Author: Tom Sullivan

‘You eat what you kill’
Tom Sullivan

You know, when I saw that headline in the Guardian, I thought I was looking at a decade-late review of the 2004 Vin Diesel film, The Chronicles of Riddick. If you missed Chronicles on cable, the film’s Big Bad (h/t to you Buffy fans) is a murderous group of interstellar religious fanatics called the Necromongers. They rampage across the galaxy, like ISIS in space ships, converting or killing everyone in their paths. They also “believe heavily in a philosophy that says ‘you keep what you kill’, believing that ending another’s life entitles you to their property and position.” Having screwed investors, thrown families from their homes, brought the planet to its economic knees, and demanded tribute (bailouts) lest they take us all down with them, that pretty much describes Wall Street’s philosophy these days, too. Which is why, as Suzanne McGee writes, “’You eat what you kill’ is the motto on many a trading desk.”

What Wall Street doesn’t believe in is its own bullshit, business school catechism about how in a meritocracy pay is a function of celestial mechanics that must not be perturbed lest we offend the Market gods – pay is an elegant function of one’s contribution to the enterprise’s bottom line. How do we know they don’t believe this?

… Wall Street’s profits aren’t what they used to be. Pretax profits fell 4.2% in 2014 to $16 billion, according to New York’s office of the state comptroller. If you think that sounds like a relatively modest decline, consider that 2014 profits were 33% below 2012 levels, and a whopping 74% below 2009, when Wall Street posted record results as markets zoomed back to life after the crisis and banks profited from ultra-low asset values and interest rates.

So what? Well, in spite of the falloff, bonuses rose for the second straight year, with “a 30.1% decline in profitability, and a 15% increase in bonus payments” in 2013, followed by a more modest 2% increase this year.

McGee explains:

Of course, here’s where the fun and games start on Wall Street. Bonuses don’t come out of a bank’s profits, but out of its revenues. It’s only folks like you and I – and, one would hope, at least some of the investors – who might want to take a look at these numbers and tie them to profits. Because what good is it rewarding employees for bringing revenue through the door if it isn’t profitable revenue?

This year, bonus payouts will amount to a whopping 170% of the profits reported by New York stock exchange member firms – profits that continue to be eroded by legal settlements and regulatory expenses. Back in 2009, that figure was slightly more than 36% of profits, and it has crept steadily higher.

Because Wall Street figures bonuses on revenue, not profits, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley dole out “about 40 to 50 cents out of every dollar of revenue they generate every year in bonuses.” That is to say, the Necromonger priests are raiding the grainaries.

But what about the excuse that Wall Street base pay is too low? McGee responds:

It only feels low if you happen to work on Wall Street. If you’re starting out, right out of college, you’ll be making about $85,000, after a wave of raises announced last year.

If they really believed in their own meritocratic gospel, the pharisees wouldn’t behave as if bonuses are bestowed by the Market simply as reward for their faith and devotion. And if shareholders weren’t such suckers for Wall Street blather, they wouldn’t stand for it.

They’ve got a little list
by Tom Sullivan

A few weeks ago, we looked at how Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin is using his position to weaken and eliminate pockets of political opposition. The University of Wisconsin system, specifically. Chris Hayes had observed:

There’s something sort of ingenious about this from a political standpoint. It seems to me that one of his M.O.s in office has been to sort of use policy as a mechanism by which to reduce the political power of people that would oppose him — progressives, the left. I mean, go after the unions, right? Which is a huge pillar of progressive power in the state of Wisconsin. And another big pillar of progressive power in the state, frankly, is the university system.

I noted that Republicans in North Carolina were using the same M.O. Since then there have been more efforts by the NCGOP at legislatively targeting political opponents. Democrats swept the four open seats on the Wake County Board of Commissioners last November? No problem.

The Raleigh News and Observer’s Rob Christensen crystallizes how the GOP is working “to rig the system so the wind is always blowing at their backs.” If they control the governor’s mansion and legislature where you live, you’d best watch yours. They’ve got a little list:

This shows how politics has changed over the years.

OLD POLITICS: When your party lost an election, you got off the ground, dusted off your pants and figured out how you could do better next time.

NEW POLITICS: You begin plotting in the legislature how you change the election laws to make sure it is nearly impossible that you ever lose an election again.

OLD POLITICS: You analyze the results, figure out how to improve your get-out-the vote effort, improve your messaging, recruit better candidates and maybe raise more money. It is a strategy that requires heavy thinking, hard work and discipline.

