Deval Patrick (born July 31, 1956) is the 71st Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. A member of the Democratic Party, Patrick served as United States Assistant Attorney General under President Bill Clinton. He is the first African American to hold the office of Massachusetts governor.
Deval Patrick was born on the South Side of Chicago, where his family resided in a two-bedroom apartment in Robert Taylor Homes housing projects. Patrick had a strained relationship with his father and was raised by his mother, who traces her roots to American slaves in the American South. While Patrick was in middle school, one of his teachers referred him to A Better Chance, a national non-profit organization for identifying, recruiting and developing leaders among academically gifted students of African American descent, which enabled him to attend Milton Academy. Patrick graduated from Milton Academy in 1974 and from Harvard College in 1978. He then spent a year working with the UN in Africa. In 1979, Patrick returned to the US and enrolled at Harvard Law School. While in law school, Patrick was elected president of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, where he first worked defending poor families in Middlesex County, MA.
He and his wife, Diane Patrick, a lawyer specializing in labor and employment law, married in 1984. They have lived in Milton, MA since 1989 and have two daughters, Sarah and Katherine. In July 2008, Katherine publicly announced that she is a lesbian, and mentioned that her father did not know this while he was fighting against a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would have banned same-sex marriage. In a joint interview Patrick expressed support for his daughter and said he was proud of her.
In 1994, Clinton nominated Patrick Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, subsequently confirmed by the United States Senate. As the head of the Civil Rights Division, Patrick worked on issues including racial profiling, police misconduct, fair lending enforcement, human trafficking, prosecution of hate crime, abortion clinic violence and discrimination based on gender and disability. He led what was (before 9-11) the largest federal criminal investigation in history as co-chair of the Task Force investigating the arsons of synagogues and Black churches in the South in the mid 1990's. He had a key role as an adviser to post-apartheid South Africa during this time and helped draft that country's civil rights laws.
In 2005, Patrick announced his candidacy for Governor of Massachusetts. He was at first seen as a dark horse candidate, facing veteran Massachusetts campaigners Thomas "Tom" Reilly and Chris Gabrielli in the Democratic primary. Patrick secured the nomination in the September 2006 primary, winning 49% of the vote in a three-way race and carrying every county in the state. Governor Patrick was the first gubernatorial candidate in the country to win office while actively campaigning in support of civil marriage rights.
Breaking with the tradition of being inaugurated in the House Chamber of the Massachusetts State House, Deval Patrick and Tim Murray took the oath of office, and Patrick delivered his inaugural address, outdoors on the West Portico of the State House facing Boston Common. This allowed a larger part of the public to witness and take part first hand in the event, and was intended to signal more open, transparent, and accessible government. The governor-elect was facing the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, just across Beacon Street, a memorial to the first black regiment in the U.S. Civil War. He took his oath of office on the Mendi Bible, which was given to then-Congressman John Quincy Adams by the freed American slaves from the ship La Amistad in honor of his heritage.
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Before taking office, Patrick faced criticism for urging legislators to ignore the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s finding that the legislature was constitutionally bound to take a second vote in the annual Constitutional Convention on whether or not to allow a citizen initiated referendum to define marriage as an institution between one man and one woman. Patrick favored the legalizing of same-sex marriage because of the fundamental principle that "citizens come before their government as equals". He worked with the state legislature to prevent a ballot measure eliminating same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, which reaffirmed the state's first-in-the-nation same-sex marriage allowance.
from the New York Times-
On June 9, 2007, Governor Deval Patrick again made history when he became the first sitting governor to march in a Gay Pride parade. His youngest daughter, Katherine, joined him. As they marched up Beacon Street past the State House, the crowds cheered wildly. Five days later, Patrick, who ran on a platform of marriage equality, followed through on his commitment to our community. On June 14, 2007, he stood on the State House steps with legislative leaders and celebrated the defeat of an anti-marriage equality ballot amendment. Their leadership protected our state constitution and same-sex marriage in the Commonwealth.
