Is Australia the Face of Climate Change to Come? In early 2012 once-in-a-century floods submerged swaths of Great Britain and Ireland, causing some $1.52 billion in damages. Then in June record-high temperatures in Russia sparked wildfires that consumed 74 million acres of pristine Siberian taiga. Months after that, Hurricane Sandy pummeled seven countries, killing hundreds and running up an estimated $75 billion in damages. Just this week, a tornado of virtually unheard of size and ferocity tore through a small city in Oklahoma, leaving 24 people dead.[[MORE]] Each of these one-off traumas was bad enough, wreaking havoc, but in Australia such events seem to be becoming commonplace. The Lucky Country has experienced a major spike in extreme weather in the past few years, with a string of devastating incidents just since January. That has people wondering if the island continent is somehow a perfect bellwether for the Earth’s changing climate. So scientists are bearing down on the problem with intensity, investigating Australia’s increasingly violent weather patterns and trying to figure out what they might portend for the rest of the world as our climate changes. So Hot Even the Summer Got Angry The rough-hewn sandstone buildings perched atop Observatory Hill have been keeping an eye on Sydney Harbor since 1858. They’ve pretty much seen it all—from the installation of the city’s first gaslights to the construction of the now iconic Sydney Opera House and Harbor Bridge. But at 2:55 p.m. on January 18, 2013, meteorological equipment in the observatory registered something new: a read-out marking the hottest day in the city’s history: 45.8°C (114.4°F). Much of the continent was languishing in the grip of a heat wave that would break 123 heat and flood-related records in 90 days—among them, the hottest summer on record and the hottest seven consecutive days ever recorded. At the time these statistical dramas, and their possible significance, paled against the imperative of not self-combusting on your walk from office to car. At the Pink Roadhouse in the outback town of Oodnadatta—whose locals are legendary for the stoicism with which they have long dealt with living in Australia’s hottest town—temperatures pushed so high that gasoline vaporized before it even made it into the fuel tank. “The ground, the building, everything is so hot, you walk outside and you feel it’s going to burn you,” Lynnie Plate, the exhausted owner of the establishment, told a reporter at the time. The national record of 50.7°C (123.2°F) set in Oodnadatta in January 1960 stayed intact, just barely. Australians love their summer heat. They take particular joy in mocking British tourists for the magenta hue they often acquire after even a mild day at the beach. Because winter and summer temperature variations aren’t all that great in much of Australia, Aussies, unlike the Brits, are habitually accustomed to heat that might melt lesser mortals. But when 8 of the 21 days in the last 102 years on which Australia averaged a high of more than 39°C (102°F) happened to occur in 2013, people weren’t charmed. The anomaly stood out. Numbers like those break through what climate scientists like David Jones, manager of climate monitoring prediction at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, call the “signal to noise” ratio. “One of the first places on the planet where the global warming signal is easy to discern is actually Australia, because of this low temperature variability,” Jones said. “And that’s exactly what we’re seeing. The Australian warming trend is very clearly apparent in our records. It pops out quite quickly from the background noise of weather patterns.” But just what does that breaking through the noise tell us? Apparently, it says not to expect things to calm down any time soon. A Continent-Size Canary? On January 26, before the heat wave was even over, the second round of devastating flooding since 2011 was battering Queensland. The remnants of Tropical Cyclone Oswald lashed the country’s east coast, killing six people and costing about $2.5 billion in damages. Military helicopters were sent into the city of Bundaberg to evacuate stranded residents as the streets churned with water, debris, and sewage.    