Kwame Kilpatrick was a guest on Real Time with Bill Mayer on Friday, Feb. 27 [2004]. On the show, which is broadcast live on the cable television network HBO, Kilpatrick adamantly opposed marriage for gays.
"I think that where this doesn’t belong is in a political discussion and I think that that’s where we’re starting off on the wrong foot," Kilpatrick said. "I personally do not support gay marriage. No, I don’t support gay marriage."
"Is that a political opinion?" Mayer asked.
"I think that marriage is between a woman and a man," answered Kilpatrick. "That is not a political opinion. If I was not in politics I’d say the same thing."
"Based on what?"
"Based on who I am, whose I am and where I come from," Kilpatrick continued.
Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is hanging on for his political life after the revelation that, among 14,000 text messages between him and his chief of staff Christine Beatty, there was evidence of an extramarital affair between the pair — evidence that contradicts his sworn statements in a whistleblower case brought by former police officers that ended in $9 million in damages against the city.
City Councilman Kwame Kenyatta this afternoon began the process to initiate a full audit of the finances of the mayor’s office — including travel and legal charges — since Kwame Kilpatrick took office in 2002.
A full council vote is expected next week.
Kenyatta also wants the city’s Auditor General to investigate the law department and what type of legal representation it has provided Kilpatrick.
Last week it was confirmed that a secret deal was hatched to help settle an $8 million whistle-blower’s lawsuit filed by two ex-police officers. The deal prevented the disclosure of text messages embarrassing to the mayor. The messages confirmed an affair between Kilpatrick and his now-ex chief of staff Christine Beatty, contrary to their testimony during the whistle-blower’s trial.
No doubt the fact that Michigan allows same sex marriage is responsible for Mr. Kilpatrick’s cheating on his wife. Oh…wait…
MICHIGAN
Current law: DOMA written into state constitution and state law
Legislation: State constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage placed on the Nov. 2 [2004] ballot by citizen initiative groups and approved by 59 percent of voters.
What They Thought Of Us Then. What They Think Of Us Now.
Some random thoughts on homosexuals and homosexuality from back when I was a struggling gay teen…
I think homosexuals cursed, and I am afraid I mean this quite literally, in the medieval sense of having been struck by an unexplained injury, an extreme piece of evil luck whose origin is so unclear as to be, finally, a mystery.
If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth. I would do so because I think that it brings infinitely more pain than pleasure who are forced to live it; because I think there is no resolution for this pain in our lifetime, only, for the overwhelming majority of homosexuals, more pain and various degrees of exacerbating adjustment; and because, wholly selfishly, I find myself completely incapable of coming to terms with it.
They are different from the rest of us. Homosexuals are different, moreover, in a way that cuts deeper than other kinds of human differences — religious, class, racial — in a way that is, somehow, more fundamental. Cursed without clear cause, afflicted without apparent cure, they are an affront to our rationality.
…
I do think homosexuality an anathema, and hence homosexuals cursed, and thus the importance, for me if for no one else, of my defining a homosexual as someone who has physical relations, for it leaves room for my admiration for the man who is pulled toward homosexuality and resists, at what psychic price I cannot hope even to begin to imagine.
…
I was stunned, then angry. I was angry, first, at my own lack of judgment and subtlety in not deducing that Richard was a homosexual; and, second, more intensely, at being victimized by his duplicity. We were not close friends, but I liked him, and not it seemed that every moment we had spent together was a huge sham, an elaborate piece of deception to hide the essential, the number one, fact in his life.
…
I have four sons, and while I do not walk the streets thinking constantly about their sexual development, worrying right on through the night about their turning out homosexual, I have very little idea, apart from supplying them with ample security and affection, about how to prevent it. Uptight? You’re damn right. Given any choice in the matter, I should prefer sons who are heterosexual. My ignorance makes me frightened.
-Joseph Epstein, "Homo/Hetero: The Struggle for Sexual Identity," Harper’s, September 1970
…and then, from back when I was a struggling gay young adult…
In the case of the husbands at Fire Island Pines, the homosexuals were right about one thing. Their uneasiness did contain a large component of fear. The fear of straight men in the face of the homosexual community, however, is not that they will be tempted to join in but that they are being diminished by it, diminished in their persons and diminished in their lives. As women in a full company of homosexual men feel devalued and sexually rejected – that is the very reason certain women, they used to be called "fag hags", choose to spend their lives in such company – heterosexual men feel themselves mocked. They feel mocked in their unending thralldom to the female body and thus their unending dependence on those who possess it. They feel mocked by the longing for and vulnerability to and even humiliation from women they have since boyhood permitted themselves to endure, while others apparently just like themselves, slowly assert their escape from these things
They feel mocked most of all for having become, in style as well as substance, fmaily men, caught up in getting and begetting, thinking of mortgages, schools, and the affordable, marking the passage of years in obedience to all the grubby imperatives that heterosexual manhood seems to impose. In assuming such burdens they believe themselves entitled to respect, but homosexuality paints them with the color of sheer entrapment.
