Mark Leno flashes a broad smile when a conversation about his political
legacy pivots to an earlier part of his life, when he was a restless young man
who abruptly decided to walk away from rabbinical school without any plan for
what would come next.
What is he so proud of?
He shoved the destructive, anti-biological homosexual agenda on everyone.
He forced through the forced wage hike which will drive businesses underground or out of business entirely.
He has been the sprearhead piercing this state's economy and culture.
“My friend gave me a T-shirt that year for Hanukkah that said, ‘Rebbe
Without A Cause,’” Leno said with a laugh.
Rebbe? Don't rub me the wrong way.
To know him is to get the joke: This is a man full of causes, ones for
which the Democrat has patiently and passionately advocated during a 14-year
career in the California Legislature that’s now coming to a close.
The best cause will be his leaving the state of California.
God forbid this guy should replace Nancy Pelosi when she retires (or dies in office).
“If there's a theme throughout this, it’s that I fight for the
underdog,” Leno said. “Whoever that underdog may be."
Underdog? Really? This man is a dog of a legislator, chewing away at what's left for everyone else.
The gay bullies are not underdogs. They are attacking everyone else.
They are no longer "the oppressed." They are the oppressors. They are attacking men and women's freedom of conscience.
They are going after private institutions.
Through the years, his causes have often led to substantive change, in
part because of what friends and even foes agree is his unmatched perseverance.
Leno, the author of 161 laws, rarely gives up.
In almost all of his celebrated achievements — this year’s deal to
boost California’s minimum wage to $15 an hour, to require police search
warrants to access electronic devices or Internet service providers, more
probation services for felons — the fight took years. Some efforts, such as one
of the nation’s first efforts at single-payer universal healthcare, may never
come to fruition.
So, with that forced wage hike, where will all the released prisoners find new jobs?
Leno is undaunted.
“You just chip away, year after year after year,” he said. “You start
getting some cracks in that wall, and then sometimes circumstances change.”
That's exactly what Republicans, that's exactly what conservatives are going to do.
We are going to chip away at the corruption, malfeasance, waste, and irresponsibility of the Democratic Party and their corrosive dominance in California.
Forced out of office by term limits, the state senator who championed
an expansion of gay rights, reform of the prison sentencing system and new
warnings on flame-retardant chemicals in furniture has no idea what comes next.
With no immediate political office waiting in the wings, Leno, 65, will
return this fall to San Francisco and the neighborhood small business he
started in 1978.
“I’ve never been kicked out of any place in my life,” he said with a
quick laugh. “So this is a new phenomenon.”
Leno is in many ways a throwback to a different era. From his crisp
shirts and suits to his devotion to decorum, he stands out in a political
environment where the goal is often to dominate rather than legislate. Never
one to hide his identity as a gay man and an unabashed liberal, he has won
admirers in both parties.
In June, after he presented his final state spending plan as budget
chairman, the entire Senate rose for a long and loud ovation. As many
Republicans as Democrats praised him.
Leno’s penchant for civility has not faded even when fiercely
advocating for a cause that inflames passions under the Capitol dome.
“He’s not afraid to have a fight,” said Democrat Darrell Steinberg, the
former president pro tem of the state Senate. “But he has the rare ability to
fight while also maintaining a grace about himself, and an intellect to go with
it.”
He's going to face more fights very soon, and so will all the other
Perhaps his most consistent battle has been for the rights of lesbian,
gay, bisexual and transgender Californians. Leno, one of the first two openly
gay men elected to the Legislature, wrote laws to expand bans on housing and
employment discrimination as well as workplace benefits for transgender
employees. And perhaps most visibly, he wrote the 2005 bill to legalize
same-sex marriages, a bill former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed.
Give me a break!
LGBT "identity" is not a civil right.
Next.
“There is no legislator in the country who has done more to advance
LGBT rights than Mark Leno,” said Geoff Kors, a friend and longtime gay rights
advocate who is now a city councilman in Palm Springs.
It's time to scale back this intrusion of the government into our daily lives.
euality
Equal rights for all, special privileges for none.
“Mark’s not the person who plays public hardball politics,” Kors said.
“He’s the person who talks one-on-one with everyone to make his case.”
That's such a lie.
That skill was probably well-honed as a child.
"I was a skinny little kid who could never have won a physical
altercation if I had one,” he said. “You learn how to get along with people
when you need to."
Leno was born in Milwaukee, Wis., to first-generation Americans, a
family of Eastern European Jews who immigrated to the United States in 1915. He
left Milwaukee after high school and headed for New York City and the chance to
freely live his life as a gay man.
That conflicted with plans to become a rabbi. Leno couldn’t reconcile
the chaste world of religious leadership with the liberated nightlife provided
by Manhattan in the 1970s. He admits he had “no aspirations” once rabbinical
school faded away. And after a series of odd jobs, including a brief stint as
an office assistant to singer Art Garfunkel (they coincidentally met on an
airplane), his youngest sister suggested he move west to San Francisco.
It was not an easy transition, but he made up for it with enthusiasm. A
small loan led him to open a sign-printing store, and the business’ success
gave him entry into volunteering in local politics.
John Whitehurst, his campaign manager for legislative races in 2002 and
2008, said the story of Leno’s arrival in San Francisco has uncanny parallels
to that of the late Harvey Milk, another gay man who left New York to open a
small business in San Francisco and then launched a historic career in
politics.