It could have been worse—in 2011 similar floods killed more than 30 people and chalked up a $2.4 billion tab. Tropical cyclones have always been a reality of life here, but the sheer intensity of these storms shocked the country. Once upon a time, once-in-a-century flooding meant just that, but these days the term seems to be shorthand for a really bad flood. Higher ocean surface temperatures caused by the spiraling heat results in more evaporation. And an atmosphere loaded with water vapor means more and heavier rain. Climate scientists have long been reluctant to link individual extreme weather events to climate change—something that’s impossible to do with any scientific rigor. They’ve also been loath to speak in the aggregate about a connection. That reluctance, however, is starting to disappear. In early March the Australian government’s climate change watchdog, the Climate Commission, released a bombshell of a report called “The Angry Summer.” The report explicitly connects Australia’s recent spate of weather to climate change. Will Steffen, executive director of the Australian National University Climate Change Institute and the report’s author, reckoned that there was a one-in-five-hundred chance that natural variation had caused the recent extreme events. Although Steffen still isn’t willing to say that individual weather occurrences are the result of climate change, he suggests that collectively they do demonstrate a rapidly changing climate. He believes Australia is a unique environment in which to watch the change because it is already such a naturally extreme place. “We have such a range of different types of extreme events and climatic patterns that affect people,” Steffen said. “Examples being obviously sea-level rise, because we’re a coastal country; high-temperature events; bush fires; droughts and floods all at the same time. “So you’ve got the basket of the worst types of extreme weather events all being fairly prominent in Australia.” The blistering 2013 heat wave started out in the parched, largely empty, red center of the continent and spread to the east coast. Roughly 80 percent of Australians live within 30 miles of the coast, which means that all its major population centers are susceptible to sea-level rise, powerful storms, and flooding. If the death tolls we’ve already seen from the 2011 and 2013 floods are any indication of things to come, there will be no shortage of suffering as sea levels creep ever higher and megastorms batter the populated coastlines. “We seem to be on the firing line for a lot of this stuff,” Steffen said. “I think in terms of what actually matters for people and infrastructure, we could be the canary in the coal mine.” This is the main reason so much scientific brainpower in research institutes across Australia is being directed at studying weather and climate there, with massive funding support from the federal government. The Future Could Be Grim If Australia’s average temperatures rise by 0.6 to 1.5°C by 2030, and then by 1.0 to 
5.0°C by 2070, as predicted by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), extreme weather events may become the norm. To Steffen, the lineup reads like a shopping list for an Australian apocalypse: blistering heat waves spanning the entire continent, less rainfall and more droughts in the south and southwest, uncertain rainfall in the north, less snow, many more fires, more storms with heavy rainfall, and more frequent and intense cyclones. “The one-in-a-hundred-year flooding event is going to happen every year, or even a bit more often,” Steffen said. Soon after issuing its “Angry Summer” report, the Climate Commission issued a follow-up document: “The Critical Decade: Extreme Weather.” In the next ten years, it warns, Australians should expect more heat, bush fires, rainfall, droughts, and sea-level rise. It’s hard to think of another country on Earth that has to deal with such a range of extreme weather events. Even the United States, the place that scientists say is most comparable to Australia, has the twin saving graces of having neither a vast interior desert to trap heat nor ocean waters all around it to intensify the impact of rising seas and superpowered storms on population centers. Unfortunately for Australians, the Climate Commission fully expects to have a decade of extreme weather events to study on their behalf. “Stabilizing the climate,” the commissioners wrote, “is like turning around a battleship—it cannot be done immediately given its momentum. “When danger is ahead you must start turning the wheel now. Any delay means that it is more and more difficult to avert the future danger.”