In Fire Island Pines they were in fact being mocked explicitly, not so much by individual homosexuals as the reigning homosexual fashion. The essence of that fashion was the worship of youth – youth not even understood as young manhood but rather boyhood (and indeed, the straight women among themselves always referred to the homosexuals as "the boys"). On the beach particularly, this worship became all powerful and inescapable to the eye. It was a constant source of wonder among us, and remains so to me to this day, that by far the largest number of homosexuals had hairless bodies. Chests, backs, arms, even legs, were smooth and silky, an impression strengthened by the fact that they were in addition frequently and scrupulously unguented to catch the full advantage of the sun’s ultra violet. We were never able to determine just why there should be so definite a connection between what is nowadays called their sexual “preference” and their smooth feminine skin. Was it a matter of hormones, or was there some constant special process of depilation? But smooth-skinned they were, and, like the most narcissistic of pretty young girls and women, made an absolute fetish of the dark and uniform suntan, devoting hours, days, weeks, to turning themselves carefully to the sun. Nor was this tanning flesh ever permitted to betray any of the ordinary signs of encroaching mortality, such as excess fat or flabbiness or on the other hand the kind of muscularity that suggests some activity whose end is not beauty. In short, year by year homosexuals of all ages presented a never-ending spectacle, zealously and ruthlessly monitored, of tender adolescence.
…
One thing is certain. To become homosexual is a weighty act. Taking oneself out of the tides of ordinary mortal existence is not something one does from any longing to think oneself ordinary (but only following a different “lifestyle”). Gay Lib has been an effort to set the weight of that act at naught, to define homosexuality as nothing more than a casual option among options. In accepting the movement’s terms, heterosexuals have only raised to a nearly intolerable height the costs of the homosexual’s flight from normality. Faced with the accelerating round of drugs, S-M, and suicide, can either the movement or its heterosexual sympathizers imagine that they have done anyone a kindness?
-Midge Decter, "The Boys On The Beach," Commentary, September 1980
Read a good take down on Epstein over at David Ehrenstein’s site…Here. Ehrenstein was one of the gay activists who stormed the offices of Harper’s Magazine after Harper’s doggedly refused to air any rebuttals to Epstein’s public wish to see homosexuals removed from the face of the earth.
Decter’s theses, if you will, in The Boys On The Beach, is that only a conservative and officially anti-gay culture keeps the innately self destructive impulses of gay men in check, whereas liberalism allows those impulses to become fully realized. Thus, according to Decter, persecuting homosexuals is actually a kindness. Anti-gay persecution is necessary in order to save homosexuals from themselves. This is the position that the American movement conservatives have taken ever since, and Decter’s 1980 essay in Commentary is still regarded warmly in winger circles, as an important work. You see echos of The Boys On The Beach in every opinion piece on homosexuals and homosexuality from the movement conservatives, even now. The premise, often unspoken but there between the lines, that culture and the law must be stacked against gay people, for their own good of course, because of the innately self destructive nature of homosexuality, is so ingrained in their rhetoric now that it’s central premise is taken as a given. It is homosexuality, not the persecution of homosexuals, that is destructive. Therefore, the solution is, surprise, surprise, More persecution.
But the Epstein essay gets to the heart of it: Homosexuals are cursed…they are anathema…they are different from us…they frighten us…if we could, we’d remove them from the face of the earth…because we are incapable of coming to terms with them. Yes we’re cursed alright. Not by our nature, but by their hate. Their calm, cool, thoroughly intellectual hate. There is the bedrock of The Boys On The Beach. There is the stinking rotten core of the secular right’s view of gay people. See how it is not all that different from that of the fundamentalists. Just add God, and you have a James Dobson speaking there. Anyone who thinks there is enough difference between the religious right and the secular right when it comes to gay people, that at least the secularists can be talked to, is just not paying attention.
MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) — For many who lived through Vermont’s not-so-civil debate over civil unions, the memories remain painfully fresh: hate mail, threatening telephone messages, tense public meetings.
This time around, as the state weighs whether to legalize gay marriage, the debate is noticeably tamer with little of the vitriol and recrimination that surrounded its groundbreaking 2000 decision to legally recognize gay and lesbian couples.
