John McCain (R-AZ) is defending his U.S. Senate seat against a challenge from ultra-conservative radio host J.D. Hayworth. (Yes, the same Hayworth who was a very large recipient of money and gifts—like sports skyboxes—from the shamed lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to the New York Times)

While voters may find McCain’s name on the ballot, the man is utterly unrecognizable, switching positions daily to mollify the unruly Tea Party crowd. According to today’s Times:

….McCain now finds himself jammed, moving starkly—and often awkwardly—to the right, apparently in an attempt to gain favor among the same voters whom Hayworth, a consistent voice for the far right, could pull toward him like taffy come summer.

McCain now sharply criticizes the bailout bill he voted for, pivoted from his earlier position that the Guantanamo Bay detention facility should be closed, offered only a muted response to the Supreme Court’s decision undoing campaign finance laws and backed down from statements that gays in the military would be OK by him if the military brass were on board.

I never agreed with John McCain’s largely conservative voting record. There once was a time, however, that he had a small independent streak and could be counted on to occasionally buck the party line. Unfortunately, he threw his integrity out the window when he chose Sarah Palin for his running mate.

He knew she was incompetent and not qualified to be President. Yet, he sold out America and placed our national security at risk for a short uptick in the polls following the Republican convention. (Read More)

Harold Ford Jr., a former Tennessee congressman and MSNBC commentator rejected the “ex-gay” myth in Maureen Dowd’s New York Times column:

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.

By Laurie Goodstein

For more than 50 years, the National Prayer Breakfast has served as a prime networking event in Washington, bringing together the president, members of Congress, foreign diplomats and thousands of religious, business and military leaders for scrambled eggs and supplication.

Usually, the annual event passes with little notice. But this year, an ethics group in Washington has asked President Obama and Congressional leaders to stay away from the breakfast, on Thursday. Religious and gay rights groups have organized competing prayer events in 17 cities, and protesters are picketing in Washington and Boston.

The objections are focused on the sponsor of the breakfast, a secretive evangelical Christian network called The Fellowship, also known as The Family, and accusations that it has ties to legislation in Uganda that calls for the imprisonment and execution of homosexuals.

The Family has always stayed intentionally in the background, according to those who have written about it. In the last year, however, it was identified as the sponsor of a residence on Capitol Hill that has served as a dormitory and meeting place for a cluster of politicians who ran into ethics problems, including Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, and Gov. Mark Sanford, Republican of South Carolina, both of whom have admitted to adultery.

More recently, it became public that the Family also has close ties to the Ugandan politician who has sponsored the proposed anti-gay legislation.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group, sent a letter this week to the president and Congressional leaders urging them to skip the prayer breakfast. They have also called on C-Span not to televise it this year.

Melanie Sloan, executive director of the ethics group, said: “It is a combination of the intolerance of the organization’s views, and the secrecy surrounding the organization. It doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be allowed to hold their breakfast; of course they should. The question is, Should American officials be lending legitimacy to it, giving their imprimatur by showing up.”

The Family has no identifiable Internet site, no office number and no official spokesman. J. Robert Hunter, a member who has spoken publicly about the group, said that it was unfair to blame the Family for the anti-gay legislation introduced by David Bahati. Mr. Hunter said that about 30 Family members, all Americans, active in Africa recently conveyed their dismay about the legislation to Ugandan politicians, including Mr. Bahati.

Mr. Hunter said the recent controversies had prompted a debate within the group about its lack of transparency. “I and quite a few others are saying we should be much more open,” he said.

Jeff Sharlet, author of “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power” (Harper Perennial, 2009) said in a telephone interview, “Here’s an organization that, in the past, has not acknowledged its own existence.”

“It’s not a sinister plot. This is their theological stance,” said Mr. Sharlet, who infiltrated the group to do research for his book. “Their leader, Doug Coe, says that the more invisible you can make your organization, the more influence it will have.”

A White House official said that Mr. Obama, like each president since Dwight D. Eisenhower, planned to attend the breakfast. Michelle Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and other cabinet members will also attend. The president will deliver remarks about “the importance of an openness to compromise,” the official said.

The official also said that the president and the State Department had spoken out strongly against the legislation in Uganda.

The breakfast, which usually features a prominent keynote speaker (past ones have included Bono, Mother Teresa and former Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain), is only the most visible in several days of gatherings where the Family’s networking takes place in smaller groups. There are separate meetings for African politicians, military leaders, business people and media professionals, to name a few.

Many states also have prayer breakfasts this week, which may appear to be government-sponsored but are also mostly affiliated with the Family.

Liberal members of the clergy and gay rights leaders organized the alternative events in haste this year, calling theirs the American Prayer Hour. The will convene at places like Calvary Baptist Church in Washington; Glendale City Seventh-day Adventist Church in California; the bishop’s chapel of the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York, in Rochester; and Covenant Community Church in Center Point, Ala.

Wayne Besen, executive director of Truth Wins Out, a gay rights group, said he initiated the prayer-hour idea because many religious Americans who attend the breakfasts have no idea about the connection to the Family and the anti-gay legislation.

“They have symbolically taken the mantle of religion,” Mr. Besen said, “and I think it’s time to take it back. And the American Prayer Hour is a step in that direction.”

Tomorrow’s New York Times correctly identifies the individuals who launched Uganda’s campaign to exterminate its LGBT citizenry.