Is Australia the Face of Climate Change to Come?

In early 2012 once-in-a-century floods submerged swaths of Great Britain and Ireland, causing some $1.52 billion in damages. Then in June record-high temperatures in Russia sparked wildfires that consumed 74 million acres of pristine Siberian taiga. Months after that, Hurricane Sandy pummeled seven countries, killing hundreds and running up an estimated $75 billion in damages. Just this week, a tornado of virtually unheard of size and ferocity tore through a small city in Oklahoma, leaving 24 people dead.

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Posted by Andrew, 8 hours agoNational Geographic
Google Search thinks “gayest” and “worst” are the same thing The complexities of creating and developing a search engine that provides the most appropriate and relevant results for an enquiry are often taken for granted when we enter a couple of vague terms and expect instantaneous answers to impossibly complicated questions.[[MORE]] Bing recently claimed in TV ads that it “can do anything better” than Google, and in one aspect at least, that appears to be the case. Google Search has picked up an unusual habit, in equating the word “gayest” with “worst” in its search results.  Search for “gayest apps”, and the top results returned discount any interpretation of the word “gayest” in reference to homosexuality, or even happiness, assuming instead that you were searching for the worst apps out there. BuzzFeed highlighted other examples, including searches for the “gayest trends” or the “gayest Disney movies”, which similarly interpreted the term in its pejorative sense.  This isn’t a new phenomenon; it seems that Google’s been spitting out results like this for at least the last couple of years. Google itself doesn’t view this as a problem, but rather a symptom of the way that people conduct searches online. As people have increasingly used ‘gay’ as a disparaging term to describe something in a negative way, Google Search has reacted accordingly. In a statement to BuzzFeed, a Google spokesperson said:  Google’s results, including where a search term is synonymized with another, are a reflection of content on the web and how people search. These results are determined by algorithms and we don’t manually correct this process, but we are always looking at how we can improve our algorithms.” So don’t expect this to change any time soon. It’s also worth noting that searching for “gayest apps” on Bing includes “The 15 Worst iPhone Apps” at number 5 on its results - so while Bing isn’t quite so negative when it comes to interpreting the word “gayest”, it wouldn’t be fair to say that it’s an issue that’s exclusive to Google. Still, as Huffington Post observed, Google’s search algorithms don’t discriminate when it comes to dishing out results that some might view as inappropriate. During the 2012 US Presidential race, Google users searching for “Santorum” found that the first result didn’t take them to Rick Santorum’s campaign homepage, but rather to another website entirely, which defined his surname as “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex”, with a photo of the former senator below.

Google Search thinks “gayest” and “worst” are the same thing

The complexities of creating and developing a search engine that provides the most appropriate and relevant results for an enquiry are often taken for granted when we enter a couple of vague terms and expect instantaneous answers to impossibly complicated questions.

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Posted by Andrew, 17 hours ago

Rumsfeld suggests gay marriage could lead to polygamy

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggests in a new interview with Larry King that legalizing gay marriage could one day lead to polygamy.

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Posted by Andrew, 1 day agoWashington Post
United Nations: World is On Course to Run Out of Water The world is on a crash course to run out of freshwater, according to United Nation’s Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. At yesterday’s UN’s International Day of Biological Diversity, Ban Ki-moon addressed a number of the water security issues facing the planet today. Only a small amount of water on earth is freshwater, and the Secretary General reinforced that there is a delicate relationship between water and biodiversity.[[MORE]] Water and Biodiversity was the theme of yesterday’s program as it coincides with this year’s designations the International Year of Water Cooperation. “We live in an increasingly water insecure world where demand often outstrips supply and where water quality often fails to meet minimum standards. Under current trends, future demands for water will not be met,” Ban Ki-moon said. It has been found that water, food, energy and climate are all linked together, and Ban’s presentation outlined the challenges that we face as climate change impacts the availability of water for our growing population. It is our responsibility to protect the biodiversity present in our ecosystems in order for our supply of water to be preserved. Forests help to protect water quality and supply in our water tables, wetlands can reduce flooding, and the diversity of soils throughout our farmlands can help to hold water. Ban went on to talk about how important thinking of water in our future developments and planning. “Integrating nature-based solutions into urban planning can also help us build better water futures for cities, where water stresses may be especially acute given the rapid pace of urbanization,” he said.

United Nations: World is On Course to Run Out of Water

The world is on a crash course to run out of freshwater, according to United Nation’s Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. At yesterday’s UN’s International Day of Biological Diversity, Ban Ki-moon addressed a number of the water security issues facing the planet today. Only a small amount of water on earth is freshwater, and the Secretary General reinforced that there is a delicate relationship between water and biodiversity.