…
Although that absence of an impending vote may be what’s keeping things civil, people involved in the debate have noticed a change in atmosphere.
"It’s a very different tenor," said Beth Robinson, chairwoman of the Vermont Freedom to Marry Task Force, which supports gay marriage. "People have had an opportunity to come to terms. Vermonters have had eight years to see the two guys next door, or the two women down the street who have a legally recognized relationship under the civil unions law."
Ah yes… Now that they’ve had a chance to see how it works for themselves, and that the sky didn’t fall when same sex couples were allowed to have the same rights as opposite sex couples…tensions have eased, and people are more use to the idea….
"It was a time unlike anything since the Vietnam War era, when you had the sense that the whole world around you was divided," said David Moats, author of "Civil Wars: A Battle For Gay Marriage," a book about Vermont’s civil unions controversy.
…
Last summer, the Legislature appointed an 11-member Vermont Commission on Family Recognition and Protection to explore the idea of gay marriage and hear how Vermonters feel about it. The panel, which opponents say is stacked with gay marriage supporters and have boycotted, has held seven hearings and has three more scheduled.
The hearings have generated plenty of input, but no name-calling or personal attacks.
James LaPierre, who has a civil union partner and two children, saw the contrast firsthand. He went to a 2000 meeting on civil unions intending to get up and speak, but he was intimidated by the atmosphere and kept quiet.
"People would stand up and go to the microphone and there was jeering and catcalling," said LaPierre, 43, a nurse from Burlington. "It was hateful, and scary."
Last month, LaPierre went to a hearing by the Commission on Family Recognition. This time, the gathering was "supportive" and he got up and spoke. But it had fewer people — about 100, by his count, compared with about 500 at the 2000 event.
"Instead of a hateful, unruly, mob-like meeting, it was civil and organized. There was representation of the other side, but only two or three people," he said.
Now…you see how that works? When people can see for themselves that gay folks aren’t monsters out to destroy America and Family Life and Moral Values things get a lot calmer.
Oh…wait…
Opponents believe the change in tone may have more to do with their boycott — and the lack of impending action — than acceptance of gay marriage.
There’s the reason things are more civil today in Vermont then they were in 2000. It’s the boycott. The bigots figured they were going to loose…probably even worse this time then in 2000 because their vitriolic hate looks so ugly in retrospect…and so they called a boycott of the town meetings. And so…surprise, surprise…things are a lot calmer now.
This isn’t so much an indication of progress, as a reminder that things would have been a lot calmer back then too, were it not for the hate mongers. Nobody’s really moved on this issue; the majority of Vermonters didn’t object to same sex marriage or they’d have thrown out of office all the politicians who supported it and that wasn’t what happened. Only the bigots care, and of course they still care as much now as they ever did. If you could teach a bigot something they wouldn’t be bigots. The only thing that’s changed in Vermont is that this time the bigots aren’t going to those town meetings to whip everyone into a frenzy of hate. So things are calmer. How…unsurprising.
At Saturday night’s Republican debate, Mike Huckabee used a word he emphasizes quite a bit: “vertical.”
“I think we also ought to recognize that what Senator Obama has done is to touch at the core of something Americans want,” Huckabee said. “They are so tired of everything being horizontal — left, right, liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican. They’re looking for vertical leadership that leads up, not down. He has excited a lot of voters in this country. Let’s pay respect for that. He’s a likable person who has excited people about wanting to vote who have not voted in the past.”
A few hours earlier, Josh Marshall noted that “vertical” is a Huckabee favorite, with the former governor’s website arguing, “I think the country is looking for somebody who is vertical.”
Can anyone explain what the hell that means? Vertical? I guess if you’re main opponent was Fred Thompson you might push the fact that you spend most of your time standing up. But seriously, is there something I’m missing here? Or is this the weirdest campaign I’ve ever heard?
What Marshall was missing was one of the current fundamentalist tropes. He wouldn’t know, because he doesn’t live in that stifling environment…
This probably won’t come as too big a surprise given Huckabee’s faith-based campaigning, but this “vertical” talk seems to have dog-whistle implications.
This is definitely dog-whistle politics — that is, a message delivered in coded terminology and targeted to a particular subcultural group. Conservative evangelicals often talk about the need to prioritize their vertical relationships with God first and foremost before worrying about horizontal relationships among people. It’s the individualized “get right with God” approach of conservative Protestantism.
