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The Maryland State Bar Association has announced its endorsement of a same-sex marriage bill sponsored by Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley. “ I could not be prouder of our endorsement, which while protective of religious sensibilities and prerogatives, clearly and emphatically extends those civil rights embodied in our fundamental belief that ‘all men are created equal’ — and not simply ‘all heterosexual persons are created equal’ — to our entire citizenry,” said Maryland State Bar Association President Henry E. Dugan Jr. in a statement. The bill is scheduled for a formal hearing before the Senate on Tuesday. The Senate passed marriage legislation last year, but the the Maryland House of Delegates didn’t have enough votes to pass the measure. — Fatima Najiy

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Mitt Romney accused President Obama of waging “ the assault on religion ” during a conference call with Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition last night and said that the administration is “fighting to eliminate conscience clause” protections for health care works and “pave the path to same-sex marriage”: ROMNEY: Then of course there’s the assault on religion….now he’s gone forward and said that religious institutions, universities, hospitals and so forth, religious institutions have to provide free contraceptives to all their employees, even if that religious institution is opposed to the use of contraception, as in the case of the Catholic Church. Even in that regard, fighting to eliminate the conscience clause for health care workers who wish not to provide abortion services or contraceptives in their workplace, in their hospital for instance. It’s an assault on religion unlike anything we have seen. There’s been an assault on marriage. I think he is very aggressively trying to pave the path to same-sex marriage. I would unlike this president defend the Defense of Marriage Act. I would also propose and promote once again an amendment to the constitution to define marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman. Listen: In reality, the rights of health care workers to follow their consciences and avoid prescribing contraception or assisting in abortion services are still very much protected. Federal regulations contain clear provisions in three separate laws protecting federally-funded health care providers’ right of conscience. For instance, the 1976 Church Amendment “prevents the government (as a condition of a federal grant) from requiring health care providers or institutions to perform or assist in abortion or sterilization procedures against their moral or religious convictions,” the Coats Amendment of 1996 prohibits the government from “discriminating” against medical residency programs or other entities that lose accreditation because they fail to provide or require training in abortion services” and the Hyde/Weldon Conscience Protection Amendment of 2004 “forbids federal, state and local governments from requiring any individual or institutional provider or payer to perform, provide, refer for, or pay for an abortion.” Even the new Affordable Care Act regulations , which require institutions to offer reproductive health care services without additional co-pays, include a narrow religious exemption. Houses of worship and other religious nonprofits that primarily employ and serve people of the same faith will be exempt from the provision, while religiously-affiliated employers who do not qualify for the exemption and are not currently offering contraceptive coverage may apply for transitional relief for a one-year period to give them time to determine how to comply with the rule. Twenty-eight states already require employers, including most religiously affiliated institutions, to cover contraception in their health plans. The only change is that now they must cover the full cost. In fact, marriage equality laws that allow gay and lesbian couples to enter into civil marriages provide similar conscience protections for religious institutions, exempting houses of worship and their leaders from recognizing same-sex relationships.

Tags: #abortion, affordable care act, author, donate, green, health, january-2012, mitt-romney, prostitution, religion, taxes

Former Vice President Al Gore is heading to Antarctica to highlight the extraordinary changes greenhouse pollution is causing even in our most remote continent. When Gore visited Antarctica in 1988, scientists were predicting it could warm more rapidly than the global average. “This prediction has proven true,” Gore writes. “Today, the West Antarctic Peninsula is warming about four times faster than the global average.” Although the vast ice sheets of the frozen continent are remote from almost all of human civilization, their warming has drastic implications for billions of people. With the melting of those almost inconceivable reserves of ice , the planet’s sea levels are rising. Scientists now expect 21st-century sea level rise — on the scale of three to six feet or more — will be dominated by the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps. Gore is leading an expedition of “civic and business leaders, activists and concerned citizens, as well as “many of the world’s leading climate scientists” to see how man’s negligence is transforming the forbidding continent: To better understand the changes taking place near the South Pole and the impacts those changes will have around the world, I will be returning to Antarctica this month with The Climate Reality Project. A large number of civic and business leaders, activists and concerned citizens from many countries on this voyage will be joined by many of the world’s leading climate scientists and Antarctica experts to see firsthand and in real time how the climate crisis is unfolding in Antarctica. The Climate Reality Project is asking everyone to host their own expeditions wherever they live. As the new plant hardiness zone maps from the USDA remind us, we don’t even need to leave our backyards to see the effects of the hundreds of billions of tons of carbon pollution we have pumped into the atmosphere with the profligate burning of fossil fuels. Nor do we have to leave our neighborhoods to see the signs of positive change — community gardens, electric cars, solar panels, wind turbine manufacturers, and more in the growing mass movement to build a sustainable, resilient civilization on our changing planet.

