This is priceless. Just absolutely, breathtakingly priceless. Wingnuts in Minnesota are pushing a constitutional amendment to write anti-gay discrimination into that state’s constitution, and here is their strategery:
Minnesota pastors and lawmakers who support a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as between one man and one woman aim to develop varied strategies to win voter support.
At a strategy session today, a gathering of ministers and politicians known as the Faith and Freedom coalition discussed ways to sell the marriage amendment to people who may not hold their fervent views.
Among their solutions: avoiding arguments over whether gays should have the right to marry, presenting marriage as a vehicle for child-rearing and reframing the issue as an opportunity for Minnesotans to exercise their right to vote.
The first rule of Gay Haters Club is that you don’t talk about Gay Haters Club! Yes, that quote really says that they intend to sell this by not talking about the actual stated intention of the amendment, and by simply trying to get Minnesotans excited that they get to vote! Everybody likes voting!
Many GOP lawmakers who voted for the amendment were at the meeting, but the room came to its feet for a last-minute appearance by Republican U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, who first proposed a marriage amendment when she was a state senator. Before a room full of supporters she described how to sell the amendment more broadly:
“I think if you want to talk to people who are not interested in talking about the morality you can also come at it as “should people be allowed to vote,” Bachmann said.
That’ll get ‘em excited about hurting their gay family members!
“Increasingly LGBT people are empowered, not ashamed,” he said. “They’re attacking us, and we’re confronting them. We’re holding them accountable and calling them on their lies and their ‘pious baloney,’ to borrow Newt Gingrich’s phrase. America is waking up to the fact that we’re not bogeymen, and we’re not coming to do any harm, and that we’re your daughters and sons and neighbors, sometimes your parents, your co-workers, friends, colleagues. The Republican party, in this desperate [nod] to its dying evangelical base, is just ramping up the homophobia, and they’re doing themselves real long-term damage.
“What’s interesting is that, you look at who’s been doing the most hate speech: Bachmann? She’s out. Herman Cain? He’s out. Perry? He’s all but out. Santorum? He’s running fourth, he’s trailing even in conservative South Carolina,” Savage continued.
“It’s not winning them the election anymore. It’s not 1992; Pat Buchanan can’t get up and give a ‘gay rights never, family values forever’ speech at the Republican National Convention anymore. Times have changed.”
This is why, though, if we step back from the GOP primaries and look at the state of the whole movement, the Religious Right is becoming more extreme in their rhetoric against LGBT people. They are desperately trying to hold on to the last few clingers, as they’re well aware that the younger generations just aren’t replacing the older generations when it comes to anti-gay bigotry. They won’t admit it, but they know they’ve lost the overall war. In the piece above, we find Dan wondering whether the GOP will ever look the same again, once they truly realize that the bigot thing doesn’t play with the general population anymore. I wonder the same thing, because it’s really not like the current Republican party believes IN anything.
I must confess that I’m truly baffled by the level of support I’m seeing among my friends for presidential candidate Ron Paul. While the number of Paul fans in my circles is relatively small, he nonetheless enjoys the highest level of support from my LGBT-identified and equality-supporting friends out of all the non-LGBT friendly candidates. In addition, the Ron Paul supporters I know tend to be passionately, often blindly, devoted to their candidate, steamrolling over any criticisms of Paul no matter how legitimate and simply dismissing out of hand those they cannot outargue.
To many people, Ron Paul’s sound bites are very appealing: less government. Individual liberty. Legalization of marijuana and other drugs. (Yes, I think this has a lot to do with the support Paul receives, especially among young people and college students.) Unfortunately, it’s been my experience that most supporters of Ron Paul stop there and either don’t dig any further or ignore the digging done by others. This alarms me, because Ron Paul is very, very, VERY anti-gay.
On his best days, Ron Paul supports the so-called “states’ rights” position regarding marriage equality. On his worst, he has specifically bragged about his efforts to obstruct and attack LGBT people’s civil rights and gone out of his way to slander and mischaracterize LGBT people.
