Representing the LGBT Community

/ Eric van der Vort / Leave a comment

Towleroad has a round-up of recent discussions that have centered around members of Congress (MCs) who are members of the LGBT community, yet have voted against generally liberal or progressive positions (most recently voting with the GOP majority in the House to ‘shut down’ the government).  This has led to a good deal of debate about the disconnect between LGBT elected officials and the putatively progressive community they are part of.  Michaelangelo Signorile describes the voting behavior in question:

Since taking office, Sinema has voted with the GOP against economic justice issues that progressives, including LGBT activists, view as crucial. Both she and U.S. Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), an openly gay former Clinton aide, also elected for the first time in 2012, have voted with big banks and Wall Street time and again. Right out of the gate, Maloney, who took a lot of Wall Street money, voted with the GOP on the debt ceiling early this year, and actually co-sponsored a bill that would roll back reforms of the very Wall Street practices that led to the economic collapse. He even voted with the GOP to take authority over the Keystone XL project from the president. Like Sinema, he also voted to jeopardize Obamacare or shut down the government. And he too was supported in his election campaign by the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, the Human Rights Campaign, and other gay and progressive groups, touted as a progressive.

The assumptions behind the idea that Sinema and Mahoney should vote in accord with liberal or progressive values are, I would argue, fairly faulty.  At the core of this argument is an assertion that there is a connection between liberal or progressive values, on the one hand, and LGBT identity on the other.  While it is true that there is a tendency in the LGBT community to vote for Democrats and Democratic candidates, this is hardly a universal trait and, more critically, is a poor measure for the whole panoply of political attitudes.  Party ID is a useful but blunt measure for policy preferences.  For example, some measures show that in the most recent presidential election, LGBT voters favored President Obama 3 to 1. However, polling done prior to the election indicates that much of this may have more to do with Obama’s favorable stances toward LGBT issues rather than universal approbation of Obama’s or Democratic policies more generally.  As just a few examples: 60% of respondents in the Logo TV poll report supporting the Affordable Care Act while approval ratings among LGBT voters are higher than the general population, but, aside from gay rights issues, the approval ratings for Obama’s handling of health care, general economic issues and unemployment/jobs each hovers around the 60% mark.  These results indicate that perhaps 2/3 of LGBT voters are support or are in agreement with Obama and the Democrats on important issues of the day.

The White House’s record on LGBT rights in general has been strong.  It is equally indisputable that, over time, the Democratic party has grown more friendly to the LGBT community than the Republican party.  The connection that Signorile and others bemoan between liberal or progressive values and LGBT voters, citizens and representatives is not created by attitudes on economic issues, foreign policy and so on.  Rather, as political scientist Kenneth Sherrill has argued, what may be driving much of this partisan loyalty is a sense of shared fate (a sense of group identity or shared consciousness that can lead to perceptions of common interest) — many LGBT voters may default to the Democratic option because of their positons on LGBT issues.  To infer from this that the majority of LGBT individuals share a liberal or progressive outlook is faulty inference.  Normative desires for LGBT representatives who are also ideologically “pure” members of the Democratic coalition are fine, but to turn these into operative assumptions that LGBT voters are primarily or predominantly liberal is a step too far.

Following Windsor, Lawsuits Take Aim At Pennsylvania Same-Sex Marriage Ban.

/ Matthew McKeon / Leave a comment

Like many other states, Pennsylvania bars same-sex marriage by statute.  23 Pa. Cons. Stat. §§ 1102 and 1704 (1996).  Unlike other states, Pennsylvania’s ban is currently being challenged at all levels of government.  This drive is even visible at the local level: Reuters reported that the county clerk of Montgomery County issued more than 170 marriage licenses to same-sex couples between late July and mid-September, when a state court ordered him to stop.  In the state legislature, two representatives in the lower house plan to introduce a bill on October 6 that would override the existing ban and permit same-sex marriages.

While acts of civil disobedience and bold legislative proposals may inspire marriage equality advocates, the Republican governor and the Republican majorities in both houses of the state legislature are unlikely to be so moved.  In the end, the most significant threat to the state ban is a pair of lawsuits filed in two different federal district courts.  Both suits are the direct result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s holding in United States v. Windsor, 133 S. Ct. 2675 (2013).  In Windsor, the Court struck down Section 3 of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which permitted the federal government to withhold federal recognition for same-sex marriages entered into in states and jurisdictions where same-sex marriage is legal.  Although Justice Anthony Kennedy based the Court’s holding in part on the traditional supremacy of states in regulating marriage, other parts of his reasoning paradoxically provided fertile ground for federal challenges to state same-sex marriage bans.        