In the crowd that day as well was 17-year-old Katherine Patrick, who says she "never felt more proud of her father." A month later she would come out to him and her mother, and a year later she would publicly come out. Katherine quickly pointed out that her father’s support for marriage equality was not premised on his daughter’s sexuality: "He didn’t know that I was gay then. For someone to fight for something that doesn’t even affect him was just like, ’That’s my dad,’ you know." Now it affects him.
from the Boston Globe-
Diane and Deval Patrick have become a textbook model of loving parents and when the governor called his daughter’s coming out "just no biggie," he uttered words that LGBT children, of whatever age, all over this country long to hear from their parents. But then again this is a politician who already has spent a lot of capital, political capital that is, on marriage equality, convincing many who were wavering that defeating an anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment was the right thing to do.
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MassEquality Endorses Governor Deval Patrick
“MassEquality is proud to support Deval Patrick for governor. He is the only candidate who supports the Transgender Civil Rights Bill, which would provide long-overdue employment, housing, education, credit, and hate crimes protections to some of the Commonwealth’s most vulnerable residents.
“Since taking office, Governor Patrick has also signed into law three major pieces of legislation that expand equality in Massachusetts. In May, he signed a measure that will protect students from bullying, with LGBT students widely seen as one of the chief beneficiaries of the law. And in July, 2008 he signed a bill repealing the discriminatory 1913 law, which prevented out-of-state lesbian and gay couples from marrying in Massachusetts. He also signed the MassHealth Equality bill, which grants equal Medicaid benefits to married same-sex couples.
“Governor Patrick was the first governor in the country to win office after campaigning in favor of marriage equality. After he won, he spent considerable political capital campaigning for the defeat of a discriminatory marriage amendment by meeting with key lawmakers, strategizing with State House leaders, and speaking publicly about the need to defeat the amendment.
“MassEquality is confident that Governor Patrick will continue his public support for equality for LGBT residents of Massachusetts. As the governor has stated many times, support for LGBT equality is good for all of us. And as he has shown repeatedly, he understands the need for equality on a personal, visceral level.”
Statement from Deval Patrick on MassEquality Endorsement:
From the Patrick 2010 Website-
Deval Patrick was born on the South Side of Chicago, where his family resided in a two-bedroom apartment in Robert Taylor Homes housing projects. Patrick had a strained relationship with his father and was raised by his mother, who traces her roots to American slaves in the American South. While Patrick was in middle school, one of his teachers referred him to A Better Chance, a national non-profit organization for identifying, recruiting and developing leaders among academically gifted students of African American descent, which enabled him to attend Milton Academy. Patrick graduated from Milton Academy in 1974 and from Harvard College in 1978. He then spent a year working with the UN in Africa. In 1979, Patrick returned to the US and enrolled at Harvard Law School. While in law school, Patrick was elected president of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, where he first worked defending poor families in Middlesex County, MA.
He and his wife, Diane Patrick, a lawyer specializing in labor and employment law, married in 1984. They have lived in Milton, MA since 1989 and have two daughters, Sarah and Katherine. In July 2008, Katherine publicly announced that she is a lesbian, and mentioned that her father did not know this while he was fighting against a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would have banned same-sex marriage. In a joint interview Patrick expressed support for his daughter and said he was proud of her.
In 1994, Clinton nominated Patrick Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, subsequently confirmed by the United States Senate. As the head of the Civil Rights Division, Patrick worked on issues including racial profiling, police misconduct, fair lending enforcement, human trafficking, prosecution of hate crime, abortion clinic violence and discrimination based on gender and disability. He led what was (before 9-11) the largest federal criminal investigation in history as co-chair of the Task Force investigating the arsons of synagogues and Black churches in the South in the mid 1990's. He had a key role as an adviser to post-apartheid South Africa during this time and helped draft that country's civil rights laws.
In 2005, Patrick announced his candidacy for Governor of Massachusetts. He was at first seen as a dark horse candidate, facing veteran Massachusetts campaigners Thomas "Tom" Reilly and Chris Gabrielli in the Democratic primary. Patrick secured the nomination in the September 2006 primary, winning 49% of the vote in a three-way race and carrying every county in the state. Governor Patrick was the first gubernatorial candidate in the country to win office while actively campaigning in support of civil marriage rights.
Breaking with the tradition of being inaugurated in the House Chamber of the Massachusetts State House, Deval Patrick and Tim Murray took the oath of office, and Patrick delivered his inaugural address, outdoors on the West Portico of the State House facing Boston Common. This allowed a larger part of the public to witness and take part first hand in the event, and was intended to signal more open, transparent, and accessible government. The governor-elect was facing the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, just across Beacon Street, a memorial to the first black regiment in the U.S. Civil War. He took his oath of office on the Mendi Bible, which was given to then-Congressman John Quincy Adams by the freed American slaves from the ship La Amistad in honor of his heritage.
