Hurley was responding to a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that said gay men have higher rates of HIV and syphilis than the general population. Because of these figures, if the state allows gay men to get married they are “sanctioning self destructive behavior.”

Iowa Family Policy Center President Chuck Hurley speaking on the steps of the state Capitol earlier this year (photo by Jason Hancock/Iowa Independent).

“The Iowa Legislature outlawed smoking [in some public places] in an effort to improve health and reduce the medical costs that are often passed on to the state,” Hurley said. “The secondhand impacts of certain homosexual acts are arguably more destructive, and potentially more costly to society than smoking.”

The CDC report made it clear that “factors such as homophobia and stigma” can prevent gay men from seeking prevention, testing, and treatment services.

“There is no single or simple solution for reducing HIV and syphilis rates among gay and bisexual men,” said Kevin Fenton, director of the CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention. “We need intensified prevention efforts that are as diverse as the gay community itself. Solutions for young gay and bisexual men are especially critical, so that HIV does not inadvertently become a rite of passage for each new generation of gay men.”

Jordan Selha, executive director of the AIDS Project of Central Iowa, told The Des Moines Register that the CDC data is more evidence that additional resources are needed for prevention and tests.

Not so, says Hurley.

“Iowa lawmakers need to pay attention to hard facts and not be persuaded by emotion laden half-truths,” he said. “Because of their unwillingness to correct the error of last April’s Iowa Supreme Court opinion, the Iowa Legislature is responsible for sanctioning activities that will lead to dramatically higher rates of HIV and syphilis in Iowa.”

Hurley’s comments echo those made by WHO-AM radio host Jan Mickelson last month at an Iowa Family Policy Center fundraiser. Mickelson said that simply being gay shortens your life, a statement that is only backed up by widely discredited or misrepresented studies. Mickelson’s comments came during his introduction of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and GOP gubernatorial hopeful Bob Vander Plaats, who were the featured speakers at the event.

The Des Moines Register reported Wednesday afternoon that Hagenow attempted to amend Senate File 2357, which prohibits a person subject to a protective order or who was convicted of domestic violence from possessing a gun. His amendment essentially would define marriage as between one man and one woman using a portion of Iowa law that the Iowa Supreme Court struck down t last year when it legalized same-sex marriage.

Hagenow’s argument was that the law the court struck down was still on the books.

From The Register:

Hagenow, after the vote, said his intention was to push the legislature to address the issue rather than deny same-sex couples protection from domestic abuse. Same-sex couples would still be protected from being assaulted, he said.

“I think it was just an attempt to reaffirm that” Iowa law “is still on the books and the legislature has still neglected to address the issue,” Hagenow said.

LGBT advocacy group One Iowa called Hagenow’s attempt “shameful.”

“Shame on Rep. Chris Hagenow for playing politics with the domestic abuse bill,” the group said in a statement. “Seeking to exclude married gay couples from equal protections is unconscionable.”

The amendment was ultimately ruled to be not germane to the bill, and thus, not eligible for discussion.

With the news that Citibank screens some of its clients for “objectionable content” — and applies that screening process to gay-themed businesses — many LGBT business people and Citi customers are probably wondering where their business is truly welcome.

Luckily, Jeremy Quitner of The Advocate has a great run-down of banking programs designed to cater to the needs of LGBT clients — and, specifically, to the special needs of same-sex couples.

Quitner explains why targeted LGBT banking and financial planning programs are so important.

“It boils down to marriage rights,” says Jennifer Hatch, president of Christopher Street Financial, one of the oldest financial advisories for gays and lesbians, based in New York. “The average straight couple gets a lot of their financial setup simply by saying ‘I do.’”

As LGBT rights advocates have often argued, marriage confers certain legal rights that makes everything easier — and it includes banking.

