Garance Franke-Ruta

Within moments of holding a news conference, Ruslan Tsarni, the uncle of the suspected Boston Marathon bombers, became the top trending topic on Twitter in the United States and worldwide. Speaking with mix of anger and disgust in his features he appealed to his fugitive relative: "I say Dzhokhar, if you are alive TURN YOURSELF IN. And ask for forgiveness from the victims, from the injured."

His fuller remarks:

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Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano cancelled a planned appearance before the immigration-reform bill hearing at the Senate Judiciary Committee Friday to oversee her agency's participation in the manhunt in Boston. The suspects: Chechen immigrants.

"They got their start as refugees. Refugees from war," the uncle of the Boston Marathon suspects said of the young men, one of whom was slain in a shootout with police in Watertown, Mass., overnight.

The unfolding events in Boston and its surrounding suburbs immediately began to influence the debate over the immigration bill under discussion in Washington, as conservatives on Twitter began to prick at Sen. Marco Rubio over his support of immigration reform and to call for a slow-down in efforts to create a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already in the Unites States.

"Given the events of this week it's important to understand the gaps and loopholes" in the immigration system, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in opening remarks at the hearing. He said hoped the hearing would "shed light on the weaknesses of our system" and "how can we beef up security checks," as well as how to insure that "those who would do us harm do not receive benefits under the immigration laws."

Grassley described the committee as "off to a rough start," with the most members and staff on the committee not having had an opportunity to read the bill. Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Democratic chairman of the committee, said he expected there would be a lengthy review of the bill and that he did not anticipate a vote on it until sometime next month.

The precise immigration status of the Boston suspects was not entirely clear. The elder one, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was featured online in a photo essay about his boxing aspirations titled "Will Box for Passport."

"I'm dressed European style," he described himself in the caption accompanying one photo. Another one said that he "fled Chechnya with his family because of the conflict in the early 90s, and lived for years in Kazakhstan before getting to the United States as a refugee."

Reported the New York Times:

Officials said that the two men were of Chechen origin. Chechnya, a long-disputed, predominantly Muslim territory in southern Russia sought independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union and then fought two bloody wars with the authorities in Moscow. Russian assaults on Chechnya were brutal and killed tens of thousands of civilians, as terrorist groups from the region staged attacks in central Russia. In recent years, separatist militant groups have gone underground, and surviving leaders have embraced fundamentalist Islam.

The family lived briefly in Makhachkala, the capital of the Dagestan region, near Chechnya, before moving to the United States, said a school administrator there. Irina V. Bandurina, secretary to the director of School No. 1, said the Tsarnaev family left Dagestan for the United States in 2002 after living there for about a year. She said the family -- parents, two boys and two girls -- had lived in the Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan previously.

One of the big questions that's come up in the Gosnell case is what role poverty played in leading women to choose his cut-rate clinic, which abortion-rights advocates report offered prices considerably lower than at other facilities in Philadelphia.

It's never been easy for women to get outside funding for abortion. But during the period when it was illegal in most states, some groups of women pooled funds to help each other obtain them and travel to providers in distant locales. These groups grew after the legalization of abortion, and especially after legislation barred Medicaid from paying for abortions in 1977. A network of the groups, called abortion funds, banded together in 1993 into the National Network of Abortion Funds. The local fund serving Philadelphia is the Women's Medical Fund, which has been operating since 1985 to help fund abortions for women who make up to 150 percent of the federal poverty level and who lack insurance or have insurance (such as Medicaid) that does not cover abortion. The fund does not perform abortions, but works with an array of clinics in Philadelphia to pay them directly when women show up unable to pay for them.

Did this Women's Medical Fund, which says it helped 1,532 of the poorest women get financing for their abortions last year, ever work with Kermit Gosnell's Women's Medical Society?

"No," said Executive Director Susan Schewel. "Nope. Never."

"We had heard stories over the years about care that seemed inappropriate," she told me. "We had no idea -- no idea -- of how horrible things were there."

Schewel, a former nurse practitioner who has been with the fund for 10 years, said that some of the women her group spoke with on its abortion-related Help Line had previously had experiences at Gosnell's facility, and that she personally tried to work with two women to file complaints to the Pennsylvania of Department of Health about him. In both cases, the women found the complaint process so onerous and the telling of their stories so personally difficult that they failed to complete the paperwork and abandoned the effort.

The Health Department complaint process "was way too burdensome" for the women, she said, "not to mention the stigma, to have to tell your story aloud to state officials."

So why didn't she complain on her own? "It really had to be a patient," she said. There was no clear channel for independent third-party complaints like hers.

Her story confirms what's laid out in the grand jury report, which recommended both making the complaint process easier and allowing complaints from victims to be made anonymously when accompanied by the complaint of a named health-care provider:

The Pennsylvania Department of Health makes it next to impossible to file a complaint concerning abortion providers. ... When persistent lawyers, like Semika Shaw's; and doctors, such as Dr. Hellman, the Medical Examiner from Delaware County, and Dr. Schwarz, Philadelphia's Health Commissioner, have registered complaints anyway, they have been uniformly ignored. DOH did not inspect Gosnell's clinic even after Karnamaya Mongar died.

We applaud the current Secretary of Health for reinstituting regular inspections of abortion facilities. But the department must also develop an effective, easy, and responsive complaint process. Complaints should be accepted by telephone (a toll-free 800 number should be instituted), online, or in writing - in any manner, that is, in which a citizen might choose to complain. Every complaint should be logged in and investigated. The complainant should be informed that the department has received the complaint and should be provided with a means of following up to check its status. When fellow doctors, public health agencies, or law enforcement agencies file complaints, they, obviously, should be taken seriously and should trigger immediate investigations, including unannounced inspections.

The Department of State has a complaint process, and a complaint form, for filing complaints against doctors. The complaint process should be made easier and more responsive. Complaint forms to health care-related boards should be tailored to medical concerns and assure confidentiality of patients' records. Forms should be available in common foreign languages and should be simple to understand and fill out. Complaints should also be accepted by telephone and internet, with the phone number published online. Patients should be allowed to remain anonymous, but third-party complainants should be identified. Hearings, if necessary, should be offered locally.

Schewel emphasized that she had no idea how bad things were at Gosnell's clinic: "We just didn't know. We thought there were little odds and ends of problems, but nothing like this .... All of us were completely surprised to learn how bad it was."

So why wouldn't her feminist fund work with him? Stories like the following, which she says one woman told her: the people caring for the woman, who had "her procedure" late at night, wore lab coats but had no name tags.

"I think that's not OK," she said. "I think it's required by regulations to wear a name tag. It never occurred to us that these would be unlicensed people wearing lab coats."

Pennsylvania passed a law in late 2010 that made the identification requirement even more stringent, mandating that in the years ahead all medical personnel wear photo IDS with their names and credentials in block letters.

In a March piece for the Huffington Post, Kate Michelman, the former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, and Carol E. Tracy, the executive director of the Women's Law Project, wrote that one reason that poor minority women went to Kermit Gosnell's house of horrors was that they were driven there by fear of anti-abortion protestors outside Planned Parenthood facilities in Philadelphia. They cite the story of one woman, Davida Clarke Johnson, who said "the picketers out there, they just scared me half to death," leading her to turn to Gosnell in 2001. "[P]rotesters (ironically) were not an issue" at Gosnell's clinic, Michelman and Tracy write. Amanda Marcotte repeated the charge in Slate Monday.

Intrigued by the accusation, I reached out to Edel Finnegan, director of the Pro-Life Union of Greater Philadelphia, which runs the anti-abortion protests in the city, according to other groups involved in the abortion fight in the state.

Finnegan refuted the report and confirmed that Gosnell's Women's Medical Society was in fact on the Pro-Life Union's radar for decades, and was not exempted from its picketing or prayer. "We were involved with praying outside of the Gosnell facility. For about 20 years, there was a group of people going out on the second Saturday of the month" to area abortion facilities, she told me.

That makes the Pro-Life Union of Greater Philadelphia perhaps the single longest-standing regular outside observer of Gosnell's clinic, which was last inspected by state authorities in 1993 before a Feb. 18, 2010, raid on it by an FBI team going after what it thought was an illegal prescription mill uncovered the dire conditions at the abortion facility located on the same site. "Every Saturday morning," clinic neighbor Bill Baumann said in the Gosnell documentary 3801 Lancaster, "the priests and the antiabortionists were out front praying the rosary."

But just because Finnegan and her team would spend Saturdays praying outside the facility doesn't mean she ever got any sense of what went on there. "Were we aware of the specific and grave horror that was going on at the Gosnell facility? No," she said. Despite Pro-Life Union members' attempts to engage women going for appointments with Gosnell or at the Planned Parenthood facilities in the Philadelphia area that provide abortions (the majority of Planned Parenthood offices that serve the area don't), Finnegan's group never got clear information from the women about their experiences or any kind of comparative picture of the facilities.

And as far as she is concerned, every abortion clinic is a house of horrors, full stop, meaning that Gosnell's was no different: "What's happening at this abortion facility, it's happening at every abortion facility."

Nor did the group pull public (such as court) records of complaints against Gosnell, which might have allowed anti-abortion advocates to see the pattern state regulatory authorities were ignoring, despite repeated complaints from doctors and Gosnell's victims. "Groups like Operation Rescue have the manpower to investigate clinics. Most pro-life groups don't have that kind of manpower. We're there to offer women an alternative," she said. The problems with the clinic were "apparently known in the neighborhood, but I wouldn't necessarily know that."

Operation Rescue, the Kansas-based national anti-abortion group, keeps a list of every abortion clinic in the country, according to Senior Policy Adviser Cheryl Sullenger. And while she said that it does a great deal of work investigating abortion-providing facilities and filing third-party complaints against them, when it came to Gosnell, "He was kind of under the radar. In fact most of the pro-lifers didn't ever realize he was conducting the kind of business that he was." She blamed the fact that he conducted most of his pregnancy terminations late at night or on Sundays, and said Operation Rescue first became aware of his abuses "when the FBI raided his clinic." Added Sullenger, "We were aware of his clinic, we just didn't know what was going on there."