The first challenge, Whitewood v. Corbett, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania just days after the Supreme Court handed down its opinion in Windsor.  In their complaint, the plaintiffs challenge Pennsylvania’s ban on same-sex marriage on the grounds that denying same-sex couples the right to marry in Pennsylvania violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause and Equal Protection Clause.

Quoting Kennedy, the plaintiff’s complaint alleges that the state ban “‘tells [same-sex] couples and all the world- that their relationships are unworthy’ of recognition.”  The complaint also references the part of Kennedy’s reasoning which addressed a significant group of people affected by  government’s refusal to recognize same-sex marriage: the children of same-sex couples.  The plaintiffs claim that the state ban “‘humiliates the…children now being raised by same-sex couples’ and ‘makes it even more difficult for the children to understand the integrity and closeness of their own family and its concord with other families in their community and in their daily lives.’” Governor Tom Corbett—himself the primary defendant in Whitewood–has moved to dismiss the case.

The second challenge, Palladino v. Corbett, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in late September.  Although a record of their complaint was not available at the time of this article’s posting, Alfred Lubrano of the Philadelphia Inquirer reports that the plaintiffs in Palladino are challenging the state ban on the grounds that it violates Full Faith and Credit.  The plaintiffs, two women who were lawfully married in Massachusetts, assert that it is unconstitutional for Pennsylvania to not recognize their marriage.  While it remains unclear if the plaintiff’s will reference Kennedy’s reasoning in Windsor, they echoed Kennedy’s consideration for children of same-sex couples at a recent press conference, stating that their young son “doesn’t know he’s a second-class citizen in Pennsylvania, where we’re not considered married.”

On top of the suits themselves, a high-profile schism in Pennsylvania’s executive branch may complicate the state’s defense of the law.  Despite being named as a defendant in both Whitewood and Palladino, Pennsylvania’s Attorney General Kathleen Kane, a Democrat, has publically denounced the state ban as unconstitutional and has stated that she will not defend it in federal court.  Kane’s position puts her at odds with Governor Tom Corbett, a Republican who supports the state ban and – perhaps at the suggestion of Rick Santorum – recently compared same-sex marriage to incest.  With developments in both cases on a weekly basis, Pennsylvania remains at the center of the nation’s debate over same-sex marriage.

Jimmy Kimmel Live: Obamacare vs. The Affordable Care Act

In an effort to bring some levity to the blog, Sundays will feature  “Sunday Funday” posts, posts about the lighter side of public policy debates.  This week, we have the viral video from Jimmy Kimmel Live where people on the street are asked which they prefer: Obamacare or The Affordable Care Act.

Here is a description of the video from CBS:

As someone who covers entertainment and viral videos all day long, I am not going to pretend that I totally understand Obamacare, but I kind of hoped that the general public knew more than me (since I choose to stay out of politics as a rule), but this clip from Monday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live” demonstrates that we really don’t know what we’re talking about when it comes to this healthcare initiative. Watch the segment titled “Six of One” above, posted on Kimmel’s YouTube page, and be prepared to be disturbed.

This clip seemed particularly timely in the midst of all this government craziness, and it just seemed to scare me more. Were you shocked that people knew so little about Obamacare? Or that Obamacare and The Affordable Care Act were the same thing? Now, I know that this “data” is not scientific in the least, and they definitely chose clueless people on purpose, but it’s still a pretty shocking indication of what most people probably know and think.

But what I do like best about Kimmel, and the way he handled this social experiment is that no matter how dumb he may make people look, he’s always a good sport. As the woman who really seemed clueless on the segment was in the audience, and the late night host joked, “Welcome stupid people, you have a home here with me.” Always keeping it light, that’s what I like to see.

Sunday Funday: Obamacare vs. The Affordable Care Act

/ Matthew Clemente / Leave a comment

Increased Assessment in Education: At What Cost?

/ Joanna Masingila / Leave a comment

There has been much discussion about increased and new types of assessment at various levels of education—of K-12 students, of teachers and principals in K-12 education, and of prospective teachers in K-12 education.

