He is the nicest right-wing evangelical powerhouse you’ve never heard of. Jim Daly grew up the last of five children in what anyone would call a broken home. His mother died when he was 10 and he lived with, in turn, a stepfather, a foster family, his own alcoholic father and his divorced brother. He came to Jesus in high school, under the guidance of a football coach. His recent memoir, "Finding Home," has barely made a dent on the best-seller lists. Nevertheless, in 2005, Daly got the job of president and CEO of Focus on the Family, and although he denies this, it’s clear that he was picked to be the yin to James Dobson’s yang. While Dobson continues to threaten in the press, Daly chats amiably with a reporter about the fall weather. He sticks to the hard line on policy issues—gay marriage is bad for families, he says—but his presentation is all soft edges. "I’m sure there are wonderful gay parents out there; there’s a poster child for everything." If one of his boys turned out to be gay, he says, "I’d love him."
Sure he would. He’d love him right into an ex-gay camp. It’s telling of the relentless animus the religious right has toward gay people, that Miller considers a Pew study showing opposition to gay marriage has crept down a tad among white evangelicals under 30, to 76 percent, as a sign of growing tolerance. Yes. And mount Everest is still growing too but I wouldn’t try watching it.
But there’s this little tidbit also…
According to a new study by the Barna Research Group, 80 percent of churchgoers between the ages of 16 and 29 believe that the term "anti-homosexual" describes Christianity, and they complain that they don’t get enough guidance from their pastors in how to apply Christ’s message of love to their gay friends.
I’ve seen this statistic cited elsewhere recently. Well I just can’t imaging why young people would describe Christianity as "anti-homosexual"…
One of the Seven Straight Nights for Equal Rights gatherings was held on October 8 in Greenville, South Carolina, and Faith in America has passed on photos and coverage of what transpired there, as those at the vigil faced protesters from a local church.
When the voices of straight allies unite with those of their gay and lesbain friends, family and co-workers, the shrill voices of religion-based bigotry can’t stand up against reason and heart-felt conviction. That’s what happened last Monday in downtown Greenville, S.C.
It was a beautiful night for Seven Straight Nights for Equal Rights in Greenville, S.C. on Oct. 8. But when a van full of anti-gay protesters from a Greenville community church showed up, the special event’s celebratory mood was maligned by the anti-gay group’s attitudes of intimidation and confrontation.
The good men and women of faith arrived at the protest bearing signs that read God Abhors You. There’s a video over at Pam’s House Blend.
Strolling back and forth yelling out that gay and lesbian people were doomed to hell, one of the leaders of anti-gay protesters continued his booming tirade of hate toward gay and lesbian citizens.
After the initial intimidation – which is what the protesters were all about – several of the people gathered for the Seven Straight Nights event approached the protesters and began questioning the message and their tactics.
Jon and Dawn Kennedy were two of those people at the celebration. Their brother, Sean Kennedy, died May 16, 2007 in Greenville, S.C., after being struck by a man who reportedly called Sean a faggot before striking Sean with such force that it crushed the bones in his face. Sean died from the one fatal blow.
Sean’s mother was present at Seven Straight Nights and was one of the event’s several speakers, including Faith In America Executive Director Jimmy Creech.
When Sean’s brother and sister politely told the leader of the anti-gay protesters that their brother was killed and that their hateful speech promotes violence toward gay and lesbian people, the protester flatly and unemotionally told Jon and Dawn Kennedy that their brother "was burning in hell right now."
I realize that these people are not representative of the whole of Christianity. But the silence in the pews toward this kind of thing is telling.
If you have friends who seem to think that violence against gay and lesbian citizens isn’t pervasive in our society, you need to introduce them to Erin Davies and her Fagbug.
Erin Davies, a student at Sage College in New York, was targeted by anti-gay vandals when her VW Beetle was sprayed with the words "U R gay" and fag" in mid-April, most likely because the vehicle has a rainbow sticker affixed to its bumper. The incident occurred on the national "Day of Silence" in which students across the country use silence as a means to bringing awareness to intolerance and homophobia.
Instead of having the car cleaned up, Davies says she plans to use it to spread a message of tolerance and take it on a cross-country trip this summer with the hateful messages still emblazoned across its windows.
Erin attended the Seven Straight Nights for Equal Rights in Greenville, S.C. last week and it was there that she reported the awful news that she had been the victim of another painful – and potentially serious attack – in her hometown of Tampa, Fla.
On Oct. 4, just a week before arriving in Greenville, S.C., someone threw a brick through the window of her home in Tampa and the back window of her car parked there.
This is what Love The Sinner, Hate The Sin buys you. Not tolerance for the homosexual, but tolerance for bigotry. You cannot arouse religious passions against couples in love, without giving license to hate. This isn’t murder we’re talking about here. It isn’t violence. It isn’t theft. To denounce acts of violence, crimes of greed, the hurtful, harmful, things people to To their neighbors, is to condemn hatefulness. To denounce couples in love is to condemn love itself and that gives hate free reign to do what it will, because only love can stand against hate. Once you have destroyed love, you have unchained hate and hate obeys no one. It throws the brick through Erin Davies automobile. It laughs in Jon and Dawn Kennedy’s faces, and tells them their brother is burning in hell. It ties a 112 pound college student tied to a fence, tortures him, then leave him to die alone on the cold Wyoming plains. That is what Love The Sinner, Hate The Sin buys you. Not absolution, but blood. On your hands.
I’m terribly sorry if all this puts you in a theological bind. But the bible says… Yes. And it says we shouldn’t suffer witches to live either. And then it turns around and says Love Thy Neighbor. Over here is God flooding the earth, killing everyone and everything on it, including by the way, all its little children. Over there is Jesus, warning people not to harm a hair on a little child’s head or face the wrath of God. The bible can have its cake and eat it too. Unfortunately, you can’t. Those people vitriolically condemning homosexuals and their families and friends, Are the face of Christianity in America, until you give it a better, more loving one. And you can’t. Not until you start loving your gay neighbor. And as long as you hold to the belief that the love between same sex couples is a sin, you don’t. All you can do is watch impotently, while they are eaten by wolves you cannot speak out wholeheartedly against. Or you can wash, wash your hands of it all, and look the other way.
According to the documentation, my new Mercedes c300 will read in vCards from a Bluetooth enabled cell phone. That’s really handy, except my iPhone doesn’t do vCards. That’s just one of many common smart phone features Apple mysteriously decided to re-invent the telephone without. However, the Mac address book application does do vCards, and the Mercedes has a PCMCIA card reader slot in the dash, from which it can also import vCards (it can also be used to play MP3 files and update the Nav system maps). So I figured all I needed to do was export my address book entries from one of my Macs, onto a PCMCIA card, then put the card in the Mercedes and import them into the car’s address book.
Back in the day, PCMCIA cards were how you expanded a laptop. Nowadays laptops come with just everything you’d want built-in, but I had on hand several old PCMCIA cards, including modems and Ethernet adapters, that I’d bought for laptops I’d previously owned. But I had no PCMCIA memory card. So I went looking for one online. They’re not exactly hot selling items anymore. I saw very few and those had very little memory on them by today’s standards. They also cost far more then the Compact Flash cards I use in my digital cameras. But lo and behold, there were PCMCIA Compact Flash card readers available for sale cheap. I could buy one of those, and pop one of my flash cards into it, and that had the extra added advantage that I already had a USB Compact Flash card reader.
