The parents of Russell Groff speak their minds about a post I made a couple days ago…
The court battle is not over, our son was buried like a piece of garbage, in a pine box, in a woods, where his grave will grow up with weeds. There is no perputal care. We will not stop till we get his remains buried properly, in a vault, in his family cemetery. You don’t bury someone you love like this. This has been very painful to go through all of this, losing our son, who was our live. Dealing with all of the evil that has been done. We have not been able to mourn our son, who was involved in a life style that destroyed his beautiful life, wasted, just never having a change to be somebody. He should not be dead!!! He was in essence brainwashed and endoctrinated into this lifestyle. He was controlled, manipulated, and alienated from the parents who loved him so much. This is the norm, though in a homosexual relationship. If this was such a loving relationship, why did he die of AIDS!!!!
…and so on. You can read both their comments (yes…they followed up on themselves) and my brief response back at the original post, Here.
An interesting postscript on the Maryland Senate race: Exit polls suggest that the "white lie" phenomenon, in which more white voters tell pollsters that they’ll vote for the black candidate than actually go through with it in the end, may have helped doom black Senate candidate Michael Steele. This is a phenomenon more often noted against Dems, of course, since African-American candidates are Democrats much more often than they’re Republican, but in this case, it may have harmed GOPer Steele as well.
Steele lost by 10 points — a higher spread than some pre-election polls suggested. Exit polls show that white voters split their vote evenly between Cardin and Steele, well short of the percentage of whites that ordinarily back the GOP candidate in seriously contested races in Maryland. In pre-election polls, meanwhile, respondents were promising to vote for Steele at a higher rate: a Baltimore Sun poll from five days before the election had Steele leading Cardin among whites by seven points. So the Republican candidate may have been victimized by the "white lie" after all.
You know who else suffers from this phenomenon? Right…
…most of the measures on the Nov. 7 ballot in eight other states already have strong voter support. In fact, they may be even farther ahead than they appear, because polling on the issue has been consistently and inexplicably inaccurate.
Same-sex marriage ban supporters and opponents agree that pre-election polls often undercount support for the measures.
…
Polls that underestimated support for the bans were off by as much as 19 percentage points in North Dakota and 7 to 16 percentage points in six other states.
"What it means is that if history is any guide, which I think it is, you have to subtract at least four percentage points from pre-election polls to get a more accurate reading of what the results are going to be on election day," said Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, a gay rights group working in opposition to the amendments.
Bans are expected to pass Nov. 7 in Idaho, Virginia, South Carolina, South Dakota and Tennessee. The races still appear close in Colorado, Arizona and Wisconsin.
…
Ban supporters also account for the consistent polling error in their strategies.
"We’ve seen it, I think, in every single case, that it is underpolled every single time," said Tom McClusky, vice president of government affairs at the conservative Family Research Council. "I’ve seen higher, but normally we would add 5 to 10 percentage points to any polling."
Gay rights supporters blame people’s unwillingness to express an anti-gay opinion to a pollster for the discrepancy between polls and the ballot box…
This is why we lost in Wisconsin and South Dakota, even though the polls said we could probably win. Arizona actually surprised me. I guess people are more honest about their opinion of gay people there. But this is something I’ve seen time after time, and not just regarding same sex marriage. When Anita Bryant went on her anti-gay crusade to repeal Dade County’s anti-discrimination law, the polls showed the race was close. It wasn’t even. The vote went against gay people by about four to one.
Call it, the Guilty Conscience effect. People know discrimination is wrong. Why else would you see so many cheap rationalizations for it? Gay people aren’t being discriminated against by the marriage laws…they have the same right to marry a person of the opposite sex anyone else does… And it’s surprisingly uncynical. In years of arguing online with bigots, I keep running into this dogged insistence that as long as someone has an excuse to discriminate, no matter how pathetically lame it is, they’re not really discriminating. I am not a bigot…I’m very sorry you feel you’re being treated unfairly…but my flimsy rationalizations serve to excuse me from any and all blame for the unfairness of your situation…not that I am admitting that it’s unfair…not that I would ever admit to being a bigot…I am a Good Person… And so on… It isn’t prejudice, if you say you don’t mean it.
Some years ago, shortly after I started working up here in Baltimore, I was talking to a group of co-workers about the upcoming elections. It was 1992, and Alan Keyes was running against Barbra Mikulski. It was his second try at becoming a senator from Maryland, and that year and in that workplace of mine, sentiment was running high against democrats. These were mostly all blue collar folks where I was working then. Though I worked mostly with the managers, most of them had worked up the ranks from the field technicians they now managed. Baltimore blue collar folks through and through. And all of them white males.
