What are we doing to do with this troubled child?
First he ran around the country looking like his mom dressed him up as a pimp for Hallowe’en, trying to “entrap” ACORN employees. Then he doctored the videos to make it look like they committed crimes, when investigations revealed no such thing took place.
Then he participated in some stunt in Mary Landrieu’s office where he misrepresented himself and his intentions, as his friends tampered with her phones while playing dress-up.
Now we find out that two years ago, he and a friend tried to “stick it to the liberals” (their only motivation in life, apparently) by applying for marriage licenses in Massachusetts. No, they’re not gay:
Still, the Wetmore-O’Keefe friendship was, in gonzo journalism terms, a productive one. In 2008, after O’Keefe had left the Leadership Institute, the two men recorded hidden camera video of themselves going to three state offices in Massachusetts, applying for marriage licenses, openly admitting that they were straight men who wanted to get married to take advantage of the benefits.
O’KEEFE: We probably plan on doing this for about a year and then..
CLERK: And then, divorcing.
O’KEEFE: Right.
CLERK: Yeah.
WETMORE: Yeah.The closest thing O’Keefe and Wetmore got to an ACORN moment was a Worcester, Mass., clerk admitting that she wasn’t telling a supervisor about their meeting because she didn’t want to get in trouble. Because the gag didn’t go any further, the stunt got little media attention. Fourteen months later, it reveals just how close O’Keefe and Wetmore were.
Lord. Apparently the idea that people will use the marriage equality to scam the government into giving them benefits is some sort of wingnut fever dream? Digby thinks so:
I’m not sure what this was trying to prove, but there’s little doubt that these guys are jackasses of the highest order. They are just mean little pranksters seeking to entrap low level clerks into validating bigots’ worst imaginations.
Oh well. Whatever. Even if people did use marriage equality for the purpose of getting benefits, would this be new? I mean, really.
What’s next? Is this little wanna-be badass going to show up at a Planned Parenthood with a rolled up blanket in his shirt and ask for a partial-birth abortion, JUST TO SEE IF THEY’LL GIVE HIM ONE?
This little boy totally reminds me of some stupid comedy bit I saw years ago, where the world’s dumbest pranksters would go through drive-through windows and pay the people, but they wouldn’t take the food. Zing!
Anyway. I smell Daddy issues. Don’t you? To be his age, rich, white and racist…he should be out having fun, you know?
(h/t Joe Sudbay)
Some people might use legal SSM as a means of “scamming” their way into benefits? Wow, like no opposite-sex couple has ever done that. Are we supposed to forbid any legal right on the basis that it might be abused? If so, what rights would any of us have?
any man and any woman who are legally eligible to do so can get married for any reason they choose, even if they met 5 minutes ago. They don’t even have to like each other. green card marriages never happen?
So what were they trying to prove? That gay people are somehow different from straihgt people? They failed miserably.
This boy is so stupid he doesn’t realize that if they were to get married, they would also be responsible (depending on the state) for each other’s debts as well.
I wonder if you wouldn’t mind providing citations which prove your claims that O’Keefe is a racist and that his friends “tampered” with the phone lines at Landrieu’s office.
I didn’t say what they did with the phone lines, first of all. I said they tampered with the phones. That’s in the FBI affidavit. We’re not quite sure what they did.
Oh, and the entire ACORN debacle was a racist act, or do wingnuts think we don’t see that? The entire bloodlusting ragegasm that wingnuts feel toward ACORN is, at its heart, a problem with the fact that ACORN helps poor black people vote, among other things. If they didn’t work so hard to get out the vote with people who would never vote for wingnuts, wingnuts would not care about ACORN.
But if you need more information on O’Keefe’s racist connections (Yes, I know, all conservatives have them), this is a good jumping-off point:
http://washingtonindependent.com/75626/race-and-james-okeefe
Or this one:
BeliefNet
And if that’s not enough, search “James O’Keefe” and “racist” on Google. There are 287,000 hits.
Or what about this one? I wasn’t even searching for this…just catching up on my Google reader, and whoa, James O’Keefe’s running thread of racism, throughout his entire activist life.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/02/03/james_okeefe_white_nationalists/index.html
Like straight people don’t abuse the privileges of marriage all the time? Hello, Britney Spears. Why should gay people doing the same thing be such a threat, unless you’re threatened by gay people themselves.
Even CS Lewis (a heterosexist who favored marriage equalty) had a legal marriage of convenience and stated publicly he thought it was moral to do so. If anyone, man or woman, needs some marriage benefits, call me!