I bought one from B&H Photo, who I’ve made a lot of online purchases from, for about ten bucks. It came in the mail today, and right away I put my plan to work. I connected my USB flash card reader to Akela, my Mac Powerbook, and exported a few selected entries from Akela’s address book onto vCards onto one of my Compact Flash cards. Thanks to my .Mac account, all the address books on my Apple computers plus my iPhone sync with each other, so Akela had the same address book list that my iPhone did.
Then I put the flash card into the PCMCIA card reader and took it out to the Mercedes. You activate the Command-Nav system and bring up the Phone menu, and then work your way into the Phone’s address book where you eventually find a menu item that’s normally grayed out, for importing vCards from a memory card. Once I popped the PCMCIA card in the slot in the dashboard that menu item came to life and I clicked on it. A little timer icon came up, and pretty quickly I got a message saying the import process had completed successfully.
Well…not. Most of the address book entries were malformatted. Some wouldn’t even come up when I clicked on them, but only displayed a “Function Not Available” message. I figured the Apple vCard format was different enough somehow from the standard, that the Mercedes software wasn’t able to cope. So I went back and tried exporting the vCards again, but this time from the Palm Pilot software I still had installed on Akela.
Once again I selected a few entries in the address book…only the ones I figured I’d want to call while on the road. This would be mostly immediate friends and family. I figured once I had the process down, I could add entries later as needed. Once again I copied the exported vCards to my Compact Flash card via the USB card reader, then popped the flash card into the PCMCIA card reader and walked it back out to the car.
I did the import and was horrified to see that the damn Palm Pilot software had exported not just the address book entries I’d highlighted, but Everything in that address book. Every phone number and contact I’d ever acquired in the last fifteen years or so. The Mercedes phone book was a complete mess now, though at least the entries seemed to be properly formatted. But it was too much. And I discovered then, that there was no way to delete a bunch of records from it all at one time. I had to go through each individual entry and manually delete it.
After about the first thirty I got frustrated enough that I started looking around for a way to just blow away the whole address book and start over. I found a “Reset” command under the “System” menu and gave that a shot. It promptly warned me that I was about to erase all my data and I figured that since I’d only had the car a few days, I didn’t have enough of my own data on it to worry about having to rebuild everything. It deleted everything, including all my radio presets and my Nav map customizations. But thankfully it didn’t delete the Bluetooth setup with my iPhone, so I didn’t have to go through that process again. And it didn’t delete the Gracenote database entries it had found for the CDs I had in the changer.
I spent a couple minutes redoing my radio presets and my Nav map settings, and making sure my iPhone was still talking to the car. Then I went back inside and sat down with Akela and looked at the preference settings for the Apple address book application. My theory at that point was that maybe the photos I’d attached to some of the entries in my iPhone contact list were getting into the vCards and confusing the import software on the Mercedes. So I looked around for a setting that allowed me to specify which fields in the address book I wanted included in a vCard. There wasn’t one of those, but there was a setting to choose between exporting a 3.0 vCard or a 2.1 vCard. I decided to give the older 2.1 format a try.
I redid the export, and walked the card back out to the Mercedes. It worked. The import went without a hitch, and all the phone entries were now correctly formatted.
That task finally finished, I flipped over to the Nav system to see if it got all the addresses. That was when I discovered that the car’s phone book, and the Nav system address book, were two entirely different entities. I could import vCards into the phone book, but the Nav system required you to manually enter every destination you wanted to save, and it offered no way to link those to the phone book entries.
I suspect that’s because the Nav book has its own database of city and street names that it uses to compute directions. Whenever you enter a destination into the Nav system, you go through a series of menus that drill you down to the street address. So for instance, to get to my workplace, The Space Telescope Science Institute, which is at 3700 San Martin Drive in Baltimore, first I select my state, “Maryland” from a pulldown menu that lists all the states in the U.S. Actually, Maryland comes helpfully pre-filled in the state field, I assume because the Nav system knows I’m in Maryland. Once I’ve selected my state, select “Baltimore”, again from a menu that lists all the named cities and towns in Maryland. When I’ve done that, I can go to another menu that lists all the named roadways in the city of Baltimore and select “San Martin Drive”. You’d think that having done that, I could simply enter the street address using the numeric keypad on the dashboard. Nope. The system gives me another menu, with all the valid numbers for that street. I can’t enter 23 San Martin Drive, because there is no such address on San Martin Drive in Baltimore, Maryland. But theoretically I could have a vCard with that wrong address on it, or a misspelled street name, and the Nav system wouldn’t know what to do with it.
But still, it would be nice to at least be able to link the phone number in the Phone book, with a physical destination in the Nav system, even if you had to enter that one in manually using the Nav system’s built-in street maps. The software engineer in me doesn’t much like the idea of having redundant information in a database. There should only be one contact list, that both the phone system and the Nav system use. I can accept not being able to import addresses from vCards into the Nav system, but at least I should be able to link a Nav system destination address with a name and phone number entry in the phone book.
But at least I got all my critical phone numbers copied over. I’ll add the addresses into the Nav system as I need to. Hopefully Apple will add vCard functionality to its re-invention of the telephone and then all I’ll have to do is sit in the car with my iPhone and send updated vCards to the Mercedes’ phone book via the Bluetooth connection.
I realize I’m going to be spending more on gasoline now that I own a car that runs on premium, and what is more get’s almost ten miles per gallon less. But…geeze…
LONDON: Concern that Turkey may attack Kurdish militants in Iraq and disrupt petroleum shipments pushed crude oil to a record price Tuesday, nudging $88 a barrel and extending a rally that has added $8 in a week.
Crude oil for November delivery rose as much as $1.84, or 2.1 percent, to $87.97 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the highest level since the futures were introduced in 1983.
In early London trade, the contract was at $87.45.
Oil is closing in on the inflation-adjusted high of $90.46 seen in 1980, the year after the Iranian revolution and at the start of the Iran-Iraq war. Prices this year have averaged $67.
The latest surge in oil prices came after Turkey talked over the weekend of invading northern Iraq to pursue rebel fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.
You want to get people’s attention here in America? Instead of issuing terrorist threat alerts on a color scale, they should issue them on a cost of a gallon of gas scale. The Homeland Security Administration rose the terrorist threat level to $4 a gallon today…
The common media image of today’s youth is that they have, under a steady barrage of sexually charged images, become increasingly precocious – engaging in intercourse at a younger and younger age and with a dizzying array of partners.
But the reality, according to a new report entitled Sexual Health in Canada, is that adolescent sexual practices have remained largely unchanged for decades. "Young people aren’t having sex any younger than their parents or grandparents," Linda Capperauld, executive director of the Canadian Federation for Sexual Health, said in an interview.
Nor – despite suggestive music videos, ready access to Internet porn and creeping hemlines – are more teens having sex.
Nationwide, only 28 per cent of adolescents age 15 to 17 report having had sex, a figure that rises to 65 per cent by age 18 to 19.
All told, the mean age for sexual intercourse is 16.5 years, about where it’s been since the sexual revolution that was launched by today’s baby boomers.