But some groups, like Christopher Street Financial, work specifically with same-sex couples and LGBT individuals to design financial plans in accordance with their sometimes unique needs and, in the last decade, has seen competitors finally pop up all over the country. Chicago’s Northern Trust, which deals exclusively with high net-worth individuals — a lucrative income stream for many retail banks — just launched its first practice aimed at high net-worth individuals with non-traditional family relationships. Boston’s Wainwright Bank started issuing affiliate credit cards in the 90s that gave a portion of the proceeds to LGBT rights groups — and it says that 10 percent of its employees are openly gay, including two senior executives and one member of the board.

Wells Fargo, based in San Francisco, worked to reach out to the LGBT community for 20 years, though it only established a specific LGBT practice in 2005, and in 2009 it began a program to certify financial planners to work with same-sex couples. Bank of America’s wealth advisory practice through its Merrill Lynch affiliate — again, a personalized banking service aimed at high net-worth individuals — will nonetheless work with LGBT individuals or couples in any income bracket for financial planning fees ranging from $250 -$1,000.

Interestingly, Citibank today announced that it plans to double its private banking force over the next two years. It is not reportedly dedicating any of those new private banking resources to an LGBT-specific practice. Apparently, the money in the LGBT community that is attracting attention from its big competitors isn’t of enough interest to Citibank. ]]> http://iowaindependent.com/29742/where-same-sex-couples-bank-without-fear/feed 1 http://iowaindependent.com/29655/santorum-responds-to-pro-life-fraud-robocall http://iowaindependent.com/29655/santorum-responds-to-pro-life-fraud-robocall#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:00:42 +0000 Jason Hancock http://iowaindependent.com/?p=29655 Former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Penn., used almost his entire speech Tuesday night in Des Moines to respond to recent robocalls around the state that accuse him of being a “pro-life fraud.”

Former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum (photo by Dave Davidson, TEApublican.com)

Santorum — who has said repeatedly that he is mulling a presidential run in 2012 and was the keynote speaker at at an Iowa Christian Alliance event — said even though he has a “perfect pro-life voting record” during his tenure in the U.S. House and Senate, “the comment about being a pro-life fraud could have applied to me, as it does, unfortunately, to many pro-life legislators.”

“There are a lot of people who vote pro-life, but there are very few people who stand up and fight for life,” he said. “And there is a reason for that: You pay a price.”

He never uttered the word “abortion” during his years in the House or his first term in the Senate, Santorum said, preferring to work behind the scenes on the issue. He thought, and other assured him he was correct, that speaking out on abortion would cost him with voters.

“You pay a price when you stand up out of the foxhole and you fight for life, not just vote for life,” he said.

But he eventually started attending a new church, as well as regular Bible study, and “as I grew, I recognized the blind spots. As a husband, as a father, and as a leader.”

By 1996, he was leading the fight to override President Bill Clinton’s veto of a ban on late-term abortion, and began speaking out on the issue in public. But he still makes mistakes, Santorum said, pointing specifically to his work on behalf of fellow Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, who switched parties and became a Democrat last year. He helped Specter get re-elected, Santorum said, because he promised to support President George W. Bush’s nominees for the U.S. Supreme Court.

“I was wrong in retrospect,” he said.

Abortion was the main topic of Santorum’s speech, but he did address another issue he’s well known for: same-sex marriage. Santorum discussed how important it is for Christians to stand up and fight to overturn the Iowa Supreme Court’s decision last April to legalize same-sex marriage, ultimately calling marriage equity “an attack on religious liberty”

“Anybody who stands up and opposes the redefinition of marriage is considered a bigot,” he said. “Someone who speaks from the pulpit is considered hate speech. This is what we face.”

In 2003, Santorum came under fire for publicly comparing homosexuality to incest, bigamy and adultery. As a result, Santorum was the victim of a Google Bomb — a tactic designed to manipulate Google search rankings for certain keywords in order to make someone or something less appealing. To this day, the first few results of a Google search of “Santorum” pertain to a sexual term coined by sex-advice columnist Dan Savage in response to the then-senator’s statements.