This particular group of them were ranting that day, on and on about how much they didn’t like Mikulski. Mikulski was too liberal. Mikulski was too democrat. On and on it went. I was amazed and appalled at how thoroughly the republican Mighty Wurlitzer had turned what had to have been at one point a bunch of solid blue collar union democrats into republican voters. After several minutes of Mikulski bashing one of them asked me what I thought of her. By then Alan Keyes had his own reputation in the state for being a pure to the bone nutcase. So I shrugged my shoulders and said, Well…there’s always Keyes." They looked at me…a group of about a half dozen or so white middle aged, blue collar guys, and one of them finally said, "You really play dirty don’t you?" But he was grinning. The rest of them were all shaking their heads and grinning ruefully. Then I realized. What I thought I was asking them was, "Okay…but would you vote for a nutcase?" What they heard was "Okay, but would you vote for a black man?" Keyes never had a chance with them, no matter how much Limbaugh managed to make them hate liberals and democrats.
I thought about that all during this campaign here in Maryland, whenever the polls said that Steele was either winning, or close to it. All I had to do was stroll around my neighborhood and look at all the GOVERNOR EHRLICH signs in the yards, and not a single STEELE sign among them. But if it was racism that killed Steele’s chances among the Limbaugh republicans here, let it be said that he wasn’t above playing the race card himself. During the 2002 campaign, as Ehrlich’s running mate, Steele was asked if he supported adding sexual orientation to Maryland’s anti-discrimination laws. He instantly responded that there were already plenty of laws on the books protecting gay white men from discrimination.
Dig it. He took a question about gay rights, and turned it into a matter of race; of privileged white faggots riding on the coattails of the black civil rights movement. That’s straight out of the republican play book. I’d figured that Steele held the same cheapshit prejudices toward gay people Ehrlich did, or else Ehrlich wouldn’t have brought him onto the ticket. What I saw then was that he was just as big a race baiting thug as any other republican in the state.
And it came back to bite him in the ass. Welcome back to the world of the suspect classes Michael. You might have thought that being accepted into the republican machine was your ticket out of all that. It wasn’t.
…and why I’m so thrilled that our gutter crawling bigot of a Governor John Ehrlich got the boot last Tuesday. In May of 2005, Ehrlich vetoed a domestic partnership bill, saying it would "…open the door to undermine the sanctity of traditional marriage." This was, some of us noted, at a time when he was conducting a whisper smear campaign against the family of Baltimore Mayor O’Malley, who everyone figured would be his democratic challenger in the upcoming election. Ehrlich and his henchmen spread lies that O’Mally was having secret extramarital affairs utterly without concern for the effect on O’Malley’s wife and children. So much for the sanctity of marriage.
Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. vetoed a bill yesterday that would have granted rights to gay partners who register with the state, concluding after weeks of intense deliberations that the legislation threatened "the sanctity of traditional marriage."
The emotionally charged bill was among 24 that Ehrlich (R) rejected yesterday afternoon, including legislation to raise the state’s minimum wage by $1, allow early voting in elections and heighten oversight of the state’s troubled juvenile justice system. Another measure sought by gay rights activists that would have extended a property transfer tax exemption to domestic partners was also scuttled.
(Emphasis mine) His staff made a big noise to the news media afterward that he would "probably" sign the bill adding gay people to Maryland’s anti-discrimination laws. But that was another of his little moves to the middle made only when he knew he had no choice. The statehouse would have overridden a veto of that particular bill and he knew it. But it was useful to put the word out there that he’d sign it, because he’d just made a move which shocked, shocked, the chattering class…
Ehrlich’s decision to side, almost without exception, with business interests and social conservatives surprised some analysts, who thought he might try to burnish his credentials as a moderate by allowing some of the session’s more controversial bills to become law.
Most of the legislation vetoed yesterday had been strongly opposed by Republican lawmakers. But Ehrlich’s appeal to swing voters was key to his 2002 election in a state where registered Democrats still hold a nearly 2-to-1 advantage.
"I think it’s just breathtaking that he’s casting his lot with the right wing of his party," said Tom Hucker, executive director of Progressive Maryland…"He ran for governor as the moderate, affable son of an automobile dealer who would stick up for working-class families."
No it wasn’t breathtaking. It was eminently predictable. Ehrlich ran as a moderate. But he wasn’t. A simple glance at his political career would have made it obvious to anyone. He’s pure Ellen Sauerbrey Republican, and there are no moderates in the Maryland republican party since the Sauerbrey wing took it over.