Despite the closing gender gap – equal numbers of boys and girls now say they have had sex – the primary reason for not having done so remains remarkably unchanged from previous generations: Most girls said they were not ready, while most boys reported a lack of opportunity. The No. 2 reason for both sexes is the same: "I haven’t met the right person."
But when they do, teens are remarkably faithful. The number with a single sexual partner is on the rise.
It’s not all good news though
The 150-page report also contains some grim news. The number of teens with sexually transmitted infections like chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis is soaring.
Gosh…that wouldn’t be because they’re being given adequate sex education, on the theory that if we don’t tell them how to have sex they won’t have it? Sex is a basic instinct, older then the fish, let alone the mammals, let alone the primates, let alone humans. Human couples are perfectly capable of figuring out how to have sex on their own. What they need to be taught is how to avoid pregnancy and disease. And…a little responsibility please. But responsible sex is the last thing they’ll learn from the Family Values crowd…
OCTOBER 8–An Alabama minister who died in June of "accidental mechanical asphyxia" was found hogtied and wearing two complete wet suits, including a face mask, diving gloves and slippers, rubberized underwear, and a head mask, according to an autopsy report. Investigators determined that Rev. Gary Aldridge’s death was not caused by foul play and that the 51-year-old pastor of Montgomery’s Thorington Road Baptist Church was alone in his home at the time he died (while apparently in the midst of some autoerotic undertaking). While the Montgomery Advertiser, which first obtained the autopsy records, reported on Aldridge’s two wet suits, the family newspaper chose not to mention what police discovered inside the minister’s rubber briefs. Aldridge served as the church’s pastor for 16 years. Immediately following his death, church officials issued a press release asking community members to "please refrain from speculation" about what led to Aldridge’s demise, adding that, "we will begin the healing process under the strong arm of our Savior, Jesus Christ."
GREEN BAY — The chairman of the Republican Party in Brown County faces criminal charges for allegedly fondling a 16-year-old Ethan House runaway and providing him with beer and marijuana late last year.
Donald Fleischman, 37, of Allouez, was charged last month with two counts of child enticement, two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a child and a single charge of exposing himself to a child.
If convicted on both felonies and all three misdemeanors, Fleischman faces up to 52 years in prison.
Fleischman’s attorney, Jeff Jazgar, said he plans to confront the charges at the preliminary hearing set for Oct. 29.
“My client is innocent of the charges,” Jazgar said Friday. “Our plan is to get some witnesses to testify and present enough information to dismiss the case.”
Efforts to reach Fleischman were unsuccessful.
Fleischman has resigned his post with the Brown County Republicans, said Kirsten Kukowski, communications director for the Republican Party of Wisconsin.
The teen, now 17, told authorities Fleischman took him to a hotel in Appleton during that time and then to a cabin near Florence for several days before returning to Fleischman’s Allouez home. The boy said Fleischman provided him with beer and marijuana, the complaint said.
The boy told police that when he would go to bed, Fleischman would fondle him and that on one occasion he awoke to find Fleischman at the foot of his bed masturbating.
To neighbors here, J. D. Roy Atchison was a deft federal prosecutor, an involved father and a devoted volunteer, coaching girls’ softball and basketball teams year in and year out.
His wife is a popular science teacher; his youngest daughter, an honors student who was on her high school homecoming court last year. Their house, with rocking chairs on the porch, oaks in the yard and a wrought-iron fence, is among the prettiest in town.
But in an instant last week, the community pillar became an object of community loathing. Mr. Atchison, 53, was arrested getting off a plane in Detroit on Sept. 16 and charged with the unthinkable. The authorities there said he was carrying a doll and petroleum jelly, and that he had arranged with an undercover agent to have sex with a 5-year-old girl.
Now Mr. Atchison is awaiting trial in a federal prison in Michigan, and the people of Gulf Breeze, an affluent bayside suburb in the Florida Panhandle, are outraged, baffled and repulsed.
…
Mr. Atchison has worked at the small United States Attorney’s Office in Pensacola since the 1980s, most recently handling asset forfeitures in criminal cases as an assistant United States attorney. In one high-profile case, Mr. Atchison oversaw the government seizure of a popular beach bar at the center of a cocaine-trafficking ring.
His is considered one of the most conservative United States attorney’s offices in the country, known for refusing plea agreements and seeking the stiffest sentences.
Mr. Johnson said Mr. Atchison was close with the other prosecutors in his office, going with some on an annual lobster-diving trip in the Florida Keys. A big white fishing boat sat in his otherwise-empty driveway this week. His interests, according to the Yahoo profile that the police said was his, include “surfing, skiing, diving, boating, young girls, petite girls, skinny girls.”
And yes…according to a commenter at Daily KOS who looked up the public election records for the Pensacola suburb of Gulf Breeze, Atchison was a republican. Surprise, surprise. And here’s another anti-gay republican with a wide stance…
A Florida state representative and co-chairman of John McCain’s presidential campaign was arrested Wednesday for offering to perform oral sex on a male undercover cop in a Titusville, Fla., public restroom, police said.
Rep. Bob Allen, R-Merritt Island, was booked into the Brevard County jail on a charge of solicitation to commit prostitution, the Orlando Sentinel reported, then released on $500 bail. The charge, a second-degree misdemeanor, is punishable by a year in county jail and a $500 fine.
Titusville police told the Sentinel that they were carrying out a burglary detail in a city park when they saw a disheveled, unshaven man enter and leave the park restroom three times. They decided to send in an undercover officer; minutes later, they told the Sentinel, the man knocked on the stall door and offered to perform oral sex on the officer for $20.
"After he was arrested, he (Allen) mentioned he was a state legislator," Lt. Todd Hutchinson told the paper.
Allen, 48, is married with a daughter, according to his legislative bio.
First elected in 2000, Allen is the chairman of the House Committee on Energy. He received the Rainbow Democratic Club of Orlando’s worst possible rating.
In March, he co-sponsored HB269, the Lewdness and Indecent Exposure Bill, which proposed enhanced penalties for "offenses involving unnatural and lascivious acts or exposure or exhibition of sexual organs committed within specified distance of certain locations." The bill never made it to a vote.
About six years ago, he was one of 21 Florida legislators to sign Gov. Jeb Bush’s friend-of-the-court brief supporting the state’s ban on gays adopting children, Rainbow Democratic Club secretary Carol Bartsch told Gay.com
"Practically as soon as he got into office, he wanted to go on record as being anti-gay," Bartsch said.
Due to be termed out of the House next year, Allen, however, had been considered a likely state Senate candidate, Sentinel writer John Kennedy blogged Wednesday.
Just a few of your friendly neighborhood Family Values folks who know what’s best for the rest of us when it comes to having sex…
The little door hatch in the center console, just above the air vents, is where the video display comes out when you activate it. It will show the navigation screen and the stereo system display. There are a lot of buttons there but in practice you don’t really have to use them. Just behind my furry little car mascot in the cup holder is a little knob that you can use a bit like a joystick when the video display is active, and cycle through a series of menus that control just about everything.
Below the stereo system controls, just in front of the shift lever is the climate control. The knobs on either side set the temperature for the driver’s side and passenger side independently. In the center of the speedometer is a display that you can cycle through with the buttons on the steering wheel to show you things like the odometer and trip odometer, miles per gallon, miles left before you need to refuel, the direction of travel, your street location, what’s playing on the iPod, and the caller ID when there is an incoming call on your cell phone. The car talks to my iPhone via a Bluetooth wireless interface and when the phone is in the car I can take and make calls via the voice control system.