NEW POLITICS: Draw up legislation to create new districts that makes it difficult for your party to lose. All it requires is political power, connections and a little bit of guile.

OLD POLITICS: The public is the master and elected officials are the servants, hence the term “public servants.”

NEW POLITICS: If the public – in this case the Wake County voters – do not vote in the politically correct way, then the voting system must be changed so that it does not happen again. In this case, the masters of Jones Street have deigned that the people of Wake County voted incorrectly and therefore corrective action must be taken.

Nixon had a little list. You can be sure they have too.

A duty and a privilege
by Tom Sullivan

At the Daily Beast, Eleanor Clift explains why Wisconsin Republican Jim Sensenbrenner’s bipartisan effort to repair the Voting Rights Act is going nowhere. Sensenbrenner’s H.R.885, co-sponsored by Democrat Rep. John Lewis of Georgia and forty others (including eight Republicans), was introduced on February 11. The bill is “going nowhere,” Clift believes, in spite of the observance last weekend of the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday at Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. John Lewis was among the civil rights marchers famously beaten there by Alabama State troopers.

It is worth noting that H.R.885 specifically exempts laws requiring “photo identification as a condition of receiving a ballot for voting in a federal, state, or local election” from actions that trigger federal jurisdiction over state efforts to abridge the right to vote. The price of that bipartisanship, no doubt.

Clift quotes David Bositis, formerly with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies:

Asked whether the symbolism of Selma fifty years later might move Congress to act, Bositis said flatly, “It’s not going to happen, nothing’s going to happen…. On balance this is more of a problem for the Republican Party than the Democrats because the people who are being disenfranchised view the Republican Party as hostile to them. It’s hurting the Republican Party.”

The Supreme Court 5-4 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder in June of 2013 opened the door to a spate of voter ID laws. “Voter suppression, that’s the intent, but so few people vote in the United States,” says Bositis, “so all they’re doing is reinforcing the idea that Republicans are hostile to minority groups.” The GOP did very well in 2010 and 2014, but it had nothing to do with voter suppression, he says. Young people and minority voters typically have low turnout in non-presidential years.

[snip]

No election outcomes will be changed with or without the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, he declares. Still, it’s important. “The fact that one of the two major political parties is hostile to the rights of minority citizens is a very big deal—and a lot of that hostility is in the center of gravity of the party, which is Southern whites.” They’re not wielding clubs and hoses anymore, he says, and they may not say anything overtly racist. They cloak their objections in states’ rights. But Republicans not only have no incentive to update the VRA, they have a disincentive, he explains.

I’ll offer two personal experiences set in sharp relief the differences between the parties regarding voting.

In 2006, I was the state party’s Get-Out-The-Vote coordinator for North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District, then 14-1/2 counties. It may sound hokey, but at the grocery store one day I had a kind of transcendental experience. I suddenly had a sense of everyone around me in the store. People standing in line at the checkouts. The woman coming towards me with the cart full of groceries. Another behind me. The people down the pet food aisle. It struck me that all these were “my voters.” Ensuring they got out to vote was both a duty and a privilege. And it didn’t matter what their party affiliation was. (Well, not at that moment anyway.) A quote from former Colorado Senate Majority Leader Ken Gordon (D-Denver) expresses it better:

“We think that voting actually is not just a private vote for the person who gets the vote, but a public good, and that the more people who vote, the more legitimate the elected officials are, and that they represent the actual values of the electorate.”

Contrast that with the T-party’s voter integrity “boot camp” I wrote about. Not once in seven hours did anyone suggest expanding the franchise or registering new voters and encouraging them to exercise their right to vote. Forget about public good. It was a personal, white-knuckled, bars-on-the-windows exercise in keeping the unwashed Irresponsibles from stealing their votes. On Election Day, you may get up, drink your morning coffee, and then head down to your polling place to do your civic duty in the American democratic process. The T-party frets that invisible hordes of Others get up on Election Day intent on committing felonies punishable by five years in prison and a $10,000 fine — just to add a single, extra vote to their team’s total. And they must be stopped.

Clift concludes:

In a rapidly changing America, the signals the GOP sends are as important as any legislation. Sensenbrenner told the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2013 that he didn’t expect his career to include a third reauthorization of the VRA, “but I believe it is a necessary challenge. Voter discrimination still exists, and our progress toward equality should not be mistaken for a final victory.”

