The piece directly below this one broke the news that Ken Mehlman, former RNC chair, would be coming out in an article from Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic. It also featured a pre-emptive smackdown from Mike Rogers, which is completely warranted. Well, Ambinder’s piece just appeared, and all I can say is “Oy.”
Mehlman arrived at this conclusion about his identity fairly recently, he said in an interview. He agreed to answer a reporter’s questions, he said, because, now in private life, he wants to become an advocate for gay marriage and anticipated that questions would be asked about his participation in a late-September fundraiser for the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), the group that supported the legal challenge to California’s ballot initiative against gay marriage, Proposition 8.
“It’s taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life,” Mehlman said. “Everybody has their own path to travel, their own journey, and for me, over the past few months, I’ve told my family, friends, former colleagues, and current colleagues, and they’ve been wonderful and supportive. The process has been something that’s made me a happier and better person. It’s something I wish I had done years ago.”
Bully for him.
Privately, in off-the-record conversations with this reporter over the years, Mehlman voiced support for civil unions and told of how, in private discussions with senior Republican officials, he beat back efforts to attack same-sex marriage. He insisted, too, that President Bush “was no homophobe.” He often wondered why gay voters never formed common cause with Republican opponents of Islamic jihad, which he called “the greatest anti-gay force in the world right now.”
Oh, that’s because the Republican plan for fighting Islamic extremism is laughably stupid, driven by emotion and fear, and exemplifies all the characteristics of Severe Small Penis Syndrome. Additionally, it’s been a hilarious failure everywhere it’s been tried. Thanks, Bill Kristol! Also, because under Ken Mehlman’s tutelage, the RNC and the Bush administration used people like Ken Mehlman as a political wedge issue to scare the bumpkins, rubes and yahoos into voting.
Read it all if you want.
Many of us do oppose Islamic jihad. However, all the GOP offered was replacing Islamic fundamentalism with Christian fundamentalism. Is he surprised we were not impressed by this lousy menu of options?
And, maybe if he had not helped elect so many homophones, he would ace been comfortable coming out at a much younger age.
Welcome out Ken. But your spin won’t go far. We are not the rubes on the right you are used to fooling with such ease.
Out or not, that guy gives me the creeps.
Let’s see: Islamic fundamentalism might be a threat to gays in places like Iran/Iraq/Afghanistan. Sure. (Just like it’s a threat to women/jews/etc.) But the specific threat to gays from Islamic fundamentalism in the United States is zero. There is simply no chance that the United States is going to become a terrible sharia theocracy any time soon.
By contrast, the threat to gays in the USA posed by Republicans is incredibly high. See, e.g., the marriage amendments, DOMA, DADT, etc.
So it’s kinda funny that Mehlman can argue with a straight face that gays, faced with Republican efforts to demonize/marginalize/persecute gay people in the USA would buy their argument that they’re keeping gay people safe from islamic terrorism abroad.