In contrast, progressive people of faith reject the vertical-horizontal dichotomy as a false one, saying that in interpersonal relationships one’s faith and spiritual teachings are made manifest. Such an outlook is wishy-washy, watered-down liberal theology in the minds of conservative evangelicals. Southern Baptist minister Huckabee knows this, and speaks evangelical-ese with his words. In fact, he’s got it up on his website as well.
I know this is so because I’ve been present a number of times when “vertical” rhetoric — the exact word — has been used in evangelical circles. It’s indeed a way of speaking one hears in many churches, part of the faith vocabulary of the evangelical and fundamentalist subculture.
And from “The God Strategy: How Religion Became A Political Weapon in America”:
That’s the power of narrowcasting. Targeted, under-the-radar messages denote who is part of the club. It’s like a secret handshake, writ large and electoral: politicians who narrowcast religious cues are assigned considerable credibility by voters in the targeted constituency.
Something to keep an eye on.
Andrew Sullivan, who is no Huckabee fan, was quoting Rod Dreher, who admits now that he was bamboozled by Bush and is ready to be bamboozled now by Huckabee…
I don’t get why Andrew calls Huckabee’s rise a sign of "the perils of fundamentalist politics." For one, Huckabee is not a fundamentalist. He’s more of a Rick Warren Evangelical…
No, and No. If he’s not actually a theocrat, he’s certainly willing to give actual theocrats everything they want so long as they get him elected. Jim Burroway, as always, has done some homework on his past, and the folks he likes to hang out with…
We reported earlier on Southern Baptist minister and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee’s fundraising event at the home of Houston multimillionaire Steven Hotze, a well-known Christian Reconstructionist. Pastor Rick Scarborough, who also maintains Reconstructionist beliefs, was there as well. Since then, we’ve learned that Huckabee’s ties go far deeper than mere acquaintances and financial backers. He has a history of working very closely with some very well-known Reconstructionists over the years. In this report, we will examine two of Huckabee’s closest Reconstructionist colleagues.
Go read the whole thing. There is no mistaking Huckabee for what he is. It’ll be interesting to see if the corporate news media, which is horrified at the prospect of a Huckabee nomination, actually delves into any of this…
Delegates at the annual convention of the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin voted Saturday in Fresno to withdraw from the U.S. Episcopal Church. With the decision, the diocese is the first to leave the U.S. Episcopal Church, which has 110 dioceses and 2.4 million members.
Delegates said they voted to break away from the church because it allows the blessing of same-sex unions, the ordination of gay bishops and the ordination of women.
Women and Gays and Liberals Oh My! Women and Gays and Liberals Oh My! That’s San Joaquin as in San Joaquin Valley…the sullen and resentful red heartland of California. If the California coast and its coniferous mountain north are laid back, progressive wonderlands, the San Joaquin valley is Rush Limbaughville. Agrarian, xenophobic, insular, it’s the Antebellum South, only with lots and lots of irrigation and Hispanics playing the part of the darkies picking in the fields. The only surprising thing about this is they didn’t bolt back when women got the robe. Oh…and they’re aligning with the South American church instead of the murderous Bishop Akinola. But he was probably a shade too dark for them.
A mysterious group calling itself Iowans for Some Semblance of Christian Decency has begun waging a campaign against former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, insinuating that not only is the Republican presidential candidate not a true conservative, he’s not a real Christian.
In fliers put under the doors of reporters at the Marriott in Des Moines, where Huckabee was staying Monday night, the organization, whose members are unknown, lays out its interpretation of how the former Baptist minister’s views run contrary to the Bible.
Huckabee’s support of educational opportunities for the children of illegal immigrants is portrayed, for instance, as "justification for violating the 8th commandment (stealing from U.S. citizens)." A lighthearted video clip where he pretends to talk to the Lord (watch HERE) is portrayed as "sacrilegious mocking of God for political gain."
From this cesspool the republicans will pick their presidential candidate. The one who wins will be the one that floats to the top.
From Box Turtle Bulletin. I’ve mentioned before how Paul Cameron is often stealth-cited in right wing anti-gay propaganda, by citing someone else, who in turn cites Cameron. But this is a first …
As I went about organizing my library over the weekend, I re-opened the book, Staying the Course: Supporting the Church’s Position on Homosexuality (Maxie D. Dunnam & H. Newton Malony, editors). And as I often do, I take a quick glance through the bibliographies, and among the many things I look for is whether they cite Paul Cameron or not. Nope. His name was nowhere to be found.