A leading Republican lawmaker praised him for making "a principled decision."
"I know the governor wrestled with this decision because he may be sympathetic to some of the intentions," said House Minority Whip Anthony J. O’Donnell (R-Calvert). "But sometimes bad laws are the result of good intentions."
Modeled after laws in California, Hawaii and other states, the legislation would have granted nearly a dozen rights to unmarried partners who register with the state. Among those: the right to be treated as an immediate family member during hospital visits, to make health care decisions for incapacitated partners and to have private visits in nursing homes.
A principled decision. Anyone who knows a same sex couple, knows exactly the threat that constantly hangs over them from their lack of legal recognition…
A woman who could have benefited from the bill, Stacey Kargman-Kaye of Baltimore, said yesterday that she was heartbroken. "I don’t understand how a human being who has a significant other and children could not see the need for this," she said.
Kargman-Kaye, 37, said that after she emerged from heart surgery five years ago, a nurse literally pushed away her longtime partner, who was there to support her, "because we’re not considered a family in the eyes of Maryland."
But republicans just can’t seem to twist the knife in us enough…
A group of conservative activists had launched a petition drive in recent weeks that sought to repeal the bill if it became law. They argued that it was part of a "homosexual agenda" advancing in Annapolis. Maryland allows residents to put legislation passed by the General Assembly to a public vote if enough signatures are gathered.
Del. Donald H. Dwyer Jr. (R-Anne Arundel), a leader of the petition drive, said organizers would soon decide whether to continue, in case lawmakers override Ehrlich’s veto in January. Dwyer said he was "very pleased that the governor has sent a strong message about the morality of the state."
Dwyer had been puking anti-gay venom into the Maryland statehouse for years now, and I am delighted to say he lost in his bid for re-election this year. Good riddence. Perhaps the voters in Anne Arundel Country had just about enough of his brand of morality…
A gay Baltimore man has won a courtroom battle to keep his late partner buried in the Tennessee grave the two men chose.
But the victory is not absolute. Kevin-Douglas Olive said the parents of Russell Groff have indicated they plan to appeal the Nov. 2 ruling that Olive received Thursday.
“This is awesome,” Olive said. “It may not be over if they appeal, but I feel so good.”
Baltimore City Orphans’ Court Judge Karen Friedman ruled against Lowell and Carolyn Groff, who sought to overturn their son’s will and move his body to a family cemetery.
Groff’s parents argued in court Sept. 25 and 26 that their 26-year-old son didn’t know what he was doing when he completed his will and burial instructions shortly before his death on Nov. 23, 2004.
Groff, who was HIV-positive, died from a staph infection that spread throughout his body.
Olive said Groff was estranged from his parents at the time of his death, and completed a will and burial instructions in anticipation of the legal battle.
So he knew what he was doing all right. He knew his own parents would try to take him from the man he loved after death. And they tried. And they might Still succeed. Morality.
Olive, who married Groff according to local Quaker tradition in 2003, said his battle illuminates the need for equal marriage rights for gay couples.
“I won, but I wouldn’t have had to go through this at all if the state had some sort of provision that allowed my partner and I to have legalized our relationship in some sense,” he said. “This is kind of bittersweet because I had to go through a lot of shit to get this.”
A principled decision… That simple Quaker marriage of two young men in love in 2003 did nothing, Nothing to harm the marriage of any heterosexual couple in this state, or anywhere else. It takes nothing away from anyone save for this one thing: the ability to twist the knife in the broken heart of a gay person who has just lost the love of their lives. There is no pain like the loss of a loved one. What kind of person wants to make that bottomless loss even harder for someone to bear? What kind of person sees righteousness in it?
You have to utterly dehumanize the person who suffers. (Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…) But before you can do that, you have to take your conscience around behind the barn and kill it. And you do that, so you can make other people scapegoats for everything fine and noble and honorable that a human being could be, that you could never live up to. All your cheap failures of character, all your pathetic evasions of reality, all those need a scapegoat. Otherwise, you’ve only yourself to blame. And the best scapegoat of all, the one you can hate the most without reservation, is the one who faced their life squarely, honestly, and honorably, and became everything a human being can, that you could never be. It isn’t the sanctity of marriage but the sanctity of gay bashing that they’re afraid of loosing. Because if we don’t bleed, if we can’t be made to bleed, then they’re not righteous.