This enormous communications gap between the different communities of people who wanted for years to put Gosnell out of business is likely a result of the major cultural and values gap between anti-abortion activists and the poor minority women whose desperation Gosnell exploited. "The stigma against abortion creates this silence," said Charlotte Taft, director of the Abortion Care Network, on a Tuesday conference call arranged by RH Reality Check. It "makes women who go to clinics like this not blow their own whistle."

Finnegan, for her part, blames the National Abortion Federation, the professional association of abortion providers in North America, for not reporting Gosnell to authorities after inspecting his facilities. "The National Abortion Federation knew how bad things were in the Gosnell facility. We did not," she told me. It's a fair point -- though it's also worth noting that Gosnell only reached out to NAF and asked for an inspection after the November 2009 death of Karnamaya Mongar, making the group a pretty late comer on the scene. He was shut down by state authorities less than two months after NAF rejected his application. NAF did its inspection on Dec. 14 and 15, 2009, and rejected Gosnell's application on January 4, 2010. The clinic was raided on Feb. 18 of that year and Gosnell's license was suspended on Feb. 22.

It's self-evident why Gosnell did not apply for NAF membership earlier, during the many years the Pro-Life Union was praying outside his unmonitored, unregulated, and law-breaking clinic, which performed abortions past the point of viability and used a medical procedure for them (and for legal second-trimester abortions) that he appears to have made up himself.

According to the state charges against him, he used these unusual protocols, administered by unlicensed staff, to deliver heavily-drugged premature infants, whose necks he would then snip. He developed this technique after trying and failing to master more commonly used abortion methods. "This particular procedure is nowhere in the medical literature. This technique that he does is nowhere in the lexicon of practice in abortion care," noted Tracy Weitz, an associate professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, on the RH Reality Check call.

"Despite Gosnell's best efforts to alter his practices, clean up the facility, and hire licensed personnel for our site visit, his facility was not even close to meeting NAF's quality standards. We therefore rejected his application for membership. We absolutely did not observe the egregious criminal activity that has been alleged," Vicki Saporta, president and CEO of NAF, said in a statement.

Amid the extraordinary cavalcade of system failures that allowed Gosnell to operate as he did, it's an open question whether the anti-abortion movement could have done more to call attention to his abuses if it had been able to forge any kinds of bonds of trust with the abortion-seeking women who were injured by him. Finnegan rejected that premise. "We are not responsible for the abortion industry or what goes on there," she said. 

It's a hard argument to make 40 years after Roe, during which the nature of abortion services in the United States have been shaped by the political opposition to them more than any single other factor. In the wake of the Gosnell scandal, renewed anti-abortion activism in Pennsylvania led to legislation requiring abortion-providing facilities to be licensed as ambulatory surgery centers; Gov. Tom Corbett signed the bill into law in December 2011, and it went into effect last summer.

That's led to a decrease in the number of abortion providers in the state from 22 or 20 to 13, according to Tara Murtha, a Philadelphia Weekly writer who has been covering the Gosnell story for years. The Gosnell case has also come up in Virginia and Utah as state lawmakers have considered similar new regulations.

New restrictions that decrease the number of providers make it more logistically difficult for women to get first-trimester abortions, which are less expensive, less risky, and less politically charged. This is precisely the outcome anti-abortion advocates want -- less access to abortion and less abortion -- but it comes with the side effect of pushing more of the least organized and poorest abortion-seeking women further into pregnancy as they chase the fee of a second-trimester abortion (which grows with each passing day of pregnancy) and try to find a place that will perform any kind of procedure. Right now 92 percent of abortions in this country are done in the first trimester, and only 1 percent after 20 weeks of pregnancy, Weitz said.

But when it comes to the poorest women, those figures are starting to shift into later pregnancy. "We're moving in the wrong direction, especially for vulnerable women," she said.

Since last Friday, the Gosnell case has largely resurfaced as a media criticism story. A comprehensive review of the coverage over the past three years showed that the raid on Gosnell's clinic in 2010 was covered largely by the Philadelphia papers and reproductive rights press (both anti-abortion and pro-abortion rights). There was a flurry of coverage in ideological publications left and right -- such as The Nation, National Review and the Weekly Standard -- as well as in feminist and African-American new media outlets after the release of the Jan. 14, 2011, grand jury report charging Gosnell with heinous crimes. Anti-abortion and pro-abortion rights news outlets, such as LifeNews and RH Reality Check, have covered the story extensively and continuously over the past few years, as has the Philadelphia press. And right-wing blogs and smaller publications have done a lot of aggregating about the trial since it began in March. But there was little jump from these smaller outlets to major coverage in national newspapers (the New York Times ran a handful of stories in 2011 and one in 2013), or national television networks until a concerted push by abortion opponents last week.

There was one man who was perfectly placed to change all of that over the past two years, during which the Gosnell case lawyers were under a gag order: staunch anti-abortion advocate and former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum. Opposition to abortion was a key part of his 2012 presidential primary campaign and close work with anti-abortion groups in the Midwest essential to the strength of his efforts in Iowa in 2011 and early 2012. Plus he was from Pennsylvania! Gosnell's alleged abuses happened while Santorum was a U.S. senator representing the state; he served from 1995 to 2007, and during his later time in office was the third-ranking Republican in the U.S. Senate. But a Nexis search for Santorum and Gosnell showed no record that Santorum mentioned the Philadelphia doctor in remarks between 2010 and the end of 2012; a Google search was similarly fruitless.

Because Nexis is an incomplete record in the age of online media -- and because Google is such a mess these days -- I reached out to Santorum through an aide, who said that the former senator's recent health problems would prevent him from responding directly. "Senator Santorum first began discussing this case when the grand jury report was released in early 2011," emailed Virginia Davis, the communications director for Santorum PAC Patriot Voices. "He had Philadelphia DA Seth Williams on his radio show at the time to talk about the horrific details of this case." This was about two years ago. He also tweeted about it on Friday and planned to urge his supporters to direct more tweets at mainstream media reporters demanding coverage, she said.

What he did not do was turn the Gosnell case into a campaign cause while the highest profile national political reporters in America were writing down his every word. Instead, the very month the grand jury report came out, Santorum stumbled on the question of race and abortion when he told CNS News that he found it "remarkable" that President Obama supported abortion rights as a black man. Again, the cultural and values gap loomed wide. African Americans, who have a much higher rate of abortions in this country than do white women, thanks to their greater rate of unintended pregnancy, went on to overwhelmingly back Obama in the general election against a Republican less conservative than Santorum. So did Hispanics, who also have a much higher rate of abortion than their numbers in the general population might predict.

Indeed, the major transformation in the abortion arena since Roe has been this demographic flip: In 1973, the majority of abortion-seeking women were white, while today only 36 percent are. "Abortion is increasingly being concentrated among poor women," and among poor, minority mothers, in particular, according to a 2011 report in Obstetrics & Gynecology. But blacks and Hispanics are no more likely to identify as pro-choice than whites.

The anti-abortion movement has tried to keep up and in recent years reached out more aggressively to minorities, especially with advertising campaigns, such as the 2010 billboard in Atlanta declaring "Black children are an endangered species." But they've also found getting poor black and Hispanic women to reach back as big a challenge as has the rest of the conservative movement and the GOP, which has awkwardly and not-that-successfully been making moves to try to diversify its base of support for years.

After the grand jury report came out, Alveda King, director of African American outreach for Priests for Life, arranged a National Day of Mourning and a February 2011 vigil outside the shuttered Gosnell clinic. "As soon as we did know about it we began to organize," she said. "Why did it take so long for me to find out about it, I can't really answer that, but when I found out about it me and my colleagues began to pray." As to why none of Gosnell's victims reached out to her or anyone she knew before the FBI raid, her answer was the same as Taft's: shame. "Once upon a time abortion was just a very secret type of thing that nobody talked about. I had two abortions myself.... I kept it a secret. I kept it under a cloak of shame," she said. But "more and more, people are speaking out."

Meanwhile, there is little question that Gosnell will get his due, and that coverage of his trial will increase. It may not immediately be front-page news, thanks to the bombing in Boston. But the poor minority women who were his victims are getting their day in court -- no thanks to anyone except the FBI.

Bitcoin boom and bust be damned: America's biggest third party is accepting donations of the electronic currency through bitpay.com, which converts the donations into U.S. dollars. Given that Bitcoin is sometimes called a "libertarian fantasy," it's not so surprising the Libertarian Party would make room for the currency in its fundraising efforts.

The currency has been gaining popularity as a mechanism for political donations since the fall of 2012, when a Republican New Hampshire state representative became the first major-party politician to accept Bitcoin donations. A libertarian candidate in North Dakota and an independent state senate candidate in Vermont also set up systems to accept Bitcoin donations in the fall. The Libertarian Party of Canada began accepting Bitcoin in March.

Long before Barack Obama dusted off his shoulders, Margaret Thatcher used a bright turquoise feather duster to sweep away the dirt of lingering socialism at the Conservative Party Conference in October 1975.

The Telegraph, which as a great old black-and-white picture of the occasion, says that it was "given to her by a member of the audience" at the party conference, where she delivered these remarks. Of all the images of her as a leader, this is the one that's stuck in my mind since yesterday. What a deft use of imagery -- sweeping away old ideas, dustbin of history, a woman leader ready to clean up the nation, etc. -- and how very dated! The idea of a female party leader today in the West using a feather duster as a prop -- impossible to imagine.

Nineteen ninety-eight was a watershed year in the battle for gay rights in America -- in a bad way. Bill Clinton had in 1997 nominated James C. Hormel as ambassador to Luxembourg. But his nomination as the first openly gay U.S. ambassador stalled the following summer. Hormel, born during the early 1930s, had been a dean at the University of Chicago Law School and also a leader in creating gay institutions in his home town of San Francisco. In 1991, he endowed the Gay and Lesbian Center at the San Francisco Public Library, which would go on to bear his name when it opened.

His nomination snagged on the Republican leadership in Congress, then busily seeking President Clinton's impeachment over his affair with Monica Lewinsky. An even bigger obstacle was their disgust over Hormel's homosexuality.