Some of the discussion has focused on what has happened to the education K-12 students receive as a result of the increased emphasis on standardized testing, fueled by No Child Left Behind. Kenneth Bernstein, a retired teacher, wrote an article that appeared in Academe in February 2013, and was reposted by Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post, “A Warning to College Profs from a High School Teacher” in which he laid out the effects he sees that result from the heightened testing environment. In August 2013, Bernstein followed this up with another article, “Teacher Who Left: Why I am Returning to School“.

As Bernstein notes in his second article, the stakes have continued to rise with the implementation of the Common Core State Standards and the tests associated with these standards. Voices from students (e.g., Nikhil Goyal, “Why I Opted Out of APPR“) as well as principals (e.g., Carol Burris, “What Big Drop in New Standardized Test Scores Really Means“) have joined the conversation on the negative effects of this increased assessment on student learning.

Alongside this increased testing of student learning, are new systems of assessing teacher effectiveness. In New York State, assessment of teacher performance occurs through Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR), which was adopted by the Board of Regents in 2000. Changes that were approved in 2010, require school districts to conduct an annual review of each teacher and principal resulting in a single composite effectiveness score and a rating of “highly effective”, “effective”, “developing”, or “ineffective”. This change to the APPR has not been without controversy, as evidenced in this story from October 4, 2013 of hundreds of teachers appealing their APPR.

The emphasis on increased testing has moved to the higher education arena as well, with the new requirement that all teachers seeking certification in New York State pass the edTPA (a teacher performance assessment developed at Stanford University). While the edTPA tasks assess things that teachers need to be able to do—plan for instruction, lead students in learning, and assess student learning—what has many teacher educators (e.g., teacher educators at the University of Massachusetts; Julie Gorlewski at SUNY New Paltz) and others concerned is having a prospective teacher’s performance over an entire teacher preparation program, including weeks of student teaching, come down to a snapshot of the teacher’s performance scored by a person hired by Pearson.

Commonalities among current assessment of K-12 student learning, K-12 teacher and principal performance, and prospective K-12 teacher performance are the high-stakes nature of the assessment, the use of snapshots of performance, and the critical assessment roles of persons other than the ones most familiar with the performance. Critics have already raised concerns about this increased assessment. What will be the cost to education? Kenneth Bernstein notes that we are already seeing some of the costs in the students who are now at the college level.

Calculating the Economic Cost of the Federal Shutdown

/ Edward Thater / Leave a comment

Let’s set aside for a moment the politics of the shutdown.  Regardless of political views, we can all generally agree that the shutdown costs the economy something.  The bigger question is what that number is.  The national media have more or less universally been reporting a number calculated by IHS Global Insight, a Massachusetts-based economic forecasting firm, of $12.5 million per hour.  For you non-mathematically inclined readers, that works out to $300 million a day. The problem with that number is that it represents only the dollars that the federal government spends on goods and services each day.  It does not represent the actual economic costs of the shutdown.

The main reason for this is something called the multiplier effect.  One dollar of spending by any economic actor does not just raise GDP by that same dollar.  Instead, my spending is someone else’s income that the next person can spend.  If I buy a hot dog and a soda from the vendor down the street, I spend $3.  The hot dog vendor, in turn, uses those $3 in income to purchase buns for tomorrow’s sales.  (Yes, I know, the buns cost more than $3.  The idea is that part of the money to buy the buns is my $3.)  The grocery store uses those same $3 to pay the employee who put the buns on the shelf.  And so on. Thus, my initial $3 ends up creating an increase of more than $3 in GDP.

Obviously, the real word is more complicated.  Some of the $3 is taken out at each transaction in taxes, some of it is saved by various economic actors instead of spent, etc.  However, you can measure this effect.  The Congressional Budget Office generally calculates the multiplier for federal spending as a range between 0.5 and 2.5.  (Here is sample source,  but there are lots of CBO reports using the same numbers.) So this means that, in reality, the shutdown is costing the US economy anywhere between $150 million to $750 million a day in lost GDP.  In any event, the costs are almost certainly more than $300 million per day number that is being widely reported in the media.

Of course, this calculation doesn’t include the medium- and long-term savings we get for not borrowing nearly a third of that money to cover the deficit, but that is a different blog post entirely.