So after a generally positive election day, one where I can take some solid comfort in the fact that although seven states voted to strip same sex couples of any and all legal rights one state refused to go along, I find myself sweating blood again over the situation in Massachusetts, the only state in the union so far, to allow same sex couples to actually marry, as opposed to being civil-unioned.
In states where it only takes a minority of voters to sign enough petitions to put a referendum on the ballot, and only a minority of registered voters actually vote on the measures, anti-gay bigots have been enormously successfully in writing their gay and lesbian neighbors out of their state constitutions. But in most of those states, the state-houses have had little to no backbone in them to resist the hate. The religious right is powerful in the heartland, and in the south in particular, and many politicians in those regions make their careers either catering to it, or kowtowing to it when necessary. Standing for the devil and against the baby Jesus just isn’t a winning proposition.
But more and more in the blue states, the fight against hate is being joined. In California, the statehouse there actually passed a law granting same sex couples the right to marry (which Arnold to the everlasting shame of his name promptly vetoed). And in Massachusetts they’re not taking the venomous hatreds of the anti-gay gutter laying down. And they’re not just fighting on principle either. They’re fighting, finally, just like the enemy does. To win. By any means necessary.
Lawmakers voted to recess the ConCon until 2 p.m. Jan. 2, 2007 by a 109 to 87 vote, which is the last day of the legislative session. Technically, lawmakers could reconvene to take the issue up, but it’s extremely unlikely. Which means that the amendment has died by procedural maneuver.
When I first read the news I was both elated, and still a bit worried. Why not just adjourn altogether? Why leave prejudice and hate that one last chance and keep gay couples in the state, and all over the nation looking to Massachusetts for hope, still holding their breaths? Well…here’s why:
The significance of the recess vote as opposed to an adjournment vote is that Governor Mitt Romney cannot call the legislature back into session.
Tactics. They have a bigot governor who is kissing up to the religious right in hopes of making a run at the presidency. He’s been kicking the homosexual devil for their approval for months now (which he’ll never get because he’s a Mormon, but that’s another story…). But in this state the fighters for liberty and justice for all have taken full measure of the enemy. They understand perfectly well that they’re in a knife fight, and so they brought a knife. That’s how you fight a knife fight: to win. Let the gutter howl that they’re being denied their rights. It was their neighbor’s rights after all, that they were seeking to take away. This fight was never about rights. It was about power. It was about a group of venomous haters trying to reserve democracy, and its promise of liberty and justice for all, to themselves. If that’s what you’re about, then don’t complain when someone else comes along and takes some of that away from you: brother, you asked for it.
"I’m probably 3,000 feet to the right of Attila the Hun. But the gracious people, the socially conscious people, the liberal people, you’re the ones who always want everyone to be heard. What about these 170,000 people?" said Democratic Rep. Marie Parente.
Yes, we’re the ones who are always wanting everyone to be heard. And yes, you’re not. And that’s the whole point here. One-hundred and seventy billion people would still not have the right to take away a single individual’s right to equality under the law, let alone the rights of tens of thousands of their neighbors. They only way you do that, is to assert a right of force, by virtue of the power of your shear numbers. The term for that isn’t democracy, it’s mob rule. And that’s why we have checks and balances in our form of government, to prevent democracy from degenerating first into the rule of mobs, and then into tyranny. We The People includes your gay and lesbian neighbors too you drooling moron. It includes all of us. And yes, we are the ones who believe that. And yes, you’re not.
The people can always vote the politicians who stood by the gay minority out of office. But that takes more work, and it means every voter must weigh one vote taken in the statehouse against many. Maybe a voter does not like the vote their representative made on the same sex marriage amendment, but they generally like their other votes. Do they vote a politician they generally like out of office on that one single issue? Now suddenly, the bigots need the rest of the population to be as passionate about denying gay people equality as they are. And the population at large just isn’t. They might vote against us if it’s presented to them as a single issue. But it is not the single issue of most voters and the bigots know it.
This is how the tables turn on the bigots. For decades now they’ve been fighting against equality for gay people in situations where they’ve been able to win on their sheer passion, against a voting public that is lukewarm at best in support of us, but only lukewarm at worst in their own prejudices. They may find us distasteful, but they’re not going to throw out a politician they generally like because that politician let the homos marry each other. At least not in the blue states. Every time the gay haters have tried to hold a blue state statehouse accountable when it has supported, in some measure, the rights of same sex couples, they have failed. They failed in Vermont. They failed in California. And they failed in Massachusetts. And that is why there were 109 votes to recess yesterday. The voters Have spoken, and what they’ve said is they really don’t care that much about gay rights. And the bigots know it. That’s why the bigots want to fight this in a forum where they know they only need a minority of the registered voters to win, and where they can make the stab against their gay and lesbian neighbors as easy and painless as possible for just enough voters, to rewrite their constitutions. Tactics. They can’t complain now that they were outmaneuvered.