Good on Sensenbrenner for trying, but he’d better not hold his breath.

Behold, the relativist wasteland
by Tom Sullivan

A number of people have taken shots at David Brooks this week for his essential cluelessness about people who are not David Brooks. Over at Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi calls Brooks’ “The Cost of Relativism” his “10 thousandth odious article about how rich people are better parents than the poor.” Taibbi writes:

Brooks then goes on to relate some of the horrific case studies from the book – more on those in a moment – before coming to his inevitable conclusion, which is that poor people need to get off the couch, stop giving in to every self-indulgent whim, and discipline their wild offspring before they end up leaving their own illegitimate babies on our lawns:

Next it will require holding people responsible. People born into the most chaotic situations can still be asked the same questions: Are you living for short-term pleasure or long-term good? Are you living for yourself or for your children? Do you have the freedom of self-control or are you in bondage to your desires?

Yes, improving your station is a simple matter self-discipline and of pulling yourself up by those bootstraps, if you have the boots. Can’t find a job? Pull together some investors and start your own business. Personal responsibility … yadda, yadda, yadda … achieve the American Dream.

The conservative cant about “personal responsibility” has long been a dog whistle for race. Not always, just mostly. It’s “a hell of a lot more abstract than” … well, you know what Lee Atwater said.

But it was another Rollineg Stone writer, Jeff Tietz, who provided in 2012 perhaps the most accessible portrait of the poor in “The Sharp, Sudden Decline of America’s Middle Class.” Set in Santa Barbara, CA, the piece profiles the nuevo homeless living out of cars in a church parking lot. They are “there, but for the grace of God” stories writ large. Maybe that setting is a tad less threatening than the inner-city images evoked when secure, well-off, white people write about poor people in the New York Times.

Aljazeera has a 2014 photo series on poverty entitled “Getting By” that gives a glimpse into just what living hand-to-mouth is like outside the imaginings of Fox News and David Brooks. They invite people to write in with their stories:

Sometimes I’m convinced that the stigma of poverty is worse than the actual conditions. In this country it’s assumed that if you’re poor, you’ve somehow earned it/deserve it … Living in poverty has been and continues to be, an intense as well as an invaluable education. My life is rich and happy.

I was raised in the middle class but have raised my own children in poverty, albeit American style. Sometimes I’m convinced that the stigma of poverty is worse than the actual conditions. In this country it’s assumed that if you’re poor, you’ve somehow earned it/deserve it — That you’re lazy, lacking intelligence or savvy,or simply doing something wrong. Or perhaps just “a loser,” reaping what you’ve sown. Living in poverty has been and continues to be, an intense as well as an invaluable education. My life is rich and happy, for the most part. Despite having left the consumer class two decades ago.

— Lisa Anthony, Iowa City, Iowa

Behold, the relativist wasteland.

Junior DeMint
by Tom Sullivan

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton’s letter to the Iranian government, the one 46 of his GOP colleagues signed, has everyone from NPR to the Wall Street Journal to MoveOn.org talking about the Logan Act. This, in spite of the fact that since its passage in 1799, there have been “no prosecutions under the Act in its more than 200 year history.” The law forbids citizens from interfering with U.S. foreign policy “without authority of the United States.” Whatever that means.

But the controversy must look to his T-party cohort like Tom Cotton’s coup. (Or is that Tom Cotton’s kooks?) “Cotton is a conservative hero, and a crackpot,” reads the Washington Post’s landing page teaser. Paul Waldman writes for the Post’s Plum Line:

On paper, Cotton looks like a dream politician with nowhere to go but up — Iraq veteran, Harvard Law School graduate, the youngest senator at 37. It’s only when you listen to him talk and hear what he believes that you come to realize he’s a complete crackpot. During the 2014 campaign he told voters that the Islamic State was working with Mexican drug cartels and would soon be coming to attack Arkansas. When he was still in the Army he wrote a letter to the New York Times saying that its editors should be “behind bars” because the paper published stories on the Bush administration’s program to disrupt terrorist groups’ finances (which George W. Bush himself had bragged about, but that’s another story).

While in the House in 2013, Cotton introduced an amendment to prosecute the relatives of those who violated sanctions on Iran, saying that his proposed penalties of up to 20 years in prison would “include a spouse and any relative to the third degree,” including “parents, children, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, grandparents, great grandparents, grandkids, great grandkids.” Forget about the fact that the Constitution expressly prohibits “corruption of blood” penalties — just consider that Cotton wanted to take someone who had violated sanctions and imprison their grandchildren. Needless to say, this deranged piece of legislation was too much even for Republicans to stomach, and it went nowhere.

