New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd summed up bigot and blowhard Newt Gingrich in one of the most brutal columns ever published. The best part is that everything she said is true:
Newt Gingrich’s mind is in love with itself.
It has persuaded itself that it is brilliant when it is merely promiscuous. This is not a serious mind. Gingrich is not, to put it mildly, a systematic thinker.
His mind is a jumble, an amateurish mess lacking impulse control. He plays air guitar with ideas, producing air ideas. He ejaculates concepts, notions and theories that are as inconsistent as his behavior.
He didn’t get whiplash being a serial adulterer while impeaching another serial adulterer, a lobbyist for Freddie Mac while attacking Freddie Mac, a self-professed fiscal conservative with a whopping Tiffany’s credit line, and an anti-Communist Army brat who supported the Vietnam War but dodged it.
Ouch….I couldn’t have said it better myself. What the hell are so-called “family values” conservatives thinking by flirting with this hypocritical clown?
Contact: Wayne Besen, Executive Director Phone: 917-691-5118 E-Mail: wbesen@truthwinsout.org
LGBT Catholics Shouldn’t Confess, They Should Come Out, Says TWO
BURLINGTON, Vt. – Truth Wins Out today condemned an iPhone App, designed to guide Catholics through confession. Among one of many offensive questions asked on, “Confession: A Roman Catholic App”, is “Have I been guilty of any homosexual activity.”
“This is cyber spiritual abuse that promotes backward ideas in a modern package,” said Truth Wins Out’s Executive Director, Wayne Besen. “Gay Catholics don’t need to confess, they need to come out of the closet and challenge anti-gay dogma. The false idea that being gay is something to be ashamed of has destroyed too many lives. This iPhone App is facilitating and furthering the harm.”
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote about the downloadable software today. Three young men in South Bend, Indiana designed it with the help of two socially conservative priests. According to iTunes, the App is ranked No. 22 in sales worldwide.
“When a person feels his or her most innate feelings of sexuality and love are sinful, it denies them a healthy connection to humanity,” said TWO’s Besen. “This app is helping to create neurotic individuals who are ashamed of who they are. The creators of this device are the true sinners and they need to confess for the damage they are doing in the name of religion.”
The app says it is: “Designed to be used in the confessional, this app is the perfect aid for every penitent. With a personalized examination of conscience for each user, password protected profiles, and a step-by-step-guide to the sacrament, this app invites Catholics to prayerfully prepare for and participate in the Rite of Penance.”
Recently, there has been concern that the Catholic Church is becoming more anti-gay and intolerant. The organization Catholics for Equality recently voiced unease over new funding from the Dioceses of Oakland and Colorado Springs for the establishment of chapters of the “ex-gay” organization Courage. This organization has traditionally focused on celibacy for gay people, because it has worked so well for priests.
Truth Wins Out is a non-profit organization that fights anti-LGBT religious extremism. TWO specializes in turning information into action by organizing, advocating and fighting for LGBT equality.
Everything about the climax of the legal quest to overturn California’ ban on gay marriage was appropriately cinematic ‚Äî even the month best to imagine two men atop a wedding cake or two women walking down the aisle.
“It may be appropriate that the case is coming to closing argument now,” Chief Judge Vaughn Walker said with a twinkle. “June is, after all, the month for weddings.”
Elena Kagan is, um, not gay. But that doesn’t mean Maureen Dowd will pass up the opportunity to phone in a juvenile, far-less-creative-than-she-thinks-it-is column about Elena Kagan being Not Gay. In fact, MoDo decided to write a column about how Kagan is so girly that she can’t possibly be gay! And even better, she wrote it as a silly fake letter from Joe Biden. Behold the trainwreck:
Folks —
This week, when the president first told me he’d chosen Elena Kagan to serve on the Supreme Court, I couldn’t help but smile. I met her 20 years ago, when she took a break from teaching school and chasing guys to join my staff in the Senate, and even back then, it was easy to picture her in a black robe.
Of course, Elena prefers to see herself in something frillier, because she’ a girl’ girl. Just try dragging her out of La Perla! And I’m sure, under those robes, she’ll be rocking some Juicy Couture jeans and Christian Louboutin suede boudoir slides. Uh-oh. Did I sound gay there for a minute? Well, I’m not. And neither is Elena Kagan.