Well…they can…they’re hypocrites too after all. And they can probably still keep winning this way in the red states. Most of them. They lost after all in Arizona, which is more "leave us alone" libertarian then conservative (no daylight savings time for us, thank you…). But they’ve about picked off all the low hanging apples now, and the rest of it is going to be a fight, and no bigot ever wanted a fair fight. A fight where they massively outnumber their victims, sure. Their vision of democracy is more mob rule then anything resembling the vision of the founders. Which is why the founders put in all those checks and balances. A democracy is a government of citizens, of equals, not of mobs.
That’s the Mac "dock", for all you Windows and Linux kids (I am all three). Be nice if force quitting the Rumsfeld app took all its child processes with it…
Hey…I get to put the "Computer Geeking" tag and the "Politics" tag on the same post!
Buoyed by a national tide against Republicans, Mayor Martin O’Malley declared victory in the governor’s race last night, appearing to have prevailed in his long and difficult campaign against a popular incumbent. Despite a poor showing in the crucial Baltimore suburbs, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. said he will not concede until thousands of absentee ballots are counted.
With more than four-fifths of the state’s precincts reporting, Ehrlich, Maryland’s first Republican governor in a generation, faced a large deficit that he could overcome only by capturing the vast majority of absentee votes.
…
Ehrlich told several hundred backers at the Hyatt Regency in Baltimore early this morning that his administration had a "decent shot" at another four years.
"We don’t know, folks, we just don’t know," Ehrlich said. "We will count the votes. We will count all the votes. … We’ve been around 20 years, and we’ve got a decent shot to be around four more."
Ehrlich’s speech interrupted O’Malley’s televised victory declaration, prompting boos from the crowd at the Hippodrome who could see the governor’s image on a big-screen television.
"I’m still waiting for the call, by the way," O’Malley said.
He’ll be waiting a long time. A lot of people in this state are under the mistaken impression that Ehrlich is a moderate. He’s nothing of the kind. He’s an Ellen Sauerbrey right wing republican kook who’s only real difference from Sauerbrey is that he was willing to put up the appearance of being a moderate so he could win elections. He has not governed as a moderate, except when he knew damn he didn’t have the votes in the statehouse to win on a particular issue. Maryland limits governors to two terms, so you would have seen a much more hard line Ehrlich in his second term, particularly if he had presidential aspirations. You can see what he’s really made of now. It’s Ellen Sauerbrey loosing badly all over again.
Republicans said they believe the governor can make up ground when the record number of absentee ballots are tallied. More than 190,000 people requested absentee ballots after calls by Ehrlich and Democratic leaders to use them as a means to bypass the state’s new electronic voting machines. More Democrats than Republicans requested absentee ballots, however.
Election workers will begin counting those ballots on scanning machines tomorrow, but election challenges from the lawyers who have been retained by both political parties could prevent a winner from being officially declared for weeks. The last time an election was this close, in 1994, the losing candidate, Ellen R. Sauerbrey, pursued a legal challenge for two months and never conceded defeat.
Go for it Bob. Let the people in the rest of the state see the real you finally.
But get on this. It looks like Virginia will decide the senate. Karl Rove has turned races like this around before. You don’t know the lengths they’ll go to. Believe me, you’re not being imaginative enough.
Check out Josh Green’s article on Karl Rove from two years ago. Look what Rove pulled off in the disputed Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice race. Read it.
Get ready for the bogus headlines on Drudge. The rumors and innuendo. Live boys and dead girls. Like I said, your imagination will only get you maybe half the way there. Get ready.
Right. We’re still in a knife fight for the future of the American Dream. But it’s hard not to feel a great satisfaction upon seeing images like this from last night…
Hello? Dubya? Dubya? Hello…?
Yes…a bunch more states passed amendments stripping same sex couples of any and all legal rights. But one state, Arizona, didn’t, and even though that’s only one state, it puts a knife in the homophobe’s argument that every time same sex marriage comes up to a vote it looses. Last night Arizona defeated one at the polls. And what is more, it was done without the help of our worthless national gay rights organizations…
With 94 percent of the vote reporting, it looks like Arizona’s Prop. 107, the gay marriage ban will go down — 51.6 percent against it, 48.4 percent for it. Of particular interest is Maricopa county (home of Phoenix) which went against the ban. Pima county, home of liberal Tucson, played a big part in the victory — defeating the amendment by large margins.