Senator Jesse Helms, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman well known for his public opposition to the "homosexual lifestyle" and the people he called, in Newsweek in 1994, "degenerates" and "weak, morally sick wretches," vowed to block the appointment. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi on June 15, 1998, added fuel to the fire, comparing being gay to a condition "just like alcohol...or sex addiction...or kleptomania'' -- a pathology in need of treatment. House Majority Leader Dick Armey chimed in to support Lott, affirming, "The Bible is very clear on this." Assistant Senate Majority Leader Don Nickles of Oklahoma told "Fox News Sunday " on June 21, 1998, that Hormel "has promoted a lifestyle and promoted it in a big way, in a way that is very offensive." Against that backdrop, the comments of Republican Chuck Hagel, U.S. senator from Nebraska, didn't stand out as idiosyncratic. Ambassadors "are representing our lifestyle, our values, our standards. And I think it is an inhibiting factor to be gay -- openly aggressively gay like Mr. Hormel -- to do an effective job," Hagel, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said after meeting with Hormel, according to a July 3, 1998 Omaha-World Herald story.

In September of that year, Salon revealed that House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde -- who had helped rush the Defense of Marriage Act through in 1996 as part of the Gingrich Revolution with the justification that same-sex unions were "illegitimate" and "immoral" -- had broken up another man's marriage by having an affair with his wife. (Newt Gingrich, who worked to push DOMA through and impeach the adulterous president who'd signed it, was later revealed to have also been having affair at the time.)

In October 1998, 21-year-old gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard was beaten into a coma and tied to a fence outside Laramie, where he would not be discovered for 18 hours. The passing motorist who discovered him at first thought he was a scarecrow, Reuters reported at the time. Shepard, whose skull had been cracked, never regained consciousness and died several days later at the Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, from his severe injuries.

America is a different country now, a dozen years on from what Frank Rich described in 1999 as "[t]he homophobic epidemic of '98, which spiked with the October murder of Matthew Shepard."

After a decade of legislative fighting, federal hate crimes legislation was finally extended to protect gay people in 2009. The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act passed as a rider to the National Defense Reauthorization Act and was signed into law by President Obama during his first year in office.

The president has done an "It Gets Better" video; so too have the White House staff and some leading Democrats in the United States Senate. Gay marriage is legal in nine states and the District of Columbia; "Don't ask, don't tell" has been overturned; America has elected its first openly lesbian U.S. Senator -- and from the Midwest! -- and even the president backs same-sex marriage rights.

America is a different country now. But the "Stone Age," as Jodi Foster has called it, in which gay people were seen as perverts justifiably targeted for violence or invective, is a none too distant a memory, and in too many quarters it is still extremely difficult for people -- especially very young people -- to be out and gay without experiencing severe social, physical, or economic repercussions (as the documentary Bully showed this past year, in case any one had any doubt).

Today, according to Washington Post-ABC News polling, 58 percent support gay marriage, up from 41 percent in 2004, while opposition has dropped from 55 to 36 percent. A March CNN/ORC International survey puts the jump as an increase from 40 to 56 percent support from 2007 through 2013.

And so the question arises: How does America address its homophobic past as it moves forward into a more tolerant future? If American views on gays have changed -- and they have, with shocking rapidity -- that means there are a lot of people in this country who used to hold more deeply anti-gay views than they do today, and who may be ashamed of what they once thought and said in what now seems a distant and unenlightened era. Two thirds of the change in views on gay marriage comes from "individuals' modifying their views over time" and only "one-third was due to a cohort succession effect, or later cohorts replacing earlier ones," according to sociologist Dawn Michelle Baunach, who looked into the issue in a 2011 Social Science Quarterly piece. Most such people have had the privilege of a private life, where their participation in an ugly ideology that diminished and damaged gay people is something they speak of only in conversation with friends, or recall within the inmost sanctuary of their own thoughts.

But some people have been living public lives a long time, and have left a very public paper trail of their expressions of discomfort and distaste. What is the proper response to the discovery of such information?

How do we as a society react when people openly change their views in public on gays, and on same-sex marriage?

And are we finally ready to get beyond the politics of the mid-1990s?

The moves by politicians on gay questions in the past year -- and especially over the past three and a half months -- have been by turns cautious and bold, awkwardly and imperfectly executed. Some announcements were made under duress, or in haste, while others came seemingly out of the blue, fueled by paternal love or a sense of the historic moment. Not one of these pronouncements has escaped some measure of suspicion and derision by gay-rights activists or progressive writers, even as organized gay-rights groups have hailed them. (Few public comings out by gay public figures escape similar controversies.) But with the Supreme Court in June set to render decisions on the historic challenges to California's Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage and the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibits federal recognition of same-sex marriages permitted by the states, it's worth taking a look at how politicians have publicly "evolved," to use Obama's term, on the question of gay rights in America -- and what, precisely, they have been evolving on.

Though the drumbeat of shifting views on gay marriage picked up in March, thanks to the impending oral arguments in the Supreme Court cases, in many ways it was Hagel's January nomination to be defense secretary that began the conversation, and which gets at the core of the issue.

Gay money flooded into Obama's campaign coffers after he came out for gay marriage in May 2012 -- but gays and lesbians were also some of his staunched backers before that. A CNN analysis found one in 16 of his bundlers -- high dollar fundraisers -- in the first quarter of 2012 was gay; the Advocate estimated the number at closer to one in five in mid-2011, and the Washington Post at one in six in May 2012.

Gay voters went on to reveal they had some serious clout at the polls in November. "Mr. Obama's more than three-to-one edge in exit polls among the 5 percent of voters who identified themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual was more than enough to give him the ultimate advantage," according to a New York Times post-election report analyzing the impact of the GLB vote (no T measured). The fact that Obama was able to win reelection after publicly backing gay marriage -- and the tremendous debt he owed gay voters and political fundraisers -- helped change dynamics in Washington around gay issues in the immediate post-election period.

In particular, gay leaders who'd bit their tongues in advance of the election felt newly empowered to push back at the president, and the Hagel nomination provided an early opportunity to do that. Not only had Hagel spoken disparagingly of Hormel, but he had "a zero-per-cent rating (three times) from the Human Rights Campaign, the leading gay-rights lobby," according to Richard Socarides. "Among other things, Hagel voted against extending basic employment nondiscrimination protections and the federal hate-crimes law to cover gay Americans."

Hagel was the man who would manage the oversight of the end of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," as well as the winding down of the war in Afghanistan. His views, so common in 1998, were seen as bluntly prejudiced in 2013 -- and as such, anathema to both gay conservatives eager to tar a potential Obama nominee, and gay liberals infuriated that the reward for their electoral support would be the nomination of someone who talked like that about them.

Hagel recognized the severity of the situation and apologized before he was even nominated. "My remarks 14 years ago in 1998 were insensitive," he said in a statement. "They do not reflect my views or the totality of my public record, and I apologize to Ambassador Hormel and any L.G.B.T. Americans who may question my commitment to their civil rights. I am fully supportive of 'open service' and committed to L.G.B.T. military families." That tamped down criticism, but not fully, and not on the right.

Criticism of the administration erupted anew when it was revealed that the pastor selected to give the inaugural benediction had also made anti-gay remarks. "We must lovingly but firmly respond to the aggressive agenda of not all, but of many in the homosexual community," Louie Giglio had preached in the mid-90s, warning that gays were going to hell, and that they could change with the help of Jesus. When he declined to apologize, he was quietly dropped from the inaugural program. "Due to a message of mine that has surfaced from 15-20 years ago, it is likely that my participation, and the prayer I would offer, will be dwarfed by those seeking to make their agenda the focal point of the inauguration," he told ThinkProgress.

And it was progress. When in 2008 it was revealed that Rick Warren, the pastor selected to give Obama's 2009 inaugural invocation, had called homosexuality a sin (but "not the worst sin") and unnatural, he stayed on the program.

The Defense of Marriage Act was a very successful piece of legislation. Not only did it create two categories of marital benefits -- one for straights, and one for gays -- but it had a profound silencing effect on political leaders. Between 1996 -- when DOMA was passed -- and 2006, only one member of the U.S. Senate came out in support of same-sex marriage, according to data collected by Wonkblog's Dylan Matthews: Dean Barkley of Minnesota, who replaced Paul Wellstone after his death in 2002 and served a grand total of 61 days in office.

But starting in 2012, that began to shift -- thanks in large measure to Joe Biden.

The vice president got the ball rolling on the new round of gay-marriage pronouncements on May 6. "I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual -- men and women marrying -- are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties," he told NBC's Meet the Press. That put pressure on Obama to make his own views clearer -- not that there was much doubt about what they were. "There's no doubt in my mind that the president shares these values and that's why it's time for him to speak out in favor of marriage equality as well," Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement. Days later, Obama sat down with ABC's Robin Roberts, telling her, 'I've just concluded that, for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married."

By the end of 2011, only 15 U.S. senators had endorsed same sex marriage. In 2013, so far, 19 senators have come out to support same sex marriage -- including six just in the first week of April -- as pressure from gay groups and the impending Supreme Court decision helped create a cascade effect. The evolution has been eased by the gay marriage movement's wins in state legislatures and ballot initiatives.

The most important boulder to be unlodged was Republican Sen. Rob Portman, who changed his position two years after his son came out as gay and who is now out front ahead of the Ohio voters who elected him. His Op-Ed and his courage put pressure on Democratic hold-outs who shared his beliefs but were shy of expressing them.

Portmans shifting view was presented "absolutely perfectly," said Fred Sainz, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign. Many parents are not as supportive of their gay children as Portman has been, he pointed out. "I'm now 45 years old. I came out when I was 28. My father hasn't spoken to me since I came out. I would love to have a dad like Rob Portman," he told me. Wrote Will Portman of his coming out two years ago: "[my parents] were surprised to learn I was gay, and full of questions, but absolutely rock-solid supportive. That was the beginning of the end of feeling ashamed about who I was."

As if to emphasize the point, Republican Rep. Matt Salmon told a local TV station in Arizona in April that he wasn't going to budge on gay marriage despite having a gay son.

What's happening now is a wholesale repudiation of the 1990s move to eject gay people from the American family, writ large. The reason for DOMA was anti-gay animus by a group of men who showed their respect for marriage by divorcing multiple times and having affairs. The reason to undo DOMA is a rejection of that animus, and the growing recognition there is no way to argue against same-sex marriage that is not ultimately an argument for the moral inferiority of gay people. As of Friday, only four Democrats in the U.S. Senate had not come out in favor of gay marriage.