The wood trim is real burled walnut. Mercedes backs the wood panels with aluminum so if there is an accident the wood won’t splinter. Some Mercedes fans are bellyaching online that they don’t like this new dash design but I just love it. I really hated the look of the old C class cockpit. This new look really appeals to me.
The car wants to do a lot for you automatically. I’ve been running the climate control on auto and just setting the temperature and its always been right. There are sensors that determine the ambient temperature inside and out, and which way the sun is beaming down on the car, and adjust the AC and fan speeds and vent openings accordingly. You can also set the headlamps on auto and the car will figure out when and which ones to turn on and how bright to set them. The turn signal lamps each have a backup, and when the active one burns out, and the backup is being used, you are notified in the speedometer info panel that you need to replace it. The dealer had to tell me about that because, she said, I might one day see a notice that I’ve got a burned out turn signal and I’ll go look at it and see that it’s still working and I might think the warning system is broken. But no…I really do need to replace the lamp. The rearview mirror is not adjustable for day/night operation. There is a sensor in it that darkens the mirror when it detects headlights behind you. The darkening varies according to the intensity of the light coming in behind you. The sideview mirrors do the same. I can’t begin to tell you how nice it is to have auto darkening sideviews. So many times I’ve had to turn my sideviews away when some idiot, particularly in an SUV, comes alongside with headlights that aren’t aligned right, and then reset them after they’ve passed.
You notice I’m not even talking about the ride. That’s mostly because I can’t push it yet. I’m still in the break-in period. I’ll say more about the ride when I’m free to do that. I’m looking forward to it. They say this car is as good on the road as any Mercedes sedan ever built. Not quite as good as the best of the E class…but good. And that’s probably way better then most other sedans. One thing I am noticing now though, is the difference between a rear wheel drive and the front wheel drives I’ve been used to driving since 1993 and my Geo Prism. But my first cars were rear wheel drive and it’s more like remembering how it was then learning something entirely new. This car has a very solid feel to it on the road. In part that’s probably because it’s heavy. But it’s also a Mercedes sedan, and they just feel like that.
There’s a lot I still haven’t tried yet, particularly the voice command system. I’ve been using the joystick to control the Nav system and the stereo. And I’m still working on a way to copy my iPhone’s phone book over to the car. The car will accept vCards, but the iPhone doesn’t do vCards yet. However the Apple address book does. There’s a slot in the console that accepts a PCMCIA memory card and I’m working on transferring the phone book that way. Once I get the phone book transferred, I can not only make and receive calls with it, I can get directions to the addresses in it from the Nav system.
The cockpit is so…sensual…to just sit in. When you buy a luxury grade car, you get (or damn well ought to for the price) a degree of fit and finish above the basic. It’s not just the finer quality materials, it’s the degree of care that goes into the making of it. Everywhere your eye looks, everything is fitted together just so…nothing is misaligned or out of place. You can see the care that was taken in the assembly of the car everywhere you look. It’s not the bells and whistles. it’s the solid feel of quality and care throughout the whole passenger compartment, and every other part of the car. It’s the real thing.
The folks who put this car together can be proud. It is a real fine piece of work. It was made in Germany, so the whole car actually rode the boat over to the U.S, unlike the previous two Japanese cars I’ve owned, which were made in factories here in America…the Geo Prism in California, the Honda Accord in Kentucky. I have the Mercedes factory tag with the chassis number, order number and production number info on it…in German. I’m still looking around the car to see if I can find a sticker somewhere with the actual factory location and production date on it.
Brown County GOP Chairman Donald Fleischman has resigned his post, says a spokesperson, after being accused of enticement and fondling of an underage boy, reports the Green Bay Press-Gazette Saturday.
Fleischman, 37, is free after posting a $20,000 bond on September 28. "My client is innocent of the charges," says attorney Jeff Jazgar, who "declined to discuss specifics."
"Our plan is to get some witnesses to testify and present enough information to dismiss the case."
The boy was found by police in Fleischman’s home on two occasions in late 2006 while being sought as a runaway from Ethan House, a home for at-risk youth. Now 17, he says he stayed with Fleischman at his house and a cabin, where he was provided with alcohol and cannabis, and regularly fondled.
On November 19, 2006, according to a September 7th complaint obtained from the WisPolitics Courtwatch Blog, the boy in question was found hiding in a bedroom closet, and a pipe was found in the house, which tested positive for THC. Shortly after, on December 8, 2006, Fleischman said he was trying to convince the boy, discovered again in the home, to turn himself in as a runaway.
Fleischman faces two counts of child enticement, two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a child, and one count of exposing himself to a child. He returns to court on October 29.
It’s been like a week doesn’t go by that some GOP operative or religious right nutcase turns up in the middle of some kind of sex scandal. And they’re lecturing us on sexual conduct?
The venue is owned by the Lynnwood Public Facilities District, a public taxing district that operates the convention center but is separate from the city.
“Our understanding is that they’re law-abiding. They have a right of free speech just like any other group,” said Mike Echelbarger, the board’s chairman.
“If we were talking about the (Ku Klux Klan) we’d have a totally different take on it. Of course we wouldn’t rent to the KKK,” he said.
Of course, they wouldn’t rent to the KKK. But as we reported earlier, they may as well. The rhetoric the Watchman use has often been violent, using the rhetoric of warfare in their speeches and writings. Founded by Redmond, Washington by preacher Kenneth Hutcherson, holocaust revisionist Scott Lively, and Latvian megachurch pastor Alexey Ledyaev, Watchmen on the Walls have gained a tremendous amount of influence in Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine and Russia. Ledyaev’s fomenting of anti-gay hatred in Riga, Latvia led to violence when skinhead and other demonstrators threw excrement and eggs at Gay Pride participants in 2006.
And as the SPLC recently reported, the Watchmen also represent an increasingly violent anti-gay movement among Slavic evangelical immigrants in several U.S. cities which have previously been known as being gay friendly. In July 2007, a group of Russian-speaking men killed Satender Singh, a 26-year-old gay Fijian of Indian near Sacramento, California. Two men, Andrey Vusik, 29, and Aleksandr Shevchenko, 21 were charged in connection with Singh’s death. Vusik fled to Russian in July and is being sought by the FBI. Ledyaev and Lively have refused to publicly condemn the killing.
Jim quotes Lively, who employs rhetoric chillingly similar to the eliminationist what the Third Reich once emplyed against Jews:
There is a war that is going on in the world. There is a war that is waging across the entire face of the globe. It’s been waging in the United States for decades, and it’s been waging in Europe for decades. It’s a war between Christians and homosexuals.
This is a war you haven’t seen yet. You’ve only seen a little bit of it, because Russia had been protected against the homosexual movement by the Communists. One of the few good things that the Soviet Union did is that it stopped the sexual revolution from infecting the Russian people. But all across the West, the sexual revolution changed the culture of the nations. The sexual revolution embraces the idea that there should be no limits on sexual conduct.
And this is the design of the Devil to destroy civilization, because civilization is based on the natural family. One man and one woman united in marriage bringing children into the world and training them to replace them in the next generation. That’s the foundation of civilization and the heart of Christian living.