Back in October,  Santorum visited Iowa to deliver two speeches: one at an event sponsored by Iowa Right to Life and another at an event sponsored by the American Future Fund.

Several Iowa Independent readers are reporting another round of robocalls, also to Democratic households, but this time in the Des Moines metro area. In three different instances, the calls focused on same-sex marriage, eventually concluding with Branstad saying that he supports marriage only between a man and a woman. One person indicated they received their call from the Branstad campaign in late January, with the others within the past two weeks.

A series of robocalls received in eastern Iowa early in December touted Branstad’s “proven record” of income tax cuts and then indicated that he would “fight for traditional marriage.” Those calls came from a Washington, D.C., number that has also been linked to possible push-poll political calls on taxpayer-funded abortion and death panels in “Obamacare.”

In a blog on Politico over the weekend, Lynch — who has worked for politicians ranging from former Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle to former Republican Sen. Bob Dole — says the GOP would be wise look to Bob McDonnell’s recent victory in the Virgina gubernatorial race as a model for 2010 Senate and House campaigns. McDonnell “shied away from emphasizing social issues on the stump,” focusing instead on economic concerns, Lynch said.

To be fair, McDonnell benefited from a weak general campaign opponent who never fully drew the support of the Virginia Democratic base. Nonetheless, biting his tongue on abortion, gay marriage and other hot button social issues (on which I’m sure he was more than willing to speak) netted him the support of independents and moderate conservatives who either stayed home or voted for Obama in 2008. Social and “movement” conservatives, apparently adequately convinced that McDonnell was “one of them”, overlooked his unwillingness to preach their gospel on the campaign trail.

Lynch’s advice is similar to that given repeatedly by Doug Gross, the 2002 GOP candidate for governor and longtime adviser to Terry Branstad. Gross has become a polarizing figure in Iowa politics — and public enemy No.1 for many grassroots conservatives and evangelical Christians — for calling on the Republican Party of Iowa to be more inclusive and focus less on social issues.

Jonathan Narcisse, right, talks with then candidate Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign (submitted photo).

But even though he’s running in the Democratic primary and worked hard for Culver’s 2006 campaign and Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential bid, Narcisse’s ties to the Democratic Party have always been tenuous at best.

His ideology doesn’t mesh well with the liberal-conservative labels that dominate politics today, a fact Narcisse is always happy to point out. His philosophy is probably best described as an equal mix of religious conservatism and economic populism, something Narcisse said has gotten him warm receptions from Tea Party activists and organized labor — two groups that he thinks could form the base of his constituency.

“When you travel this state you realize that even though Iowans may see different paths to the same destination, we really are focused on the same destination,” he said in an interview with The Iowa Independent. “We want accountable government. We want a prosperous economy. We want equity. We want a great education system. The difficulty has been achieving that. So we end up in these [Democrat and Republican] camps that keep us in constant turmoil while the political class serves the same greedy if not corrupt masters.”

He rails against “corporate welfare” and a bloated bureaucracy that is choking Iowa’s education system. He advocates for a complete overhaul of Iowa’s prison system that stresses rehabilitation and restitution.

But his social conservative credentials are not in doubt. He opposes abortion, believes marriage should be between one man and one woman and thinks the Iowa Supreme Court’s decision legalizing same-sex marriage was an example of a court overstepping its bounds. Over the years, the newspapers that he has published have always refused money from gambling, liquor, tobacco or “sexually oriented” businesses.

But Narcisse, 46, doesn’t want to get bogged down in the type of divisive politics currently gripping the Republican Party, where candidates have to outdo each other in their opposition to same-sex marriage.

“I want to end the era of single-issue politics. Put marriage, abortion, capital punishment and legalization of marijuana on the ballot,” he said. “Let Iowans decide, and once Iowans decide, it’s over.”

And what if Iowans choose a path he disagrees with?

“If Iowans are making the decision, we live with the outcome and move on,” he said.

And so he begins his journey to knock out a one-term governor he helped get elected. But whether he wins or loses in June, Narcisse will be on the November ballot — either as a Democrat if his challenge is successful or an independent if it is not.