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Posted by Andrew, 1 day agoinhabitat.com
Boy Scouts Vote To Admit Openly Gay Members The Boy Scouts of America has agreed for the first time to allow openly gay boys as members, but a vote of the organization’s National Council left in place a ban on gay Scout leaders.[[MORE]] The Associated Press reports that of the local Scout leaders voting at their annual meeting in Texas, more than 60 percent supported the proposal. The policy change approved by the 1,400-member National Council would take effect Jan. 1, 2014, the organization said. Here’s a statement issued by the BSA after the vote: “For 103 years, the Boy Scouts of America has been a part of the fabric of this nation, with a focus on working together to deliver the nation’s foremost youth program of character development and values-based leadership training. “Based on growing input from within the Scouting family, the BSA leadership chose to conduct an additional review of the organization’s long-standing membership policy and its impact on Scouting’s mission. This review created an outpouring of feedback from the Scouting family and the American public, from both those who agree with the current policy and those who support a change. … “The resolution also reinforces that Scouting is a youth program, and any sexual conduct, whether heterosexual or homosexual, by youth of Scouting age is contrary to the virtues of Scouting. A change to the current membership policy for adult leaders was not under consideration; thus, the policy for adults remains in place.” As Reuters reports, the National Council’s decision came amid intense lobbying by gay-rights activists and members of conservative organizations. The group GLAAD praised the Scouts’ decision: “Today’s vote is a significant victory for gay youth across the nation and a clear indication that the Boy Scouts’ ban on gay adult leaders will also inevitably end,” said GLAAD spokesperson Rich Ferraro. “The Boy Scouts of America heard from religious leaders, corporate sponsors and so many Scouting families who want an end to discrimination against gay people, and GLAAD will continue this work with those committed to equality in Scouting until gay parents and adults are able to participate.” As NPR’s Kathy Lohr reported on Wednesday: “The most recent debate over the [no gays] policy began in January. One idea was to allow local troops to decide whether to allow gay members. Some conservative organizations objected. So the Boy Scouts conducted a survey and came up with the latest proposal, which would allow openly gay youth to participate. For the past couple of months, groups have been lobbying, protesting and threatening to leave the group if the proposal passes.” Update at 7:15 p.m. ET. Conservative Groups Disappointed “We are deeply saddened,” Frank Page, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s executive committee, was quoted by the AP as saying after learning of the result. “Homosexual behavior is incompatible with the principles enshrined in the Scout oath and Scout law.” The Assemblies of God, another conservative denomination, said the policy change “will lead to a mass exodus from the Boy Scout program.”

Boy Scouts Vote To Admit Openly Gay Members

The Boy Scouts of America has agreed for the first time to allow openly gay boys as members, but a vote of the organization’s National Council left in place a ban on gay Scout leaders.