And in the United States where the sexual revolution began, it was the homosexual political movement that designed this strategy to attack Christianity. The homosexual movement teaches sexual freedom, and its first target is the heterosexual people. The homosexual activists stayed hidden but they taught this philosophy through their activists. And out of the philosophy came the principalities and powers that is destroying the West: The pornography industry, the abortion industry, and the destruction of marriage through divorce.
These things are the product of a way of thinking. They deny the Truth of God. They deny the design of God for human beings. And their purpose is the change the cultures of the world.
Now, the homosexual movement has been winning this war in the United States, and it has been winning this war in Europe. And we’re looking at the future collapse of Western civilization. And Watchmen on the Walls is an organization to fight against this collapse. Watchmen On the Walls is an organization of men and women with courage, who will stand on the Truth of God and without compromise demand that the culture will follow the guidance of God. That marriage and family must be held at the highest level.
So Lively and his pal Ledyaev have been feeding this to the Slavic immigrant community in several west coast cities and it did its work. Two of their useful tools killed Satender Singh and Lively isn’t merely refusing to condemn the act, he’s making excuses for it:
Now, I’ve been working with the Russian community in Sacramento. And I want to tell you this is an example of how bad things are in the United States. Because we’ve come to a place in the United States where the homosexuals have achieved very high power. And they’ve begun to punish… They’ve begun to cause the political powers to punish anyone who says that homosexuality is wrong.
There was a situation in Sacramento a few weeks ago in a public park. There was a group of homosexuals and they were very drunk and one of the homosexual men was taking off his pants. And there were children in the park. And a Russian man went over to these homosexuals and he was rebuking them and there started a fight. And the Russian man punched the homosexual. [The audience starts to shout and applaud.] No, no, no, don’t… The man was very drunk… the homosexual was very drunk. He was very drunk and he fell down and he hit his head and he died. [Some in the audience start to applaud and laugh] No…. no…
Now the Russian man has been accused of murder and the FBI is seeking him. And all of the powers in Sacramento have been accusing all of the Russian community of being murderers. And the goal is to silence everyone who speaks against homosexuality. And this is a very dangerous situation because we don’t want homosexuals to be killed. We want them to be saved. Amen?
But that’s not what happened in the park. Singh and his friends, three couples including a pregnant woman, were taunted by a group of young slavs who hurled racist and homophobic insults at them. One of the Slavs called some friends on his cell phone and they came and joined the group just as Singh and his friends were leaving the park. There was no fight. One of the Slavs sucker punched Singh hard in the head and he fell and hit his head again on the sidewalk. He remained in a coma until eventually taken off life support.
Make no mistake…Lively is excusing murder there. Note not only the audience response to Lively’s telling them that the gay man was struck and died, but Lively’s half hearted attempt to quell their enthusiasm for murder. He’s not telling them their blood thirsty hatred is wrong, he’s telling them to shut up because his speech there is being recorded.
Burroway’s right, The Lynnwood Convention Center might as well be hosting a Ku Klux Klan gathering. The Watchmen On The Walls aren’t just some anti-gay right wing religious group. They are the public face of a violently anti-gay movement that has already killed at least one gay person. And that’s not the only act of violence associated with this Slavic religious community. People will die as a result of the hatred that will be passionately inflamed at The Lynnwood Convention Center on October 19, 20 and 21. They might be gay. They might be family or friend to a gay person. They may be straight and merely mistaken for being gay in the wrong place at the wrong time. But look at the rhetoric this movement employs. …this is the design of the Devil to destroy civilization…it was the homosexual political movement that designed this strategy to attack Christianity… We better wake up. This is a war. They aren’t using that word "war" metaphorically.
Someone will die as a result of what is said in the Lynnwood Convention Center in the coming weeks. Some of that blood will be on the hands of the The Lynnwood Convention Center Management. Just sayin…
I’m fortunate enough to be working for an employer that takes diversity in the workplace serious. I have never, Never, felt more comfortable as a gay man in the workplace as I have at Space Telescope. The work environment I’ve experienced has been pleasant, professional, and genuinely good-natured. But I have worked in a hostile environment too, so I know how it is. I’ve been told to my face that there was "no place for homosexuals in our company". And I’ve been let go in situations that I was certain were about my sexual orientation and nothing else, even when other excuses were being made. I’ve been harassed, I’ve been threatened. I’ve seen the atmosphere turn on a dime, the instant my sexual orientation became known.
365Gay.Com has a good post up today, about the Gay Glass Ceiling. There’s an interesting little tidbit in it…
In one ingenious study at Rice University, undergraduates were fitted with one of two hats: one of them said “Texan and proud”; the other, “Gay and proud.” The students didn’t know which hat they were wearing, but they were instructed to apply for retail jobs.
The researchers found something interesting: the gay hat-wearing students were just as likely to be hired as the Texan-hat wearing students. There was no hiring discrimination (and in fact, the students were in a municipality that protects against gay employment discrimination). But the interviewers were more hostile toward the gay hat-wearing students and more likely to end the interview early.
Most students were able to tell which hat they were wearing from the treatment they received.
I’ll bet they were. The difference between being gay, and being black or Hispanic, is that you can’t usually tell someone’s gay just by looking at them. Unless something in their job application or resume alerts them to it, a prospective employer isn’t likely to know that the person they’re interviewing for a job is gay. So white gay folks don’t generally experience job discrimination upfront. But unless the gay person is deeply, and I mean Deeply closeted, sooner or later their co-workers figure it out and then things change.
The glass ceiling is what you experience if you’re lucky. Otherwise you are simply ushered out the door. Sometimes they tell you to your face it’s because you’re gay. Sometimes they make some other excuse. When the religious right points to studies that they claim prove that gay people earn far more money then heterosexuals, what they’re really pointing to are studies that prove that rich people aren’t as afraid of being open about their sexual orientation on a job survey form as someone barely making ends meet has to be.
I knew I was in for it when I bought a car that runs on premium instead of regular. I accepted that as part of the joy of owning a Mercedes (The Mercedes Experience…as my friend Dan puts it…). But still I had visions of all the gas station signs I saw while on the road last July, particularly in Nevada for some reason, advertising premium gasoline for over four dollars a gallon. We were having a gasoline price peak back then, right as I was taking my annual road trip vacation. I was driving the Accord, and counting my blessings that I had a car that was doing about 33 miles per gallon. I’m still in the break-in period on the Mercedes, but it looks like I’ll be getting at best around 25 mpg in it.
What I didn’t expect was how widely the price of premium varies. At least around here. The price of regular only varies by a few cents locally. Last night as I was looking to fill up, I noticed the price of premium here in the Baltimore area running between $3.10 and $2.80. I saw stations right down the street from each other, having the same exact price for regular, differing by as much as 20 cents a gallon on the price of premium. I’ve no idea why that might be.
There’s A Period Of Adjustment In Every Relationship
First, you have to understand that for years…decades really…I’ve considered driving a stick shift to be the only kind of real driving there is. Everything else is merely riding. When looking at a new car, the stick was a manditory feature. If the dealer couldn’t sell me a stick it was a deal breaker. Every new car I’ve ever bought, has had a stick.
