Breaking down the SCOTUS decision on marriage equality for your class - PBS NewsHour (blog)
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 PBS NewsHour (blog) |
Breaking down the SCOTUS decision on marriage equality for your class
PBS NewsHour (blog) In the case Obergefell v. Hodges, plaintiff James Obergefell argued that the state of Ohio should recognize his marriage to his partner. Obergefell and his husband John Arthur had married in Maryland in 2013, but moved to Ohio where their marriage was not ... and more » |
CARACAS (Reuters) - One hundred and twenty policemen have been murdered so far this year in Venezuela, one of the world's most violent countries, a local watchdog said on Friday.
After officially ending his fourth marriage to estranged millionaire wife, Sale Johnson, earlier this year, it appears Ahmad Rashad has moved on into the political arena of love.
According to the New York Post, the former NFL star-turned-sportscaster is reportedly dating President Obama’s Senior Advisor, Valerie Jarrett, who are said to be remaining mum about their relationship. And while Rashad’s manager and the White House have yet to respond to the news, a source revealed to the daily newspaper that the pair “haven’t gone out in public” and are “sneaking around.”
As for Rashad and Johnson’s broken marriage, the ex-couple, who wed in 2007, released a joint statement in February announcing their annulment.
"This process, while difficult, is and has always been amicable – despite erroneous press reports to the contrary – and we remain committed to jointly raising our daughter," they said. "We appreciate the respect of our privacy during this trying time."
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In every generation, Americans have wised up and embraced new dimensions of freedom: Equal rights for women, equal rights for African-Americans and now, with Friday’s monumental Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage, the full and equal rights of gays and lesbians.
This is America, a nation founded on the promise of a single word — freedom. This is our reason for being.
On Friday, the Supreme Court wrote the latest chapter, and it will be remembered as one of our nation’s greatest days. More than ever, the words ring true. We are a land of “freedom and justice for all.”
EDITORIAL
“Same-sex couples may now exercise the fundamental right to marry in all states,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the Court’s majority 5-4 opinion. “The limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples may long have seemed natural and just, but its inconsistency with the central meaning of the fundamental right to marry is now manifest.”
The 30 Americans who sued in this case, Kennedy wrote, simply “ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”
No new rights were granted on Friday, no special treatment was offered. That is the beauty of this decision. The court simply extended the rights that all other married couples currently enjoy. As Kennedy wrote, “It is demeaning to lock same-sex couples out of a central institution of the Nation’s society.”
In a thoughtful dissent, Chief Justice john Roberts argued that the court stepped in too early, short-circuiting the democratic process. A robust public debate on gay marriage was underway in public squares and state legislatures, he said, and it should have been allowed to run its course. The danger now, Roberts warned, is that the public won’t fully accept this new court-imposed freedom.
But fundamental freedoms can’t wait on politics. Should the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, not have ordered an end to racial segregation in Southern schools? If so, how much longer should black Americans have been asked to wait to attain their basic human rights?
Same-sex marriage is every bit as fundamental of a right, equally protected by the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Just how much longer did Justice Roberts think gay people should wait? And Friday’s ruling, far from defying public sentiment, followed in the footsteps of a swelling crowd.Marriage equality already was a reality in 37 states and Washington, D.C., covering more than 70 percent of the U.S. population.
The time, simply, had come. Push had come to shove.
“While the Constitution contemplates that democracy is the appropriate process for change, individuals who are harmed need not await legislative action before asserting a fundamental right,” Justice Kennedy wrote for the Court’s majority. “Especially against a long history of disapproval of their relationships, this denial to same-sex couples of the right to marry works a grave and continuing harm.”
We have traveled far as a nation. Millions of once hard-hearted Americans, in the span of a lifetime, have come to see gay people for what they are, naturally and perfectly fine — our brothers and sisters, our mothers and fathers, our friends and neighbors, ourselves. For this we own a debt of gratitude to a brave, fierce and determined gay rights movement.
Where once we were blind, Kennedy essentially said in his scholarly way, now we can see.
“The Court has recognized that new insights and societal understandings can reveal unjustified inequality within our most fundamental institutions that once passed unnoticed and unchallenged,” he wrote. “Changed understandings of marriage are characteristic of a Nation where new dimensions of freedom become apparent to new generations.”