Cindy Jordan, chair of No on 107, credits the victory (if it occurs, knock on wood) to grassroots efforts.The big national gay organizations have been notably absent there, and the campaigns have been smart about attracting voters from both conservative Phoenix and liberal Tucson with targeted messages and tactics. "We did this with no national help," says Jordan, "this grassroot’s effort was local."
(emphasis mine) This is exactly why I don’t give money to those jackasses.
In Tennessee, voters passed an anti same sex marriage amendment by about 80 percent, which I know is going to cause a lot of pain to some very good people, and friends of mine down there. But according to reports I’ve seen it was done with only about 20 percent of the voters actually voting on it. I wonder what was going on in the minds of the people who voted, yet decided not to vote on that issue. I doubt it was because they didn’t think they knew enough about the issue to cast a vote on it. You’d have to be living in a cave not to have heard the issue being discussed, and you know damn well that practically every vein throbbing pulpit thumper down there was exhorting his flock to go to the polls and smite the homosexual devils. But only a small fraction of those who voted, voted on the issue one way or the other, if the stories I’m hearing are true.
Divided loyalties? I can’t vote against the baby Jesus, but I can’t vote against my son…daughter… brother…sister… aunt…uncle… co-worker…neighbors…? Tired of all the hate…but unwilling yet to take a stand against it?
I’m glad to see the South Daktoa seems to have repealed it’s horrible anti-abortion law. At Daily KOS, they’re saying that with 86% of precincts reporting, Referendum 6, the abortion ban was at 45% Yes; 55% No. The same sex marriage and civil unions ban was 52% Yes; 48% No. Almost exactly the inverse. The worst hypocrites of the night were those voters in South Dakota, who voted against the abortion ban and voted against giving same sex couples any legal rights too.
Full Text of Constitutional Amendment C:
Section 2. That Article XXI of the Constitution of the State of South Dakota, be amended by adding thereto a NEW SECTION to read as follows:
9. Only marriage between a man and a woman shall be valid or recognized in South Dakota. The uniting of two or more persons in a civil union, domestic partnership, or other quasi-marital relationship shall not be valid or recognized in South Dakota.
Democracy means liberty and justice for me…not for thee…
You have to worry that with so much corruption, so much fiscal debt, and the dawning realization now, even in the red zones, that Iraq is an unmitigated disaster, that so many of these races were so close. But any election night that costs so many gutter crawling bigots their seats, like Maryland’s own jackass governor Ehrlich and his bigot pal Steele, is still a pretty good one.
Gay Marylanders won’t have to beg you any more for a shred of common human decency Bob. Fuck off.
Next time some republican half-wit starts yapping at you about how Militiant Homosexual activists and Liberal Activist Judges hate the democratic process because they don’t want the voters to decide the issue of same sex marriage…laugh in their face.
Laura Ingraham has asked her listeners to call the Dem Voter protection hotline — and they are now being flooded with calls from crank callers. Please call Laura and tell her what you think about this: 800.876.4123. You can e-mail her here. Apparently, voter intimidation and fraud are a joke to Laura Ingraham. Let’s let her know that it is no joke […]
More on Laura Ingraham: "caller indicated she is running a tape of Bill Clinton over and over saying "call 1-888 Dem Vote to report problems" — and then making fun of him, thus producing a spike in crank calls to the number" Protecting voter integrity is no joke. And I am not laughing. If anyone has audio of this, I’d love it.
The headquarters for Jay Fawcett’s campaign for Colorado’s 5th Congressional District was vandalized overnight and a death threat – the third such threat – was also emailed to Fawcett. Both incidents have been reported to the police.
As voters headed to the polls, Fawcett campaign volunteers arriving at campaign offices were greeted with a vile "Skunk" aroma, making it virtually impossible to conduct work there. The campaign is expecting more than 200 people to come through the offices today to help with Get Out The Vote and Poll Watching efforts.
"Don’t let these hooligans deter you from exercising your Constitutional right to vote," said Fawcett. "It’s time to take a stand against these attacks."
This is the second time the Fawcett Campaign has been vandalized. Last Tuesday the Campaign Finance Director’s car was covered in the skunk smell, while parked out front of the El Paso County Republican Office.
