TLDR News: Why The Supreme Court's Major LGBTQ Ruling Was so Shocking: What it Means for the Future

Yesterday the US supreme court made a major ruling in favour of LGBTQ+ rights. The decision was good news for activists, but it also represented a major surprise, with two conservatives justices siding with the four more liberal judges leading to a major 6-3 decision. In this video we explain what happened, the implications and why the move was such a shock.

FiveThirtyEight: The Latest Swing State Polls Look Good For Biden

In Michigan, the most notable result comes from long-time Michigan pollster EPIC/MRA, which found Biden up by 12 points in a poll conducted between late May and early June, 53 percent to 41 percent. For context, in 2016 the pollster never found Hillary Clinton with more than 47 percent in a single general election poll. However, in Wisconsin, Biden’s lead might not be that secure. The Marquette Law School Poll — often seen as the gold standard in the Badger State — had Biden up only 3 points in early May, 46 percent to 43 percent. Biden and Trump also ran about even in Pennsylvania, another pivotal state in 2016, which might seem at odds with the data from Michigan and Wisconsin. But unlike those states, Pennsylvania didn’t have any surveys from highly rated pollsters, and what they found was a bit noisy — two put Trump up by 4 to 5 points, while another put Biden ahead by 9 points. We wouldn’t read too much into this yet without higher quality polling, but the inconsistent results here could be evidence that Pennsylvania will remain competitive.

As for the polling picture in the Sun Belt states — Arizona, Georgia and Texas — they all seemed more or less in line with what you would expect, once you account for Biden’s lead in the national polls and how these states voted in 2016. But they do signal potential trouble for Trump. For instance, the fact that Trump carried Arizona by 3.5 points in 2016 seems to have been erased by Biden’s polling lead. On average, Biden led by 3 points, including a high-quality early June survey from Fox News that showed him up 4 points. In Georgia and Texas, on the other hand, Trump was still in the lead, by 1 and 2 points, respectively. Yet this is not as cushy of a margin as one would expect for Trump, considering he carried Georgia by 5 points and Texas by 9 points in 2016. If this trio of states are all in play — and Arizona is possibly even leaning Democratic — that would give Biden many additional paths to 270 electoral votes. [...]

There are two big takeaways here. One, Biden is in an enviable position in many of these battleground states. However, the second takeaway — which is the caveat we mentioned earlier — is that all of these battleground states save Michigan are more Republican-leaning than the national average. In other words, most of the states that will decide the presidential election are to the right of the country as a whole, and that speaks to Trump’s advantage in the Electoral College. Should Biden continue to hold a sizable lead, the chances of an Electoral College-popular vote split will probably be low. But if the polls get closer, the odds will increase because the eventual tipping point state is almost certainly among these eight states. But as it stands now, if Trump carries Arizona along with every state that’s more Republican-leaning in those recent polls, he would almost certainly win the presidency.

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Associated Press: States accused of fudging or bungling COVID-19 testing data

In Florida, the data scientist who developed the state’s coronavirus dashboard, Rebekah Jones, said this week that she was fired for refusing to manipulate data “to drum up support for the plan to reopen.” Calls to health officials for comment were not immediately returned Tuesday.

In Georgia, one of the earliest states to ease up on lockdowns and assure the public it was safe to go out again, the Department of Public Health published a graph around May 11 that showed new COVID-19 cases declining over time in the most severely affected counties. The daily entries, however, were not arranged in chronological order but in descending order. [...]

Guidelines from the Trump administration say that before states begin reopening, they should see a 14-day downward trend in infections. However, some states have reopened when infections were still climbing or had plateaued. States have also been instructed to expand testing and contact tracing.[...]

Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said a lot of these cases are not necessarily the result of any attempt to fool the public. For example, she said, states may not have updated information systems that allow them to tell the difference between an antibody test and a viral test.

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Vox: Marion Wilson was the 1,500th person executed in the US since 1976

Wilson is the 74th person executed in Georgia since 1976; the second person in Georgia executed in 2019; and the 10th person executed in the US in 2019. Texas has held the most executions, at more than 560 since 1976.

Yet the dwindling number of death sentences carried out in the US indicates that the option is no longer as popular. While there has been a slight rise in executions since 2016, when the number hit an all-time-low at 20 executions, there has been a general downward trend of executions since the early 2000s. There’s been a shift in public opinion on the issue, too: Support for the death penalty has gone from 80 percent in 1994 to 56 percent in 2018, according to Gallup.[...]

States are starting to reflect this shift their own sentencing policies: Most recently, New Hampshire became the 21st state to abolish the death penalty on May 30. While the other 29 states still leave death penalty as an option on the table, it is just a handful of states — Texas, Florida, Alabama, and Georgia — that practice it regularly.

