Not Loudoun-related, but I wanted to share an article I just saw; it’s from the Forbes.com website (not exactly a publication that would be very sympathetic to progressive causes) that states that the tax breaks offered to small businesses in the health care reform law to provide their employees with health care coverage have actually spurred a number of those small businesses to do just that.

The major health insurance companies around the country are reporting a significant increase in small businesses offering health care benefits to their employees.

I don’t know who Rick Ungar (the blog author) is, since I don’t normally read Forbes, but he makes a compelling argument that opponents of the healthcare reform law should divert their attention elsewhere, because the law is actually doing something that it was intended to do – provide health coverage to those who had none previously, and making it affordable for businesses to do so.

If you’re all about beating up on President Obama, you can conveniently forget this bit of data as if it never really happened. However, if your interest is to make health care available to more Americans, this should be a happy day for you – no matter what your ideological beliefs.

So, Republicans in Congress, if you want to try to repeal, go right ahead & try – it’s a political stunt that, according to this bit of new data coming in, may just come back to bite you in the butt.

Oh, and unemployment dropped last month, from 9.8% to 9.4% – not overwhelming, but a step in the right direction, along with the 103,000 new jobs created.

There’s a terrific discussion going on about redistricting, focused on the Dulles District. Comments there got off to a good start with one by our own Paradox13.

Gay marriage has directly impacted my life. Or, rather, the lack of gay marriage has directly impacted my life. My opinion of, and positions on, sexual orientation have been entirely determined by my life experiences. My case for gay marriage isn’t one of justice, or politics, or even progressive values. My case is one simply of compassion and personal opinion. But that’s enough for me.

Growing up, I knew no one who was gay. My experience of “gay” was limited to a childhood visit to Provincetown with my family when we were vacationing down the Cape. When I saw men walking hand-in-hand down the street, I didn’t understand what it was, and thought it a little creepy. To my parents’ credit, they simply told me that they “were gay” and that was that – no value judgment.

Fast forwarding a couple decades, the first gay person I ever knew who was out was a friend a few years behind me at UVA. And he did not fit the stereotype still in my head from my fuzzy childhood memories of that single Provincetown visit. He was an introverted techie who liked guns and was a member of the NRA. Finding out he was gay was a well-needed shock to my personal mindset. He and his boyfriend started dating not long after I started dating my wife, and we would all have a blast going out together.

A few years later, my wife and I were living in New York, and a neighbor in the building opened my mind even further. My friend there was out, proud and – to be frank – a little bit intimidating to my still-sheltered mindset on the question of sexual orientation. Thanks to the patience of this man, who took the time to befriend me and talk to me in spite of what I realize today was tactless ignorance in some of the things I said and did, I learned that, no, not all gay men wanted to date me. In fact, I was just plain unattractive to the majority of them, just like women. This friend, too, was soon in a long-term relationship. And those of us living in that building would all go out and have a great time with some frequency. When we moved to Virginia, my friends from New York came to visit us and enjoyed the hospitality of our back deck.By January 1, 2011, all of these gay friends of mine had broken up with their long-term boyfriends. To be frank, this kinda made me angry.

No one can know what goes on inside of another person’s relationship with their significant other. But at least in a heterosexual relationship throughout America, there’s a pattern that it can be assumed serves as the baseline: Dating, Engagement, Marriage. That pattern serves all couples as a framework for having hard conversations about kids, moving in together, and mutual expectations about “where a relationship is going.” The end-game expectation for the vast majority of people is marriage, and that expectation creates a context for having difficult conversations sooner rather than later, and ensuring that couples are on the same page about relationship direction, if not content at any given time.

My friends were denied that expectation. Though they may have individually harbored the expectation of marriage some day in the future, that expectation was personal and not the assumption of the society in which they lived. Their relationships were not afforded the same socially-sanctioned framework of emotional progression that is helpful in catalyzing critically important, if difficult, conversations between two people in love.

I make no judgements as to fault or blame in the dissolution of my friends’ long-term relationships. Every relationship is its own universe, for no one else to truly understand. Indeed, there is likely no fault or blame to be found. But I do judge a society which does not provide the same level of emotional support and expectations for their relationships as for mine. I find myself asking if my friends would have been in these relationships as long as they were if the expectation of engagement and marriage were assumed by all around them? Would they have gotten years of their lives back, years they could have had with another person who might have been walking a path of emotional development more similar to their own?