"I find it disgusting that, as we are fighting for Democracy in Iraq, people are besmirching Democracy here in Colorado Springs," said Fawcett Campaign Manager Wanda James. "Death threats and childish illegal activities will not deter us from getting out the vote to victory today."
Bush republicans. They love America. Really. It’s just democracy they hate.
On October 29 the state of Tennessee essentially washed its hands of the question of whether or not Love In Action needed to be licensed in order to treat mentally ill "clients". Tennessee agreed to pay LIA’s legal bills in exchange for their dropping a lawsuit that claimed they had a religious exemption from any department of health oversight. Tennessee is accepting the word of a man who said God could make him see blue walls were there were yellow, that he has not, and will not be dispensing drugs to his "clients".
The fact of their forcing ex-gay therapy on unwilling gay teenagers, which was what started the public outcry over LIA practices, was never at issue, unfortunately. At least one gay teen has publicly accused the ministry of forcing him to take Prozac, which he did not have a doctor’s prescription for. LIA denied it, and apparently Tennessee never performed more then a perfunctory investigation of the allegations that they were giving clients drugs, let alone that they were forcing them on unwilling gay teenagers as part of their therapy to cure them of their homosexuality. What their dangerous mix of religion and invasive psyco-therapy does to adolescents, apart from any issue of drugging them, was never even looked into. So the abuse of gay youth in Memphis will continue. Probably until some catastrophe happens, at which point everyone will be wondering why nothing was done sooner…
"Father, give us grace and mercy. Father, help us this next week and a half as we go into national elections, and Lord we pray for our country. Father, we pray that lies would be exposed. We pray that deception would be exposed."
Be careful what you ask God for. Because you might get it.
I keep plugging Fred Clark’s blog, Slacktivist, because he’s a really decent guy, and in these times of religious right triumphalism this nation needs more voices like his. Had there been more Baptists like him in my life growing up, I might still regard myself as one.
Haggard has waged this political battle against homosexuality while living a lie. That requires two, related responses. The first is on a political level. Haggard and his allies have been fighting a political fight — they have been trying to wield power to force others to comply with their wishes. And it’s perfectly legitimate to respond to power with power…
…
But the second response — which I can’t ignore — has to do with Ted Haggard the person who is, among other things, my "brother in Christ." There’s a script for how this will play out in the evangelical community — a script written out on that very same NAE page cited above:
… homosexuality [is] a sin that, if persisted in, brings grave consequences in this life and excludes one from the Kingdom of God.
Individual Christians, ministers, and congregations should compassionately proclaim the Good News of forgiveness and encourage those involved in homosexual practices to cease those practices, accept forgiveness, and pray for deliverance as nothing is impossible with God. Further, we should accept them into fellowship upon confession of faith and repentance, as we would any other forgiven sinner.
All that language — forgiveness, deliverance, confession, repentance — really means here only that Haggard needs to go back to living a lie. If he agrees to live that lie, and with clenched teeth to continue proclaiming that others must join in living that lie, then Haggard will be "accepted" back "into fellowship."
Haggard is now seeking "spiritual advice and guidance," and there are tens of thousands of Very Nice Christian people praying for him. But his spiritual guides and advisors are all going to tell him to follow that script. Those people praying for him are all praying for him to follow that script. And that script is evil. That script is a lie.
For Christ’s sake, enough with the lies. The last thing Haggard needs is to be "accepted" into a fellowship that cannot accept who he really is. Both he and that fellowship have just been given an opportunity to abandon lies. I’m praying that they will recognize that opportunity and take it.
Go read the whole thing. I ping Fred’s blog often. You should too. At the end of her novel about the life of the poet Simonides, The Praise Singer, Mary Renault writes, "In all men evil is sleeping; the good man is he who will not awaken it, in himself or in other men." It’s a moral roadsign we can all try to keep in view, regardless of our spiritual or political beliefs. And it is the touchstone by which you can see, clearly, what distinguishes the militant religiosity of the right. This country desperately needs more people like Fred in the public discourse, who keep doggedly trying to rouse within others, their better nature.
It is the tragedy of these times, not only for the Christian faith in America, but also the American Dream, which once upon a time offered the promise of religious freedom to the oppressed people of the world, that the arousal of ugly passions that turn neighbor against neighbor has become nearly synonymous with Christian politics in America. And the religious right is not completely to blame for it either. Secular and cynical politicians, republicans largely, have been using the fierce hatreds of that one strain of American Christianity as a crowbar to break this nation into ever smaller and smaller warring factions, the better to win elections. And they’re supported in that, by secular and cynical big businesses, who don’t give a good goddamn about religion, but about keeping big business friendly republicans in power.