Then, I skimmed through H. Newton Malony’s chapter, “Homosexuality In the Postmodern World.” And there it was:
Longevity is another area in which homosexuality has been a determining factor. A 1991-92 survey of newspapers available to homosexual communities found that among homosexuals not suffering from AIDS, the median age of death for 5,371 persons to be 42 years of age, [sic] with only 9 percent living to old age. Among lesbians, the average age at death was 45 years. Both these figures are dramatically below the life expectancy of the population in general.22
Footnote 22 was this:
22. Malony, Perspectives on Homosexuality, 37.
See? No Cameron. Unless of course, you happened to have access to Malony’s 1998 Perpsectives on Homosexuality: The Transforming Point of View from Integration Press. And if you could find access to that obscure and now out-of-print book, you would eventually discover that this nugget came from an earlier version of Cameron’s pamphlet, “Medical Consequences of What Homosexuals Do.”
There’s no doubt here about this one. Obviously, that you’re citing yourself to hide the fact that Cameron is the source of your "facts", means you know full well what you’re doing is deceitful. Now take another look at that title… Staying the Course: Supporting the Church’s Position on Homosexuality. A faith that needs lies to support it, is a faith that is already dead.
Via Molly I over at Eschaton… The Kenosha Kid says it’s not that Rudy had an extramarital affair that will cost him the wingnut vote. It isn’t even that he billed it to the tax payers. It’s that he conducted his affair in the Hamptons, that hated den of filthy Jews Liberals. They’ll never forgive him for it.
I think he’s on to something there. The moral posturing of the hard right, especially the southern contingent, has always been a nothing more then a thin veneer over the bedrock of their prejudices.
I’m headed for bed, and not even going to bother watching the republican debate. But scanning the blogs that are following it live, I’m seeing that a gay (former) general asked a question concerning gays in the military and he was apparently roundly booed by the audience…
…so I just want to re-emphasize something I put up on my Twitter bar a few hours ago, for the sake of a few certain someones I no longer speak to, and one who I’m still very much holding at arm’s length: If you can still vote republican after all the gay bashing they’ve been doing, then we are not friends. It really is that simple.
Someone put a fork in the party of Lincoln, it’s done. And…I’m going to bed now…
In case you haven’t been following it…Time Magazine, courtesy of its columnist Joe Klein, has been giving the nation a textbook example of the problem with American corporate journalism. Some days ago Time columnist Joe Klein huffed that, basically, the democrats were once again coddling terrorists.
Unfortunately, Speaker Nancy Pelosi quashed the House Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan effort and supported a Democratic bill that — Limbaugh is salivating — would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only. In the lethal shorthand of political advertising, it would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans. That is well beyond stupid.
Note that this verbiage has now been…altered…on their website since the netroots started blasting Klein and Time over the original text’s blatant, in-your-face-falsehood. In fact, the bill did no such thing as even a child with third grade reading skills could clearly comprehend. Glenn Greenwald has been on it relentlessly since Klein’s bullshit column hit the newsstands…
"Well beyond stupid" is a good description for what Klein wrote here. "Factually false" is even better. First, from its inception, FISA did not "protect the rights of U.S. citizens only." Its warrant requirements apply to all "U.S. persons" (see 1801(f)), which includes not only U.S. citizens but also "an alien lawfully admitted [in the U.S.] for permanent residence" (see 1801(i)). From 1978 on, FISA extended its warrant protections to resident aliens.
But Klein’s far more pernicious "error" is his Limbaugh-copying claim that the House bill "require[s] the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court." It just does not.
The only reason why Congress began considering amendments to FISA in the first place was because a FISA court earlier this year ruled that a warrant was required for foreign-to-foreign calls incidentally routed through the U.S. via fiber optics. Everyone — from Russ Feingold to the ACLU — agreed that FISA never intended to require warrants for foreign-to-foreign calls that have nothing to do with U.S. citizens, and thus, none of the bills being considered — including the bill passed by the House — requires warrants for such foreign-to-foreign calls. Here is Rep. Rush Holt, a member of the House Intelligence Committee and one of the key architects of the House bill, explaining what the House bill actually does:
* Ensure that the government must have an individualized, particularized court-approved warrant based on probable cause in order to read or listen to the communications of an American citizen. . . .
The RESTORE Act now makes clear that it is the courts — and not an executive branch political appointee — who decide whether or not the communications of an American can be seized and searched, and that such seizures and searches must be done pursuant to a court order.
Under the House bill, individualized warrants are required if the U.S. Government wants to eavesdrop on the communications of Americans. Warrants are not required — as Klein falsely claimed — for "every foreign-terrorist target’s calls."