Money and politics

Narcisse has no shortage of big ideas for state government. But the cornerstone, he said, is taking on the powerful and vested interests that have dominated Iowa politics for too long.

“If we end the era of corporate welfare, if we end the era of literally seeing politicians voting monies to their friends and buddies and supporters, we can have small, accountable, transparent government,” he said. “We can have a low-tax, free market economy while also funding things like great education and compassion. It’s not an either or.”

That’s the key, he said, to doing everything else he hopes to do as governor.

“The reason we don’t focus on the issues I talk about is because politicians have been purchased to focus on certain issues,” he said, adding: “We need meaningful campaign finance reform.”

Narcisse said he’ll put his money where his mouth is and refuses to accept donations from out-of-state political action committees. He also promises on day one of his administration to take on powerful interests in state government and work to make the system more fair.

“We must get away from the trickle-down economics that have been advocated by both parties, that have given money to Microsoft and Google hoping that somehow they create money that filters down to the rest of us,” he said. “We must understand that the way to grow Iowa is by letting Iowa stimulate Iowa. High-paying jobs and low working class taxes.”

Narcisse proposes eliminating taxes on any income earned after 40 hours of work in a given week, a proposal he said would benefit those forced to work long hours just to stay afloat. He also wants to lower the regressive sales tax to three percent by 2014 and eliminate many tax subsidies and credits for business.

“Do we really want to tax grandma to death, tax working moms to death, tax the middle class to death while we create all these loopholes for people who can afford lobbyists?” he said. “Think about it, we offered money to Bill Gates and Google… these are billionaires. Meanwhile people working 40, 50, 60 hours a week are taxed to death and are bearing the burden of taxes in this state.”

Education bureaucracy

Narcisse has dedicated more time to education reform than probably any other issue, and it is the area where his campaign’s message goes into the most detail. He said he can demonstrate how the state can afford to pay for a child’s education, from pre-school through college, with the revenues that currently exist. The first step, he says, is dramatically cutting the education bureaucracy.

“We’re spending hundreds of millions to a billion dollars or more lining the pockets of folks who make six or seven figures who could care less about our kids,” he said.

He wants to eliminate superintendents and much of the services that are duplicated district by district across the state. He also wants to eliminate many of the positions in the Department of Education that don’t directly relate to educating students. Then train school boards to do what they should doing, which he says is run a district, and spend most of the money invested in education at the building level and in the classroom.

“This would reduce class sizes and increase teacher pay,” he said. “There is not a teacher in this state who should walk into a building making less than $50,000 to $60,000 a year in our public schools. But we’ve pumped that money into administration. Only a fraction of our education money actually makes it to the classroom.”

There would even be enough money to pay for college tuition for Iowans, but it wouldn’t be free. Students would have to pledge to community service during their summer breaks, and for each year of college the state paid for, they would have to live and work in Iowa after graduation.

Outsider campaign

Whether or not Narcisse is successful during the Democratic primary, he sees it as a chance to build his name recognition and form a statewide network for the fall campaign. He assumes the Republicans will nominate former Gov. Terry Branstad, but will happily take on whomever emerges.

Steve Deace, a controversial Christian radio host who has been friends with Narcisse for many years, said the Branstad-Culver matchup would give Narcisse his best shot at victory.

“That race, based on what we’ve seen from Branstad at this point, would represent the old status quo versus the new status quo, and in this anti-incumbent atmosphere an insurgent candidate like Narcisse, who is very smart about how state government works, could appeal to the disaffected bases on both sides,” he said, adding that Narcisse’s campaign would bring in “minorities and union workers on the left” and “Christian conservatives and small business owners on the right.”

But if Bob Vander Plaats emerges from the GOP primary, Deace said it would be very difficult to dislodge the Christian conservative base from the Republican Party in the fall.