Setting aside the generally disturbing deployment of the “states’ rights” argument at all, given its shameful history as a justifier of slavery and Jim Crow laws in this country, I’d like to ask Mr. Paul (as well as those who profess to support both Ron Paul and LGBT equality) why LGBT couples should be the only Americans whose marriages are subject to the “states’ rights” standard. Why should only LGBT couples, but not straight couples, have to seek the approval of our state legislatures and/or citizenry in order to marry the person we love? Why should our marriages be the only ones that dissolve when we cross state lines? And why is this an acceptable state of affairs, especially given the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees equal protection under the law to all American citizens?
Yeah, many of my Paul-supporting friends will say, but that’s just your opinion.
Which brings up another point: the difference between opinion and fact. Maybe it’s just me, but in this era of false equivalency memes, it appears as though this distinction is being increasingly overlooked. A fact is something that is empirically true and can be supported by evidence, while an opinion is a belief that may or may not be backed up with some type of evidence, usually taking the form of a subjective statement that can be emotionally based or result from a person’s individual interpretation of a fact.
FACT: Ron Paul’s presidential campaign issued a flyer that boasted about the candidate’s efforts to introduce legislation that would remove challenges to the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act from the federal court system.
FACT: Ron Paul’s Iowa state director is Mike Heath, a long-term Christian right activist who formerly served as the board chairman of an SPLC-certified anti-gay hate group known as “Americans for Truth About Homosexuality.”
FACT: As state above, Ron Paul supports the so-called “states’ rights” approach to marriage, but interestingly, only for LGBT couples.
FACT: Ron Paul said, “If I were in Congress in 1996, I would have voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which used Congress’ constitutional authority to define what official state documents other states have to recognize under the Full Faith and Credit Clause, to ensure that no state would be forced to recognize a same-sex marriage license issued in another state.”
FACT: Ron Paul opposes the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would prohibit discrimination against employees on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity by civilian, nonreligious employers.
Based on the above examples and so many others, there is no way one can honestly characterize Ron Paul as anything other than anti-gay. Of course LGBTs and supporters of LGBT equality, like all voters, can and should vote for whomever they choose. I am neither disputing that right nor attempting in any way to tell anyone how to vote. What I am saying, however, is that LGBT and pro-LGBT voters should at least acknowledge that a vote for a candidate like Ron Paul is a vote for someone who opposes their rights.
This, from the man who can’t seem to go five minutes in public without making all kinds of noise about how much he hates gay people. In an interview with Bill O’Reilly, Rick Santorum said the following things:
O’REILLY: To rescind — rescind it after a licenses already given. That’s a big deal.
SANTORUM: The federal government would have to pass a constitutional amendment and if the Constitution says that marriage is between a man and woman, then things that are inconsistent with that would not — would be inconsistent with the Constitution so –
O’REILLY: Would you be doing that if you were elected president? Would you be campaigning for a constitutional amendment in that way?
SANTORUM: I would — well, if you pass a constitutional amendment that says marriage –
O’REILLY: So would you — would that be — would that be in the forefront of your — of your administration?
SANTORUM: As you know, Bill, if you’ve been following me out on the trail, I haven’t been talking a lot about this. Although I strongly believe in it. What I’ve been talking about as I did last night on my acceptance speech where didn’t talk about this issue, I talked about the importance of getting this economy going and talked about my grandfather and coming here for freedom. And this is the fundamental issue in this campaign is whether government is going to be big and obtrusive and telling people how to manage their — their lives or — and are they going to support the basic values of faith and family that allow government to be limited and allow our economy to be strong. Those are the things I talked about and did across Iowa. I’ll be talking about those things here in New Hampshire.
Guess that’s just more of his “not talking about gays.” My guess is that, with his surprising showing in Iowa, one of his advisors might have suggested that he cool it with the anti-gay weirdness, if he has a prayer of winning anything else ever, for the rest of his life.