Exodus International board member Don Schmierer, U.S. ex-gay activist Caleb Lee Brundidge, and U.S. ex-gay activist Scott Lively are the three evangelicals who led a March conference in Kampala to accuse LGBT Ugandans of child recruitment and pedophilia, to recommend forced ex-gay therapy, and to support Uganda ex-gay activist Stephen Langa and antigay pastor Martin Ssempa in their effort to toughen Uganda’s pre-existing life-imprisonment sentence for LGBT Ugandans.

The Times said:

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

The Times fails to point out the direct role that U.S. government aid has played in subsidizing Uganda’s antigay evangelicals. Instead, the Times indirectly points to the State Department’s PEPFAR program for HIV/AIDS prevention as a source of aid to Ugandan conservatives. And the Times identifies sources of funding for Ugandan LGBT human-rights advocates:

“It’s a fight for their lives,” said Mai Kiang, a director at the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, a New York-based group that has channeled nearly $75,000 to Ugandan gay rights activists and expects that amount to grow.

Despite denials of responsibility issued by the three U.S. ex-gay activists, the Times points out that “the Ugandan organizers of the conference admit helping draft the bill, and Mr. Lively has acknowledged meeting with Ugandan lawmakers to discuss it. He even wrote on his blog in March that someone had likened their campaign to ‘a nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda.’ Later, when confronted with criticism, Mr. Lively said he was very disappointed that the legislation was so harsh.”

Schmierer has traveled to Uganda numerous times since 2002, and should have known that his false teachings to parents about homosexual “recruitment” would cause violence.

“What these people have done is set the fire they can’t quench,” said the Rev. Kapya Kaoma, a Zambian who went undercover for six months to chronicle the relationship between the African anti-homosexual movement and American evangelicals.

Mr. Kaoma was at the conference and said that the three Americans “underestimated the homophobia in Uganda” and “what it means to Africans when you speak about a certain group trying to destroy their children and their families.”

“When you speak like that,” he said, “Africans will fight to the death.”

Minnesota Republican Rep. Michelle Bachmann loves controversy and is a regular on cable news. The New York Times reports, however, that she is severely and habitually truth challenged and has trouble separating fact from fiction.

Bachmann is a fan of conspiracy theories, such as this doosie reported in the Times article:

And in April, Ms. Bachmann told an interviewer that she found it interesting that “it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president, Jimmy Carter.” She added, “And I’m not blaming this on President Carter; I just think it’s an interesting coincidence.”

As it happens, the scare of the 1970s came in 1976, PolitiFact found. Gerald Ford, a Republican, was president.

Needless to say, when you are as nutty as Bachmann, you are probably anti-gay. According to the congresswoman.

“If you’re involved in the gay and lesbian lifestyle, it’s bondage. It is personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement.”

Yes, entering relationships that are emotionally, physically and spiritually satisfying is “bondage”. While marrying someone out of convenience or religious guilt is “healthy” for both partners. Typical Bachmann “logic”. Interesting how this dishonest Bible-thumper never brings up the “false witness” section of the Good Book.

Bachmann also believes GLBT relationships are are larger problem than a failed health care system, an absence of new jobs and even  terrorism. On March 20, 2004, Bachmann said on a KKMS-AM  radio program, “Prophetic Views Behind The News”:

[Same-sex marriage] is probably the biggest issue that will impact our state and our nation in the last, at least, thirty years. I am not understating that.”

Bachmann is also an End Times enthusiast, saying on the same KKMS program:

“We’re in a state of crisis where our nation is literally ripping apart at the seams right now, and lawlessness is occurring from one ocean to the other. And we’re seeing the fulfillment of the Book of Judges here in our own time, where every man doing that which is right in his own eyes—in other words, anarchy.”

I suggest that everyone read today’s New York Times articles about Bachmann’s aversion to honesty. This is not a brave woman who speaks her mind. But a intellectually dishonest person who sows fear and division to drive her political career. That Republicans take this individual seriously, shows how far they have strayed from the mainstream in recent years.

George W. Bush longed to escape his daddy’s shadow, while Barack Obama has turned to shadowy preachers in his long search for a father figure. His filial approach to faith began with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and has now taken a sharp turn right.

The New York Times reports that the president has surrounded himself with a cadre of clerical crackpots known as the “Circle of Five.” These holy men are: Rev. Joel Hunter, former head of the Christian Coalition; anti-gay Bishop T.D. Jakes; the ex-gay loving Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell; and Jim “waffling” Wallis, a protean progressive. The only Obama shaman who isn’t shameless is the civil rights era preacher Rev. Otis Moss Jr.

Rev. Jakes refers to homosexuality as “brokenness” and has claimed that he wouldn’t hire a sexually active gay person. But it seems T.D. can’t even keep his own son off the D.L. (down low). His “sexually broken” heir was arrested earlier this year for cruising a Dallas Park in search of gay men.
(Read More)

Family Law Attorney Don Schweitzer appeared on the O’Reilly Factor to oppose same-sex marriage. When pressed, he could not come up with a cogent or lucid reason why Californians should vote against granting gay people marriage equality. Watch the video to see how intellectually bankrupt our opponents truly are.

Also, opponents of same-sex unions were pondering a range of legal and legislative challenges to Gov. David A. Paterson’s new policy of having state agencies honor same-sex marriages that have been performed outside New York. However, such challenges are likely to fail and face an uphill fight, legal experts said.

Finally, the Los Angeles Times had an excellent editorial on this topic:

Surely the trailing edges of society will soon reflect on the resistance to this phenomenon with chagrin and more than a little embarrassment. It is bracing, after all, to realize how recently much of this nation blanched at interracial marriage, and thrilling to recognize how quickly most of us buried that prejudice, first in law, then in custom.