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Before taking office, Patrick faced criticism for urging legislators to ignore the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s finding that the legislature was constitutionally bound to take a second vote in the annual Constitutional Convention on whether or not to allow a citizen initiated referendum to define marriage as an institution between one man and one woman. Patrick favored the legalizing of same-sex marriage because of the fundamental principle that "citizens come before their government as equals". He worked with the state legislature to prevent a ballot measure eliminating same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, which reaffirmed the state's first-in-the-nation same-sex marriage allowance.
from the New York Times-
Same-sex marriage will continue to be legal in Massachusetts, after proponents in both houses won a pitched months-long battle on Thursday to defeat a proposed constitutional amendment to define marriage as between a man and a woman.
“In Massachusetts today, the freedom to marry is secure,” Gov. Deval Patrick said after the legislature voted 151 to 45 against the amendment, which needed 50 favorable votes to come before voters in a referendum in November 2008.
The vote means that opponents would have to start from Square 1 to sponsor a new amendment, which could not get on the ballot before 2012. Massachusetts is the only state where same-sex marriage is legal, although five states allow civil unions or the equivalent.
Thursday’s victory for same-sex marriage was not a foregone conclusion, especially after the amendment won first-round approval from the previous legislature in January, with 62 lawmakers supporting it. (To get on the ballot in Massachusetts, a referendum needs approval by 1/4 of the legislature, 50 votes in back-to-back Constitutional Conventions.)
As late as a couple of hours before the 1 p.m. vote on Thursday, advocates on both sides of the issue said they were not sure of the outcome. The eleventh-hour decisions of several legislators to vote against the amendment followed intensive lobbying by the leaders of the House and Senate and Governor Patrick, who, like most members of the legislature, is a Democrat.
“I think I am going to be doing a certain number of fund-raisers for districts, and I am happy to do that,” said Mr. Patrick, who said he had tried to persuade lawmakers not only that same-sex marriage should be allowed but also that a 2008 referendum would be divisive and distract from other important state issues.
On June 9, 2007, Governor Deval Patrick again made history when he became the first sitting governor to march in a Gay Pride parade. His youngest daughter, Katherine, joined him. As they marched up Beacon Street past the State House, the crowds cheered wildly. Five days later, Patrick, who ran on a platform of marriage equality, followed through on his commitment to our community. On June 14, 2007, he stood on the State House steps with legislative leaders and celebrated the defeat of an anti-marriage equality ballot amendment. Their leadership protected our state constitution and same-sex marriage in the Commonwealth.
In the crowd that day as well was 17-year-old Katherine Patrick, who says she "never felt more proud of her father." A month later she would come out to him and her mother, and a year later she would publicly come out. Katherine quickly pointed out that her father’s support for marriage equality was not premised on his daughter’s sexuality: "He didn’t know that I was gay then. For someone to fight for something that doesn’t even affect him was just like, ’That’s my dad,’ you know." Now it affects him.
from the Boston Globe-
It was just three weeks after her father, Governor Deval Patrick, had helped keep gay marriage legal in Massachusetts. The family was at their vacation home in the Berkshires, preparing a midafternoon picnic by the pool.
Katherine Patrick walked into the kitchen, told her parents to stop what they were doing, and asked her aunt to leave the room.
"I'm a lesbian," she told them.
Her mother, expecting terrible news, nearly burst out laughing, a sense of relief coming over her.
Her father wrapped her in a bear hug and said, "Well, we love you no matter what."
Katherine Patrick, 18, recounted the experience of coming out to her parents last summer.
"It's not only something that we accept, but it's something that we're very proud of," Katherine Patrick told Bay Windows. "It's a great aspect of our lives and there's nothing about it that is shameful or that we would want to hide."
Local and national gay advocates immediately hailed the Patricks' story as a model for how parents should handle similar situations. Several said the news may take on added significance in the black community, where being openly gay often has an added negative stigma.
Diane and Deval Patrick have become a textbook model of loving parents and when the governor called his daughter’s coming out "just no biggie," he uttered words that LGBT children, of whatever age, all over this country long to hear from their parents. But then again this is a politician who already has spent a lot of capital, political capital that is, on marriage equality, convincing many who were wavering that defeating an anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment was the right thing to do.