Tags: author, brad-johnson, global-boiling, green, health, january-2012, lgbt, thinkprogress

Via Politico’s Pulse , a new report from John McDonough, formerly the executive director of Health Care for All, identifies 15 similarities between Romneycare and Obamacare: As Families USA Executive Director Ron Pollack — whose group published the comparison — told Pulse, the Romney and Obama plans “are fraternal, and almost appear like identical, twins,’ Pollack said. ‘It is therefore quite strange for Gov. Romney to criticize, and to claim he will repeal, legislation that mirrors his own creation.” Read the full report here .

Tags: affordable-care-act, director, economy, green, january-2012, lgbt, media, mitt-romney, security, twins, war

Matthew Shepard ‘s father is speaking out against anti-gay initiatives in Tennessee and several other states, which have, “become a bully pulpit in more ways than one.” Dennis Shepard said Tennessee’s infamous “ Don’t Say Gay ” and “ license to bully ” bills “disturb me” and urged state lawmakers to work instead “toward an all-inclusive law toward hate crimes.” He also condemned legislation designed to discriminate against transgender people, warning that threats “about stomping transgender and other gays . That does encourage it [harassment]. What it does is say nobody’s going to do anything. And as I mentioned … it creates a policy of it’s open season. I can do whatever. And that’s what happened to Matt.”

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Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), chair of the House energy committee, told Politico that House Republicans intend to attach language pushing approval of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline into an expected February bill to extend the payroll tax holiday. “ We’re going to be using it, every opportunity to push Keystone .” Republicans are also considering attaching it to the upcoming transportation spending bill .

Tags: author, barack-obama, brad-johnson, economy, january-2012, joe-romm, rep-fred-upton-r-mi, security, tar-sands

During Monday’s GOP debate in Florida, Mitt Romney advocated for a policy of “self-deportation” for undocumented immigrants — a policy borrowed from the anti-immigrant hate group NumbersUSA. As one of his advisers admitted several months ago, Romney’s hard-line approach to the undocumented population consists of making immigrants’ lives so unbearable that they voluntarily choose to leave the country. Today fellow GOP contender Newt Gingrich condemned Romney’s idea as “inhumane” during an interview with Univision: Republican Newt Gingrich says Mitt Romney’s call for self-deportation of illegal immigrants is an “Obama-level” fantasy that is inhumane to long-established families living in America . The former House speaker ridiculed that part of Romney’s immigration policy during a forum Wednesday with the Spanish-language network Univision. Gingrich laughed at the idea and said it wouldn’t work. Romney said during a recent debate that he favors what he calls “self-deportation” over policies that require the federal government to round up illegal immigrants and send them back to their home countries. Gingrich has embraced a more moderate approach to immigration than Romney and was recently endorsed by Somos Republicans, the nation’s largest Hispanic Republican group. Romney, facing criticism for not being conservative enough, has tried to outflank many of his opponents on the right when it comes to immigration. Yet surprisingly, his harsh stance has been largely overlooked by many voters. The Obama campaign recently dubbed Romney the most extreme GOP candidate on immigration — a claim borne out by a comparison of the candidates’ positions .

