. Her colleagues were mortified that she would make this statement as a freshman in the late 1980’s when politicians didn’t talk about AIDS. Well she did.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi may be accused of many things – not being terribly articulate at times, saying too much when her ire is up, being a partisan, and being a strong woman that threatens many of those milk toast white guys in Congress, but she is not someone given to lying and she is a woman with high integrity.  Plain and simple- the Speaker is a loyal American who loves her country and has dedicated her life to its service.

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