Maryland legislators withdraw same-sex marriage bill, Illinois abolishes the death penalty, and American Muslims say the scrutiny they receive at US border crossings is excessive.
Maryland’s Same-Sex Marriage bill has been withdrawn after two Democratic members of the House withdrew their support citing pressure from constituents, the New York Times reports:
Democratic lawmakers in Maryland on Friday failed to gather enough votes to pass a bill to allow same-sex couples to marry and withdrew it from consideration after hours of emotional debate, effectively killing the bill’s chances for passage this year….
…For weeks, the bill’s passage was thought to be assured. Maryland’s House is overwhelmingly Democrat — 98 out of 141 members, more than enough to pass the bill over Republican opposition. But the closer it got to a final vote, the bumpier its path became, with a number of Democrats from districts with strong religious constituencies saying they would vote against it.
Two of its co-sponsors, Tiffany Alston of Prince George’s County and Melvin Stukes of Baltimore County, withdrew their support at the last minute, under pressure from their constituencies, which both have powerful religious communities.
Ultimately, about a third of the Democrats in the House opposed it.
Luke Clippinger, one of the House’s seven openly gay members, whose voice had cracked while giving a personal speech during the debate, said he felt “tired but not broken” by the turn of events.
On Wednesday, Governor Pat Quinn of Illinois finally signed a bill passed in January abolishing the death penalty, according to the Washington Post.
After two decades of debate about the risk of executing an innocent person, Illinois abolished the death penalty Wednesday, a decision that was certain to fuel renewed calls for other states to do the same.
Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat who has long supported capital punishment, looked drained moments after signing the historic legislation. Lawmakers sent him the measure back in January, but Quinn went through two months of intense personal deliberation before acting. He called it the most difficult decision he has made as governor.
“If the system can’t be guaranteed, 100-percent error-free, then we shouldn’t have the system,” Quinn said. “It cannot stand.”
NPR had a story yesterday about the experience of American Muslims at the hands of the US Border Patrol.
Consider the case of Samer Shehata, professor of Middle Eastern studies at Georgetown University. He ran into trouble at customs this past January when he was returning to the U.S. with his wife and their 4-year-old son. They had gone on vacation to Cancun, Mexico. “After she looked at our passports and did her computer work, she asked us to follow her,” Shehata said. “This was something I had not experienced before.”
Shehata and his family were taken into a secondary screening room. Forty minutes ticked by. Shehata began to worry about missing their connecting flight. He told one of the guards as much and a few minutes afterward he was summoned to speak to the supervisor of homeland security at Fort Lauderdale (Fla.) airport. Shehata said what followed wasn’t a question-and-answer session as much as it was an interrogation.
“He asked me about my parents, what I studied in college, where I went to college, my sisters’ names …” Shehata said. “Then I suggested he look up my resume on the Georgetown University website because all the information he wanted was there.”
Then the interview took a bizarre turn. “After he asked me what I teach at Georgetown University and my response was Middle Eastern politics, he asked, ‘Who’s going to win?’ ” Shehata said.
Who’s going to win? The Muslims or the Americans? The Israelis or the Palestinians? Shehata said he wasn’t sure what the question meant, but he felt he had no choice but to answer it. Finally, after nearly two hours, Shehata got his U.S. passport back. “At the end of the interview, the agent told me the reason I was summoned, or taken for these extra security measures, was because of my ‘location of birth.’ ”
He paused. “I was born in Egypt, and I think it was on that basis that they decided to interrogate me.”