[courtesy of California Progress Report]

In this week’s Democratic weekly radio address, Assemblymembers Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) and Lloyd Levine (D-Woodland Hills) explain why the California Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision is an important civil rights victory that all Californians can celebrate.

You may listen in English or Spanish or read the transcript below.

Hello, this is Assemblyman Mark Leno.

Last week, the California Supreme Court said that denying marriage licenses to lesbian and gay couples is unconstitutional.

I applaud and strongly support our state’s highest court in their decision supporting equal treatment of every Californian under the law.

In their historic ruling, the Justices underscored what all human beings have in common, regardless of their sexual orientation -- and that is the desire to love another human being in an intimate and committed fashion.

I along with my colleagues have worked to pass marriage equality legislation twice in the pass several years, only to see it vetoed.

by DFA Staff [courtesy of Blog for America]

Bilal Hussein is an Associated Press photographer who has been held in United States custody in Iraq for over two years. He has been convicted of no crime and never placed on trial. On Monday, he got a little good news, the AP reports:

An Iraqi judicial committee has dismissed terrorism-related allegations against Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein and ordered him released nearly two years after he was detained by the U.S. military.

Hussein, 36, remained in custody at Camp Cropper, a U.S. detention facility near Baghdad's airport.

He is still in military custody and there is no indication of when or if he will be freed.

"Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice." -- Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Danny
Communications Director

by DFA Staff [courtesy of Blog for America]

Martin Luther King, Jr.
January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968

Use this thread to talk about Rev. King: what he meant to you; where you were when you found out he was assassinated; how his work changed your life.

Danny
Communications Director

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

"I am in Birmingham because injustice is here....Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King (from "Letter from a Birmingham Jail")

By Marty D. Omoto
Director/Organizer
California Disability Community Action Network

[courtesy of The California Majority Report]

I returned from the state Democratic Convention today with a number of impressions. One inspiring sight was a new modern graphic showing Democratic icons on the screens of the main hall with sharp facial features shown in linear shadow. Of course, Senators Clinton and Obama were pictured, as were Thomas Jefferson, Bobby Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and César Chavez. As a gay man, the one that spoke to me most though was the late San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk.
 
It’s amazing a city supervisor lives in a pantheon with Jefferson, Johnson, and Kennedy. But, I couldn’t help feeling Harvey wouldn’t have liked what he saw in the Senate District Three fight if he were alive today. "Harvey pushed the system" is how Carole Migden summed him up in Ken Yeager’s Trailblazers, a book portraying lesbian and gay political pioneers, including Migden herself. Milk challenged the electoral establishment to include women, ethnic minorities, and marginalized people like himself.

There's more...

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Mary Lyon

"I may not get there with you..."

So said Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., once upon a time, talking about a figurative Promised Land that he himself would indeed never reach. It was a Moses reference, with the Promised Land in this case being the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave - in its most perfect form, evolved, open, transcendent, every inch the land of opportunity for ALL - not just those well-heeled, well-positioned, or exclusively white-skinned. It was a portrait of a Promised Land that he envisioned for everyone in the dream he had for America.

Moses never made the transition to the Biblical Promised Land with his people. It was left to Joshua to lead the Israelites there. Perhaps we in early 21st-Century America have our own latter-day Joshua, finally? Or at least the hint of one?

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Sharon Kyle and Dick Price

America needs a Democrat in the White House who can transform our country for years to come the way Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy once did. We believe Barack Obama can best unite, inspire, and transform America and here’s why.

Since the advent of Ronald Reagan’s “Smell the Coffee” Administration nearly three decades ago, through these last bitter days of George W. Bush’s dismal presidency, the Federal government has rested largely Republican hands, to America’s great detriment. For 20 of the past 28 years, a Republican has sat in the White House and until recently, Republicans also controlled Congress — where they still can and do blunt any real progress toward justice and equality with their invidious partisanship. Now, with Bush’s recent appointments, the increasingly ideological GOP controls the Supreme Court and with it much of the Federal judiciary.