Until now. Because I always wanted a Mercedes…
So I’m driving my new Mercedes-Benz c300 to Arlington Virginia, to visit some friends that I visit most every Friday evening. There are a group of us middle aged gay guys who get-together every Friday for happy hour drinks, and then a good restaurant, and then maybe a little clubbing afterwards. I usually stop first at Jon’s house, where we meet up with Joe, and then the three of us all go in Joe’s nice new Acura TL to the 30 Degrees lounge where we meet up with the others in our group.
It was admiring Joe’s Acura when he got it, that got me thinking about actually buying the Mercedes I’ve always wanted. We’re both IT professionals, both of us in pretty well paying positions. If he didn’t feel ostentatious about owning a car like that, then maybe I shouldn’t either.
I took delivery of the Mercedes Friday morning. I put the key in the ignition at 1PM (actually an infrared dongle thingy that only vaguely resembles a key…there’s a picture of it a couple posts down…), started the car up, drove it off the dealer’s lot and headed right to Jon’s. I left early so I could take my first drive in the new car casually, unhurriedly, learning its road feel, keeping its speed and revs within the limits set by the manual for the first thousand mile break-in period. The car is a pure pleasure to take down the highway.
When I get to Arlington, I realize I haven’t eaten all day and I’m famished. As soon as I get off the beltway, I head for a Subway shop I know is in a shopping center near the exit. I pull in to a parking spot, set the parking brake, switch off the ignition, and for a few moments savor the feeling of being surrounded by the car I’d always dreamed of owning. Then I go to pull the key out of the ignition.
It doesn’t budge. What the hell…??? The damn key is stuck in the ignition and I can’t get it out. I turn it this way and that…turn the motor back on and off again. Nothing works the key is frozen in the ignition.
Damn! Damn! My new car…and it’s already broken. When Jon and Joe hear about this they’re going to laugh their tails off… I could hear the teasing already… Nice car Bruce…guess you’ll always know where the key is… Hey…that’s one of those Mercedes safety features…so you’ll never loose the key…right…? I’d hear about it for years…I just knew it.
Damn! Damn! How do I get this goddamned key out of the ignition? My eyes begin to wander around the dash, which is still activated because the key is still in the ignition. I try pulling out the key again. It won’t budge. My hand drops down to my side…taps randomly on the shift lever while I try to think. And then I realize…
…I’d forgotten to put the car in Park.
Oh. Right.
Once I do that, the car gives me my key back. See…I could just turn the engine off and leave the car in gear when I was driving a stick. All you people who only drive automatics and hate sticks can go ahead and laugh at me now.
I’ve wanted to own one of these since I was a teenager…
Reisender
Now there’s a happy face. That’s my new 2008 Mercedes-Benz c300, the U.S. version of which was just released for sale last month on my birthday. I took it as an omen. Also, the rush of satisfaction I experienced the first time I sat in one at the dealership.
It was more, much more then I Like It. It was This Is Me. I’ve seen very few cars in my lifetime that didn’t have at least one small detail of style and design that I didn’t care for. A nice body with a weirdly shaped grill. Nice leather seats over carpeting that seemed to have been borrowed from the local miniature golf course. Instrument panels that were either too cluttered or not informative enough. But from the moment I set eyes on the new c class, I was completely entranced. There is nothing, nothing about the design of this car that I don’t find attractive. It drives with that same solid, substantial feel to it that every Mercedes sedan I’ve ever rode in has. It not only has state-of-the-art technological gizmos galore, they all make sense. This car is, to my eye, extravagantly beautiful, inside and out, and yet there is not one superfluous thing about it. Naturally, your mileage may vary, but if a car is a statement, no car I have ever owned has ever been more Me then this one. I knew it the moment I sat in one.
I’d just finished paying off the Accord, and I stressed for weeks about whether or not to do this now, or wait a bit longer. But I’ve been waiting for so long. I have several old Mercedes-Benz brochures going back to the 1980s in my storage bins, from when I almost thought one of the least expensive sedans might…might just…finally be within my reach. It never happened. Mostly it was that for so much of my life I’ve lived right at the edge of poverty. Partly it was that when I was living well, I was too afraid to spend a lot of money on anything, let alone a new car. And then, in the 1990s, Mercedes quality took a nosedive. I’d begun making good money as a software developer by then, and I could have afforded the c-class then, but I kept taking a pass. The old Mercedes reliability wasn’t there, and I just hated the design of the dash and the passenger compartment. And it was too small a car for the asking price.
As I said, I’d just finished paying off the Accord, and for kicks and grins decided to look around. A friend of mine in Northern Virginia had bought himself an Acura TL, and it was just lovely. It had a nicely fitted leather interior, the bluetooth cell phone connectivity and the video navigation system. And you could control almost everything via spoken commands if you didn’t want to be taking your hands off the steering wheel. I looked at that car and though to myself that I’d been making good money now for over a decade, why don’t I have a nice car like this?
Well for one thing, I was raised not to want luxuries. Of all the deadly sins pounded into my head while growing up Baptist, I think my household regarded Pride as the worst, followed closely by Vanity. So all my life I’ve pulled back from spending more for something, just because I found it beautiful. When comparing products, if the plain no-frills version did the job just as well, then I bought that, and…no kidding, this is how thoroughly they pounded it into me when I was a kid, felt a twinge of guilt just for desiring the more beautiful one.
But to want beauty in your world, for its own sake, isn’t vanity. Rationally and logically I’ve accepted this for years. But emotionally, down in my gut, it’s been hard to overcome the way I was raised. There is a difference between spending a lot of money on something like a car, just for the status value, just to make people envy you, and spending the money because you you really admire the craftsmanship, the engineering, and the art of its makers. It takes your breath away, verses you think it makes you somebody. I know this rationally. I think I’m finally comfortable with it now emotionally. I was raised for so long, so very very long, to fear taking joy in material things, lest I loose sight of spiritual things. But there are harmful extremes on both sides of that scale.
I did the math, and looked long and hard at my budget. I’d paid off the Accord quickly, and so it had a lot of trade-in value, and that made buying the Mercedes make more financial sense then it would have otherwise. Thing is, paying for this car will not be a hardship, even with the other obligations I have currently. Of course, I could put the money to some more practical use, or just stash it away in savings until I needed to spend it on something more practical. But…see that smile? There’s, really, all the reason beauty needs. I only wish I could thank each and every person whose hands called steel and copper and aluminum and glass and fabric and plastic and rubber and leather and little bits of silicone and software code into becoming this car. All the engineers, all the assembly line workers…everyone. Thank you for wanting more then good enough. I promise from now on, not to feel guilty about wanting it too.
According to global marketing information firm J.D. Power and Associates, 42 percent of all car buyers … won’t even look at a vehicle built by a U.S. company.
Dave Sargent, J.D. Power’s vice president of auto research, said [that is] a mistake.
"Many consumers still have a view of the Detroit automakers that the products are not as reliable as the imports, but what our studies show is that that is simply not true," he said.
Detroit has been closing the quality gap in recent years, Sargent said. In a study this summer of three-year-old vehicles, J.D. Power said Buick tied Lexus as the most dependable brand. In another J.D. Power study on quality, Ford won in five categories — more than any other company.
But Sargent said when it comes to cars, it takes years for perception to catch up to reality.
