Catholic leaders issued a letter Friday to GOP presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, themselves Catholics, urging them “to stop perpetuating ugly racial stereotypes on the campaign trail.”
The letter, signed by 45 Catholic leaders says:
Mr. Gingrich has frequently attacked President Obama as a “food stamp president” and claimed that African Americans are content to collect welfare benefits rather than pursue employment. Campaigning in Iowa, Mr. Santorum remarked: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.”
“At a time when nearly 1 in 6 Americans live in poverty, charities and the free market alone can’t address the urgent needs of our most vulnerable neighbors. And while jobseekers outnumber job openings 4-to-1, suggesting that the unemployed would rather collect benefits than work is misleading and insulting,” the letter adds.
See, the problem with their request, as Gingrich and Santorum likely see it, is that they’re at the point where they’re having to pander to the nasty Republican base, the base that absolutely lost it when Juan Williams dared to even bring up the subject of racism during the Fox News Republican debate on Martin Luther King Day, and during the same debate, booed Mitt Romney for having family born in Mexico. Racism isn’t icing on the cake for these people — it’s central to their governing platform.
Also, lest we forget, they’re running against the re-election of a black, Democratic president.
Glad those Catholic leaders are at least trying to say something, but I think it’s falling on deaf ears.
The Religious Right may cynically use the term, but they certainly don’t own it. Here, a Republican straight guy in New Hampshire, standing up for his gay brother and talking about why he supports marriage equality:
UPDATE: Craig Stowell, the straight brother in the video, has a petition up at Change.org, asking New Hampshire legislators not to repeal marriage equality. Go sign it.
Speaking at a boarding school in New Hampshire on Friday, Santorum cited an unnamed “anti-poverty expert” to claim that children are better off having a parent in prison who abandoned them than having two same-sex parents.
[...]
It’s unclear to which “anti-poverty” expert Santorum was referring, or what the expert’s study said, but it is clear that Santorum is likely distorting it. He isn’t wrong that numerous studies have highlighted the importance of keeping children connected to parents who may be in prison, but none of them include any actual research on comparisons with same-sex families. They may juxtapose a child having no father (i.e. a single mother) with having a father in jail, but it’s completely invalid to compare an abandoned mother to two committed loving mothers.
Numerous conservative groups regularly attempt this “fatherless” rhetorical trap to make a case against same-sex marriage.
Yes they do, because they are liars. I actually referred to this the other day. I never know which conservatives are actively lying when they misuse studies that pit single parents against married opposite-sex parents to condemn gay couples raising children, and which are simply parroting the ignorant crap others have taught them. Santorum, though he fancies himself an intellectual, doesn’t convince me that he has the gray matter to come up with creative lies by himself. It doesn’t matter, because he has irrational bigotry and fear in droves, and that’s all that really matters at the end of the day.
What is so strange about this line of argument, though, is that only a true believer who has completely lost the ability to reason for himself would buy into it. Theoretically, Rick Santorum is running for president, and I cannot believe that he doesn’t have at least one advisor passionately urging him to cut this sh*t out if he wants to have a prayer of making it past New Hampshire. And the fact that he said this to intelligent high school kids in a boarding school! Does he simply rejoice in making a fool of himself?
It’s becoming a typical story: Republican wingnut politician is politically anti-gay because it’s necessary for the rube vote, while his wife either secretly or publicly supports marriage equality. It actually leads me to suspect that many of the wingnut men actually do not care about the issue, but are craven enough to pretend that they abhor gays to satisfy the worst parts of their bases.
Here’s Diana Fine Cantor, wife of House Majority Leader and known wingnut Eric Cantor, stating her support for marriage equality. I find this significant for one reason, though: it’s been a long time since the anti-gay hate from John McCain or George W. Bush, both of whose wives support marriage equality, seemed sincere. Not so with Eric Cantor, who has been one of the most vocally and actively anti-gay members of the U.S. House of Representatives.
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!
If you haven’t read about Michigan’s brand-new law rescinding the health benefits of state employees’ domestic partners, signed last Thursday the 22nd by Governor Rick Snyder, this article by Box Turtle Bulletin’s Timothy Kincaid is a good place to start. Kincaid points out that contrary to what the Michigan Republican Party would like to believe about itself, it is behaving in a “talibanish” way that empowers big government to force its values–in this case, religious dogma–on individuals and smaller government entities. Not to mention discouraging new businesses from relocating to the state, an ill-advised move given Michigan’s economic troubles.
The Washington Blade reports that lawsuits are on the way.
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.
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.
Help! Barack Obama is taking away our religious faith!
Dear Rick Perry and other fundamentalists: if you feel that your faith is being threatened by Barry Obama, then your faith is pathetically weak. Your problem, not mine and definitely not Barry’s.
To correct the idiot and any of the lowest common denominators in the GOP base who believe him, though: kids can openly celebrate Christmas, and they can pray in school all they want as long as it’s not disrupting other students. What these dolts want is school-sanctioned prayer, which is a SPECIAL RIGHT, not a constitutional right.