OH, funny! Amy Koch is the erstwhile Senate Majority leader in Minnesota who resigned after admitting an “inappropriate relationship” with a staffer, all while being traditionally married. She is also an anti-gay politician, having been a leader of the effort to write marriage discrimination into Minnesota’s constitution. Realizing that gay and lesbians, and our marriages, are the cause of most traditional marriage problems, some of the gays in Minnesota have decided to apologize to Koch for ruining her marriage. Here is their letter:
An Open Apology to Amy Koch on Behalf of All Gay and Lesbian Minnesotans
Dear Ms. Koch,
On behalf of all gays and lesbians living in Minnesota, I would like to wholeheartedly apologize for our community’s successful efforts to threaten your traditional marriage. We are ashamed of ourselves for causing you to have what the media refers to as an “illicit affair” with your staffer, and we also extend our deepest apologies to him and to his wife. These recent events have made it quite clear that our gay and lesbian tactics have gone too far, affecting even the most respectful of our society.
We apologize that our selfish requests to marry those we love has cheapened and degraded traditional marriage so much that we caused you to stray from your own holy union for something more cheap and tawdry. And we are doubly remorseful in knowing that many will see this as a form of sexual harassment of a subordinate.
It is now clear to us that if we were not so self-focused and myopic, we would have been able to see that the time you wasted diligently writing legislation that would forever seal the definition of marriage as being between one man and one woman, could have been more usefully spent reshaping the legal definition of “adultery.”
Forgive us. As you know, we are not church-going people, so we are unable to fully appreciate that “gay marriage” is incompatible with Christian values, despite the fact that those values carry a biblical tradition of adultery such as yours. We applaud you for keeping that tradition going.
And finally, shame on us for thinking that marriage is a private affair, and that our marriage would have little impact on anyone’s family. We now see that marriage is more than that. It is an agreement with society. We should listen to the Minnesota Family Council when it tells us that marriage is about being public, which explains why marriages are public ceremonies. Never did we realize that it is exactly because of this societal agreement that the entire world is looking at you in shame and disappointment instead of minding its own business.
From the bottom of our hearts, we ask that you please accept our apology.
Roy Edroso shortened this piece by Mark Krikorian at the National Review as, “What good are wetbacks if we can’t use them against faggots?” Then he added, “you think I’m kidding?!”
Sadly, Roy is not kidding, for if you click on the piece by Krikorian, you see a lot of verbose garbage that could indeed be reduced to that base, racist sentiment. Look:
While Hispanic immigrants, like black Americans, are conservative on certain social issues (though not as much as some might think), it doesn’t matter politically. As one political scientist recently put it, in reaction to a new poll:
“It’s always been said that Latinos have a conflict between their religion and their political tendencies. That they’re usually more progressive on economic policy but conservative on social issues,” said Matt Barreto, a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle and advisor to Latino Decisions.
However, Barreto said the poll reflects no such conflict: “Religion and social and moral values are not among their priorities when they make their political and election calculations.”
That’s part of the reason why California, the state with the largest share of immigrants in its population, has “the first state law mandating lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history and social science curricula.” It’s not that immigrants demanded this nonsense; they probably don’t even like it very much. But their large-scale presence solidifies the position of the Left, making this kind of thing possible, and they aren’t turned off by it enough to rebel against it. When there’s a referendum, sure, they’ll vote against gay marriage, for instance, but that’s not the way most social policy is made. Both by importing faithful Democratic voters and through sheer numbers creating more safe leftist seats in local and state and federal legislatures, mass immigration empowers statism and cultural leftism.
It’s all a conspiracy by the “leftists” and the “statists” and the gays to “import Mexicans” in order to create laws mandating that gay history be taught in California, you see. Now, what I want you to notice about this fine wingnut hackery is just how many of their ooga-boogas it involves. You’ve got big gub’mint, you got lib’ruls, you got gays and you’ve got “illegally imported” Mexicans! This works on their readers because wingnuts don’t have to explain anything. They just have to invoke the specter of things their readers are afraid of and it’s considered a Q.E.D. situation.