Narcisse admits his campaign is facing long odds. He knows he’ll have to raise millions just to be competitive, and the two-party system makes it difficult for any independent, regardless of political philosophy. But he remains confident and believes Iowans are looking for a new type of leader in 2010, and if nothing else, his campaign will advance ideas that would otherwise be ignored.

Westboro Baptist Church, run by Fred Phelps and predominantly attended by members of his family, announced on its Web site that it will protest at Graceland University, a school with strong religious ties. The protest is scheduled for Friday, March 5, and will be held in conjunction with a production of “The Laramie Project” by Graceland’s Theatre Department.

The play recounts the reaction to the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Members of the Phelps family are depicted in the play for picketing Shepard’s funeral.

Below is a portion of the announcement for the protest from the church’s event schedule:

… Yes, that is what this nation needs, more pushy loud-mouthed women yip-yapping lies about Matthew Shepard. What part of SHUT UP do you silly women NOT understand? Listen up women, if not for you Matt would not be in hell – right now! You did that, and instead of being ashamed, you sin more and more behind it. Our message for Lamoni, and DOOMED american theatre troops is this: Matt Is In Hell! God Hates Fags! God Hates Fag Enablers! You will eat your babies! Bloody Obama! Hell Is Real – Ask Matt! Judy Sent Matt To Hell! That is correct, if not for that disobedient woman lying to the little boy. I say, if she and her capon (now divorced from him) husband had one time told little Matthew some truth from the Bible – he would be alive To Day! …

Although the group had scheduled a protest a production of the play by Theatre Cedar Rapids earlier this year, none of the family members showed up. There were, however, several hundred individuals who turned out for a counter-protest and to show their support for marriage equality in Iowa.

As The Iowa Independent has previously reported, members of Westboro Baptist have protested the Iowa Jewish Historical Society (because “history says Jews killed Jesus”) and Marshalltown Community Theater. The group also protested at the funeral of a fallen Iowa soldier.

Jan Mickelson

Mickelson was addressing a fundraiser for the Iowa Family Policy Center. The influential social conservative organization has formally endorsed Vander Plaats’ campaign and vowed to sit out the November election if he’s not the candidate.

“Personally, I think two guys pretending to be sexual mates are making a mistake,” he said. “More than that, they are violating the design of their bodies. More than that, they are sinning against their maker. More than that, they are likely to shorten their lives in this world and impair their destinies in the next.”

In opposing gay rights, many conservatives point to studies conducted by the Family Research Institute that contend that homosexual men have a life expectancy that is 20 years shorter than heterosexual men. The studies, however, have been overwhelmingly rejected, and as critics have repeatedly pointed out, the methods used were extremely flawed. They relied on obituaries published in gay newspapers over a 12 month period and compared them to obituaries from general circulation newspapers.

Many of the group’s studies were originally published in the journal Psychological Reports, which unlike many scientific journals, charges a fee to authors for publication and does not reject an article on the basis of a negative peer review.

Dr. Gregory Herek, a professor at the University of California-Davis, said the study was “a textbook example of the perils of using data from a convenience sample to generalize to an entire population,” concluding the research was “absolutely worthless for estimating the life expectancy of gay men and lesbians.”

John Karon of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was asked about it and pointed out the obvious: “You’re only getting the ages of those who die.” Gay men of the generation targeted by the youth-oriented gay press who do grow old would not be included in the study’s sample.

Conservatives also point to a study published in 1997 by the International Journal of Epidemiology as evidence of homosexuality shortening a person’s life span. In light of all the attention their study was receiving from anti-gay groups, the study’s authors felt compelled to speak out in order to keep “homophobic groups” from misinterpreting their research simply to restrict “the human rights of gay and bisexuals rather than promoting their health and well being.”

Mickelson quickly turned his attention to the current situation in Iowa, saying that because a “a liberal court, a liberal legislature and a liberal governor” are standing up for same-sex marriage, groups like the Iowa Family Policy Center, and candidates like Vander Plaats, must resist.

“I’m really up for it,” Mickelson said. “I’m really up for this ruckus.”