We are a nation like no other, founded on the promise of freedom. It is our national calling. Expanding freedoms is as American as apple pie.
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Carol Felsenthal
What exactly does Valerie Jarrett—the Chicagoan often described as a big sister or mother figure to the Obamas—do in the White House? The instant histories of the Obama White House tend to portray her as the Obamas’ pit bull, a woman loyal only to the president, first lady and her own image. In a recent book on the 2012 campaign, Jonathan Alter writes that Rahm Emanuel, on agreeing to become Obama’s chief of staff, recognized that Jarrett would wield such outsized power that he tried unsuccessfully to finesse her into Obama’s senate seat. (Alter also speculates that Valerie Jarrett was one reason why Rahm hightailed it out of DC in late 2010 into the relative ease of the Fifth Floor.)
Others in media and Washington circles portray Jarrett, who held top positions in Chicago government and business, as a brilliant strategist and thinker who practically runs both wings of the White House and who did as much or more than anyone to put the Obamas there. In 1991, Jarrett, then Mayor Rich Daley’s deputy chief of staff, offered Michelle Robinson a job in City Hall. Before Michelle accepted, she insisted that Jarrett meet with Michelle’s fiancé Barack Obama. Jarrett promptly took both under her wing and, over the years, introduced Barack to the inner Daley circle, to wealthy business people, and to the people who mattered in her enclave, Hyde Park—all of which helped Obama as he moved up from community organizer to Springfield to Washington.
So which is it? Here are six pieces of conventional wisdom about Valerie Jarrett, 57, followed by, in my opinion, the reality.
1. Valerie Jarrett’s power in Obama’s White House stems from her position as senior adviser to the president.
Yes, she holds a conventional power position in the administration, carrying a portfolio that covers such issues as as how the administration can boost business in a down economy, implement programs to improve the lives of women and girls, develop better communication with state and local governments and other constituency groups.
The reality is that her power stems from friendship with the first couple, forged by after-hour access, total trust that her only motive is to protect the first couple’s images and advance their interests. Valerie Jarrett is not powerful because she creates and implements policy, but because she’s the last person the president and/or first lady talk to, sometimes over dinner in their private dining room. It was reportedly the Obamas who persuaded Jarrett not to pursue appointment to the President-Elect’s vacated U.S. senate seat, but instead to keep close to them in the White House.
She vacations with the first couple in Hawaii and on the Vineyard, and she can sometimes sound like their flac: Michelle is “fabulous at 50.” Barack is “just too talented to do what ordinary people do” (as quoted in David Remnick’s The Bridge). She decides who’s invited to small White House parties and state dinners.
Jarrett can save the jobs of people she likes, such as Attorney General Eric Holder, who faced calls for his ouster when he announced his decision to bring Kahlid Sheikh Mohammad to trial in New York. In advocating for Holder, she protected not just a personal favorite but one close to the Obamas as well—after she’d earlier announced that the couple wasn’t making new friends in DC. He kept his job, and is one of only two cabinet secretaries who will likely serve two full terms. Jarrett acquired the nickname “Eric’s appeals court.”
2. Jarrett has a record of success working for the President in the White House.
There’s always the historical analysis to come, but so far she is considered to have a spotty record, especially on the key portfolio item—serving as the administration’s liaison to business. Jarrett came to the White House with some impressive Chicago business credentials: CEO of The Habitat Company, a Chicago developer of housing ranging from luxury to public; chairman of the CTA; chairman of the board of the Chicago Stock Exchange; a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Yet, as the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank has written, “current and former White House officials … raised questions about Jarrett’s effectiveness and judgment.”
Politico’s Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei write that Obama’s “… relations with business leaders could hardly be worse.”
Politico’s Jeanne Cummings and Ben White have characterized the Obama White House’s “…relationship with the corporate world” as having “a sort of Mars-Venus quality to it. Business leaders say Obama simply doesn’t get them and has no one in the White House with corporate experience or who is steeped in the daily challenges of operating in a global economy.”
Jason Horowitz, then writing about Jarrett for the Washington Post, described “disgruntled Obama donors in the financial industry… [who] have cast Jarrett as insufficiently sophisticated on economic issues and incapable of brooking any dissent about Obama. `I have always thought she was a liability,’ said one prominent investor and donor…. `I’ve talked to people in the White House about it, and they have agreed with me, but they are scared to say anything.’”