"I have concluded the federal government should no longer discriminate against people who want to make lifelong, loving commitments to each other or interfere in personal, private, and intimate relationships," Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota said. "I view the ability of anyone to marry as a logical extension of this belief."

The reason to not support gay marriage is the lingering sense that there's something strange or not right about it. That it's fine for gay people to do what they want in privacy, but that their relationships are not the same as straight ones. Not as powerful, not as loving, not as legitimate.

"[T]his is the inevitable extension of my efforts to promote equality and opportunity for everyone," said Sen. Mark Warner in announcing his new views. "[A]s many of my gay and lesbian friends, colleagues and staff embrace long term committed relationships, I find myself unable to look them in the eye without honestly confronting this uncomfortable inequality," observed Senator Claire McCaskill in a Tumblr post.

The 1990s are over. Newt Gingrich, who stepped down as House Speaker after the Republicans performed poorly at the polls in 1998, in 2012 lost his comeback bid and the Republican presidential primary. Former representative Bob Barr, the sponsor of DOMA in 1996, in 2009 recanted his support for the bill and said gays should be allowed to marry. Bill Clinton -- who signed it the bill with a statement saying "I have long opposed governmental recognition of same-gender marriages" -- has too.

But if that moment of moralism in the mid-90s deserves to be remembered, it's for the lesson that the American people, when they stop being upset about an issue, really let it go. Clinton was impeached over his infidelity, but he hung on to office and became one of the most beloved ex-presidents ever. His party even won seats in the House and Senate the same year his scandal dominated the news, as the public defied political predictions and turned against the moralists instead of the man they accused.

As the drumbeat of shifting views of gay marriage continues, each voice affirms gay people as part of the American family, and each senator freshly legitimizes gay Americans as he or she repudiates past views or clarifies new ones. Whatever happens with the Supreme Court, this moment of change and affirmation -- this moment of public evolution -- is having a power all its own.

A study released Monday sheds new light on last week's foofaraw over President Obama's comment that his friend and supporter California Attorney General Kamala Harris was "the best looking" AG in the land.

Sponsored by Name It. Change It., a project of the Women's Media Center and She Should Run, the March survey of 1,500 likely voters nationwide found that no matter what is said about a female political candidate's appearance, it has a negative impact on what potential voters think of her.

"When voters heard that coverage focused on a neutral description or a positive description or a negative description of the woman candidate's appearance, it hurt her likability and it made voters less likely to vote for her," the groups report of the study, which was conducted by Lake Research Partners and Chesapeake Bay Consulting.

"Appearance coverage damages voters' perceptions of the woman candidate on all key traits we tested, but the greatest average losses are on being in touch, being likable, confident, effective and qualified," they said.

In short, the moment a woman contending for power within the system of power gets talked about as if she's contending for top marks within the system of beauty, it diminishes her standing in the other power realm.  

The only way out for female candidates is to push back on the media coverage of their appearance, which uniquely diminishes them.

A woman can regain the ground she's lost if she responds "directly by saying this coverage has no place in the media and that her appearance is not news," the survey authors say.

A caveat here about the study's methodology, which ranks descriptions as neutral, positive, and negative: The researchers provide three examples about hypothetical candidate Jane Smith, but I'm not sure these actually communicate what they are intended to.

Neutral survey description: Smith dresses in a brown blouse, black skirt and modest pumps with a short heel ...

Caveat: How is this neutral? Who wears a brown blouse with a black skirt? She sounds dowdy and like she doesn't know how to present herself for TV. Also the word "modest" is not a neutral, but rather the ground of seemingly endless cultural controversies.

Positive survey description: In person, Smith is fit and attractive and looks even younger than her age. At the press conference, smartly turned out in a ruffled jacket, pencil skirt, and fashionably high heels ....

Caveat: How is this positive? Ruffled jackets are not everyday workwear, while "fashionably high heels" are not something women in politics routinely wear, as Sarah Palin discovered when she took her red open-toed patent-leather Naughty Monkey pumps on the trail in 2008 and prompted headlines such as "Sarah Palin Wears the Same Kind of Shoes As Paris Hilton."

Negative survey description: Smith unfortunately sported a heavy layer of foundation and powder that had settled into her forehead lines, creating an unflattering looks for an otherwise pretty woman, along with her famous fake, tacky nails.

Caveat: This isn't just a negative description, but a description of a person who presents herself in a highly culturally specific way that says a lot about her education, social and economic class, and geographic background.

All of which is just to say that female appearance is a complicated semiotic system women use to communicate with each other and with men, and I'm not sure it's something that can ever be spoken of entirely neutrally. The very act of praising a woman's appearance, for example, can provoke an outpouring of contrary opinions, and creates a framework in which assessing her appearance can become a dominant theme. And then we are all suddenly debating Kamala Harris's hotness and Hillary Clinton's "sleek new layered cut that looks modern and glamorous," as if her hair were a cup of tea leaves.

President Obama's biggest gaffe yesterday when speaking of California Attorney General Kamala Harris was not in flirtatiously complimenting her as "the best-looking attorney general," but in introducing an observation from the system of beauty into a forum that was about the system of power.

What's that, you say? Irin Carmon does a great job in Salon in laying out the bounds of propriety for when it's appropriate to talk about a woman's looks as a general matter. But I've long felt we lack a solid theoretical underpinning for easily discussing these issues, and why precisely it is that admiring and complimenting women for the beauty they work so hard to maintain--and let's be clear, nobody looks like Harris at her age (48) without effort and without herself valuing beauty and fitness, which are achievements as much or more than naturally occurring properties--can sometimes be inappropriate.

It seems to me--and I touched on this a bit a 2009 Slate piece--that a simple distinction between the two worlds in which women today operate can help us think about this: They are the system of beauty, and the system of power.

The system of beauty is what preceded women's entry into the paid workforce in a bid to achieve economic equality and professional fulfillment. It operates everywhere in the world, according to regionally variable standards, but goes a little something like this: Women are a natural resource, a form of wealth that men can acquire. Beauty and, to a lesser extent, fertility, are the coinage in this system of value. In contemporary America, women can choose the extent to which they wish to engage with this system of power, but there's no question that it remains extant, and that in many ways the most economically successful women are those who use it best to their advantage--actresses, models, musicians, and the like. Beauty is a system of power, deeply rooted, preceding all others, richly rewarded. We pay homage to it, still, and young women as they face the world can make a choice to live a life--even a career--within it, just as they can choose to go to law or medical school or contend in any other way for standing and earning capacity in the world.

That is, they can enter the system of power. Power as the acquisition of status, capital, position, knowledge, property. And for a reason other than the exploitation of the resource of the physical self. The fight of feminism was the fight of women for entry into the system of power from the system of beauty. The fight in the workplace for women very often is to create a space for themselves within the system of power while continuing to operate within the system of beauty in their private lives. And the struggle of feminism has often been to acknowledge that the system of beauty is irrevocable and cannot be expunged by protest or discourse or time. To be an educated professional woman in contemporary America is to know that you operate--and often, must operate--within both systems. It's why beautiful and extremely capable women are often valued above their less glamorous or less fit peers--they are triumphs in two systems of value, double-threats.

Harris, like Michelle Obama, is a triumph in the system of beauty as well as the system of power. But President Obama's remark mistook the setting. Just as it's perfectly appropriate to tell a colleague she looks gorgeous when she's dressed to the nines for some black tie work event, it would be inappropriate to refer to her as "gorgeous over there" during a work meeting. Doing so takes her out of the system of power and puts her into the system of beauty in a setting in which power is the value that's brought her to the table. And that, dear readers, is a gaffe.

Here's a big one to add to the catalog of potential sequestration casualties: long-term flood control efforts in Iowa, the first-in-the-nation caucus state.

It may only be 2013, but Iowa is already drawing 2016 presidential hopefuls; Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul will headline the Lincoln Day Dinner sponsored by the Iowa Republican Party in Cedar Rapids on May 10. But the impact of the sequester on that Eastern Iowan city could eventually give new meaning to the cliche of testing the Iowa waters.

The Cedar Rapids Gazette reports this morning that city flood-protection plans are at risk, thanks to sequestration.

Five years after record floods devastated Cedar Rapids, funding for flood-prevention plans on the east side of the Cedar River are facing a cloudy future as a result of congressional cuts to the federal budget.

Congressman Bruce Braley does not have to look far in his new district office in downtown Cedar Rapids to be reminded of the damage the 2008 flood brought to the city -- a large, "vivid" photograph of the flooding hangs just inside the front door.

"It was epic," said Braley, who lives upriver in Waterloo but whose redrawn district now includes Cedar Rapids. "I have very vivid memories of getting on a helicopter and flying over the river corridor and just being shocked at the widespread devastation.

"People need to understand that the fund these projects are paid through was cut by 11 percent from the 2012 level. That's a dramatic reduction, so going forward and trying to get support for this project will be tougher because there are now fewer resources for these projects around the country."

Based on Gazette interviews with Cedar Rapids city officials, the Army Corps of Engineers and all four members of Eastern Iowa's congressional delegation -- Reps. Braley and Dave Loebsack, and Sens. Chuck Grassley and Tom Harkin -- the various projects fall into two categories: The Army Corps project for the river, which faces immediate peril, and a long list of 350 flood-recovery projects pending before the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which are protected for now....

The most threatened project is perhaps the most important -- protecting the Cedar River from another flood of similar size ....

Ron Fournier, corporate communications chief for the Army Corps' Rock Island District, which has jurisdiction over Cedar Rapids, said the project's future will be clarified once Army Corps officials know for sure how much their budget is being cut.

"Any single project that we work on right now can be affected, depending on how much they cut," Fournier said. "But if we don't get any money for ongoing engineering and design work, there won't be any work. Right now, there's no funding."

We often forget how much domestic work the U.S. Army does, whether through the Corps of Engineers or National Guard, and the blunt instrument of the sequester is going to be impacting the readiness of the Iowa National Guard -- you know, the people who mobilize during times of natural disaster -- as well. Reported the Gazette in late March:

The federal budget sequester will impair the readiness of the Iowa National Guard, as well as the personal finances of at least 1,100 of its members, officials say.

"Our main concern is readiness. That is everything to our operation," said Guard spokesman Col. Greg Hapgood, one of about 1,100 "federal technicians" facing mandatory furloughs this summer....