Regardless of our spiritual beliefs, simply as American citizens, we all have a stake in making sure other Christian voices can be heard too. We can demand that our news media not routinely accept the pronouncements of the Dobsons, the Falwells, and the Robertsons, as "the Christian point of view". We can demand that whenever religion is brought into the public discourse, that the religious right is not given a free pass to define Christianity in the popular culture. Every one of us, whether we ourselves are Christian or not, have a stake in how broadly the Christian experience is represented in the media. Because the voices of peace and reconciliation must not be shut out of the conversation. Because a house divided against itself cannot stand.
I’m stealing this from Steve Gilliard, because I want to make sure you read it. But then he reposted from Wonkette. Late Night Shots is a young republican social networking website. Next time you hear some republican halfwit on Captial Hill bellyaching about welfare moms and raising the minimum wage, remember this…
As we’re sure you know by now, Late Night Shots is a closed social networking site for DC’s best and whitest. We turbos have a lot to learn from them. Their message board is home to some of the best entertainment on all the internets — but because of the closed nature of the site, not everyone can join in the fun. Thankfully, Intern Lauren is a card-carrying LNS member, and she’s gathered excerpts from some of last week’s best posts on the LNS forum. See what the fuss is about, after the jump.
My boyfriend’s dad
Posted By: HHHS00 on 10-23-2006 12:40 pm
I recently found out that the dad of the guy I am hooking up is a dentist. Where I come from dentists are looked at as sheisters. I think this guy may have been hiding it from me, and in my mind he lost some serious points after this revelation.
Lying about Greek affiliation
Posted By: very concerned on 10-19-2006 11:20 am
At age 29 if you’re dating a chick, how big of a problem is it if you’re digging through her desk and you find out that she was lying about what sorority she was in. This happened to a friend of mine.
RE: Lying about Greek affiliation
Posted By: problem on 10-19-2006 11:23 am
I think that’s a bit of an issue. More than the lying, you don’t want to date a girl who couldn’t get into a good house. It spells problems down the road.
Interview Mentality
Posted By: Williams College on 10-26-2006 1:49 am
Am I wrong to think it is a big advantage to go into an interview on the hill with a chief staff assistant knowing that he was an R.A. during college and that you were a D3 varsity athlete. It has always given me a leg up, both in terms of toughness and maturity, and I feel like it always will.
what are acceptable handouts from parents
Posted By: cashmoney on 10-25-2006 6:21 pm
gifts? education? do you draw your line at maintenance?
RE: what are acceptable handouts from parents
Posted By: taxman on 10-25-2006 6:23 pm
Someone should receive absolutely no more than 30 k/yr and car payments from parents. If you’re above that, you really have problems. Girls may be entitled to a bit more than that with shopping and everything, but I feel like 30k is pretty reasonable.
RE: what are acceptable handouts from parents
Posted By: the cleaners on 10-26-2006 11:07 am
What is an acceptable allowance to give your girlfriend. $200 per week?
Absolutely no more the 30k a year. And car payments. Absolutely no more. Geeze pal…I guess you’d have committed suicide or something if you’d had my childhood, and mine wasn’t so bad by comparison. I never went to bed hungry. Never. But I wore a lot of second hand clothes until I was about 12 or so. And it wasn’t until I was 14 that we even had a car in the household. Color TV didn’t come into the house until I was about 15. A fine night eating out was a trip to Howard Johnson’s or Hot Shoppes. Vacations were to Ocean City New Jersey or Rehoboth Beach. The most exotic vacations I had when I was a kid were the two trips we made by train to Fort Lauderdale Florida when I was 7 and 8. I lived in apartments my entire life, until June of 2001 when I settled on Casa del Garrett, the little Baltimore rowhouse I have now. Home ownership did not come into my life until I was 47. And for all that, I’ve had it good compared to a Lot of other Americans.
My first real job was flipping burgers at a fast food joint. There was no money for college but I did manage three semesters of community college until dad died and I had to work full time to keep the household afloat. Mom was able to co-sign for the loan on my first car when I was 20, but I had to make the payments myself. Does it really hurt that much to have to buy your own goddamned car when you’ve clearly had the best education money can buy and on top of whatever golden job the republican network has dropped in your lap, your parents are throwing 30k a year at you too?
If I hear one more jackass pundit bellyaching that democrats are out of touch with America’s working families I’m going to fucking scream.
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