It was, well, conventional wisdom, that Bill Daley was brought in as Rahm’s successor as chief of staff to clean up the administration’s messy relationships with business; perhaps understandably, Jarrett did not warm to Daley—and, according to Politico’s Glenn Thrush, “frequently shared her unflattering assessments with Obama.” Daley’s tenure as COS was short.
3. In Chicago, before the Obama presidency, Jarrett was widely admired for her skills in government and business.
In his latest book, Jonathan Alter writes that the oft-told story of Obama insisting on interviewing Jarrett before allowing his girlfriend to take a job in Daley’s administration did not “amuse” Rich Daley. According to Alter, Daley was no fan of Jarrett, finding her “indecisive as city planning commissioner” and refusing to promote her to chief of staff. Alter also writes that a CEO who visited the White House remarked, “When we go to the White House we talk to people we wouldn’t hire.”
In their book on the 2012 campaign, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann write that Wall Streeters “disparaged Obama’s team for lacking anyone with a meaningful background in the private sector. When Jarrett would huff, ‘Well I have one,’ they rolled their eyes; they considered her a political hack, ineffectual and entitled.”
4. Jarrett is a mother figure to other White House staffers, especially women.
She’s certainly that to Barack and Michelle: “I can count on someone like Valerie to take my hand and say, You need to think about these three things,” Michelle told the New York Times’ Jodie Kantor. “Like a mom, a big sister, I trust her implicitly.”
And she’s certainly that in her own mind: “And I try very hard to make sure that I am available to people here, particularly, I think, women often come to me. I am older than most of the people here, so I try to be a resource.”
Jonathan Alter’s reporting revealed someone quite different: “Staffers feared her, but didn’t like or trust her. At meetings she said little or nothing, instead lingering afterwards to express her views directly to the President, creating anxiety for her underlings and insulting them by saying, `I don’t talk just to hear myself talking.’”
Derogatory nicknames abound for Jarrett: “Keeper of the Essence,” “Night Stalker” (because of her access after hours to the Obamas in their private quarters), “personal custodian of the president’s lofty motives and gifts.” The latter comes from This Town author Mark Leibovich, who quotes from an apparently leaked memo titled “Magic of Valerie,” its 33 talking points circulated to White House staffers ahead of a New York Times Jarrett profile.
The memo cites as her “magic” qualities, “her intellect and her heart. She is an incredibly kind, caring and thoughtful person with a unique ability to pinpoint the voiceless and shine a light on them and the issues they and the President care about…. Valerie has an enormous capacity for both empathy and sympathy. She balances the need to be patient and judicious with the desire to get things done and work as hard as possible for the American people from the White House… Valerie is tapped in to people’s experiences, their good times and bad. …. Single mother, woman working to the top in a competitive male dominated world, African-American, working for change from the grassroots to big business…. Valerie is someone here who other people inside the building know they can trust. (need examples.)”
5. Jarrett’s dual role as the first couple’s best friend and their adviser is not particularly unusual in White House history.
The only White House adviser who comes close, personally and professionally, to matching Jarrett’s influence with both the President and First Lady is the FDR administration’s Louis Howe. Unlike Jarrett, Howe lived in the White House, but by then his power as an adviser had waned. He remained extremely close to both Franklin and Eleanor until his death in 1936 before Roosevelt finished his first term. According to University of Chicago political science professor Charles Lipson, “[Jarrett’s] position in the White House is unprecedented. No one has ever been a best friend and top adviser.”
6. On 1/20/17 Jarrett will hold the senior-adviser longevity record; she’ll turn off the lights in the White House and move on to another chapter in her life.
Jarrett will continue to harness her future to the Obamas’. Just as she helped with their transition to the White House, she’ll help with their transition out of it. She’ll be a key player in every aspect of the Obama Library and Museum, from pushing for it to be located at the University of Chicago, where she has deep ties, to helping to choose an architect, to raising money, to articulating and polishing the details of Barack Obama’s legacy.
As Jodie Kantor told me, “I don’t think Valerie’s ever leaving [the Obamas]. ….She has thrown her entire life into their cause, and she’s made it very clear that she would happily run in front of a speeding truck for them…. She has taken the president’s and First Lady’s success as the defining mission of her being.”