Squeezing most of the cuts into a five-month period -- May through September -- makes them harder to implement, said Hapgood, who along with other federal technicians will be taking one unpaid day per week, in effect a 20 percent pay and benefits cut during that period.

The furloughs affect only personnel classified as "federal technicians" - full-time, uniform-wearing Guard members who are basically indistinguishable from the majority of the Guard's personnel, classified as Active Guard and Reserve.

CWO3 Kevin Unkel, maintenance chief at the Iowa National Guard Armory in Cedar Rapids and one of 20 federal technicians working in the shop, said vehicle readiness will suffer during the furloughs....

Both Schwendinger and Andersen said the reduced vehicle maintenance will hurt the readiness of Guard units during their upcoming 15-day annual training exercises.

"We will see a reduction in the operational readiness of our equipment, as well as reduced ammunition availability," said Maj. Rob Cain, commander of the Guard's 650-member 234th Special Troops Battalion in Cedar Rapids.

Overall, the sequester is expected to "trim $46.5 million in federal funds out of Iowa's annual budget of about $12 billion," according to the Iowa Republican, for a 0.4 percent reduction in the state budget.

When Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan read aloud from the 1996 Report to Congress that accompanied the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act, there were audible gasps of shock in the courtroom, according to several people who attended oral arguments Wednesday.

"I'm going to quote from the House Report here," Kagan had said "... 'Congress decided to reflect and honor of collective moral judgment and to express moral disapproval of homosexuality.' Is that what happened in 1996?"

"Does the House Report say that?" replied Paul Clement, the attorney defending DOMA. "Of course, the House Report says that. And if that's enough to invalidate the statute, then you should invalidate the statute."

But, he continued, "This Court, even when it's to find more heightened scrutiny ... it suggests, 'Look, we are not going to strike down a statute just because a couple of legislators may have had an improper motive. We're going to look, and under rational basis, we look: Is there any rational basis.'"

In short, he argued, "The House Report says some things that ... we've never invoked in trying to defend the statute"-- and so the court should focus on these other articulated rationales for preserving the controversial law.

Yet the intent of Congress in passing the law, as laid out in the House Judiciary Committee Report to Congress, is hard to ignore. Noted Kagan: "We have a whole series of cases which suggest the following ... that when Congress targets a group that is not everybody's favorite group in the world, that we look at those cases with some --­ even if they're not suspect -- with some rigor to say, do we really think that Congress was doing this for uniformity reasons, or do we think that Congress's judgment was infected by dislike, by fear, by animus, and so forth? I guess the question that this statute raises, this statute that does something that's really never been done before, is whether that sends up a pretty good red flag that that's what was going on."

What was going on, precisely, in 1996? Let's take a look at the section of the report in question, explaining a rationale for DOMA (I've italicized the red flags I see):

H. R. 3396 ADVANCES THE GOVERNMENT'S INTEREST IN DEFENDING TRADITIONAL NOTIONS OF MORALITY

There are, then, significant practical reasons why government affords preferential status to the institution of heterosexual marriage. These reasons -- procreation and child-rearing -- are in accord with nature and hence have a moral component. But they are not -- or at least are not necessarily -- moral or religious in nature. For many Americans, there is to this issue of marriage an overtly moral or religious aspect that cannot be divorced from the practicalities. It is true, of course, that the civil act of marriage is separate from the recognition and blessing of that act by a religious institution. But the fact that there are distinct religious and civil components of marriage does not mean that the two do not intersect. Civil laws that permit only heterosexual marriage reflect and honor a collective moral judgment about human sexuality. This judgment entails both moral disapproval of homosexuality, moral conviction that heterosexuality better comports with traditional (especially Judeo-Christian) morality. As Representative Henry Hyde, the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, stated during the Subcommittee markup of H.R. 3396: ''[S]ame-sex marriage, if sanctified by the law, if approved by the law, legitimates a public union, a legal status that most people...feel ought to be illegitimate.... And in so doing it trivializes the legitimate status of marriage and demeans it by putting a stamp of approval...on a union that many people...think is immoral.''

It is both inevitable and entirely appropriate that the law should reflect such moral judgments. H.R. 3396 serves the government's legitimate interest in protecting the traditional moral teachings reflected in heterosexual-only marriage laws.

That is one heck of a statement of congressional intent -- and one made even more notable by Salon's revelation during the Lewinsky scandal in 1998 that Hyde had, as a married man in the 1960s, had an extramarital affair. That story? "This hypocrite broke up my family," a j'accuse against Hyde by the husband of the woman Hyde had had an affair with, Fred Snodgrass. In the piece, Snodgrass's daughter also relays her mother's opinions, observing of Hyde, "She knows she wasn't his first [mistress] and she wasn't his last."

Given Hyde's relaxed relationship to monogamous heterosexual marriage, his role in pushing DOMA, and the fact that his powerful articulation of the underlying rationale for the law was included in the reporting of the bill, it seems clear that one goal of DOMA was to put the force of the state behind moral views precisely like Hyde's -- which were then widely shared by congressional Republicans, as well as some Democrats -- that gay unions are immoral, illegitimate, disreputable, against nature and not worthy of "the stamp of approval" of any U.S. government body.

The gay-marriage fight, which this week reaches a major milestone with the Supreme Court hearing arguments about the constitutionality of same-sex marriage prohibitions, may seem like your classic 21st century culture war battle. But the first skirmishes did not take place in the 21st century. They didn't take place in the 1990s. They didn't even take place in the 1980s.

Go back further than that, to June 4, 1971. Less than two years after the Stonewall uprising, a group of men and women from the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) walked into the New York City Marriage License Bureau carrying coffee urns and boxes of cake to hold an engagement party for two male couples and to protest the "slander" of City Clerk Herman Katz, who had threatened legal action against same-sex "holy unions" being performed -- yes, already then, in 1971 -- by the Church of the Beloved Disciple, which had a largely gay congregation.

The GAA was the the second major gay-rights group to form after Stonewall, the more organized cousin of the Gay Liberation Front, and it flourished in the early 1970s with goal, as one member later recalled, of "writing the revolution into law." Randolfe Wicker, one of the best known gay activists of the 1960s -- he went on the radio in 1962 to counter psychiatric descriptions of homosexuality, then seen as a form of mental illness, and in 1964 was the first out gay person to appear on national television -- posted black-and-white footage of the planning for the Marriage Bureau action, and of the action itself, on YouTube.

There are three videos, each about 10 minutes in length. The first opens with an interview Wicker conducted with the church's pastor about the controversy over whether or not the church was performing illegal marriages -- as opposed to protected religious ceremonies -- and thus violating the law. The rest of it consists mainly of a Gay Activists Alliance planning meeting for the action, with a lengthy speech by Mark Rubin, who lays out the protest's agenda and describes himself as anxious to do what he's about to do in even giving the speech to the membership. But he's also very certain of the morality of his cause.

"Any point of view which is opposed to gay rights is a wrong point of view, categorically, by fiat and word of God," Rubin says.

The whole affair has a very 1970s feel to it, as one might expect. But it also serves as a reminder of the extent to which early gay activists were cultural radicals, because only radicals would have done what they did or dared to stand up at that moment in history. That's important to bear in mind as the cultural history of the gay-marriage fight is written -- gay marriage was not an idea gay conservatives invented in the 1980s and 1990s, though men like Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch have done extraordinary work since then within conservative circles to build, if not a bipartisan constituency for legalizing same-sex marriage, at least some highly visible bipartisan support for it. But gay marriage was always on the agenda, from the very beginning of the post-Stonewall gay-rights movement, when gays were still criminals under the law in many states and designated by the psychiatric profession as suffering from a mental disorder. Homosexuality was removed from the DSM in 1973 -- the same year Maryland enacted the first state ban on same-sex marriage in response to the new agitation.

A real movement for gay marriage could only became possible once other legal and cultural battles were won. A 1971 gay marriage test case lost every appeal it went through until the Supreme Court declined to hear it in 1972, citing a lack of a "substantial federal question." In the 1980s, AIDS became the focus of the gay community's activism. And the state laws criminalizing gay sex were not struck down, finally and by the Supreme Court, until 2003; that same year, it's worth noting, Evan Wolfson started his Freedom to Marry group. For cultural and strategic reasons, the early gay-rights movement made its priority changing other widely held anti-gay views and laws -- including the right to serve openly in the military, which became a major issue as early as 1975, when decorated Vietnam veteran Leonard Matlovich appeared on the cover of Time for his lawsuit against the military ban.

"This is not an issue at this particular time that we want to be arrested for," Rubin says in the 1971 planning meeting video. "If the cops come ... if we can't talk them into letting us stay longer, we'll leave with some gay power chants and we'll take our cake back here."

The second video shows the shouting-and-chanting phase of the action, as the GAA members invade the office, set up their coffee urns, and offer the staff cake.

"We're having a wedding reception for gay people in room 265 .... You're all invited to come," activist Arthur Evans, who is the main speaker in the video, says to people down the hall.

"Our rights as gay people have been slandered by a public official," Evans says to those who tell him he has no right to be there.

Eventually the group enters Katz's office and shouts, "Bigot! Bigot! Bigot!"

The third video shows the party part of the engagement party, as activist Peter Fisher sings songs with lyrics modified to make them gay-rights protest songs. "We waited too damn long for our rights," he sings to the tune of the gospel song "He's got the whole world in his hands."

At another point, off camera, a man asks a bystander, "Any comment?"

"I just hope they're very happy," a woman sweetly replies.

"Right on!" a man interjects.

When the police finally arrive, they are offered cake and seem mightily amused by the scene.

"Having gotten no satisfaction from government, we will take our case to the people," Evans announces as the protestors leave. And so they did.

The states of the United States are known as the laboratories of democracy. They're where some of the most nationally significant laws and legislative initiatives get their start -- not to mention some of the most ferocious controversies. Before transvaginal ultrasounds were a controversial proposed addition to abortion regulations in Virginia, for example, they were an implicit part of a law in Texas that passed with little national comment.

In light of this, it's worth keeping a closer eye on what's happening in the statehouses and courthouses across the land, as well as on some of the quirkier goings on that make state politics such a lively business. To that end, here's a roundup from the states to round out your week.