I appreciate the dynamic J.D. Powerman is describing. My own experience with cars designed by the Big Three is an unbroken string of hoopdies. My Honda Civic has run for more years and more miles than my Dodge Colt, Ford Escort, Chevy Cavalier and Chevette combined. Those earlier cars all broke down so often, stranding me at so many key moments, that I can still feel the anxiety of those strandings in my muscle memory. Just thinking about it makes my stomach churn. I can’t imagine easily coming around to feeling secure about relying on another Ford or Chevy to get me from point A to point B if I need to get there.
I have no problem with buying an American-made car — my Civic was built by the UAW in Ohio, my Escort was built in Korea — but it will be a long while before I overcome my hard-earned, visceral distrust of Detroit engineering.
That’s me. My first car was a 1973 Ford Pinto and I loved it, and got 135k miles out of it (by taking care of the motor fanatically…changing the oil every two-thousand miles and so forth…) and still it broke down on me repeatedly. But it was 1973 and that was just what you expected of cars back then. Except for the Mercedes, which back then was legendary for its bombproof reliability. My mom’s first car was a 1968 Plymouth Valiant slant six (we were carless for most of my childhood), which just ran and ran and ran. But after she traded that one in, she endured a string of just awful Chryslers and I swear I wouldn’t trust a Chrysler motor any further then I could throw it.
I endured a string of really marginal used cars myself after the Pinto…but that was mostly because I was flat broke more often then not, and couldn’t afford more then a couple hundred buck junker. Then I started getting work as a software developer, and could actually afford a new car, and bought a 1993 Geo Prism on the recommendation of Consumer Reports. I got over 200k miles out of that car, and it never once left me stranded. Under the skin, that car was a Toyota Corolla.
My next car was the Honda Accord I just traded in. I drove that thing across the Imperial Valley and the wastelands of Western Wyoming and Idaho and eastern Oregon and never once worried that it would break down on me in the middle of nowhere. Thing is, that Accord, and that Geo Prism, were both made in America, by American labor.
American labor can build solid, reliable cars. But for ages it seems to me, Detroit just doesn’t want to design cars that way.
So I understand that aspect of what the J.D. Power guy is talking about. But he fails to notice another equally significant reason that the Big Three automakers have a lousy reputation: They’ve spent millions of dollars over the past several decades on a PR campaign designed to persuade us that they don’t know what they’re doing.
General Motors, Ford and Chrysler have loudly insisted for years that they are technologically incompetent. They have spent millions of lobbying dollars to explain all the things they cannot do, all the improvements they are unable to make, all the ways their abilities, designs and engineering are inferior to those of their competitors. All of that money spent advertising their limits and incompetency has had an impact. American car buyers listened. We believed them.
Consider, for example, CAFE standards — targets for corporate average fuel economy. Every time that Congress or Al Gore or the Sierra Club has suggested these standards should be higher, Detroit shrieks that they can’t take the pressure, that it couldn’t possibly be done, that they don’t have the skill, the know-how or the basic competence to pull it off. Toyota, Honda, Mercedes and Volkswagen, on the other hand, just said, "More fuel-efficient vehicles? Hai. Ja. We can do that. We’re good at making cars."
The same thing happened earlier with air bags and emissions standards. When California passed strict new emission standards in the 1990s, GM and Ford shipped their top lobbyists to Washington and Sacramento to argue that the new rules were technologically impossible. Toyota and Honda didn’t send lobbyists — they sent cars that met the new standard. The same dynamic occurred even earlier with seat belts. With GM’s lobbyists arguing that the company wasn’t capable of meeting the technological challenge of the seat belt why should consumers trust them to build reliable engines?
You know…I hadn’t thought of this before, but it fits. I can appreciate the big three arguing against government dictating auto design…I don’t agree with it on the basis of safety and emissions standards…but I can see them making that argument. But that’s not the argument that emphasized. Instead, like Fred says there, they cried doom and gloom and said repeatedly, over every friggin’ safety or emissions requirement, that it couldn’t be done. Meanwhile, Europe and Japan just kept..well…doing it.
It’s not that Americans can’t build good cars. It’s not that Americans can’t engineer good cars. It’s that corporate management didn’t want to. The mindset was, good enough to roll out of the factory is good enough. If there are problems, fix them after the fact, until the warranty runs out.
It’s not that they just didn’t design them to be maintained or repaired either…I remember one car, I think it was the AMC Pacer, which needed to have the engine jacked up to replace one of the spark plugs…a routine operation, something you did with every tune-up back in those days…but they didn’t design them to be Assembled either. I remember looking under the hood of the Toyota a friend bought in the late 1970s, when Japan was starting to actually worry Detroit. It was a marvel. Not only where there all sorts of little things they did in there to protect vulnerable hoses and electrical cables from the engine compartment environment, and thus decrease the likelihood of a breakdown, but there was all kinds of little things they did, that you could see, to the individual components to help the assembly line workers put it together right the first time. Little tick marks, or fittings on the individual parts that at a glance told you, attach this part to this other part Here…This way. You didn’t have to even think about it. The pieces Told You how to put them together. That kind of thinking did not penetrate Detroit management for decades. I’m not sure it has even now.
You go to a Toyota or Honda showroom now, and you’ll see some of the finest cars American labor can build. Absolutely world class stuff. They’re just not Detroit designs. And that’s not the fault of American engineering either. I recall reading a few years ago, about a guy who’d been put in charge of GM’s Cadillac devision, who was proposing to build an American supercar, something to compete, not merely with the top of the line Lexus, Mercedes and BMWs, but with Rolls and Bentley. Right On, I thought. It doesn’t matter if the market for something like that is small…Build It dammit! Let’s produce one America sedan that’s made as well as a car can be made, not just at the state of the art, but defining it, and cost be dammed. Go ahead and make it for the fabulously rich…and maybe…hopefully…the techniques learned will trickle down to the rest of the GM line. You think what Toyota learns while making Lexus doesn’t find its way eventually to the Camry? That’s why they’re so damn good…they have a line where they just go for it. Every car maker should have one of those.
But no…it was never done. And I don’t think that guy’s with Cadillac anymore. The new styling in the line since the 1990s is his, and maybe some engineering improvements. But Cadillac still has the worst reliability record of any luxury model. That’s not the fault of the people who build them. American workers can build a great car, if they’re given a great car to build.
Now, this is the issue: Does a political party say to its most militant, committed, ideologically driven believers in purity that they have a veto over what the party does? And I say that procedurally because substantively I agree with them. I have spoken on this floor and in committee for including people of transgender. I have argued that with my colleagues in private. I have argued that with the Democratic Caucus. But I also believe that I have a broader set of responsibilities than to any one group and my job is to advance the moral values that I came here to advance as far and as fast as I can and not voluntarily to withhold an advance because it doesn’t meet somebody’s view of perfection. And the question is, how do we relate to those people? And it has become an increasing problem for both parties.
Frankly, until recently I have felt that one of the advantages we Democrats have had over our Republican colleagues is that we were more willing to be responsible, less susceptible to the most committed minority of our party having a veto. I think from the days of Terri Schiavo and before and since, the Republican Party has suffered from that. I don’t want the Democratic Party to suffer from it. Not because I want to protect the Democratic Party as an end in itself, but because the Democratic Party is the means by which these values I care about are most likely to be advanced.
And let me talk about this ideological faction that we have. There are some characteristics that they have that I think led them to this profoundly mistaken view that the greatest single advance we can make in civil rights in many, many years would somehow be a bad thing because it would only include millions of people and leave some hundreds of thousands out. And I want to include those hundreds of thousands. I have done more to try to include them than many of the people who say we should kill the whole thing, but I don’t understand how killing the whole thing advances that.