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2012 GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney today broke out a harsher line on Newt Gingrich, Saturday’s winner of the South Carolina GOP primary, once again saying that the former speaker of the House should give back the $1.7 million in payments he received from mortgage giant Freddie Mac. “He said in a debate, actually, that people who profited from the failed model of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae ought to give back their money,” Romney noted. “Well, the speaker made $1.7 million in his enterprises from providing services to Freddie Mac. He ought to give it back .” But Romney is throwing stones from within his own glass house, as he also profits from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, as the Boston Globe detailed back in September: On his financial disclosure statement filed last month, Romney reported owning between $250,001 and $500,000 in a mutual fund that invests in debt notes of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, among other government entities. Over the previous year, he had reported earning between $15,001 and $50,000 in interest from those investments. And unlike most of Romney’s financial holdings, which are held in a blind trust that is overseen by a trustee and not known to Romney, this particular investment was among those that would have been known to Romney. Over the weekend, Romney intends to start airing an ad that will say, “While Florida families lost everything in the housing crisis, Newt Gingrich cashed in. Gingrich was paid over $1.6 million by the scandal-ridden agency that helped create the crisis .” Shockingly enough, the ad fails to mention Romney’s own investments in the government backed mortgage giants, which have netted him tens of thousands of dollars.

Tags: author, feeds, housing, january-2012, lgbt, mitt-romney, mortgage-giant, politics, security, taxes, tweets

Virginia Del. David Englin (D-Arlington) introduced a resolution exploring whether his state should allow marijuana to be sold in state-run liquor stores . According to Englin, “right now people are smoking marijuana secretly. They’re spending money on it and it’s going into in to the hands of criminals. This legislation just seeks to find out how much money we could potentially be raising to fund core services for the Commonwealth.”

Tags: citizens-united, economy, health, january-2012, lgbt, media, security, var-jplayerswf

Last week, former CIA director and NSA chief Gen. Michael Hayden shared that during the George W. Bush administration “the consensus was that [attacking Iran] would guarantee that which we are trying to prevent — an Iran that will spare nothing to build a nuclear weapon.” But in a radio interview yesterday, ex-CIA director James Woolsey pushed in the opposite direction, calling on the Obama administration to consider military strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites and Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) facilities. Woolsey, who served as President Bill Clinton’s CIA director from 1993 to 1995, told Aaron Klein , the Jerusalem bureau chief of the right-wing WorldNetDaily, that IRGC facilities and “anything that is related to the thugs that are oppressing the Iranian people” were “fair game” for attacks if Iran moves to close the Strait of Hormuz: Let it be known that if there is a closing of the Straits of Hormuz or any other aggressive action by Iran — after all we went to war in 1812 over something just about like what Iran says it’s going to do, close the Straits — if we see that virtually nothing that is tied to the Revolutionary Guard is out of our sights . Woolsey went on to compare the IRGC to “a combination of Hitler’s Brown Shirts and Black Shirts” and declared: If we let it be known that we’re going to be able to do what unfortunately Britain and France were unable to do in [19]36, ’37, ’38, which would be to take out Hitler’s regime. If we let it be known that we can do that in Iran, then I think we’ll be in a much stronger position. But Woolsey is no stranger to staking out hawkish U.S. foreign policy positions. Last year, he spoke in support of the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) , an Iranian exile group currently listed on the U.S. government’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations for its role in the killing of six Americans in the 1970s. Woolsey also serves as chair of the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and advocated for the invasion of Iraq through his involvement with the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Woolsey told Klein that the U.S. should send four to five aircraft carriers to the Indian Ocean to retaliate against Iran if it decides to close the Strait of Hormuz — the U.S. has 11 carrier strike groups — and suggested that Obama should emulate Teddy Roosevelt who dispatched the Great White Fleet to circumnavigate the globe for two years. Indeed, Iran’s nuclear program is comprised of some troubling components. Last week, the IAEA expressed concern that elements of the program could suggest the development of nuclear weapons and the European Union just announced an oil embargo against Iran, banning all new oil contracts with Tehran. But Woolsey is setting himself apart from a growing number of retired American and Israeli intelligence chiefs expressing reservations about the rush to military action against Iran.

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