She went to Harvard, not Smith. It’ Elena, not Ellen. She barely drives, much less a Subaru. She’ never been spotted at Home Depot or the Meow Mix bar. And she doesn’t have Ani DiFranco on her iPod.
See, thank God we have MoDo around, as the supreme arbiter of OMG girliness, because otherwise we wouldn’t understand that ALL lesbians are the EXACT opposite of all of those things, and all majorly heterosexual women like Mo are too busy ogling Louboutin shoes to darken the doors of a Home Depot.
The thing that’s galling about this column is that MoDo, in her supreme idiocy, probably doesn’t think this column is homophobic, much less sexist. She’s just being “funny,” you guys. As Steve M. put it:
Put a gun to Dowd’s head and she’d swear with her dying breath that she doesn’t have a lesbian-hostile bone in her body — she’s just making light of other people’s real or imagined discomfort. Well, I must be having a reading comprehension problem, because all I’m seeing is Dowd’s discomfort.
Yeah, me too, Steve. Me too. I guess we’re just not savvy enough to catch the highbrow comedy routine MoDo’s pulling here. Then again, neither you nor I are, to my knowledge, the idealized, more-macho-than-thou Don Juans that live inside Mo’s fantasies, so we probably would not understand. We’re simply not her intended audience.
The other galling thing (which extends to most of her columns) is that Maureen Dowd is a living, breathing strawman, because she’s the quote-unquote liberal Times writer syndicated in many of the regional papers around the country. So, there are a lot of conservatives out there who read Dowd and think “God, what an idiot,” and therefore feel vindicated in their idea that their worldview is correct. The fact, of course, is that I can’t think of one well-read, well-educated liberal who thinks Dowd is anything but tedious, not to mention Not Liberal At All. Rest assured, wingnuts, there is common ground to be found between us on the fact that MoDo is an idiot.
I recall how upset she was a few years ago when she got muscled into playing softball by some friends. She hates the game, absolutely HATES it. She cried and cried — like a fragile, adorable little girl. She said the only thing worse was when she was forced to compete in the L.P.G.A. celebrity-lawyer classic.
She never watches the Rachel Maddow show. By 9 p.m., Elena’ usually snuggled up in bed in a lacy peach peignoir, scrawling “Mrs. George Clooney” in the margins of Blackstone’ Commentaries.
I am no Maureen Dowd fan, but her op-ed today has me cheering:
The church gave up its credibility for Lent.
HA. And:
Canon 1404 states that “The First See is judged by no one.” But Jesus, Mary and Joseph, as my dad used to say. Somebody has to tell the First See when it’ blind ‚Äî and mute ‚Äî to deaf children in America and Italy.
And, number four in the Vatican’s playbook on handling the scandals:
Demonize gays, as Karl Rove did in 2004.
In an ad in The Times on Tuesday, Bill Donohue, the Catholic League president, offered this illumination: “The Times continues to editorialize about the “pedophilia crisis,’ when all along it’ been a homosexual crisis. Eighty percent of the victims of priestly sexual abuse are male and most of them are post-pubescent. While homosexuality does not cause predatory behavior, and most gay priests are not molesters, most of the molesters have been gay.”
Donohue is still talking about the problem as an indiscretion rather than a crime. If it mostly involves men and boys, that’ partly because priests for many years had unquestioned access to boys.
On his embrace of gay marriage, he observed: “There were pastors in my Tennessee district who said you can minister to someone and change their sexual orientation. I just never accepted that. I’m a heterosexual. I don’t know what anyone can say to me to make me sexually be with a man.”
Ford is considering a primary challenge against Sen. Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY). While representing Tennessee, Ford had clashed with the LGBT community on several occasions. According to the Gay City News:
While his two votes backing an amendment to the US Constitution that defined marriage as “only the union of a man and a woman” and effectively barred any state or federal constitutional claim to marriage for same-sex couples might be enough to cost him gay support, earlier votes cast by Harold Ford in the House may further alienate gay and lesbian voters.
Since moving to New York, Ford has changed his stance on marriage equality. Some would call this a cynical move (same for Gillibrand who grew more liberal when she left her conservative New York district to become a U.S. Senator). Still, it was nice to hear Ford explicitly reject the false premise that people can pray away the gay.