Harvey Milk was a pedophile. Does anyone really want to be equated with that creep?!
Leno never got to meet Milk before the activist’s assassination in
1978. But he later occupied the same seat on the San Francisco Board of
Supervisors and wrote the 2009 law that created an annual Harvey Milk Day in
the state. Photos of the slain leader adorn Leno’s office.
Bleaugh!
 |
| Mark Leno (Credit: Vapoteurs) |
“What I attribute to Harvey was a burning desire to break a glass
ceiling,” Leno said. “Who he was, and the symbol he has become, was a great
motivator.”
So, Leno is claiming to be a woman now? HUH?!
He was elected to the Assembly in 2002 and arrived in Sacramento with
hopes of leading a powerful legislative committee. His assignment, chair of the
Assembly’s public safety committee, included killing crime and punishment bills
that Democrats didn’t like. In 2006, he tried instead to reach across the aisle
and collaborate on one of those bills.
It came close to costing him his political career.
Leno huddled with Republican lawmakers for weeks with the hope that he
could stave off a statewide ballot measure cracking down on sex offenders,
believing the Legislature could craft a better version.
But a dispute over punishment for child pornography left him in the
uncomfortable position of trying to negotiate an acceptable number of explicit
photos on a person’s computer hard drive — a discussion that began only by his
worry that an unintentional download could unfairly send someone to prison.
With what he believed to be a bipartisan deal in hand, Leno brought the
bill up for a vote. Democrats, trusting his lead, voted yes. Republicans
surprised him by refusing to vote. It was a painful lesson.
“Sometimes, it’s not about solving a problem. It’s about making a
point,” he said. “It turned out they only wanted to go to the ballot,” a
measure that became Proposition 83, known as “Jessica’s Law.”
Oh, that's right--the Big Bad Republicans are all wheeling and dealing, backstabbing and handwringing ...
How about all the crap that the Democrats have been doing to schools, to parents, to teachers, to businesses, to workers, to everyone?
It then got worse. A press release from the California Republican Party
castigated him for approving of “child porn,” and rivals in San Francisco whispered
the same messages when he announced he would run against a fellow Democrat,
then-state Sen. Carole Migden, in 2008.
Luckily for Leno, his political strengths were too much for Migden. And
the Senate seat he won came with perhaps the biggest assignment of all,
chairing the powerful budget committee. It put him face-to-face with
Schwarzenegger, with whom Leno sparred on several issues.
Who forget the epic trolling when Schwarzenegger vetoed the port of San Francisco appropriations bill?
Even now, the affable Leno rarely passes on an opportunity to excoriate
the record of the former governor. Leno often points out Schwarzenegger’s 2003
campaign to rescind the recession-sparked increase in the state’s vehicle
license fee. It blew a multibillion-dollar hole in the state budget, and Leno
said the ensuing fights with Schwarzenegger and Republicans over budget crises
often left him “frustrated and angry and sad.”
But it rarely showed in public, as Leno said he always tries to “choose
my words, and choose my actions, as careful as I can.”
Others saw it as an affirmation of character.
"You get what you give,” said Steinberg, “and he gets a lot of
respect because he gives a lot of respect."
Through the years, Leno was able to give more of himself to his
legislative career than might have others who balanced work with family. It was
not by choice. His partner, Douglas Jackson, died of complications from HIV in
1990. Jackson was memorialized in the early years of the national AIDS memorial
quilt. A replica of his quilt panel hangs as a poignant reminder in Leno’s San
Francisco office.
There's another lesson here: don't mess with biology.
“People were dying everywhere, so I was not alone in my grief,” Leno
said. In the years since, he said he has remained single. “I've had the
opportunity to put my entire being into public service.”
Celibate is the only way of one chooses to identify as gay.
Whether that public service continues isn’t clear. Leno admits he
doesn’t know what he wants to do next. There have been thoughts of a campaign
for mayor of San Francisco, which wouldn’t be until 2019 at the earliest.
Others think he would be ideal in Congress, should House Minority Leader Nancy
Pelosi decide in the near future to retire.
What did I say? Well, what did I say?
“He’s really a political dragon slayer,” Whitehurst said. “He would be
hard to beat.”
Last month, Leno hinted in a San Francisco public radio interview that
he might be willing to help lead a 2018 ballot measure campaign to force
changes in police accountability laws that failed this summer at the state
Capitol. "They cannot do their work without trust from the communities
they serve,” he said.
Whatever path he chooses, observers believe Leno will always take the
high road in an era where few others seem to follow.
“It’s not partisanship that’s the enemy, it’s temperament,” Steinberg
said. Leno “is an example of how you can have fierce disagreements but can
combine that with collegial, collaborative politics.”
“No matter who replaces him,” Kors said, “Mark’s departure from the
Legislature is going to leave a tremendous gap.”
No it won't.
Final Reflection
I do not care how nice someone may appear in public.
If they craft bad legislation which harms our rights, they are doing evil deeds.
Mark Leno was full of them.
And full of it.
I am glad that he is gone.
I fear whatever incarnation of regressive leftism will take his place, but let's hope that Republicans start getting their act together and take back the state house ASAP!