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Los Angeles Times: States with the worst anti-abortion laws also have the worst infant mortality rates

States with the largest number of abortion restrictions such as mandatory waiting periods, counseling and ultrasounds; restrictions on insurance coverage for abortions in public or private health plans; and unnecessary standards on ambulatory abortion clinics tended to have the fewest number of supportive policies, the survey found. Those included Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act; family leave; sex- and HIV education programs; and good access to children’s health insurance programs. [...]

These statistics should give the lie to legislators’ arguments that their anti-abortion measures are somehow good for women’s health or aimed at protecting their rights. A 2017 study by the Center for Reproductive Rights and IBIS Reproductive Health, a healthcare think tank, found that hostility to reproductive rights tended to go hand-in-hand with a lack of state-level policies supporting women’s and infant health. [...]

Experts have connected the dots between abortion restrictions and maternal and infant health problems. Limits on access to legal abortions can prompt women to choose unsafe alternatives. Indeed, the reported rate of maternal deaths in Texas soared from 72 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2010 to 148 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2012, a trend that some experts attributed to the state’s closing of abortion clinics and cuts in funding for Planned Parenthood and other family planning services during the same period.

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Vox: The real reason streetcars are making a comeback (Aug 9, 2017)

 Starting in the late 20th century, modern streetcar proposals started rippling across municipalities in the United States. They’re touted as infrastructure carrying benefits ranging from the social to economic and the environmental. But these projects often make appearances in the news as costly, blunder-filled experiments in public policy.

Cities are willing to bet big on this technology for its potential to develop the local economy. But there is some disagreement as to whether the streetcar is driving this progress, or if it is simply the result of planning *around* the streetcar.

The Huffington Post: Trump Is Wreaking Havoc On Republican Governor Primaries

Trump hasn’t meddled in GOP Senate primaries, avoiding endorsements of controversial candidates and largely following McConnell’s lead. But it turns out Republicans were just worried about the wrong type of statewide race.

In recent weeks, Trump has turned GOP gubernatorial races into his own personal playground, endangering eight years of Republican dominance over the nation’s governor’s mansions. It culminated Tuesday night when Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer conceded to Trump-endorsed Secretary of State Kris Kobach and businessman Jeff Johnson defeated former Gov. Tim Pawlenty in Minnesota’s primary after hammering him over his criticisms of Trump in 2016.

Republicans control 33 of the nation’s governorships, a record. And the Republican Governors Association is a political heavyweight, regularly outraising its Democratic counterpart by a two-to-one margin. With Trump’s approval ratings in the low 40s and a high-energy Democratic base, Republicans were already expected to lose governorships in the fall, especially in blue-tinted states like Maine and New Mexico. Trump’s meddling in GOP primaries, along with Republican voters’ desire for candidates who ape Trump’s style, could expand those losses to swing states ― Florida and Minnesota ― and even into the red territory of Georgia and Kansas. [...]

It’s also possible Trump’s endorsement didn’t turn the tide in these contests. Most of the defeated candidates are the type of establishment politicians Republican voters have been tossing aside since the tea party movement began in 2010. In the secretly audiotaped words of Cagle, the Georgia primary came down to “who had the biggest gun, who had the biggest truck and who could be the craziest.”

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The New York Review of Books: Memories of Mississippi

In a few days, with advice and contacts from John, I went on to Nashville, Tennessee, then to the SNCC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, only to be told by the woman who opened the door that “everybody” was down in Albany. Rather than take a segregated seat on the Atlanta-Albany bus, with whites sitting in front, blacks in the rear, I stood. The only other person standing was a nattily dressed black man who suggested I not try to reach the colored half of town at night. That turned out to be Wyatt Tee Walker, one of Dr. King’s lieutenants. It was a hot and humid night, with bugs flying in the bright lights of the Albany Greyhound station. An overweight policeman stood in front of me as I stepped off the bus. [...]

Then I made one walk downtown too many. As I passed the small cinderblock Cleveland police station, an officer stepped out from the parking lot and pulled me inside. I sat across from the chief as he politely explained to me that “in order to engage in the practice of photography” in Cleveland I needed to post a $1,000 bond. He opened a book of ordinances and pointed to the line. Outside in the parking lot, the policeman who had pulled me in was waiting. Clearly agitated, he explained with deep emotion that “we don’t mix the races down here.” He was sweating and rocking back and forth. Bizarre as it sounds, Frank Smith had told me that if I got into trouble I should just say I was black. This was apparently a common SNCC ruse, but it escaped me that I was supposed to say that it was a black woman who numbered among my recent ancestors. “As a matter of fact,” I said, “my grandfather was colored.” The policeman went completely crazy, reached for the gun on his belt, and said he would kill me right there on the spot. I thought he meant it. [...]