Waldman suggests Cotton is poised to be the next Jim DeMint.

But forgetting about what the Constitution expressly prohibits is just the point for T-partiers like Cotton. Cloaking themselves in it should be enough. What the law actually says doesn’t matter. What matters is what they believe it should say. (I’ve heard this argued in person.) The fact that “God helps those who help themselves” is not in the Bible, for example, is beside the point. It should be. It feels right. And that truthiness is good enough for them. To borrow again from Stephen Colbert, they want to feel the law at you.

Whistling past the atomic graveyard
by Tom Sullivan

In Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985), physicist Richard Feynman explains that one of the early problems at Oak Ridge, TN during the Manhattan Project was that nobody processing the uranium really knew much about it or what it was for. As far as the Army brass was concerned, they didn’t need to know. Except Feynman noticed plant workers storing large lots of processed uranium unsettlingly close together. Feynman observed, “Now, if you have too much stuff together, it goes up, you see.” And that would be, shall we say, bad. The staff could properly follow the handling rules only if they knew a modicum about what they were handling and how it works, Feynman knew. So J. Robert Oppenheimer had sent him to Oak Ridge to advise the plant how to handle and store the “stuff” safely. If he got any pushback, he was to say, Los Alamos cannot accept the responsibility for the safety of the Oak Ridge plant unless ….” He did. It worked like a charm.

Safety and security at America’s nuclear facilities have always been concerns. Writing for New Yorker, Eric Schlosser provides more background on the 2012 break-in by Plowshares peace activists at the Y-12 uranium processing facility at Oak Ridge. It’s a lengthy piece detailing the group’s motives, and it’s less than reassuring about the security at American nuclear facilities:

On the night of the Y-12 break-in, a camera that would have enabled security personnel to spot the intruders was out of commission. According to a document obtained by Frank Munger, a reporter at the Knoxville News-Sentinel, about a fifth of the cameras on the fences surrounding the Protected Area were not working that night. One camera did capture someone climbing through a fence. But the security officer who might have seen the image was talking to another officer, not looking at his screen. Cameras and motion detectors at the site had been broken for months. The security equipment was maintained by Babcock & Wilcox, a private contractor that managed Y-12, while the officers who relied on the equipment worked for Wackenhut. Poor communication between the two companies contributed to long delays whenever something needed to be fixed. And it wasn’t always clear who was responsible for getting it fixed. The Plowshares activists did set off an alarm. But security officers ignored it, because hundreds of false alarms occurred at Y-12 every month. Officers stationed inside the uranium-storage facility heard the hammering on the wall. But they assumed that the sounds were being made by workmen doing maintenance.

There’s much more, of course. But my mind immediately went to John McPhee’s conversations with Los Alamos weapons designer, Ted Taylor, in The Curve of Binding Energy (1973). Taylor was worried then about terrorists clandestinely getting hold of poorly secured weapons material and fashioning a crude bomb. Carson Mark admitted blithely at the time, “So far as we know, everybody in the world who has tried to make a nuclear explosion since 1945 has succeeded on the first try.” So, that’s reassuring.

One of my own experiences informs my concern over how the “stuff” is handled.

One Thanksgiving weekend in the late 1990s, my wife and I were returning from seeing friends in Mount Pleasant, SC. It was late Sunday afternoon and traffic on I-26 would be bumper-to-bumper all the way to Columbia.

In North Charleston we overtook a tractor-trailer hauling four-foot diameter stainless steel casks. Lying on their sides and the width of the flatbed, it was unusual cargo. Pulling closer, we were able to read the printing on the rear cylinder: UNITED STATES ENRICHMENT CORPORATION – URANIUM HEXAFLUORIDE.

Brilliant. Some mastermind decided to move reactor fuel – reprocessed from Soviet nuclear warheads – out of Charleston to Paducah, KY on the busiest travel weekend of the year. Sunday, yeah. Traffic is light on Sundays.

My wife was unnerved tailgating nuclear materials and insisted we drive on ahead. Ahead were three more trucks like the first. In front, an unmarked, white conversion van had curtains drawn and interior lights on in the back. “Check out the driver,” I said as we pulled alongside. Black tee shirt and military crew cut. An armed detail with automatic weapons, probably. My wife had spotted an identical van at the rear of the convoy.