The Ohio Attorney General wants even more answers in the Steubenville case. It's pretty unusual to have a state attorney general who is a former U.S. senator and member of the House of Representatives, but Ohio AG Mike DeWine is that unusual fellow, and his intensive prosecution of the offenders in the Steubenville rape case has shown a deft understanding of the politics of the prosecution (not to mention once again raising his national profile). And he's not done yet: "DeWine called the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation and told the organization that the Steubenville rape case was going to need a second investigation, eventually with a special grand jury called, even if it didn't lead to the prosecution of anyone .... Investigators have already interviewed 60 people, DeWine said, with others on deck. He plans on calling a special grand jury in Jefferson County in mid-April. State prosecutors will make the case. The grand jury can call witnesses and ask their own questions."

The goal is to examine the behavior of bystanders and who provided the underage teens with booze, among other loose ends.

Elsewhere in Ohio, a prosecutor announced he's seeking the death penalty for Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog that incorrectly predicted an end to winter. So there's that.

In Pennsylvania, an abortion doctor is on trial for killing seven viable fetuses. This is the kind of case that gives everyone hives; it is so awful in so many different ways and taking place on such politically charged ground. "In opening statements in court on Monday, prosecutors charged that a doctor who operated a women's health clinic here killed seven viable fetuses by plunging scissors into their necks and 'snipping' their spinal cords and was also responsible for the death of a pregnant woman in his care," the New York Times reported. "The physician, Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 72, is charged with seven counts of first-degree murder as well as multiple counts of conspiracy, criminal solicitation and violation of a state law that forbids abortions after the 24th week of pregnancy...Dr. Gosnell appeared in Common Pleas Court on Monday to face a trial that could result in the death penalty if he is found guilty."

North Dakota Republican legislators plan a Monday protest of the state's new anti-abortion law. Any time you get Republican women from Fargo speaking out, you know you've crossed a line in the sand. "A group of GOP state lawmakers in North Dakota will protest new abortion restrictions on Monday at a Stand Up for Women rally in Bismarck, N.D., because they believe their fellow Republicans have gone too far. ... North Dakota recently passed the most restrictive abortion ban in the nation, which prohibits abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, and a bill preventing pregnant women from choosing abortion based on a fetal anomaly or genetic disorder," the Huffington Post reports. "...Lawmakers are currently considering two 'fetal personhood' measures that would effectively ban abortion in the state and complicate the legality of birth control, stem cell research and in vitro fertilization. [Fargo Rep. Kathleen] Hawken said the personhood bills are so extreme that she and approximately 10 of her Republican colleagues in the state legislature -- both men and women -- were inspired to speak out in defense of women's rights."

Colorado became the 18th state to sign off on a type of same-sex union. "With a stroke of the governor's pen, Colorado on Thursday legalized civil unions for same-sex couples, a major shift for a Western state where voters outlawed same-sex marriages in 2006," the New York Times reported. "The law makes Colorado the 18th state to allow gay marriage or some form of same-sex union, and its signing comes days before the Supreme Court hears two major cases on marriage equality."

And also toughened up its gun control laws. "Colorado's governor signed bills Wednesday that place new restrictions on firearms, signaling a change for Democrats who have traditionally shied away from gun control in a state with a pioneer tradition of gun ownership and self-reliance," reported the Associated Press. "...Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper signed bills that require background checks for private and online gun sales and ban ammunition magazines that hold more than 15 rounds."

Minnesota took a step closer toward permitting driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants. Reported Minnesota Public Radio: "A Senate panel passed a bill on Monday that would let illegal immigrants get a Minnesota driver's license, the most recent development in a push at the Capitol to train and ensure [sic] more drivers who aren't U.S. citizens." There are four states that permit illegal immigrants to get such licenses: Illinois, Utah, New Mexico and Washington.

"Montana is this close to allowing its citizens to eat their own roadkill." So says The Atlantic Wire.
 
What have I missed? Tell me what's going on in your state for next week's roundup at gfrankeruta-at-the-atlantic-dot-com.

It may not have set out to study this, but a National Science Foundation-funded study published in the journal Psychological Science earlier this year -- now making the rounds again online, in that way that things sometimes randomly do -- appears to have elucidated a reason the Obama message worked so well in 2008, and especially why it resonated with white voters. 

The piece, "In the Land of the Free, Interdependent Action Undermines Motivation," by scholars MarYam G. Hamedani, Hazel Rose Marcus, and Alyssa S. Fu, posited that the European-American cultural context prizes independence more than, say, the Asian-American one, which also celebrates the value of interdependence. And it explored what sort of appeals were most motivating to individuals raised in these two different cultural contexts.

"[C]an American independence be a cultural and psychological barrier to motivating Americans to think and act interdependently?" the study authors asked. "And ... if so, how can Americans be motivated to take action on pressing social issues that require interdependence?"

What they found, after a series of three experiments involving college students, was that traditional appeals to the common good don't work as well as messages that connect with people as individuals:

In the land of the free, can appeals to increased interdependent awareness and action undermine motivation for independent Americans? The present studies reveal that they can. Specifically, we found that priming interdependent rather than independent action undermines general motivation for both mental and physical tasks and that framing participation in a university class about environmental sustainability in terms of interdependent action (working together) rather than independent action (taking charge) leads to decreased motivation and resource allocation. These effects were robust and suggest that the frequent and pressing calls for Americans to recognize their shared fate and think collectively may result in the unintended consequences of undermining the very motivation they seek to inspire. It is important to note that interdependent action is not inherently demotivating for all Americans. Rather, it is demotivating for European Americans for whom, unlike for bicultural Asian Americans, interdependent action has not yet been systematically and pervasively associated with valued, normative, "good" behavior in their sociocultural context....

In the land of the free, motivating Americans to take action for today's pressing societal challenges will be accomplished most effectively when people are encouraged to "take charge" rather than to "work together."

Lead author Hamedani, associate director at Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity at Stanford University, elaborated. "Appeals to interdependence might sound nice or like the right thing to do, but they will not get the job done for many Americans," she said in a statement. 

And what would an appeal to independence sounds like? A bit like Barack Obama, circa 2009, it turns out. Hamedani suggests "be the change YOU want to see in the world"  -- which is, of course, not only a quote from Gandhi but a message that was part of Obama's winning campaign in 2008, and the slogan for his first inauguration.

Reached in California, Hamedani suggested that a shift away from independence-based messaging toward calls to act for the public good and for the good of society might also help explain Obama's diminished support among white Americans since winning office for the first time.

"The big point in our study is to consider the fact that this independent streak in the American context is a huge psychological trigger or motivator for action," she said. Meanwhile, "we're hearing a lot of messages urging Americans to be more interdependent -- from gun control to the environment to even getting their flu shots." Those messages are likely to be less motivating, and may even be associated with weakness, according to community studies on the same topic with adults done by her team. "Independence was more motivating," she said. "...Instead of saying something like, 'We're responsible for one another so we must do x behavior' -- do more gun control, recycle more -- it might be better to say, 'You can make this better for all Americans' ... really emphasizing their individual agency."

The false egalitarian promise of advanced degrees

A lot of Americans don't know the precise details of how their country works. That's less a criticism than a fact -- people are busy, the way the government is run is complicated and not always transparent, and folks have plenty of other things to worry about, especially these days. And yet I'm always struck by how little the fact-based insider conversations about key budgetary matters seem to penetrate the national consciousness, allowing misperceptions to play a major role in shaping the national policy conversation. Three recent examples:

1. Almost no one knows this, but the budget deficit is going down, not up.

According to the Congressional Budget Office:

If current laws remain in place, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates, the federal budget deficit will total $845 billion in fiscal year 2013; this will be the first time since 2008 that the budget shortfall will be less than $1 trillion. At 5.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), that deficit will be well below the peak of 10.1 percent in 2009 but still larger than in all but one year between 1947 and 2008 (see Figure 1-1). As a result, debt held by the public is estimated to increase to 76 percent of GDP by the end of 2013, the largest ratio since 1950.

And yet, reported Bloomberg's Julie Hirschfeld Davis in February:

The size and trajectory of the U.S. deficit is poorly understood by most Americans, with 62 percent saying it's getting bigger, 28 percent saying it's staying about the same this year, and just 6 percent saying it's shrinking. The Congressional Budget Office reported Feb. 6 that the federal budget deficit is getting smaller, falling to $845 billion this year -- the first time in five years that the gap between taxes and spending will be less than $1 trillion.

2. People think balancing the budget will lead to job growth. In fact, in the absence of strong economic growth or other sources of increased revenue, economists believe that dramatically cutting the federal budget enough to balance it would lead to job cuts and economic contraction in the short term. This is what we're seeing already with the much smaller cut of the sequester -- job cuts, pay cuts, furloughs, and so on. It's all expected to be a minor drag on the economy, clipping the rate of growth of a recovery that's just starting to heat up. But according to Politico, internal Republican polling shows that people believe cutting even more jobs by cutting the federal government by another order of magnitude will lead to more jobs, rather than more unemployment:

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), GOP leadership staff and Ryan himself were all briefed on the poll results, according to several GOP sources.

The poll showed that 45 percent of Democratic voters think "balancing ... the federal budget would significantly increase economic growth and create millions of American jobs." A sky-high 61 percent of independents and 76 percent of Republicans agree....

Seventy percent of voters in districts Republicans are targeting, and 67 percent of swing district voters support balancing the budget by reforming entitlements and cutting spending.

3. People think the country is much less economically unequal than it is. This extraordinary video tells the tale of how Americans think wealth is distributed in the United States, showing that "the ideal [wealth distribution] is as far removed from our perception of reality as the actual distribution is from what we think exists in this country."

It's been viewed nearly 5 million times, and if you haven't watched it already, you should.

For a brief spell on Tuesday night, both President Obama and Vice President Biden are scheduled to be out of the country at the same time. Obama is set to leave this evening for a trip to Israel and the Middle East, and Biden will be returning shortly thereafter from his trip to Rome.

That's led to some chatter online and on Twitter about "President Boehner," as if the third-in-succession would suddenly have control of the government because the No. 1 and No. 2 were off American soil simultaneously. But that's not how things work -- Boehner would only take up the reins of government if Obama and Biden were both somehow simultaneously disabled from performing their duties.