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Claim:
White House adviser Valerie Jarrett once said she seeks "to help change America to be a more Islamic country."
Example:[Collected via e-mail, January 2015]
Quoted from Valerie Jarrett:
"I am an Iranian by birth and of my Islamic faith. I am also an American Citizen and I seek to help change America to be a more Islamic country. My faith guides me and I feel like it is going well in the transition of using freedom of religion in America against itself."
Valerie Jarrett, Stanford University 1977
Origins:
Valerie Jarrett was offered a role as a White House Senior Advisor at the very beginning of the Obama administration in January 2009 and now holds the position of Senior Advisor to the President of the United States. President Obama has said he consults Jarrett on every major decision, and the
New Republic
's Noam Scheiber reported thus of her influence with the White House:
"Her role since she has been at the White House is one of the broadest and most expansive roles that I think has ever existed in the West Wing," says Anita Dunn, Obama's former communications director. Broader, even, than the role of running the West Wing. This summer, the call to send Attorney General Eric Holder on a risky visit to Ferguson, Missouri, was made by exactly three people: Holder himself, the president, and Jarrett, who were vacationing together on Martha's Vineyard. When I asked Holder if Denis McDonough, the chief of staff, was part of the conversation, he thought for a moment and said, "He was not there."
Jarrett holds a key vote on Cabinet picks (she opposed Larry Summers at Treasury and was among the first Obama aides to come around on Hillary Clinton at State) and has an outsize say on ambassadorships and judgeships. She helps determine who gets invited to the First Lady's Box for the State of the Union, who attends state dinners and bill-signing ceremonies, and who sits where at any of the above
Jarrett holds a key vote on Cabinet picks (she opposed Larry Summers at Treasury and was among the first Obama aides to come around on Hillary Clinton at State) and has an outsize say on ambassadorships and judgeships. She helps determine who gets invited to the First Lady's Box for the State of the Union, who attends state dinners and bill-signing ceremonies, and who sits where at any of the above
The level of influence Jarrett holds with the Obama administration has prompted many detractors to complain she wields too much control over the President and decisions about who should have access to him, and one expression that detraction commonly takes is the assertion Jarrett is a foreign-born Islamic "mole" who is pushing for (or furthering) a Muslim agenda through the executive branch. The quote cited above is a typical example, holding that while Jarrett was an undergraduate psychology student at
    |
Stanford University in 1977, she proclaimed herself to be an Iranian who sought "to help change America to be a more Islamic country" and she felt "like it is going well in the transition of using freedom of religion in America against itself."
Contrary to common rumor, however, neither Jarrett nor her parents are Iranian, nor (as far as well can tell) are any of them Muslim. Jarrett's parents,
Bowman and Barbara Taylor Bowman, were both American-born U.S. citizens from Washington, D.C. and Chicago, respectively; the couple merely lived in Iran for about six years in the late 1950s and early 1960s while James served as chair of pathology at Nemazee Hospital in Shiraz as part of a program that sent American physicians to work in developing countries.
Valerie was born in Shiraz during the Bowmans' sojourn in Iran; she returned to the U.S. with her parents in 1962 (when she was five years old), whereupon she attended prep school in Massachusetts, graduated with a B.A. in psychology from Stanford University in 1978, and earned a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School in 1981 before returning to Chicago to begin her working career. We've found no evidence Valerie Jarrett is (or ever was) Muslim, her only apparent connection to that religion being the incidental one that she temporarily lived in a predominantly Muslim country with her American parents for the first few years of her life.
The quote to attributed "Valerie Jarrett, Stanford University, 1977" about her "seek[ing] to help change America to be a more Islamic country" is an unfounded one that has no source other than recent repetition (primarily on right-wing web sites and blogs) and that in its commonly reproduced form is too stilted to be believable as the utterance of a fluent English speaker (e.g., "I am an Iranian by birth and of [sic] my Islamic faith"). No news article or document associated with Stanford University records Jarrett as having made this statement back in 1977; and if there were any credible evidence Jarrett had ever said anything remotely like this, it would have been a well-covered news story since shortly after the 2008 presidential election and not a obscure meme that didn't pop up until several years later.
Last updated:
10 February 2015
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