It all started with fireworks and a massive fundamentalist prayer rally in Houston’s Reliant Stadium — but by the time Texas Gov. Rick Perry dropped out of the presidential race today, he didn’t stand a prayer. Perry talked a lot about Jesus and the second coming, but who knew that he would turn out to be the second coming of Fred Thompson?
When Perry entered the race the pundits hyperventilated and immediately declared him the frontrunner. Then misfortune struck the campaign: Rick Perry spoke.
When people actually saw the man behind the myth they were so disappointment that they returned to Mitt Romney’s fold, then embraced a pizza guy who knew so little about foreign relations that he had nothing to say about Libya and was unsure if China had nuclear weapons. Once Cain’s campaign was hit with allegations of serial sexual harassment, the “family values” electorate flexed their moral muscle by lining up behind a serial adulterer in Newt Gingrich.
Once Gingrich petered out (he could still come back to life like a horror movie villain) the fickle GOP voters tricked with Rick Santorum, the admitted last man standing alone at the dance. When the voters woke up with a hangover, they turned over in bed, looked at who they were sleeping with and realized why Santorum had been jilted and standing by himself on the dance floor.
During the long, grueling campaign of clowns, the voters never returned to Rick Perry — even as he invoked Jesus more often that Pat Robertson. While the Texas governor looked great on paper, he was revealed to be a paper tiger. Now he joins Michele Bachmann as a Christian conservative candidate who bit the dust.
“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.
Reporting from Iowa, Chris Johnson of The Washington Blade uncovers the thoughts of young, gay Iowa caucus attendees, who they support in the GOP, and why.
The common themes:
“the candidate’s business background”
“limited government”
“what really made this country, and what made us who we are”
“core values of the U.S. Constitution”
Given eight years of Bush-Cheney, and given some current GOP presidential candidates’ support for global corporations that use government to tax and manipulate the American people — progressives may chortle at young Republicans’ blind assumption that the GOP favors limited government and the Bill of Rights.
But whose fault is that?
I know of few if any prominent progressives who celebrate “entrepreneurship, “limited government,” or “American values.” Instead, most folks are talking about some “99 percent” mathematical mumbo-jumbo. What next — square roots? Exponents? (I say that as someone who favors a restoration of Clinton-era taxes upon the upper class.)
I also know of few progressives who celebrate the ability of public-school children to pray as they and their parents wish, without interference from pushy rival churches or cults. Instead, we are quoted siding with religious “minorities” against “Christian students” who are inaccurately portrayed as champions of religious freedom (albeit only for like-minded Christians).
We are not celebrating the freedom to learn and protecting historic truths, so much as we are “opposing bullies” (allowing the GOP to redefine bully) and “changing curricula” (allowing the GOP to pretend it’s not changing curricula and revising history to erase all minorities).
Progressives also are not explicitly celebrating individual responsibility, entrepreneurship and initiative. We are not communicating the protection of our own families’ wealth and achievement from redistribution by either ruling party to its donors.
Many of us may assume these values have been self-evident in our actions — but they haven’t. People ranging from Mitt Romney to Tim Tebow to Fox News exploit our failure to communicate with the language and customs of middle America. So long as they are the primary source of talk about these values, we allow them to own the conversation.
Until we rethink and translate our language of economics and values, the progressive message will continue to be framed by others. Progressives and young moderate midwestern Republicans might as well be distant tribes speaking different languages, both ripe for mistranslation and political exploitation. Under present conditions, the young Republicans who will likely lead large swaths of America in 10 to 15 years will continue to tune out progressives’ sometimes-dated foreign language of (socialist?) equality, (LGBTQIA?) alphabet soup, (Gloria Steinem?) sexism, (transvestite?) gender norms, and so forth. Certainly, public understanding of sex and gender must be advanced — but in plain English, not Ivy League lingo that is so easily twisted by yellow journalists.
So long as we dismiss or ridicule flyover country instead of speaking their language, we dismiss our audience — and deny ourselves access to many of our future leaders.