It’s not that Democrats are necessarily bad (well, the slaveholder part was bad, but we finally beat that out of them),
By turning them into Republicans…
But it does mean that any successful GOP effort to woo immigrants and their children will take generations — and if small-government, morally traditionalist, pro-sovereignty conservatism is to have any chance of lasting political success during our lifetimes, future immigration must be curbed.
In order to keep ‘Murka pearly white, Christian and heterosexual, we have to keep dark-skinned people out. Gotcha.
How exactly has conservative rhetoric changed in the past forty years?
Lots of professional sports teams — mostly in baseball — have made videos for Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” project, but no NFL teams have stepped up to the plate yet. There’s a new petition at Change.org asking the Denver Broncos to be the first. I think this petition is wonderful and hilarious because Tebow.
Little Timmy Tebow is all the rage right now, idolized by Fundamentalist Christians for his willingness to show off his faith to everyone by kneeling and praying, AKA “Tebowing,” in the middle of the field. Also, his throwing style is quite unique, drawing comparisons to the throwing styles of six year-old girls. Indeed, people are talking about him so much that last night, his name was connected to two of the Republican candidates for losing the presidential election to Barack Obama.
9.16pm: Asked why he is so rubbish, Rick Perry claims that like star quarterback Tim Tebow – actually not a very good quarterback but he somehow still wins games – he can be better than he looks. “I hope I am the Tim Tebow of the Iowa caucuses,” says Perry. Perry will be lucky to be the Forrest Gump of the Iowa caucuses.
Rick Santorum reached the milestone of visiting all of Iowa’s 99 counties in November, and he’s making return trips now — by car and minivan, rather than bus. Chuck Laudner, a Santorum backer, has been involved in many Iowa campaigns. Laudner suggests Santorum is a bit like the underestimated quarterback of the Denver Broncos who has led the team to a string of surprising victories.
“They’re watching the Tim Tebow of the Republican process out there, working all the way through the 4th quarter,” Laudner told Radio Iowa this morning.
Uh, yeah, wow. Both of those links come from Tbogg by the way.
So yes, I want an “It Gets Better” video from Tim “Aren’t You Glad I Wasn’t An Abortion?” Tebow and his team. And maybe it will even make Timmy himself feel better, next time he’s having one of those games that causes him to cry. It gets better, LGBT kids, and it gets better, Tim Tebow!
Joshua Green at the Boston Globeargues that he did, with his silly Brokeback Mountain jacket-wearing “I am victim, hear me roar!” ad, which garnered hundreds of thousands of dislikes on YouTube:
[The ad] put him back in the headlines, but not in the way he intended. The response was swift and dramatic. On YouTube, where political ads are judged and debated, sentiment was startlingly negative: People hated the ad, and in record numbers. In just a few days, “Strong’’ registered 6 million views and more than 650,000 “dislikes’’ – four times the number prompted by the latest Justin Bieber video. A YouTube spokesman told the website Talking Points Memo that the ad was the “most viewed video in America.’’
Obviously, this is bad news for Perry. But it could be a blessing in disguise for the legions outraged by his remarks. In the process of killing off his own campaign, Perry may have brought an end to the use of explicitly anti-gay rhetoric as a political tactic, at least for any candidate with national ambitions.
Perry’s mistake was twofold. First, public opinion has been moving rapidly toward greater acceptance of gays and lesbians. In September, the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell’’ policy was lifted with bipartisan support. A CBS News poll the next month showed that only 15 percent of Americans “strongly oppose’’ allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly. National polls also now routinely show majority support for same-sex marriage. Furthermore, it is legal in the key early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, and efforts to overturn it have failed. Perry may motivate some voters, but their number is shrinking fast.