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Posted by Andrew, 1 day agoNPR
Tornadoes and Global Warming: Is There a Connection? It sounds intuitive: Of course global warming should lead to more—and more powerful—tornadoes.[[MORE]] We’re adding energy to the atmosphere by trapping heat with greenhouse gases, and tornadoes are the very picture of terrifying atmospheric energy. Linking any particular weather event to climate change is always tricky, because weather is inherently random. But weather patterns can speak to a warming planet. Scientists can detect that extreme rain events, for instance, are already happening more often than they used to, and that a warmer atmosphere with more water vapor in it is making such events more likely. Tornadoes are different. Global warming may well end up making them more frequent or intense, as our intuition would tell us. But it might also actually suppress them—the science just isn’t clear yet. Neither is the historical record. There is no real evidence that tornadoes are happening more often. A lot more are being recorded now than in 1950, but a closer look at the data shows the increase is only in the weakest category, EF-0. There’s been no increase in stronger twisters, and maybe even a slight decrease in EF-4s and EF-5s. That suggests we’re just spotting more of the weak and short-lived tornadoes than we did back when the country was emptier (the U.S. population in 1950 was less than half what it is now), we didn’t have Doppler radar, and Oklahoma highways weren’t jammed with storm-chasers. There is also no evidence that tornadoes have gotten more damaging, according to a study by Roger Pielke, Jr., of the University of Colorado and his colleagues. Even so, when you allow for inflation and increases in population and wealth in the United States, 2011 becomes the third worst year for tornado damage, after 1953 and 1965. When National Geographic magazine asked “What’s Up With the Weather” in a cover story last September, we put a tornado photo on the cover and six pages of twister pictures inside—including a large shot of the swath of destruction that an EF-4 tornado cut through Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 2011, killing 64 people there and in Birmingham. But as writer Peter Miller made clear in that story, intuition is not a reliable guide to tornadoes. Two Opposing Forces Since we’re changing the climate, the historical record is no more certain a guide to the future than intuition is. So what does physics tell us about the future of tornadoes in a CO2-warmed world? “It really comes down to two ingredients in the atmosphere, in the environment in which storms form,” says Jeff Trapp, an atmospheric scientist at Purdue University. Trapp has been on the road in Kansas and Oklahoma since last week, launching weather balloons into supercells—large, tornado-producing thunderstorms—as part of an effort to improve forecasting. He was 20 or 30 miles away from Moore when the tornado hit on Monday. The first ingredient needed to make a tornado, he explains, is energy in the form of warm, moist, unstable air. In Oklahoma, that comes on southerly winds off the Gulf of Mexico. The second ingredient is wind shear—a measure of how much the wind changes speed and direction between the ground and higher levels of the atmosphere. “Essentially that’s determined by the strength of the jet stream,” which blows in from the west, says Trapp. Wind shear causes the warm, rising air inside a supercell to start rotating, a necessary condition for organizing the storm and allowing it to spawn funnel clouds. And that gets at the nub of the question surrounding a potential nexus between warming and tornadoes: Although climate change is increasing the energy in the atmosphere, it’s also expected to reduce wind shear. That’s because the jet stream is powered ultimately by the temperature difference between Earth’s hot tropics and its cold poles, and that difference is decreasing with climate change, as the poles warm faster than the rest of the planet. So the same phenomenon that is rapidly melting the Arctic ice cap and marooning polar bears could lead to a weaker jet stream and fewer tornadoes. But will it? Severe thunderstorms can happen even when wind shear is lower, says Trapp. “Really it’s the product of the two ingredients that matters most,” he says. The big question, which he and a small number of other climate scientists have been trying to answer with climate simulations, is what will happen to the product of energy times wind shear—to the two ingredients combined—as CO2 continues to warm the world. “What we find in the models,” Trapp says, “is there’s actually an increase in the product. The decrease in wind shear is more than compensated [for] by the increase in energy. This tells us that the number of days that support severe thunderstorms generically should increase.” Still, that’s just one study. And it says that the future environment should favor the storms that create tornadoes—but not necessarily tornadoes themselves. It’s possible that in the future, severe thunderstorms will tend to spend themselves in violent hail or in straight-line winds. Neither is a pleasant prospect, but neither packs the damage potential of tornadoes. Trapp is now at work on a study that will combine a global climate model with a local, high-resolution model, which will show tornadoes as if on a virtual radar screen. This new study may offer a glimpse of what the future has in store for Oklahoma and other parts of Tornado Alley. Meanwhile, he can say one thing with certainty: “The last several days in Oklahoma, both the wind shear and the energy have been incredibly large.”

Tornadoes and Global Warming: Is There a Connection?

It sounds intuitive: Of course global warming should lead to more—and more powerful—tornadoes.