While the government (in order to prevent abuse) must demonstrate to the FISA court that it is applying its surveillance standards faithfully, the warrant requirement is confined to the class Rep. Holt described. Klein’s shrill condemnation of the House FISA bill rests on a complete falsehood (that’s not surprising; the last time Klein wrote about FISA, he said that "no actual eavesdropping on conversations should be permitted without a FISA court ruling" and then proceeded to defend a FISA bill which, unbeknownst to him, allowed exactly that).
What Time Magazine did, essentially, was smear the democrats as terrorist coddlers in the minds of millions of Time Magazine readers, and if you think that was accidental or merely a case of slipshod journalism you are not paying attention.
Klein’s broader point is even more odious. Along with most of the "liberal" punditocracy, Klein has been singing the same song for years and years and years now. The salvation for Democrats lies in following Republicans on national security issues. He’s been warning Democrats from the very beginning of the NSA scandal that they had better stop condemning Bush’s illegal spying on Americans or else they will justly suffer the consequences, and he issues similar lip-quivering warnings about Iraq: Democrats better stop opposing the Leader’s War or else they will lose.
The big joke here you have to realize, is that Klein is Time’s Liberal columnist. The corporate news media has been playing this game for decades…dragging the American political dialogue ever further and further to the right, by pitting hard core movement conservatives like Charles Krauthammer and outright lunatics like Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter against ersatz liberals like Joe Klein. Democrats and progressives are never represented in the corporate news media dialogue, and indeed are usually portrayed as extremists, while the likes of Ann Coulter are given plenty of time to spread their venom in the name of "Balance".
And in that environment, where the playing field is relentlessly tilted toward the right, actual policy differences between the republicans and the democrats have been consistently represented in a "he said, she said" format, where actual facts are never discussed, never even sought. For years now, the republicans have been able to push any damn lie they wanted into the public discourse, with absolutely no fear of being contradicted by the press. And this latest Joe Klein column has been a perfect example of how that not only works, but how the corporate news media remains doggedly determined to keep it working that way. After days and days of being raked over the coals for the blatant in-your-face factual inaccuracies in the Klein column, Time Magazine finally prints a…correction…but not…
Time Magazine has done a superb service for the country by illustrating everything that is rancid and corrupt with our political media. After I emailed Time.com Editor Josh Tyrangiel asking why the online version of Joe Klein’s column remains online uncorrected given that — as Managing Editor Rick Stengel now says — the article contains a "reporting error," this is the "correction" Time has now posted to the article. Seriously — this is really it, in its entirety:
In the original version of this story, Joe Klein wrote that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets. Republicans believe the bill can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don’t.
Leave aside the false description of what Klein wrote. He didn’t say "that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets." He said that their bill "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court" and "would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans." But the Editor’s false characterization of Klein’s original lie about the House FISA bill is the least of the issues here.
All Time can say about this matter is that Republicans say one thing and Democrats claim another. Who is right? Is one side lying? What does the bill actually say, in reality?
That’s not for Time to say. After all, they’re journalists, not partisans. So they just write down what each side says. It’s not for them to say what is true, even if one side is lying.
In this twisted view, that is called "balance" — writing down what each side says. As in: "Hey – Bush officials say that there is WMD in Iraq and things are going great with the war (and a few people say otherwise). It’s not for us to decide. It’s not our fault if what we wrote down is a lie. We just wrote down exactly what they said." At best, they write down what each side says and then go home. That’s what they’re for.
That our typical establishment "journalist" conceives of this petty clerical task as their only role is not news. But it is striking to see the nation’s "leading news magazine" so starkly describe how they perceive their role.
After watching our corporate news media passively allow the election of 2000 to be stolen by the republicans, after watching them cheer Bush on as he lied this nation into a war that has killed hundreds of thousands, ruined our economy, and thoroughly trashed our moral capital, after watching them help Bush cover up the outing of one of our CIA agents in an act of cold, calculating political retribution, none of this should surprise anyone. Journalism is dead and rotting in America, everywhere but in the alternative press, and on the Internet, which, not coincidentally, is the one place corporate America cannot dictate the rules of the game.
You should go read Glenn Greenwald’s evisceration of this whole sorry episode, starting Here, and then moving on Here, Here, Here, and Here. You need to see, all Americans need to see, how the news media many of us grew up reading and watching, has bellyflopped itself into the gutter.
Going into the home stretch in in the Kentucky gubernatorial election, the Republicans appear to have brought out one last card: Paranoia against gays.