I think Green is partially right. The response to Perry’s ad was pretty much across-the-board ridicule and condemnation. That being said, it’s useful to remember that GOP primary voters and their candidates don’t live in the normal world with the rest of us. Religious Right leaders are still clinging to outdated poll numbers from not so long ago, when a majority of Americans opposed marriage equality. There is a general feeling among these sorts of people that if the polls don’t say what they want them to say, that they must be wrong or biased. Even when every single mainstream poll is now showing majority support for marriage equality, they will continue to believe otherwise, and they’ll moreover use that to shore up their continued victim status. Everybody is out to get them, everybody is against Real Americans, etc.
So I doubt that this is the end of the overt gay-baiting in the GOP primaries. Now, when the general election comes? That’s where you might see a shift in tone, and that, as Green says, would be good news indeed.
The other day a video from a young kid named Jonah Mowry, where he told the story of the relentless bullying he experiences on a daily basis, went viral. Here’s that video again if you haven’t seen it:
When I posted it, I described Jonah as a specific example of a kid that Linda Harvey and the rest of the Religious Right refuses to protect, and asked what was more valuable: that child, or their dogma?
Christian writer John Shore took that idea a lot further than I did, and he took the gloves off. Quoting it almost in its entirety, because John likes me and won’t get mad:
Tell me that your belief system didn’t help put the hot tears on this kid’s cheeks. Tell me that the bullies who torment this kid aren’t in any way encouraged or empowered by your tacit approval of their actions. Tell me that the shame this kid feels about himself has nothing to do with the shame that you believe all gay people should feel for themselves.
Tell me that you can’t comprehend the connection between your conviction that God finds homosexuals repulsive, and the fact that this kid finds himself so repulsive that he habitually cuts his own flesh.
Tell me, please, how you love this kid. Tell me how you understand his pain. Tell me how when he cries, you cry.
Tell me how you want to do everything in your power to make sure that no one, ever again, feels free to in any way victimize a young gay person.
A Christian myself, I am pleading with you to be honest with me about this.
Tell me, please, how none of this kid’s anguish has anything to do with you.
I’m listening. I really am.
We all are.
All ears. You first, Linda Harvey. Then Tony Perkins. And then we can go alphabetically through America’s bigot leaders after that. Explain how your bigotry is worth more than this or any other child’s suffering.
The past few days have seen a number of alarming anti-LGBT international news items. Among them:
- in Australia, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has refused to set up a meeting with members of the advocacy group GetUp! (famous most recently for incredibly compelling marriage equality advertisement that’s gone absolutely viral), despite the fact that the group won an “intimate dinner” with Ms. Gillard in a June charity auction, intending to send same-sex couples to dine with the anti-equality prime minister and share their stories. ABC News Australia later reported that Gillard’s office agreed to hold the dinner, but not until after her party’s national conference early next month. h/t: Andy
- in Russia, the St. Petersburg administrative region is considering legislation that would ban so-called “gay propaganda,” essentially prohibiting anyone from writing, publishing, or speaking in public about LGBT identity. Two other regions, Arkhangelsk and Ryazan, have already taken similar steps. h/t: Rex
- in Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe has pledged to “punish severely” any Zimbabwean known to be an LGBT person. He also called homosexuality “Satanic” and lashed out at Western governments seeking to make future aid contingent upon the recipient nation upholding all human rights, including gay rights.
I must confess that I’m truly baffled by the level of support I’m seeing among my friends for presidential candidate Ron Paul. While the number of Paul fans in my circles is relatively small, he nonetheless enjoys the highest level of support from my LGBT-identified and equality-supporting friends out of all the non-LGBT friendly candidates. In addition, the Ron Paul supporters I know tend to be passionately, often blindly, devoted to their candidate, steamrolling over any criticisms of Paul no matter how legitimate and simply dismissing out of hand those they cannot outargue.
- in Australia, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has refused to set up a meeting with members of the advocacy group GetUp! (famous most recently for incredibly compelling 