Vander Plaats has promised that, if elected governor, he will issue an executive order to overturn the Iowa Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage. Constitutional scholars, and even many of his fellow Republicans, have dismissed the idea as unconstitutional. Even Vander Plaats has admitted it would likely lead to his impeachment.

Conservative blogger Craig Robinson posted video of Mickelson’s speech.

Republican Bob Vander Plaats addresses the crowd after being endorsed by the Iowa Family Policy Center last month (photo by Jason Hancock/Iowa Independent).

The Sioux City Republican, who has garnered an endorsement and seemingly unprecedented loyalty from at least one influential conservative religious group based largely upon his stance against same-sex marriage, said candidly that, to him, “the vote on the issue is the secondary issue.”

His focus now, and if he becomes the next governor of Iowa, he said, will be to act within the authority of his office to hold the other branches of government to their boundaries as outlined in the state constitution.

“The primary issue is holding a court in check,” he said. “You have a court that over-stepped its bounds to legislate from the bench, execute from the bench and amend the constitution from the bench. If you continue to allow a Supreme Court to go in that fashion, every one of your freedoms are up for grabs. That’s when you hand off tyranny and not liberty to the next generation.”

Although Vander Plaats has repeatedly promised that, if elected as governor, he would sign an executive order to end same-sex marriage in the state, the example he chose to illustrate a branch of Iowa’s government acting outside of its role was the 2005 executive order signed by former Democratic Gov. Tom Vilsack that reinstated voting rights for felons who had completed their sentences. But in using this example, Vander Plaats did not get the facts of the legal battle correct.

“Just like, if you guys will recall, Tom Vilsack issued an executive order to allow felons to vote. The governor doesn’t get to make that law. The legislature gets to make that law,” Vander Plaats said. After a brief pause to deflect an interruption by a reporter, he continued, “Steve King then sued the governor and won the issue on that, and he had to rescind that executive order.”

Although the executive order signed by Vilsack was legally challenged, the suit was filed and argued by Muscatine County Attorney Gary Allison. Roughly four months after the executive order had been signed, the court ruled that Vilsack possessed the authority to issue the order. The executive order was never rescinded, remains in effect and is included in constituency information on the current state Web site.  When asked by the Associated Press shortly after the decision whether he would appeal the court’s ruling upholding Vilsack’s executive order, Allison said, “The judge has the right to rule and we have the right to disagree with that ruling. But we respect the process in which the ruling was made.”

What Vander Plaats might have been referring to is the 2007 lawsuit King and others filed against the state in connection with the English-language law he introduced while serving in the state senate.

King’s complaint, which focused on several forms printed in foreign languages by the Iowa Secretary of State (an office held at the time of the lawsuit by Gov.-elect Chet Culver), was validated by the courts in April 2008. Michael Mauro, who was the Secretary of State-elect at the time the suit was filed, ultimately had to stop using the forms. No executive order, however, was a subject of that lawsuit.

Vander Plaats has faced criticism from constitutional scholars and members of his own party for advocating that a governor can and should issue an executive order in opposition to the Iowa Supreme Court’s ruling that struck down the legislature’s earlier definition of marriage.

The court-approved order signed by Vilsack, however, only sought to address an issue that had long been under the auspices of the executive branch. It was not written in an attempt to address or question a different branch of Iowa government.

“Although I believe that marriage is one man, one woman and the foundation of our society, the key issue is the separation of powers,” he said. “What you had on April 3 is a court that went out of its jurisdiction. When that happens, you need to have a governor that will institute his executive role and hold a court in check.”

In that respect, the Iowa Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage may not be the only incident where Vander Plaats, if he were governor, would flex the executive authority of his office to right a perceived wrong. Although he did not provide a specific example or issue when asked to do so, Vander Plaats made clear that he believed the executive branch should stand against any decision that it feels usurps the separation of powers.

“[R]egardless of whether I agree or disagree with that opinion, I need to make sure that the proper process is followed,” he said.