Nice democracy you got there
by Tom Sullivan

If you have been following the travails of states under “small government” Republican rule, this will sound familiar. After 59 percent of voters in the city of Denton, Texas voted on November 4 to ban hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in their town, well, Republican lawmakers in Austin are rethinking that whole “bringing democracy closer to the people” thing. Representative Phil King (R) of Weatherford has introduced two bills to prohibit city voters from controlling what happens within their own borders.

King, who per the Center for Media and Democracy sits on the executive board of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), is leading the charge to restrict pesky Texas citizens from exercising democracy when it interferes with the oil and gas bidness:

According to The New York Times, eight states led by Republicans have prohibited municipalities from passing paid sick day legislation in just the past two years. Other such preemption laws have barred cities from raising the minimum wage and regulating the activities of landlords. This year, Arkansas passed a law that blocks a city’s ability to pass anti-discrimination laws that would protect LGBT people, and bills introduced in six states this session would follow Arkansas’ lead.

Many industries, including, most prominently, the restaurant industry and oil and gas interests, are working together this year through ALEC, which generates “model” legislation that advances the interests of its corporate members throughout state legislatures. Rep. King is serving as ALEC’s national chair this year and introduced his two preemption bills with Denton’s fracking ban in mind.

King denied that his role in ALEC had anything to do with the introduction of his preemption bills and said the bills were not model legislation created by ALEC. The organization’s corporate funders have contributed tens of thousands of dollars to King over the years.

Two other bills filed in Austin this session would go even further than King’s in gutting local regulatory power: One would prevent any city or county in Texas from banning fracking, and another would effectively kill home rule authority (a city’s ability to pass laws to govern itself) so that cities cannot pass local ordinances.

This pattern is familiar. Here in Asheville, NC, former state Representative Tim Moffitt, also a former ALEC board member (you’re welcome), attempted to gain state control of the city’s water system through legislative action after 85 percent of city voters apposed the move in a 2012 referendum. Unable to win elections in several areas of North Carolina, Republican state lawmakers plan to imposed redistricting plans on local governments to change how officials are elected:

On Thursday, the Senate Redistricting Committee examined a pair of bills to alter the way voters elect county commissioners in Wake County and city council members in Greensboro. The Wake County bill was considered just a day after it was introduced.

And so it goes, from Wisconsin to North Carolina, from Michigan to Texas. Small government democracy is on the move.

Inequality for dummies
by Tom Sullivan

Corey Robin considers the irony of how white children learn about Martin Luther King while attending schools that have essentially re-seregated since the Nixon years. He casts a jaundiced eye on the effort for Salon:

In the United States, we often try to solve political and economic questions through our schools rather than in society. Instead of confronting social inequality with mass political action and state redistribution, we prefer to educate poor children to wealth. Education can involve some redistribution: making sure, for example, that black, Latino and working-class students have comparable resources, facilities and teachers as white or wealthy students. But one need only compare the facilities at the Park Slope school my daughter attends with those of an elementary school in East New York—or take a walk around James Hall at Brooklyn College, where I teach political science, and then take a walk around the halls at Yale, where I studied political science—to see we’re a long way from even that minimal redistribution.

Sometimes, our self-deception can be downright funny. Two weekends ago, the New York Times profiled a group of fancy private schools in New York City where wealthy, white and privileged students learn that they are … wealthy, white and privileged. There’s even an annual “White Privilege Conference,” which is being held this year at Dalton School (tuition: $41,350). More and more private schools, according to the Times, “select students to attend” that conference. These students are so select (and these schools so selective) that they have to be selected to attend a conference on their selectedness.

No amount of talking about class advantage this way will change it, Robin believes. He’s right. It’s not the kind of learning that comes from classroom exercises or a book.

But still, as children of advantage, doesn’t talking about structural inequality feel right in a truthiness kind of way? To talk about inequality and believe you’re actually doing something about inequality, the way clicktivism feels like activism. Season the lessons with terms like “micro-aggressions,” have students create and discuss “identity cards,” and such conversations become buzzword bingo. Corey Robin calls this kind of education “the quintessential American hustle.”

“Bingo, sir.”