I don’t know.

But I do know that I don’t care if gay marriage is the Right Thing To Do as much as I care that recognizing the importance of marriage among any two adults in love helps those two adults develop that relationship. The recognition of a marriage is about compassion for me. It’s the recognition that these two people have picked each other, through thick and through thin, and that as their friends it’s our job to help them see themselves and each other through things.

It’s about commitment, and respecting commitment with legal, socially-sanctioned authority. It’s about making staying together the assumption, instead of the exception.

Needless to say, I pray that in my lifetime the blight upon our commonwealth constitution that was enacted in 2007 will be erased, and I aim to help make it so.

{Update} – Sen. Don McEachin has introduced a bill in the Assembly to prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. We should all support him in this affort.  

Here in Loudoun County, our Democratic Board of Supervisors has successfully balanced the budget throughout their term of office. In fact, in 2010 the County ended the fiscal year with a surplus.

In general, balancing government budgets is a good idea. That’s among the reasons I’m a proponent of a balanced Federal budget as a general goal. I believe in running deficits for specific emergencies (say, the greatest economic downturn since my grandmother was choosing between buying coffee or butter on her weekly grocery list), but in times of economic prosperity, the budget should aim towards balance.

Of course, I also agree with most Americans as to how that should be acheived.

Sixty-one percent of Americans polled would rather see taxes for the wealthy increased as a first step to tackling the deficit, the poll showed.

The next most popular way — chosen by 20 percent — was to cut defense spending.

Yes, I believe those who gained the most from our American system should pay their dues to keep that system sound and prosperous – just like 61% of my fellow citizens.  

Loudoun Times Mirror’s David D’Onofrio very kindly asked me to contribute to his collection of resolutions for Loudoun County!

Here’s your link(s) to the new year.

• What Math? – How Math is a grossly misunderstood subject.
• Obama Is Suffering Because Of His Achievements Not Despite Them – An interesting take on the hits the President has taken. Basically, a bunch of the country hates him because he is getting things done, and the frustration and anger gets worse among this population the more he accomplishes.
• Will The Fed’s Debit Fee Rule Help Merchants? – In another underreported positive consequence of having Democrats in charge when the financial reform bill was developed and passed, transaction fees for credit cards and debit cards will be going down, returning that money to merchants and consumers, who actually use and spend it, rather than aggregating it to the banks, who don’t.
• Jesus Is a Liberal Democrat – If you haven’t seen Stephen Colbert’s take on Christmas-season charity, you should.
• Incredible ISS Pictures – Astronaut Wheelock took these awesome pictures of the ISS during his journey there a few months ago. Amazing.
• New Rules For a New Senate – Sen. Merkley has a proposal to have the Senate actually debate on legislation instead of sitting around holding cloture votes. I know, shocking!
  

So I decided this week to make a few New Year’s blogging resolutions.

The first one I made was to ditch my “handle” (“daverunner”) and write under my given name. Personally, I figure that if I’m going to write about issues that inspire passion in me, then I should be proud enough to put it under my own name, rather than under a pseudonym. It’s very simple for someone to hide behind a moniker and attack people. That way, you can live the life of an internet tough guy without having to face repercussions in real life, except from the few people who know who you are.

I have first-hand knowledge in this; I blogged anonymously on an old, ill-conceived blog a few years ago. I called people out for their actions, but was too cowardly to reveal myself. An internet tough guy.

So I’m going to be accountable. I write something scathing, I’ll take the heat.

In that same vein, I’m going to make a resolution this coming year to not engage in personal attacks on anyone. And I mean everyone. It’s too easy to do this with political figures, and it cheapens the debate. But that doesn’t mean I will not criticize. Politicians (and candidates, for that matter) say and engage in things that are well-worthy of criticism. So, rather than attack personally, I will attack words and actions.

Hopefully, raising the bar and having some accountability will also raise the level of debate in Loudoun County, blog-wise. If nothing else, it will show readers that progressives are willing to be accountable for their words and to engage in civility, rather than attacking people for, say, their appearance, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.

Be accountable.