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Posted by Andrew, 2 days agoNational Geographic
Think Obama’s In Trouble? That Depends On Your Party Public opinion about the scandals plaguing the Obama administration is decidedly mixed.[[MORE]] Republicans believe that the trio of controversies — concerning Benghazi, the IRS, and the Justice Department snooping on media phone records — are evidence enough that President Obama is either running a government motivated by partisan politics, or is badly out of touch. Democrats, however, are proving to be much more forgiving. “These things are being used for political purposes,” says Lois Yatzeck, a retired minister in St. Louis. “Obama’s political foes are taking advantage of it.” Yatzeck’s read on the situation is widely shared. Public opinion polls suggest that Republicans are paying much more attention to these matters and are much more likely to disapprove of Obama’s handling of them. Democrats, meanwhile, have been more steadfast in support. As a result, even as Congress and the rest of Washington have been consumed by these issues for more than a week, the president’s approval ratings have yet to take any noticeable hit. “Part of the issue is that people’s opinion of the president is already baked in,” says Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll. “These are rank-and-file Republicans and Democrats, not the leaders in Washington, and yet we found this very large gulf between them.” Consider The Source A walk along Delmar Boulevard reveals that many people are skeptical about the current trio of scandals — and whether they should even be considered scandals. The retail-and-restaurant stretch runs through University City, a heavily Democratic enclave just outside St. Louis, near Washington University. Some people there suggest that the current controversies represent opportunism on the part of Republicans and conservative media figures such as Rush Limbaugh. “It’s the same thing as always,” says bookseller Scott Bartlett. “The people I hear pointing fingers aren’t right about anything.” To the extent that there have been abuses, as with the IRS targeting conservative groups for heightened scrutiny, Bartlett and others along Delmar shrug it off as business as usual. Michael Kelley, a high school teacher in University City, says that he’s inclined to share Bartlett’s skepticism about Obama’s political opponents. “There’s no doubt that the other side of the aisle is taking every opportunity they have to take advantage of these things,” he says. But Kelley is troubled by some of the stories. He feels there are more questions yet to be answered, particularly in regard to the administration’s handling of the attack in Benghazi, Libya, last September. Still, Kelley says, “So far, I haven’t seen a trail lead back to the White House.” Not One Simple Scandal The fact that there are multiple controversies on the political radar helps to complicate matters. And these are not straightforward stories about sex or money-grubbing. There’s a lot of back and forth about these issues and their interpretation. Congressional Democrats may express outrage about the IRS, but in general they have been willing to cut Obama a good deal of slack, as was clear from their questioning of administration officials Tuesday in the Senate banking and finance committees. The public as a whole is more inclined to react strongly to scandals when leaders of both parties say there’s something serious to be upset about, says Adam Berinsky, an expert in public opinion at MIT. That’s not happening, so far. Even as more evidence comes to the fore, the minds of partisans may not be swayed by it, he says. That was the case in 1998, when Republicans impeached President Bill Clinton for lying about his affair with a White House intern. “People pick their teams and stick with them,” he says. It’s normal for partisans to defend the leader of their party and their party’s brand. What’s striking today, Berinsky says, is that so much more of the public thinks in strongly partisan terms than they used to, meaning presidential approval ratings barely budge in response to changing circumstances. “As with so many stories these days, it comes down to partisanship,” says Regina Lawrence, a journalism professor at the University of Texas who has studied reactions to scandals. “Partisan dynamics are so much stronger now even than they were during the Clinton years.” Should Have Known Better If you cross the Missouri River from St. Louis, you come into St. Charles County, one of the richest sources of Republican votes in the state. Most of the people walking along the brick-paved Main Street of the city of St. Charles are Republicans, and most of them are highly upset with Obama. “People should be outraged,” says dental hygienist Sylvia Stone. “People should be disturbed that Americans died in Benghazi, and they blamed it on a video that had nothing to do with it.” While Democrats like Kelley — and much of the media coverage — have been concerned with the question of how much the president knew, Republicans say ignorance is no excuse. “The president saying I learned about it in the press — you’re either incompetent or being dishonest,” says Bob Sutton, a retiree visiting St. Charles from Pennsylvania. He says he believes it’s the latter. Watch The Independents Obama was never going to gain much traction with either Sutton or Stone. Politically, he has to worry more about people like Robert Baker, a self-described independent. He voted for Obama last fall but is “terribly disappointed” in the proliferation of scandals that have broken since. “The president is our highest office, and we hold it to a higher standard,” says Baker. “Without knowing all the details yet, I would like to think he had his finger on what was going on around him, and it seems like he didn’t.” Baker worries that most people aren’t tuned in. “People tend to pay attention when it hits them in the pocketbook,” he says. Baker recently lost his job in the disaster restoration business, but he thinks most people are willing to cut the president some slack as the Dow Jones average rises and the economy picks up. “With unemployment getting better and the housing market getting better, people are getting lazy and not paying attention,” he says.