The state GOP is now sending a robo-call throughout the state featuring none other than Pat Boone, warning that as a Christian he is concerned that Democratic nominee Steve Beshear, who has been way ahead in the polls, will work for "every homosexual cause."
"Now do you want a governor who’d like Kentucky to be another San Francisco?" Boone asks. "Please re-elect Ernie Fletcher."
And at a campaign stop last night, the Lexington Herald-Leader reports, the Republican nominee for Lt. Governor made a direct attack upon the Democratic ticket: "Do you want a couple of San Francisco treats or do you want a governor?"
(Emphasis mine) So the republican candidate gets way behind in the polls and he starts waving the Gay Menace. This is what republicans do to win elections, and never mind how many gay Americans it gets killed. Talking Points Memo has a recording of Fletcher’s robo call. You may recall that on April 11 of last year Fletcher, declared Diversity Day in Kentucky, and on the same day eliminated anti-discrimination protections for gay state and local government workers.
I wrote a post a few days back about wanting a door I could walk through from time to time. Don’t assume that means I’m not just as pissed off at all of you as I was. In fact, I might even be More pissed off now then I was. Because it just never stops with the republicans. It just never stops.
I don’t expect everyone who knows me to agree with me on every political issue. But if you can vote republican while they’re doing this to gay people to win elections then you are not my friend. It really is that simple. I’ve got a bullseye on my back, along with ever other gay American citizen, and it’s not gutter crawling maggots like Ernie Fletcher who put it there, it’s all of you who told the republicans they can incite passions toward gay people as often and as crudely as they like and you’ll still vote for them.
So don’t ask. Just…don’t.
When the roll call of the gay bashed for this election cycle is read and I’m lucky enough not to be on it that’ll be no thanks to the likes of any of you.
(Union City, New Jersey) Two workers at a Burger King in Union City have been charged with assault and a hate crime in connection with the beating of a gay couple outside the restaurant.
Christopher Soto and Angel Carbaballo, who have since been fired by the chain, are scheduled to appear in court this week.
The victims, both in their 40s, have not been named.
When the couple asked for a refund for a menu item that the counter person discovered was not available, another counter person then asked who wanted the refund – “The faggots over there?”
The couple left the restaurant, but a group of Burger King employees allegedly followed them to a side street and beat them mercilessly, though not fatally.
The employees made repeated anti-gay slurs during the beating according to the indictment.
Atrios points to this post on Lawyers, Guns and Money with the comment, Tiny Penis Syndrome…sadly, it does explain a lot. Yes, but not everything…
I just finished teaching an upper-division US history course in which my students read — and I swear I’m not making this up — Kim Du Toit’s repellant 2003 essay on "The Pussification of the Western Male". The class had just finished Gail Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization (1995), a marvelous examination of the cultural transformations of gender between the 1880s and World War I. We used du Toit as a companion piece to the chapters on Teddy Roosevelt and the psychologist G. Stanley Hall — each of whom were, in their own ways, as anxious as du Toit about what they perceived to be the devaluation of masculinity.
…
Hall, for his part, was preoccupied not with adult masculinity but rather with the incipient manhood of youth. Believing that developing children rehearsed the cultural evolution of the human race, he insisted that young boys should not be deterred from expressing "the instinct of the savage."
Boys are naturally robbers; they are bandits and fighters by nature. A scientific study has been made of boys’ societies . . . . In every instance these societies have been predatory. All of the members thirsted for blood, and all of their plans were for thievery and murder
Allow the young boy to beat the shit out of his companions, Hall suggested, and his mental and physical development will proceed in a smooth and healthy fashion. Divert him from his natural course Hall warned, and you will produce "a milk-sop, a lady-boy, or a sneak." Such a child "lacks virility, [and] his masculinity does not ring true." Perhaps he will — as Hall himself did — grow up to be a chronic masturbator, a helpless slave to "the lonely vice."
That passage of Hall’s rang familiar in my ear. Not so much for the words, as the sensibility that male youth is by its nature savage and brutal and that cultivating that savage, brutal nature is the task of every great civilization. I’d heard all that somewhere before. So I did a little digging and it wasn’t long before I found it…
"My teaching is hard. Weakness has to be knocked out of them. In my [elite schools] a youth will grow up before which the world will shrink back. A violently active dominating, intrepid, brutal youth – that is what I am after". Youth must be all those things. It must be indifferent to pain. There must be no weakness or tenderness in it.I want to see once more in its eyes the gleam of pride and independence of the beast of prey. Strong and handsome must my young men be. I will have them fully trained in all physical exercises. I intend to have an athletic youth – that is the first and the chief thing. In this way I shall eradicate the thousands of years of human domestication. Then I shall have in front of me the pure and noble natural material. With that I can create the new order.
