All posts by: UMBC News Staff

In an op-ed published March 4 in The Baltimore Sun, Political Science Professor Thomas Schaller comments on public attitudes of gay rights and efforts to allow discrimination against gays being struck down in recent years.

“Public attitudes about gay rights have changed dramatically in recent decades. Solid majorities, especially among younger Americans, now support marriage equality and other standards of equal treatment,” he writes.

In his column, Schaller cites the recent news of a bill passed by the Arizona legislature and later vetoed that would have permitted those with religious objections to deny services to gay customers:  “Consider the fact that anyone could start a new religion tomorrow and declare that their so-called moral objections allow them to deny service to groups they find repellent, including conservative evangelicals. Citing religion to justify hate sets a very dangerous precedent,” Schaller writes.

You can read the full op-ed titled “Hate if you must, just don’t act on it” in The Baltimore Sun by clicking here.

Earlier this month, two Washington County Republican delegates signed on as co-sponsors of a bill that could stop the National Security Agency from operating in Maryland by cutting off utility services to the agency, among other proposals. An article published February 28 in The Herald-Mail examines why delegates Andrew Serafini and Neil Parrott initially supported the measure, titled the Fourth Amendment Protection Act, but later requested that their names be removed from it.

Laura Hussey, an assistant professor of political science, was interviewed for the article and noted the Maryland bill is similar to legislation in other states where the NSA operates and reflects anxiety about the agency and its operations.

A recent story published on fact-checking website PolitiFact examines a claim by the Texas Liberty PAC that a Republican congressman sponsored a bill that funded the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The claim is that Lamar Smith, a U.S. House member from San Antonio, introduced the 2014 Omnibus Spending Bill, which eventually turned into the primary vehicle through which programs in the ACA were funded.

PolitiFact asked Political Science Professor Roy Meyers to weigh in on the issue. He said that the omnibus bill did provide some funding to administer the ACA, but Smith’s original bill was intended to serve a different purpose.

“So it’s really a classic dirty trick by the Texas Liberty PAC to not acknowledge that the House Rules Committee made this bill the vehicle for passing the Consolidated Appropriations Act, amending the original bill to add all of the appropriations language,” Meyers said.

You can read the full article on the PolitiFact website here.