Think Obama’s In Trouble? That Depends On Your Party

Public opinion about the scandals plaguing the Obama administration is decidedly mixed.

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Posted by Andrew, 2 days agoNPR
Gay rights groups criticize decision not to add same-sex protections to immigration bill A decision by Senate Democrats not to add protections for same-sex couples to a landmark immigration reform bill has angered gay rights advocates and put the White House on the defensive over whether President Obama will insist on the provision going forward.[[MORE]] Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) agreed Tuesday night to withdraw an amendment to the immigration legislation that would allow foreign, same-sex spouses and partners to apply for visas after it became clear that fellow Democrats would vote against it to preserve Republican support for the bill. Several key gay rights groups did not accept that rationale, arguing that the issue was a matter of principle and fairness for the estimated 30,000 same-sex, binational couples that remain unable to unite in the country. They are currently barred from receiving a spousal visa under the federal Defense of Marriage Act. “Today it became clear that our so-called ‘friends’ don’t have the courage or the spine to stand up for what’s right,” said Felipe Sousa-Rodriguez, co-director of the GetEQUAL advocacy group. He added that Democratic lawmakers “are content to buy into the false choice that Republicans created — holding a sorely-needed immigration bill hostage in order to cement inequality into law.” Three Republicans joined the Judiciary Committee’s 10 Democrats in approving the immigration bill 13-5 and send it on to the full Senate, where Leahy could choose to reintroduce the gay rights protections. White House press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday that Obama supports the provision, but he declined to say whether the president would insist on it being added to the bill. Obama has told liberals privately that he understands a comprehensive immigration package will not contain all the elements he would like because it requires compromise with Republicans. The Associated Press, citing two unnamed sources, reported that Obama asked Leahy to hold off on the amendment until the bill emerged from the committee. The White House and Leahy’s office declined to comment on the report. Obama has “made clear that he supports that and would like to see Congress support that,” Carney said. “He’s also made clear that he doesn’t expect to get everything he wants in this bill.” Republicans who helped develop the package warned repeatedly that they would withdraw their support if the gay rights provision was added. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a member of the bipartisan coalition, cited opposition from the Catholic Church. “It would break the coalition in my view,” Graham warned Leahy. “You got me on immigration, you don’t have me on marriage. If you want to keep me on immigration, let’s stay on immigration.” Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), one of the bill’s lead negotiators, said late Tuesday that Republicans “made it perfectly clear in plain words and on multiple occasions that if this provision is added to the bill they will have no choice but to abandon our collective effort.” He called it “one of the most excruciatingly difficult decisions I’ve had to make in 30-plus years in public office.” Leahy said he withdrew the amendment “with a heavy heart.” Human Rights Campaign President Chad Griffin denounced the four Republicans in the bipartisan immigration group — Graham and Sens. John McCain (Ariz.), Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Jeff Flake (Ariz.). “It is deplorable that a small number of senators have been able to stand in the way of progress for lesbian and gay couples torn apart by discriminatory laws,” Griffin said. “We are extremely disappointed that our allies did not put their anti-LGBT colleagues on the spot and force a vote.” Some lawmakers hope that the Supreme Court, which is expected to rule on two gay marriage cases next month, will strike down the Defense of Marriage Act, thereby opening the door for same-sex couples to apply for visas.

Gay rights groups criticize decision not to add same-sex protections to immigration bill

A decision by Senate Democrats not to add protections for same-sex couples to a landmark immigration reform bill has angered gay rights advocates and put the White House on the defensive over whether President Obama will insist on the provision going forward.

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Posted by Andrew, 2 days agoWashington Post