When the summer project of 1964 started, bringing a thousand mostly white Northern college students into Mississippi, I didn’t particularly want to go. For one thing, there were now many other people photographing the movement. For another, I thought voter registration was a bore. I found direct action, sit-ins, and marches, all of which often led to arrests, more exciting to photograph. Then, on June 21, a week before the project started, two workers and a summer volunteer were spotted changing a flat tire outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi, and taken to jail while the sheriff gathered the Klan to plan their murder. James Chaney was a black Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) worker from Meridian. He died, along with his best friend, a professional organizer with CORE from New York City named Mickey Schwerner, and Andy Goodman, a Queens College student and summer volunteer who had been in the South two days. A black Southerner and two Jewish boys from New York were lynched for trying to register African Americans to vote in a state that had lost the Civil War—but won back the power over their former slaves twenty years later by denying the right to vote through terror.

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Vox: How Southern socialites rewrote Civil War history (Oct 25, 2017)

The United Daughters of the Confederacy was a significant leader of the “Lost Cause,” an intellectual movement that revised history to look more favorably on the South after the American Civil War. They were women from elite antebellum families that used their social and political clout to fundraise and pressure local governments to erect monuments that memorialized Confederate heroes. They also formed textbook review committees that monitored what Southern schoolchildren learned about the war. Their influential work with children created a lasting memory of the Confederate cause, and those generations grew up to be the segregationists of the Jim Crow Era in the South.

CityLab: City vs. State: The Story So Far

The “Fight For 15” movement is really about cities. By November 2016, Riverstone-Newell writes that nearly forty cities and counties had agreed to local increases in the minimum wage ranging from $8.50 to $15.75 an hour in states such as Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, New Mexico, Maryland, Washington, and Maine (plus Washington, D.C.). Right now, 29 states set a higher minimum wage than the federal government and Arizona, Colorado, Maine, and Washington passed statewide raises in 2016. [...]

The fight over sanctuary cities has pitted federal, state, and city officials against each other and is about to come to a head this year as federal funding is in jeopardy. The most prominent example of preemption might be Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott has already blocked $1.8 million in grant funding to Travis County over its sanctuary policy and signed a “super preemption” law last month aimed at punishing local officials who do not cooperate with immigration authorities. It is set to go into effect in September. A Florida bill would impose a $5,000 per day fine on sanctuary cities (and Miami-Dade County has already voted to end its status as a sanctuary city) and North Carolina has a bill pending to strip cities of a variety of revenue sources if they operate as a sanctuary city. Other states that enacted restrictions this year include Mississippi, Georgia, and Indiana. [...]

Cities are up against more than Trump. The GOP controls 33 governorships and both chambers in 32 state legislatures. State preemption laws seek to strip cities of their abilities not just to oppose the White House agenda but to forge policies that reflect the desires, beliefs and concerns of their own residents. State legislatures in the U.S. have long had an anti-urban bias—in 2013, a study I wrote about in CityLab found that bills sponsored by legislators from small or medium-sized cities were overall twice as likely to pass as those that originated in big cities like Chicago or New York.

Another hurdle for cities is the constitutional challenge that they are legally considered “creatures of the state.” Republicans narrowly advocate for states’ rights in the face of federal power, arguing that cities don’t have the right to challenge the state. But this misremembers the origin of rights—they belong to people. Here’s how an Ohio Republican state senator summed up his opposition to Cleveland’s minimum wage hike: “[W]hen we talk about local control, we mean state control.”

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Quartz: The simple reason so many US businesses openly support LGBT rights

The “competitive edge” pertains both to commodities and labor. Reflecting upon the hundreds of businesses that supported the marriage equality movement, Todd Sears, the founder of Out Leadership, explains how company cohesion and sustainability is linked to employee equality. “Businesses that had already adopted policies that treated every employee equally [prior to marriage equality in 2015] saw the negative effects of a state-based patchwork policy on marriage equality,” he said. “It complicated their strategies and made it more difficult to locate talent in states that lacked protections for married LGBT couples.” [...]

“We’re already seeing that businesses are standing up for equality when it comes to the Religious Freedom Restoration Acts and other discriminatory legislation that are rapidly proliferating in states around the country,” Todd observes. “In Indiana, opposition from the business community forced the government to back down from the RFRA they passed last year; in Georgia, Governor Deal listened to the voice of business and vetoed the bill that came before him.” [...]

Importantly, allies are also incredibly attentive to corporate treatment of the LGBT community. The Center for Talent Innovation’s 2016 report, Out in the World: Securing LGBT Rights in the Global Marketplace, found that “71% of LGBT individuals and 82% of allies say they are more likely to purchase a good or service from a company that supports LGBT equality.”

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