"The fact remains that President Obama is president of the United States everywhere he goes. Vice President Biden is vice president of the United States everywhere that he goes," White House spokesman Joshua Earnest told reporters at a briefing Friday. "There's no reason that that should in any way impact the day-to-day running of the country," he added.

Boehner will be the highest-ranking U.S. government official on U.S. soil, unless flight plans change -- but he still won't be able to get anything done. Partisan gridlock is partisan gridlock, whether Obama is on Air Force One or in the White House.

Remember how Howard Dean was an unelectable radical because he signed a bill permitting same-sex civil unions in Vermont, argued that the Iraq War was a dangerous break with the American foreign policy tradition, and thought Democrats should try to compete in all 50 states?

Two short presidential election cycles later, the positions once held by the doctor and presidential candidate have become shockingly mainstream -- and a person who held his 2004-views on gay marriage would be considered a conservative Democrat or moderate Republican.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll Monday showed the highest-ever measured level of support for gay marriage, with 58 percent of Americans surveyed saying they thought it ought to be legal. "Public attitudes toward gay marriage are a mirror image of what they were a decade ago," pollster Jon Cohen noted in a write-up. "In 2003, 37 percent favored gay nuptials, and 55 percent opposed them."

Support for gay marriage is now the overwhelming mainstream position among Americans 29 years of age and younger: 81 percent of them backed it in the poll -- also a record high.

As expected, Republicans and voters over age 65 remained the main opponents of same-sex marriage, opposing it 59-34 and 68-25 in the poll. Independents, including Republican-leaning independents, and Democrats, said they thought it should be legal, backing it with 62, 52, and 72 percent support, respectively.

The Republican Party on Monday released a 100-page autopsy of how its 2012 presidential campaign was conducted. I've picked out the key sections you need to read from the analytic recommendations and critiques made by the party in this "Growth and Opportunity Project" report. The project report also has a long section of recommendations for GOP friends and allies -- read, PACs and Super PACS -- which I've not excerpted from below.

The GOP today is a tale of two parties. One of them, the gubernatorial wing, is growing and successful. The other, the federal wing, is increasingly marginalizing itself, and unless changes are made, it will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to win another presidential election in the near future.

Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. States in which our presidential candidates used to win, such as New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Iowa, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia, and Florida, are increasingly voting Democratic. We are losing in too many places.

It has reached the point where in the past six presidential elections, four have gone to the Democratic nominee, at an average yield of 327 electoral votes to 211 for the Republican. During the preceding two decades, from 1968 to 1988, Republicans won five out of six elections, averaging 417 electoral votes to Democrats' 113.

Public perception of the Party is at record lows. Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country. When someone rolls their eyes at us, they are not likely to open their ears to us.

At the federal level, much of what Republicans are doing is not working beyond the core constituencies that make up the Party. On the state level, however, it is a different story. Republicans hold governorships in 30 states with 315 electoral votes, the most governors either party has had in 12 years, and four short of the all-time GOP high of 34 governors who served in the 1920s.

Republican governors are America's reformers in chief. They continue to deliver on conservative promises of reducing the size of government while making people's lives better. They routinely win a much larger share of the minority vote than GOP presidential candidates, demonstrating an appeal that goes beyond the base of the Party.

It is time for Republicans on the federal level to learn from successful Republicans on the state level. It is time to smartly change course, modernize the Party, and learn once again how to appeal to more people, including those who share some but not all of our conservative principles.

At our core, Republicans have comfortably remained the Party of Reagan without figuring out what comes next. Ronald Reagan is a Republican hero and role model who was first elected 33 years ago -- meaning no one under the age of 51 today was old enough to vote for Reagan when he first ran for President. Our Party knows how to appeal to older voters, but we have lost our way with younger ones. We sound increasingly out of touch.

The perception, revealed in polling, that the GOP does not care about people is doing great harm to the Party and its candidates on the federal level, especially in presidential years. It is a major deficiency that must be addressed.

One of the contributors to this problem is that while Democrats tend to talk about people, Republicans tend to talk about policy. Our ideas can sound distant and removed from people's lives. Instead of connecting with voters' concerns, we too often sound like bookkeepers. We need to do a better job connecting people to our policies.

If we believe our policies are the best ones to improve the lives of the American people, all the American people, our candidates and office holders need to do a better job talking in normal, people-oriented terms and we need to go to communities where Republicans do not normally go to listen and make our case. We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them, too. We must recruit more candidates who come from minority communities.

We have to blow the whistle at corporate malfeasance and attack corporate welfare. We should speak out when a company liquidates itself and its executives receive bonuses but rank-and-file workers are left unemployed. We should speak out when CEOs receive tens of millions of dollars in retirement packages but middle-class workers have not had a meaningful raise in years.

If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e. self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence. It does not matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies. In the last election, Governor Romney received just 27 percent of the Hispanic vote. Other minority communities, including Asian and Pacific Islander Americans, also view the Party as unwelcoming. President Bush got 44 percent of the Asian vote in 2004; our presidential nominee received only 26 percent in 2012.

As one conservative, Tea-Party leader, Dick Armey, told us, "You can't call someone ugly and expect them to go to the prom with you. We've chased the Hispanic voter out of his natural home."

We are not a policy committee, but among the steps Republicans take in the Hispanic community and beyond, we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our Party's appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only. We also believe that comprehensive immigration reform is consistent with Republican economic policies that promote job growth and opportunity for all.

When it comes to social issues, the Party must in fact and deed be inclusive and welcoming.

If we are not, we will limit our ability to attract young people and others, including many women, who agree with us on some but not all issues.

The pervasive mentality of writing off blocks of states or demographic votes for the Republican Party must be completely forgotten. The Republican Party must compete on every playing field.

If Hispanic Americans hear that the GOP doesn't want them in the United States, they won't pay attention to our next sentence. It doesn't matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think that we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies. In essence, Hispanic voters tell us our Party's position on immigration has become a litmus test, measuring whether we are meeting them with a welcome mat or a closed door.

Throughout our discussions with various Hispanic groups, they told us this: Message matters.

Too often Republican elected officials spoke about issues important to the Hispanic community using a tone that undermined the GOP brand within Hispanic communities. Repairing that relationship will require both a tone that "welcomes in" as well as substantial time spent in the community demonstrating a commitment to addressing its unique concerns. As one participant in a regional listening session noted, "The key problem is that the Republican Party's message offends too many people unnecessarily. We win the economic message, which is the most important to voters, but we then lose them when we discuss other issues."

It is also a fair criticism that Republicans do not do enough to elevate Hispanic leaders within the Party infrastructure. This includes not just candidates running for office, but also senior decision-makers in the RNC's infrastructure. These personnel should not be pigeonholed into demographic outreach, but should be promoted to positions to develop political strategy and provide input on all budgeting decisions. The RNC must rebuild a nationwide database of Hispanic leaders and donors that can be a resource to the Republican community at large.

The RNC must invest financial resources in Hispanic media. In a $1 billion campaign, much less than 1 percent of the total budget was spent on Hispanic or other demographic group oriented media. At one point during the 2012 campaign, OFA was outspending us 8 to 1 in these media markets. If we are going to attract these groups to our Party and candidates, our budgets, and expenses need to reflect this importance.

The RNC must improve its efforts to include female voters and promote women to leadership ranks within the committee. Additionally, when developing our Party's message, women need to be part of this process to represent some of the unique concerns that female voters may have. There is growing unrest within the community of Republican women frustrated by the Party's negative image among women, and the women who participated in our listening sessions contributed many constructive ideas of ways to improve our brand with women throughout the country and grow the ranks of influential female voices in the Republican Party.

The Republican Party committees need to understand that women need to be asked to run. Women are less likely to run for office on their own, and we should be encouraging and championing their desire to seek elective office. Additionally, the Republican Party must recognize the unique challenges that female candidates face when running for office, as well as the unique opportunities female candidates provide in winning elections. The Party should provide training programs for potential female candidates that includes fundraising guidance, digital strategy, etc.

Another consistent theme that emerged from our conversations related to mechanics is the immediate need for the RNC and Republicans to foster what has been referred to as an "environment of intellectual curiosity" and a "culture of data and learning," and the RNC must lead this effort. We need to be much more purposeful and expansive in our use of research and more sophisticated in how we employ data across all campaign and Party functions. No longer can campaign activities be compartmentalized or "siloed" in a way that makes sharing resources and knowledge less efficient.

...we must develop a deeper talent pool that understands and can deploy data and technology/digital campaigning in decision-making processes and targeting efforts. More active recruiting on college campuses, providing internships and scholarships, and recruiting from commercial firms that may harbor talent with relevant skills sets is critical in providing the talent for future campaigns. The RNC should strive to establish working relationships and open lines of communication with thought leaders in Silicon Valley to ensure the Party is at the forefront of new developments and trends in digital technology. The Party can and should play an important role in building bridges between its digital operatives and the best minds in the Valley and elsewhere. And we must make an earlier commitment to field operations and ground game than we have made in the past to ensure a year-round, election-cycle-to-election-cycle presence that can improve the quality of our voter contact.

All of these areas of focus will require a reprioritization of resources through not only the RNC budget but also the budgets of the other national party committees, state parties, campaigns, allied groups, and Super PACs. But this is critical in order for us to move forward.

Identify a team of strategists and funders to build a data analytics institute that can capture and distill best practices for communication to and targeting of specific voters. Using the GOP's data, the data analytics institute would work to develop a specific set of tests for 2013 and 2014 -- tests on voter registration, persuasion, GOTV, and voter mobilization -- that will then be adopted into future programs to ensure that our voter contact and targeting dollars are spent on proven performance. These tests should be the first order of business of the analytics team and should incorporate pollsters, data managers, and messaging professionals at the table developing a variety of approaches that would be subject to measurement.

The number of early and absentee voters continued to increase this cycle, and Election Day voting continued to fall. In 2004, 76 percent of the electorate voted on Election Day; in 2012, 65 percent voted on Election Day, a decrease of 12 percent in eight years. The Democrats successfully front-loaded many of their votes this cycle, expanding their early vote and absentee reach and giving them a much better picture going into Election Day of who had already voted and who remained a target for their efforts. They continued to expand their advantage in early voting, and this cycle they ran a much more focused effort on absentee voting, which helped them close their margins.