Oh, Mittens! You’ve gone and rustled up the ire of the wackiest fringe rabbis in the land! Why, they have given you a new title, that of “dangerous homosexualist!” Oh, dear:
The statement today comes from the Rabbinical Alliance of America, which describes itself as an organization of 850 Orthodox Jewish rabbis in the U.S. and Canada, who serve some 500,000 religious Jews.
[...]
The statement attributed to Rabbi Yehuda Levin said that Hannukah marks the defeat of the Syrian Greek efforts “to impose their pagan culture on the Jewish people.” That included, he said, the increased emphasis on homosexual behavior.
“While our organization does not make any endorsements of political candidates, in view of the disastrous national decline in morality, we are compelled to condemn Mitt Romney’s support and promotion of the immoral homosexual lifestyle and agenda,” his statement said. “While we sympathize with those challenged by homosexual urges, or a desire for minors or adultery, they all remain prohibited activities that debase the practitioners and demoralize society. Gov. Romney over a long political career has earned the title: ‘Dangerous Homosexualist’ – one who constantly advances the militant anti-religious, anti-society, immoral homosexual agenda to the detriment of family people.”
Oh, Yehuda, for him to “constantly” be advancing anything, he’d have to be capable of having a single opinion on an issue for more than five minutes.
I am happy, though, to have a new thing to call him: Mittens The Dangerous Homosexualist. It’s like a whole new Mormon superhero!
It’s widely known that Newt Gingrich’s history of it being All About Him and his ambitions goes back a long way, but this news is still really gross. A story from years ago is making the rounds right now, about his marriage to Jackie, his first wife, and it’s fairly disgusting:
She had free will. Nobody forced her to marry someone eight years younger. The man is supposed to marry someone younger, and Newt corrected that the second time around after divorcing Jacqueline in 1980 for “irreconcilable differences,” which he said had been the case through the 1970s, despite counseling.
But did he have to be so mean about it? As reported by L.H. Carter, his campaign treasurer, Newt said of Jacqueline: “She’s not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of the President. And besides, she has cancer.”
Newt has been claiming for years that it was Jackie that wanted the divorce, but it’s looking like that’s a lie:
[N]ewly revealed 30-year-old court papers posted on CNN’s website appear to contradict that.
In the papers, Battley asks the judge to reject her husband’s request for a divorce.
“Defendant shows that she has adequate and ample grounds for divorce, but that she does not desire one at this time,” her petition said.
“Defendant does not admit that this marriage is irretrievably broken.”
CNN said it was initially told the divorce documents were sealed, but then a reporter found the folder stashed in a court clerk’s drawer in Carroll County, Ga.
[...]
CNN interviewed Newt Gingrich’s former pal and early congressional campaign treasurer Leonard Carter, who said their friendship ended over the ambitious pol’s callous treatment of his wife.
[...]
He said Gingrich initially refused to pay alimony — a claim supported by the court papers — and a church had to launch a food drive for Battley and her two daughters.
Nice. The article points out, of course, that at that time, he was already dating the newer, hotter model, who became his second wife. When she got a wrinkle before Newt’s ambitions came to fruition, he started testing out the 3.0 version, named Callista, with whom he was having an affair while he was attacking President Clinton for infidelity.
Newt Gingrich will never be president — this, we know — but if his pattern holds, I wouldn’t be surprised if Callista gets the boot sometime after the 2012 elections.
“How are you going to get the gay vote?,” asked Greta to Rick Santorum. “Considering the fact that your seething anti-gay hatred is weird even by Fox News standards, in what world would any gay human consider voting for you?,” were not her exact words.
His answer is stupid, of course, but his answers are always stupid. The interview also shows Bob Vander Plaats, irrelevant wingnut and leader of the Iowa hate group “ThE fAmIlY lEaDeR,” endorsing the most irrelevant and hilarious GOP candidate I have ever seen. The video is apparently unembeddable here, so click over to Think Progress to witness the continually unfolding disaster.