It is time to admit that the gay community has a gigantic Pope problem. Under the leadership of Benedict XVI, the Vatican has become an implacable foe of liberalism, modernity and basic rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. Rome has eagerly jumped with both feet into America’ culture wars and is working on a global scale to punish or purge ideological dissenters within the church. This aggressive activism presents a formidable new front in the fight for parity — one with considerable political clout and financial resources.
Last week, a coalition of totalitarian religious activists and radical clerics joined forces to unveil the “Manhattan Declaration” at Washington’ National Press Club. This rambling manifesto, written by former Watergate felon Chuck Colson, called for “Christians” to disobey laws they didn’t fancy and to ignore civil rights laws that protected GLBT people from discrimination. It was a dishonest document filled with historical revisionism that promoted theocracy, encouraged anarchy and supported the dissolution of the rule of law. It falsely portrayed right wing Christians as victims, even as they pledged to work tirelessly to deny equality to those who would not adhere to their sectarian church rules.
An extreme manifesto of such breathtaking cynicism and insincerity is no surprise coming from what passes for “leaders” in today’ evangelical circles. It was striking, however, that more than 15 key American Catholic leaders signed on to the “Manhattan Declaration”. Signatories included heavyweights such as Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York and Donald Wuerl, Archbishop of Washington, DC. This was clearly a call to arms and a powerful signal that the Roman Catholic Church is taking the gloves off to fight political battles in America.
This hands-on involvement from Rome has passed the “trend” stage and appears to be official policy. Consider the significant involvement the Catholic Church had in stripping marriage rights away from GLBT couples in a Maine referendum held earlier this month.
In the same manner, on June 11, the Washington, DC Archdiocese threatened to abandon the homeless and quit charity work in the District if it had to comply with anti-discrimination laws. Catholic Charities had the audacity to believe it was entitled to collect $8.2 million in tax dollars meant to serve all DC residents, and then still get to handpick whom it deems worthy of assistance.
Catholic involvement with arch-conservative politics is growing by the day. In May, Catholic groups tried to stop President Barack Obama from speaking at a Notre Dame commencement ceremony because of his pro-choice position.
Earlier this month, Providence Bishop Thomas Tobin put the clamp on Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.), banning the lawmaker from communion because he is pro-choice. This was reminiscent of The St. Louis Archbishop refusing to give communion to John Kerry during his presidential campaign.
The Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis has suddenly begun to steer GLBT Catholics to 12-step programs that promise to “cure” homosexuality or support them in a lifelong celibacy. The Catholic Diocese in Sioux Falls, South Dakota urged its 128-thousand members to oppose an attempt to bring legalizing embryonic stem cell research to a public referendum. (I guess the sacrosanct “people’ right to vote” on controversial social issues only applies to same-sex marriage)
In fighting back, we must remember that the Vatican is launching these attacks from a position of weakness. It has yet to recover its moral authority from public exposure of rampant child sexual abuse scandals that cost the Church billions of dollars in legal settlements.
The Vatican appears to be acutely aware it is losing its worldwide market share. It is basically defunct in the Middle East, where the religion began, and on life-support in Western Europe, where it once prospered. In Africa, Rome competes with Islam and Anglicanism for a shrinking slice of the pie. (Who can forget that while in Africa the Pope said condoms could make the AIDS crisis worse.) South America, one of its few remaining strongholds, is losing Roman Catholics to evangelical faiths by the millions.
Instead of competing against the conservative evangelical brand, Pope Benedict has decided to embrace it, shaping a conspicuously political Catholicism that embraces extremism and drives out dissenters. The Vatican has become so doctrinaire that it recently launched an invasive probe into the lives of America’s 60,000 nuns to enforce anachronistic rules. In January, Benedict welcomed back excommunicated Bishop Richard Williamson who denied that millions of Jews died in Nazi death camps.
Fortunately, Benedict is a cold, unsympathetic figure and the majority of American Catholics often ignore his edicts. The strategy for the GLBT community should be to stand up to Rome and help mobilize mainstream Catholics to fight back against an authoritarian Pontiff who is hell-bent on making the Catholic Church as unpopular and unappealing as His Holiness.
BURLINGTON, Vt. – Truth Wins Out today condemned an iPhone App, designed to guide Catholics through confession. Among one of many offensive questions asked on, “Confession: A Roman Catholic App”, is “Have I been guilty of any homosexual activity.”
s considering a primary challenge against Sen. Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY). While representing Tennessee, Ford had clashed with the LGBT community on several occasions. According to the 