And the loser is…
by Tom Sullivan

Remember Solyndra, that failed solar tech startup the GOP tried to hang around President Obama’s neck like an albatross? Mitt Romney campaigned in front of the closed Solyndra factory in 2012, trying to deflect attention from his vulture capitalist record at Bain Capital. See, the problem was that Big Gummint was perturbing the economic gods with clean energy subsidies, “stifling free market competition by picking economic winners and losers.”

Yesterday, I concluded a post noting that it is some kind of article of faith on the right that “government shouldn’t pick winners and losers.” Rather than call them hypocrites this fine Sunday morning, let’s just say they apply that principle somewhat unevenly.

The Washington Post this morning looks at the growing threat rooftop solar poses to the big utility companies. Industry executives met in Colorado three years ago to plan how to fight back, Joby Warrick reports:

If demand for residential solar continued to soar, traditional utilities could soon face serious problems, from “declining retail sales” and a “loss of customers” to “potential obsolescence,” according to a presentation prepared for the group. “Industry must prepare an action plan to address the challenges,” it said.

The warning, delivered to a private meeting of the utility industry’s main trade association, became a call to arms for electricity providers in nearly every corner of the nation. Three years later, the industry and its fossil-fuel supporters are waging a determined campaign to stop a home-solar insurgency that is rattling the boardrooms of the country’s government-regulated electric monopolies.

Those free-market zealots among the Koch-backed American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have been trying to roll back solar expansion that threatens the fossil fuels industry with “potential obsolescence,” as the Post described it above. They’ve been trying to leverage their influence with Republican lawmakers. The free-marketeers want government help in guaranteeing they stay winners. There’s one big problem:

The average price of photovoltaic cells has plummeted 60 percent since 2010, thanks to lower production costs and more-efficient designs. Solar’s share of global energy production is climbing steadily, and a study last week by researchers from Cambridge University concluded that photovoltaics will soon be able to out-compete fossil fuels, even if oil prices drop to as low as $10 a barrel.

Turns out that instilling that free-market fervor can really bite when you’re operating a government-sanctioned monopoly and even conservatives and evangelicals in red states like Utah like putting solar panels on their church roofs. Trying to impose a solar surcharge offends their free-market sensibilities, so carefully cultivated by the right. Legislative efforts in Indiana and Utah to slow down solar’s expansion by outlawing “net metering” (homeowners selling excess power they generate back to the grid) have failed. “Some of the proposals were virtual copies of model legislation drafted two years ago by the American Legislative Exchange Council,” Warrick writes.

It’s not easy being mean.

50 years later, it’s always something
by Tom Sullivan

President Obama will speak in Selma, AL today to observe the 50th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday voting rights march that began at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It will be streaming live here at noon EST (9 a.m. PST).

Even as civil rights groups gather at the bridge, a Change.org petition started by Student Unite has gathered 150,000 signatures from people who want the name Edmund Pettus removed from the Edmund Pettus Bridge, now a national landmark and part of the Selma To Montgomery National Historic Trail. It dawned on somebody that the name of a Civil War general and Alabama U.S. senator/Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon is “a symbol of oppression.” Really.

This is happening in Montgomery:

The House Judiciary Committee on Thursday passed a bill that would prevent clergy, officials and faith-based groups with religious objections to certain marriages from being forced to officiate them, or being sued over their refusal.

Although the legislation does not directly address the issue, same-sex marriage supporters said the bill would effectively give state officials and religiously affiliated organizations, such as hospitals, homeless shelters and food banks broad powers to deny services and benefits to same-sex couples.

This is also happening:

The ACLU of Alabama; the Southern Poverty Law Center; the National Center for Lesbian Rights and Americans United for Separation of Church and State asked U.S. District Judge Ginny Granade to add all Alabama couples seeking same-sex marriage licenses as plaintiffs in an ongoing lawsuit in Mobile County, and to add all of the state’s probate judges who may enforce orders barring or resist rulings allowing same-sex marriage as defendants.

The groups also want Granade to issue an injunction that the probate judges “refrain from enforcing all Alabama laws and orders that prohibit same-sex couples from marrying or that deny recognition of the marriages of same-sex couples.”

[snip]

On Tuesday, the Alabama Supreme Court ordered probate judges to stop issuing the licenses, saying its powers to interpret the U.S. Constitution were equal to Granade’s. The seven-justice majority said that the bans did not violate the 14th Amendment, arguing that the laws did not target gay and lesbian couples and that the state had a legitimate interest in promoting traditional marriage.

And you thought it was some kind of article of faith that “government shouldn’t pick winners and losers.”

It’s always something.