Moreover, he says that wingnuts who like Mittens should apologize to America! It’s not common for a Religious Right leader to ask voters to apologize before an election, but this is Porno Pete we’re a-dealin’ with. Anyway, Porno Pete does not like Mittens because:
Peter LaBarbera, founder of Republicans For Family Values blog (www.rffv.net), issued the following response to GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s increasingly bold defense of homosexual “rights”:
I tweeted the following in light of Romney’s bold embrace of homosexuality-based “rights” — voiced in last night’s FOX debate and previously to the Des Moines Register editorial board:
“Every pro-family leader or group that said they opposed the Homosexual Lobby (and raised $$ on that) — yet supported Romney — now owes us an apology.”
Oh, Porno Pete’s gloves are off now about Mittens! [I see what I did there.] All you Mittens-loving wingnuts should apologize to Porno Pete for supporting the single candidate in the running for the GOP nomination who has a chance of mustering up at least 45% of the popular vote!
If Romney wins the Republican nomination, it will be a huge blow to the pro-family movement and our efforts to stop the normalization of sexual perversion. Romney personifies the failure of the current “marriage-only” approach toward resisting “same-sex marriage” — i.e., the idea that homosexuality is not the issue, but only “defending marriage.” Here is the supposed GOP standard-bearer saying that he has stood tall for real marriage (a fib, according to Mass Resistance writer Amy Contrada, author of “Mitt Romey’s Deception”) — and yet, like some soulless post-modern, he proudly embraces legal “rights” based on a Crime Against Nature that once dared not speak its name. (And did I mention that Romney flouts his own Mormon religion?)
HOW DARE A MEMBER OF A RELIGION SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT FROM PORNO PETE’S “FLOUT” IT SO?! And how dare he concede that an entire minority population deserves at least some dignity? That’s not the fundamentalist Christianity I was raised with!
According to Contrada’s well-researched book, Romney — who just reiterated his support for open homosexuals in the military:
Supported homosexual “domestic partnership” laws in MA;
Issued pro-”Gay Youth Pride” proclamations as Massachusetts governor and fully supported his own “Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth”;
Refused to sign the 2002 proposed Massachusetts Citizens for Marriage ballot referendum for a constitutional marriage amendment (he thought it was too extreme because it excluded “civil unions”); and
Bragged in 1994 Senatorial campaign debate that he would do more to mainstream homosexual rights than Ted Kennedy.
Duh. Anyone who hasn’t figured out by now that Mitt Romney changes his political positions at least as often as he changes underpants is an idiot.
Is (was) our “pro-family” fight against homosexual activism the defense of God’s timeless Truth or merely a money-making charade?
Oh, Porno Pete, it’s truth-telling time. You’re going to want to sit down for this. You see, for people like you who don’t actually make a lot of money hating gays, it’s about the cause. You are the “useful idiots” in this equation. For those who have actually figured out how to profit off of it, it’s about controlling people, and yes, about money.
Some Christians and conservative leaders either have been fooled by Romney, or bought into the thinking of “establishment” Republican VIPs (e.g., Ann Coulter) who say Only Mitt Can Win. I don’t believe that for a minute
Well, no one ever accused you of being a good interpreter of political trends, Pete…
Anyway, Mitt will lose too, because Republicans hate him, but all the others in the race are clowns, so I understand and am amused by the dejection wingnuts are feeling right about now.
Newt Gingrich, who spent the better part of the 1990′s carrying on an extramarital affair, all while leading a witchhunt against the President for his own marital infidelities, considers himself an expert on choices, apparently. You see, just like you can casually choose to take advantage of your wife’s being in the hospital with cancer and shack up with the newer model, Newt believes that you can simply choose whether or not to be gay. Here he is speaking to the Des-Moines Register:
Q: Do you believe that people choose to be gay?
GINGRICH: I believe it’s a combination of genetics and environment. I think both are involved. I think people have many ranges of choices. Part of the question is, do you want a society which has a bias in one direction or another?
I’d prefer a bias in the direction of reality, Newtie.
Q: So people can then choose one way or another?
GINGRICH: I think people have a significant range of choice within a genetic pattern. I don’t believe in genetic determinism and I don’t think there is any great evidence of genetic determinism. There are propensities. Are you more likely to do this or more likely to do that? But that doesn’t mean it’s definitional.