But here are some of the characteristics: first of all, they tend to talk excessively to each other. One of the things when you are in this body is you talk to people all over the country. You talk to Members of Congress from every State. And I have this with people who can’t understand why I am not introducing legislation to impeach the President and the Vice President, and I find that this is a characteristic that these are people who do not know what the majority thinks, who do not understand the depths of disagreement with their positions on some issues. And that doesn’t mean a majority that says George Bush is wonderful. That isn’t there anymore, but a majority who would be skeptical of impeachment.
But let me get back to this. There are people who talk excessively to each other. They don’t know people of other views.
There is another characteristic of these people who are so dedicated. They do not have allies. You can take an elected official who has been with one of these groups day after day for years, but let that individual once disagree, and it’s a betrayal. It’s a failure of moral will. And lest anyone think I am here being defensive about myself, let me be very clear: I will be running for reelection again. The likelihood that I will be defeated by someone who claims that I am insufficiently dedicated to protecting people from discrimination based on sexual orientation seems to me quite slender. I am not worried about my own situation, and let me also say that I have said that my colleagues suffer sometimes from the unwillingness to tell people bad news. It has been suggested that I may suffer from the opposite direction. It’s not that I like telling people bad news, but I do think that you should when you have to.
I am not worried about myself, but here is what I’m worried about: I am worried about people from more vulnerable districts because not only do people talk only to themselves and not understand the differences that exist and not accept anybody’s bona fides ever, that they will turn on anybody the first time there is an honest disagreement, but there is also the single-issue nature. That is, there are people who say, okay, you know what, I don’t care about your survival to fight for any other issue.
I’ll say this…you have to admire the chutzpah of a man who argues that he has "a broader set of responsibilities than to any one group" while defending a bill that protects only the group he belongs to, and not the broader set of sexual minority groups that it used to. You have to admire the chutzpah of a man who cites his minority rights credentials, while arguing that the people he’s culling out of a civil rights bill don’t matter as much, because they’re a smaller minority. But you Really have to admire the chutzpah of a man who is willing to state flatly that the job security of his fellow democratic congressmen is more important to him then then the job security of the people he’s culling out of his anti-discrimination bill.
This business about people with "no allies" who "talk excessively to each other" and bitch about being betrayed over an "honest disagreement" stinks like a cesspool. This is the language the gentleman bigots use to paint gay people as a militant pressure group for wanting equal rights, equal opportunity and access to marriage. They call us a threat to children and families, they call us disrupters of military cohesiveness, they call us disease spreading sexual deviants, they say we’re offensive to god almighty, and when we call them on their cheapshit bigotry they reply that they’re being viciously attacked for disagreeing with us. That’s called begging the question. What is the nature of the disagreement Barney?
You are betraying them Barney. And in doing that, you are betraying all of us. You’re selling them out, and in the process, cheapening our many many years of hard, bitter struggle. This wasn’t for fairness. It wasn’t for equality. It wasn’t for justice. It was just for Getting Ours. That’s what you’ve turned our struggle into. Jackass.
Yes you drooling moron, you have a broader responsibility. You have a responsibility to All Americans. Not just Some Americans. Not just Your Kind Of Americans. You have a responsibility to America. To what America stands for. Or…used to anyway. The American Dream? Liberty and Justice For All? That stuff? Remember it?
Members of the House of Representatives recently threatened to hold a vote on a bill that would cut from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act the people who most need its protections. There is no better example of the reason we need a transgender-inclusive ENDA than Diane Schroer, a highly-decorated veteran who transitioned from male to female after 25 years of distinguished service in the Army. Diane interviewed for a job as a terrorism research analyst at the Library of Congress, and accepted the position, but the job offer was rescinded when she told her future supervisor that she was in the process of gender transition.
The ACLU does not support an employment discrimination law that covers sexual orientation but not gender identity, for two reasons. First, the sexual orientation only bill may well not even do what its sponsors want. Because it currently defines sexual orientation as “homosexuality, heterosexuality and bisexuality,” there is still a serious risk that employers may get away with claiming they fired women because they are too masculine and men because they are too feminine. There is a serious risk courts will say the definition only covers who you have a relationship with, and not stereotypes that only apply to some gay people. If that sounds far fetched, we’ve been watching courts do just this in disability and marital status discrimination cases. And courts have already said that harassing someone over perceived masculinity or femininity is not sex discrimination if the prejudice stems from sexual orientation. We have been warning members of Congress about this problem for over four years.
But the more important reason to oppose excluding gender identity and expression is this: We truly do believe that discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity and expression are not mutually exclusive. They are all based on beliefs about what is or is not appropriate for men and women; what jobs are appropriate, what relationships are appropriate, what kind of personal and public identity is appropriate. It makes no sense to split them apart.
No one is more aware than the ACLU that compromise is a critical part of the legislative process, and that change in a large republic is almost always incremental. But a compromise that cuts out some of the community, as a group, as opposed to one that cuts out some employers or some situations, is wrong. It would create the belief that this is a less worthy group of LGBT people, something that doesn’t happen when you leave people who work for small employers uncovered (something most civil rights laws do). There has been plenty of compromise in ENDA. It allows employers to keep same-sex partners out of health plans. It doesn’t apply to the military. But some bargains are just not worth it. Cutting out people who have been on the front lines of the LGBT movement is not a concession we should make.
Matt Coles
Director, ACLU Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender & AIDS Project
Why I’m a card-carrying member. You think the ACLU is an extremist pressure group Barney? Well walk across the isle and shake John Boehner’s hand Barney, because without a doubt he believes that too.
Barney Frank wants to pass an EDNA and he doesn’t care if it leaves some members of our community (Yes John Aravosis, Our community…) in the dust. He doesn’t even really care if it really protects the people he claims it will. How does this make any sense? Because it’s got his name on it, that’s how. Frank wants his name in on the first ever federal law banning discrimination against gay people, and never mind whether or not it actually does that. It’s not for the community…it’s for posterity.
“This is a perverse distraction from the issue at hand,” said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Reid, D-Nev. “Instead of debating the merits of providing health care to children, some in GOP leadership and their right-wing friends would rather attack a 12-year-old boy and his sister who were in a horrific car accident.”
Manley cited an e-mail sent to reporters by a Senate Republican leadership aide, summing up recent blog traffic about the boy’s family. A spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., declined to comment on Manley’s charge that GOP aides were complicit in spreading disparaging information about Frosts. (emphasis mine)
In my experience, if you are not participating in something, you deny it outright to kill the story.
Mitch McConnell is the Republican Minority Leader in the Senate and sponsor of the Orwellian-named “Families First” legislation which would actually decrease the number of kids covered for benefits. Classy. Is someone in his office coordinating a dirty tricks PR advance against a 12 year old child? Have they been helping the story along, doing oppo on this child and his family and feeding it out through the wurlitzer to their corporate media buddies so their hands appear publicly clean while the wingnuts launder their slime tactics for them? As Digby asks, has the Senate Republican Minority leaders office frequently been used as a laundering point of contact for wayward freepers and random wingnuttery at large? Yes or no.
You often wonder sometimes, where the winger blogs are getting their information from.
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