From The Tent City Project:
The Denver City Council voted 9-4 to impose an urban camping ban last week — a move “that specifically targets homeless people sleeping on the streets and one that critics say simply criminalizes homelessness.”
Critics point out that the city’s shelters already are overburdened, that there is no way to house everyone living on the streets. Instead of finding ways to expand housing opportunities, the city is looking to chase the homeless from public view.
My Progressive Populist column is live on the Progressive Populist site. It’s on the president’s snail’s-pace withdrawal from Afghanistan.
When capital punishment makes the news, it rarely is because something happens to prove its utility or necessity. In fact, the death penalty hits the headlines only when the argument for it is undercut — a telling trend that should lead the United States to join the rest of the civilized world in banning executions.
Today’s news that a Texas execution carried out in 1989 most likely sent an innocent man to death fits with this trend.
Carlos De Luna was executed in 1989 for stabbing to death a gas station clerk in Corpus Christi six years earlier. It was a ghastly crime. The trial attracted local attention, but not from concern that a guiltless man would be punished while the killer went free.
De Luna, an eighth grade dropout, maintained that he was innocent from the moment cops put him in the back seat of a patrol car until the day he died. Today, 29 years after De Luna was arrested, Liebman and his team published a mammoth report in the Human Rights Law Review that concludes De Luna paid with his life for a crime he likely did not commit. Shoddy police work, the prosecution’s failure to pursue another suspect, and a weak defense combined to send De Luna to death row, they argued.
“I would say that across the board, there was nonchalance,” Liebman told The Huffington Post. “It looked like a common case, but we found that there was a very serious claim of innocence.”
Was De Luna innocent? I don’t know. But given the questions tht should have been raised, it appears to me that his guilt was sufficient entry in doubt to have spared his life.
This is the point. The system does an awful job of protecting the accused and there is no way — and can be no way — to prove guilt beyond doubt. That makes capital punishment morally unsupportable.
It’s time to stop tinkering with the machinery of death.
There is plenty to criticize from the left about the limitations of President Obama’s endowment of marriage equality.
Yes, he did the political calculus. Yes, his endorsement comes late in the game. Yes, it lacks any practical, legislative oomph.
But, and this is important, it carries massive symbolic weight. The first black president becomes the first sitting president to support gays’ and lesbians’ right to marry.
Frank Bruni, in a column on nytimes.com, describes the “emotional importance” of the president’s statement to Robyn Roberts.
I find myself thinking about all the teenagers and young adults out there who cower in silence because they worry about being ostracized if they speak the truth about their sexual orientation. I think about the ones who are bullied, even the ones who contemplate taking their own lives.
And I think about what it will mean to them to hear the president say what he did today, not because they’re focused on marriage but because they’re buoyed by any and every reassurance that there’s nothing wrong with them, nothing inferior about them. Today their president gave them that reassurance.
I think about how it would have felt to me when I was 16, and fearful, and often deeply, deeply depressed, to hear a president say what ours did today. I can’t imagine it. In the three decades since, our country has traveled an enormous distance, and today is a poignant and compelling marker of that.
And this is what it is about.
http://cdnapi.kaltura.com/index.php/kwidget/wid/0_3lh7hnon/uiconf_id/6501142Finally. After several years of trying to straddle the issue, endorsing equality but only within a separate status for gays and lesbians, President Obama has finally gotten on the right side of history.
In a sit-down interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts, Obama completed what has been a markedly long and oft-mocked evolution on the matter.
“I’ve always been adamant that gay and lesbian Americans should be treated fairly and equally,” Obama told Roberts, in an interview that will air in full on ABC’s “Good Morning America” Thursday.
“I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married,” he said.
Again, what took him so long? The answer, of course, is politics. Obama viewed his support for equality — which he expressed as support for same-sex marriage way back in the 1990s when he represented an overwhelmingly liberal state district in Illinois — as incompatible with his ability to win and maintain the highest office in the land. So his position evolved, much the same way we have watched the moderate Mitt Romney evolve.
Luckily, Obama’s ultimate evolution led him in the right direction, ending with an endorsement of same-sex marriage, making him the only sitting president to come out in favor of marriage equality.
History will remember him for that.
***
On a side note, Dahlia Lithwick, Slate’s legal correspondent, offered what may be the best line on the announcement. Writing on her Facebook page, Lithwick said,
ok it’s been 90 minutes and my marriage still feels pretty solid. anyone else????
Mine seems pretty solid, too.