It’s a sad commentary on the state of affairs in this country when this man is even being asked his “opinion” on the subject, much less having it printed in the newspaper.
Q: So a person can then choose to be straight?
GINGRICH: Look, people choose to be celibate. People choose many things in life. You know, there is a bias in favor of non-celibacy. It’s part of how the species recreates. And yet there is a substantial amount of people who choose celibacy as a religious vocation or for other reasons.
And then there are some people who choose celibacy, but yet end up diddling altar boys.
Here’s the video. It’s particularly gross how he starts talking about “values” at the beginning, since Newt Gingrich is probably one of the most obviously amoral politicians I’ve seen in my lifetime.
Kirsten at Wonkette reported on this uncomfortable situation yesterday. Mitt Romney was doing this Man Of The People thing, talking to people in a New Hampshire diner. When he saw a man wearing a Vietnam Vets cap, he figured he was safe, so he started a conversation. It did not go well:
“Vietnam veteran!” Romney greeted Bob Garon.
“I have a question for you,” Garon told the former Massachusetts governor. “New Hampshire right now has some legislation kicking around about a repeal for the same-sex marriage. And all I need is a yes or a no. Do you support the repeal?”
“I support the repeal of the New Hampshire law,” Romney said. “I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. That’s my view.”
Garon, who lives in Epsom, N.H., and was eating breakfast with his husband, turned to Romney and said: “If two men get married, apparently a veteran’s spouse would not be entitled to any burial benefits or medical benefits or anything that the serviceman has devoted his time and effort to his country, and you just don’t support equality in terms of same-sex marriage?”
“I believe that marriage is a relationship between a man and a woman,” Romney replied, adding, “and we apparently disagree.”
At that, a Romney aide called for him to wrap up the conversation: “Governor, we’ve got to get on with Fox News right now.”
“Oh, I guess the question was too hot,” Garon told Romney.
“No, I gave you the answer,” Romney replied. “You said you had a yes-or-no [question]. I gave you the answer.”
“You did,” Garon said. “And I appreciate your answer. And you know, I also learned something, and New Hampshire is right: You have to look a man in the eye to get a good answer. And you know what, governor? Good luck…. You’re going to need it.”
“You are right about that,” Romney said, as he stood up from the booth and headed into a side room for his interview.
OUCH! Garon later said that he could tell by looking into Romney’s eyes that he was not to be trusted. Wonkette’s Kirsten added, “Uh, admitting that you are a weird loser is not exactly how apologies work, Mittens. Pretending to be human is such hard work!”
Of course, there is video:
And then MSNBC interviewed the gay veteran who embarrassed Mittens as well:
When people like Bob Garon can loudly make the case for LGBT equality in public, is there any question whether or not we’ve won this stupid “culture war?”
There’s been a lot of discussion this week about the incident that happened when a lesbian parent likely put her kid up to walking up to Michele Bachmann and saying “My mommy is gay and she doesn’t need fixing.” It’s, of course, a valid statement, but I do agree with those who have expressed reservations about sending a child in to do that sort of thing. Of course, since it did happen, it was newsworthy, especially for Michele Bachmann’s dismissive reaction. On The View this morning, the hosts discussed the incident, and strangely enough, it was resident conservative Elisabeth Hasselbeck who kindly explained how Michele Bachmann, despite her views, might have acted more like a grown-up, compassionate, adult human being toward this child. Elisabeth has gotten a lot better over the years on LGBT issues, but man, when a wingnut is being schooled by Elisabeth Hasselbeck, that’s got to suck.
It all started with fireworks and a massive fundamentalist prayer rally in Houston’s Reliant Stadium — but by the time Texas Gov. Rick Perry dropped out of the presidential race today, he didn’t stand a prayer. Perry talked a lot about Jesus and the second coming, but who knew that he would turn out to be the second coming of Fred Thompson?
Given eight years of Bush-Cheney, and given some current GOP presidential candidates’ support for global corporations that use government to tax and manipulate the American people — progressives may chortle at young Republicans’ blind assumption that the GOP favors limited government and the Bill of Rights.