The Patrick campaign’s secret weapon-
By: Susan Ryan-Vollmar*/The Rainbow Times Columnist & Reporter
The Deval Patrick Campaign has deployed a secret weapon to collect votes and drum up enthusiasm among LGBT voters: the governor’s youngest daughter, Smith College junior Katherine Patrick. The petite 20-year-old, who’s sporting a close-cropped ’do these days, is volunteering for her father’s campaign this summer.
Patrick, who came out two years ago, is helping the campaign with its strategy to recruit 21,700 “organizers” who will pledge to talk with 50 of their friends about why they are supporting Patrick for re-election. “Having those person-to-person phone calls is so much more effective than doing robo calls because my friend is more likely to listen to me rather than have a volunteer reading from a script and saying three things why this guy is great,” she says.
It’s a strategy that worked for Governor Patrick in 2006 and, of course, more famously, Barack Obama in his 2008 campaign for president. And it’s outlined in entertaining fashion in Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler’s book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives in which they recount how “a single plea to vote can change political behavior and spread from” person to person, including those who never even directly hear the pitch to get out and vote.
Patrick’s goal is to recruit 200 LGBT organizers for her father’s campaign. “I’m not concerned about meeting that goal in the least,” she says. “I think we’ll shatter it on Pride.”
As for why LGBT voters should support her father, she admits to being “a little biased.” She then ticks off Governor Patrick’s rather formidable list of accomplishments: support for the Transgender Civil Rights bill (GOP nominee Charlie Baker and Independent candidate Tim Cahill have both derided the civil rights measure that would grant equal protections for transgender people in housing, employment, credit, public accommodations and hate crimes protections as “the bathroom bill”); signing the anti-bullying law (which will help protect students from bullying, and which LGBT students are a chief beneficiary); repealing the 1913 law (which means that out-of-state same-sex couples can now wed in Massachusetts, as Glee’s Jane Lynch and her wife Dr. Lara Embry recently did in Sunderland); and signing the MassHealth Equality bill (which grants equal Medicaid benefits to married same-sex couples).
*Susan Ryan-Vollmar is a media relations and communications consultant. MassEquality, which recently endorsed Deval Patrick for governor, is one of her clients.
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MassEquality Endorses Governor Deval Patrick
“MassEquality is proud to support Deval Patrick for governor. He is the only candidate who supports the Transgender Civil Rights Bill, which would provide long-overdue employment, housing, education, credit, and hate crimes protections to some of the Commonwealth’s most vulnerable residents.
“Since taking office, Governor Patrick has also signed into law three major pieces of legislation that expand equality in Massachusetts. In May, he signed a measure that will protect students from bullying, with LGBT students widely seen as one of the chief beneficiaries of the law. And in July, 2008 he signed a bill repealing the discriminatory 1913 law, which prevented out-of-state lesbian and gay couples from marrying in Massachusetts. He also signed the MassHealth Equality bill, which grants equal Medicaid benefits to married same-sex couples.
“Governor Patrick was the first governor in the country to win office after campaigning in favor of marriage equality. After he won, he spent considerable political capital campaigning for the defeat of a discriminatory marriage amendment by meeting with key lawmakers, strategizing with State House leaders, and speaking publicly about the need to defeat the amendment.
“MassEquality is confident that Governor Patrick will continue his public support for equality for LGBT residents of Massachusetts. As the governor has stated many times, support for LGBT equality is good for all of us. And as he has shown repeatedly, he understands the need for equality on a personal, visceral level.”
Statement from Deval Patrick on MassEquality Endorsement:
"I am proud to receive the endorsement of MassEquality and thank them for their service and exceptional advocacy on behalf of the LGBT community in Massachusetts. As we take time today to celebrate the tremendous progress we have made together, we look ahead to the work still to do in building a stronger Commonwealth for all."
From the Patrick 2010 Website-
Looking good!
ReplyDeletegood stuff!!! lemme know when a blog roll is set up so i can submit pimpiage.
ReplyDeletesnazzy background template, too! blogger's done some good stuff since i last tweaked "the dump".
This is a test comment. It's also to say I'm excited about this project! And go Gov. Patrick!
ReplyDelete