This trend in early, absentee, and online voting is here to stay. Republicans must alter their strategy and acknowledge the trend as future reality, utilizing new tactics to gain victory on Election Day; it is imperative to note that this will be a critical cultural shift within the Party. Additionally, early voting should be factored into all aspects of political strategy, messaging and budgeting so that we understand that we are no longer working in an environment where 72-hour GOTV efforts will determine an election outcome. And again, we must test and retest what will work best with respect to contacts and persuasion of early and absentee voters.

The Democrats' effort on maintaining a year-round presence with field operations, and investing in infrastructure to support early and absentee vote programs, had a significant impact on the outcome of the election.

Our survey asked political professionals in what areas they would like to receive more training and education, and digital and social media were the second most popular items listed. In an open-ended question, 29 percent of all respondents mentioned one or both of these items in their comments.

Our challenge is less of a technology problem and more of a culture problem. As referenced earlier, we need to strive for an environment of intellectual curiosity, data, research, and testing to ensure that our programs are working.

The RNC should recruit and hire a chief technology and digital officer for the RNC by May 1, 2013, whose experience and background sends a strong and immediate signal that we are serious about growing our digital and tech operations and data integration. The chief technology and digital officer should identify, recruit and hire a working group of data scientists, tech and digital advocates to build a structure that can eventually be deployed during the 2014 midterm elections and the 2016 presidential race to provide a 21st century digital, data and tech operation for our candidates.

The RNC should begin the search for expanded technology and digital teams that can be deployed across every division of the RNC -- fundraising, political, communications, and so on to integrate the work of those divisions and increase the potential to use technology and digital in an efficient and effective manner. (These employees are separate and distinct from those described in the data section earlier.) Technology and digital should be treated as two separate but related functions in this process. The search for members of these teams should be expanded beyond the traditional political sphere and include individuals with significant professional experience in web development and marketing programs. Integration across all areas/offices/divisions is critical for success.

Programs such as the Republican State Leadership Committee's "Future Majority Project" (www.futuremajority.com) to recruit minority candidates and women candidates for the 2012 cycle have been highly effective and should be encouraged, and the RNC and state parties should expand their efforts in this area. In the 2012 cycle, the RSLC committed to spend $3 million to identify and support new GOP candidates of Hispanic descent and women for state office. Ultimately the RSLC identified 125 new Republican Hispanic candidates and 185 new women candidates. More than $5 million was used to successfully elect 84 new women and grow the state-level Republican Hispanic caucus. The RSLC has now established a Future Majority Caucus led by new Mexico Governor Susana Martinez and Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval along with a board of 10 rising stars from state legislatures across the country. Together, these leaders will help identify new candidates and develop even more ambitious goals for electing the new generation of GOP leaders.

There is a strong consensus that we have not invested the financial resources in a labor pool that can actively conduct and run "in-person" contact at the ground level. The Obama campaign budgeted its spending to ensure the most personal forms of voter contact were a priority. But they went beyond this. They gave volunteers and field staff flexibility in implementation and creativity in decision-making to get the most out of their field teams. And they acted based on information they received from volunteers through their voter contact operation. We need to write campaign plans that reflect an increased presence of field staff in states starting much earlier than we have done in the past.

By June 15, 2013, make an investment in field staff beyond traditional battleground states and make an earlier commitment to building the field team in all state operations. It is essential for the Party to grow the playing field. There are too few existing paths to 270 electoral votes for our presidential nominee under current trend lines. We need to aggressively work to put more states in play where we have infrastructure advantages over the Democrats based on our foothold in the governorships. And this requires an early commitment to building the team.

There is no consensus on the top problem facing pollsters, according to our survey, though it's clear that public pollsters and private pollsters of both parties faced several challenges during the 2012 election cycle. When asked to choose the single most important issue or problem facing pollsters when it comes to telephone polling accuracy, four problems (cell phones, demographics, refusals, and turnout) bubbled to the top in a close grouping, each mentioned by 18 to 21 percent as most important.

Concerns expressed by pollsters include the increasing use of cell phones, making contact on land-lines more difficult and accurate polling more expensive and expansive. Another issue of concern is the need to include more young voters and Hispanics in polling samples given the growth in the electorate in these groups. An additional challenge facing pollsters was a nonresponse bias that occurred as various groups reached different levels of fatigue in the elections process. 24 percent describe higher refusal and no-answer rates as a "very important" factor. For example, following Governor Romney's first debate performance, both public and private polling firms reported a drop-off in the number of Obama supporters who would agree to participate in surveys. Understanding this bias and correcting for it is a major challenge facing pollsters in the future. And finally, 36 percent of pollsters believe that "flawed turnout models" are a "very important" factor in poll inaccuracy. The concerns expressed in our survey mirror the concerns raised in specific conversations with pollsters during the course of our task force work.

Responses to open-ended questions in the pollsters' survey suggest that many pollsters would welcome regular meetings with other researchers to share best practices and pitfalls. It is important that GOP pollsters share information on a regular basis about sampling and weighting of samples, as well as assumptions made in interpretation of survey research, to ensure more accurate data that can be used in allocating campaign and Party resources.

The significant challenge of reaching the right mix of people on the phone may sometimes require that we dedicate more resources to ensuring that our samples accurately reflect the electorate that will actually vote. This could mean enlisting bilingual interviewers in districts and states with large Hispanic populations. As mentioned earlier, it also means that a significant portion of polling samples must be dedicated to cell phones (while recognizing that auto-dialed calls cannot legally be made to cell phones). And it could mean that polls need to be fielded over longer periods and with larger samples. In addition, more spending may be required for research into special populations (e.g., youth, Hispanics) by Party organizations for private learning that could be shared with campaigns and other Party committees when appropriate.

Recent election cycles have seen a troubling diminishment of the role of political parties and even candidates themselves in our democracy. The national and state political parties are well on their way to the intensive care unit. McCain-Feingold now makes it impossible for the national parties to use funds raised under a state's own laws to support state and local candidates and parties in that state, and it forces them to use federal money for what are truly state and local activities. ...

Outside groups now play an expanded role affecting federal races and, in some ways, overshadow state parties in primary and general elections. As a result, this environment has caused a splintered Congress with little party cohesion so that gridlock and polarization grow as the political parties lose their ability to rally their elected officeholders around a set of coherent governing policies.

Fixing the inability of the political parties to be true national parties must be a top priority. Unless Congress acts, the country will continue to suffer under the current misguided statutory scheme that over regulates campaign finance, limits free speech and empowers the very so-called special interests this law was meant to diminish.

Federal campaign finance laws need to be revised to loosen the restrictive burdens that have stifled the voices of candidates and parties.

Debates must remain a central element of the GOP nominating process, but in recent years there have been too many debates, and they took place too early. The first debate of the 2012 cycle took place on May 5, 2011, eight months before the first votes were cast in the Iowa caucuses. In contrast, the first Republican primary debate of the 1980 election took place on January 5, 16 days prior to the Iowa caucuses. On January 7 and 8 last year, two debates took place within 12-hours of each other. The number of debates has become ridiculous, and they're taking candidates away from other important campaign activities....The number of debates should be reduced by roughly half....

The Republican Convention should be held earlier in the summer. It should be moved to late June or sometime in July, allowing our nominee more time to begin the general election phase. (Note: The 2016 Olympics will be held August 5-21.)

Because the nominee will still need an estimated 60-90 days to prepare for the Convention, changes will need to be made to the primary calendar. If the Convention were to be held in July, the last primary would need to be held no later than May 15. If the Convention were to be held in late June, the final primary would need to be held no later than April 30. Moving primaries up will require states and state parties to cooperate.

We also recommend broadening the base of the Party and inviting as many voters as possible into the Republican Party by discouraging conventions and caucuses for the purpose of allocating delegates to the national convention. Our party needs to grow its membership, and primaries seem to be a more effective way to do so.

Nearly five months after his loss, conservatives say he was just not the right man for the times.

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. -- Mitt Romney was greeted like a hero at the Conservative Political Action Conference Friday, drawing sustained applause and shouts of "We love you!" during a self-deprecating speech thanking the conservative activists for their early support for his candidacy and cautioning them against "pessimism" even in the face of electoral loss.

"We've lost races before, in the past, and those setbacks prepared us for larger victories," Romney said. "It is up to us to make sure that we learn from my mistakes, and from our mistakes, so that we can win the victories those people and this nation depend upon."

And what exactly were those mistakes? I asked a selection of the regular folk attending CPAC for their views. Why, exactly, did Mitt Romney lose?

Opinions were split but mainly fell into four categories that suggested attendees at the three-day conservative confab, now in its 40th year, did not see their views as being any part of the problem during Election 2012. What they thought was at issue:

Romney's personality. "He didn't have the right personality," said Michael Esteve, 22, a law student at the University of Baltimore. "Elections are all about personality. ... He was up against a very likable guy." Another student, 20-year-old Washington College sophomore Daniel Smith, attending CPAC for the fourth time in his short life, blamed Romney's inability to "communicate effectively." He "just didn't seem like a relatable guy," he said.  

Romney's campaign advisers. "He had horrible advice from his handlers," said Edward Woodson, 50, a radio host from Miami. "He allowed the Democrats to define him and when your opponent defines you you lose." The fact that the Democrats defined him as "Richie Rich" didn't help much, either, he said. Washington College senior Roy Littlefield, 21, also blamed Romney's campaign. "A lot of little things Obama slipped on and he didn't expose him." Romney didn't go after Obama hard enough.

Romney's inadequately conservative politics. "He wasn't a conservative, so conservatives stayed home," said Matthew Burke, 51, of Gilbert, Ariz. "They keep putting up these RINO conservatives..." -- such as Gerald Ford, Bob Dole and John McCain -- "there's a long line of them and they always lose." Noted David Ryan, 50, a retired chemical operator who spent his career making ethyl cellulose coatings for time-release cold medicines from wood: "Right now at this point in time people wanted a real solid conservative Republican. They see too much similarity between the socialist policies of Barack Obama and the choice that they had." A real conservative might have inspired and turned out the conservative troops.

Paul Ryan. "I don't think his vice presidential choice really energized anyone," said Littlefield. Woodson proffered the same explanation, observing that the Ryan pick did nothing but underline Romney's perceived personality deficits. "The perception was two uptight white guys," he said, adding that if Romney had picked Senator Marco Rubio he might have energized people more and maybe even won Florida.