"I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is ruin to my young men. I would have them learn only what takes their fancy. But one thing they must learn – self-command! They shall learn to overcome the fear of death, under the severest tests. That is the intrepid and heroic stage of youth. Out of it comes the stage of the free man, the man who is the substance and essence of the world, the creative man, the god-man. In my [elite schools] there will stand as a statue for worship the figure of the magnificent, self-ordaining god-man; it will prepare the young men for their coming period of ripe manhood."
Emphasis mine. I’d heard these words of Hitler’s first in my own youth, sitting in a junior high school history class watching a documentary produced in 1956 titled, The Twisted Cross. I was a bookish little kid even back then, and when the scenes of Nazi mobs burning books came on screen I was completely horrified. When the scenes of the concentraton camps came on screen later I felt that, yes, the one led right to the other. Where books are burned, people are soon after. But the scenes of Htiler and Himmler inspecting the ranks of young soldiers, while the narrator intoned those words from Hitler Speaks, chilled me to the bone. My junior high school years were when I experienced the worst bullying of my life, and I didn’t have to think hard about what living in Hitler’s Third Reich was like when I heard that. Great if you were part of the ruling thug caste…not so much if you were everyone else. I remembered that documentary so vividly that decades later when I saw a videotape of the if for sale and took it home to watch, I was amazed at how detailed my memory of it actually was after all those years.
Maybe it really is all about penis envy. But I don’t recall any of my childhood bullies feeling their threatened manhood by me. What I saw in their faces was contempt. Contempt for anyone they could beat the crap out of, whether by themselves or with the help of their gang. When you have no brains to speak of, when even a cinderblock could add 2 plus 2 more accurately then you, all you have left is brute force to live by, and for some that is the only standard of value they know for taking their measure, and everyone else’s too. The contempt for effete intellectuals is no envy. It really is contempt. So what if you can grow food. So what if you can turn dirt into steel. So what if you can cure disease. If I can beat the crap out of you, then I’m the better man. Because then I can simply take everything you have. That really is the thinking going on there.
And never mind that no amount of force, no advantage in weapons, no military superiority ever gave a single penny’s worth of value to a dollar. The criminal mindset, unable to distinguish between creating wealth and stealing it, regards all creation as theft, all theft as creation. All that matters in the end, is can you take it away from someone else. If you can, then it’s rightfully yours. If the other guy can’t hold onto it, then it was never his to begin with. Might makes right. Any other standard of morality is literally incomprehensible to them. When you’re too stupid to know how modern civilization really works, you’re also too stupid to know it.
That is the essential fascist mindset. When you hear some moron babbling on and on about…
The feminization of males
Effete Intellectualism
Military glory
…all rolled together in one tightly packed little ball of bitterness, you can be pretty sure of what you’re dealing with. What dimwits like Du Toit and all the other right wing kultar kampfers think they’re selling America is this…
…but what what you always get is this:
There’s what not deterring young men from expressing "the instinct of the savage" gets you, right there. Look at it. There’s your savage manly man’s promise land.
BALTIMORE – A grieving father won a nearly $11 million verdict Wednesday against a fundamentalist Kansas church that pickets military funerals out of a belief that the war in Iraq is a punishment for the nation’s tolerance of homosexuality.
Albert Snyder of York, Pa., sued the Westboro Baptist Church for unspecified damages after members demonstrated at the March 2006 funeral of his son, Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, who was killed in Iraq.
The jury first awarded $2.9 million in compensatory damages. It returned in the afternoon with its decision to award $6 million in punitive damages for invasion of privacy and $2 million for causing emotional distress.
Snyder’s attorney, Craig Trebilcock, had urged jurors to determine an amount "that says don’t do this in Maryland again. Do not bring your circus of hate to Maryland again."
…
The church and three of its leaders — the Rev. Fred Phelps and his two daughters, Shirley Phelps-Roper and Rebecca Phelps-Davis, 46 — were found liable for invasion of privacy and intent to inflict emotional distress.
Even the size of the award for compensating damages "far exceeds the net worth of the defendants," according to financial statements filed with the court, U.S. District Judge Richard Bennett noted.
Yes, but those financial statements are almost certainly bullshit. I’ve seen Fred’s compound…he and his family own an entire neighborhood block’s worth of property. And their forays around the country to picket everything from Funerals to high school plays are being paid for with something.
Their attorneys maintained in closing arguments Tuesday that the burial was a public event and that even abhorrent points of view are protected by the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech and religion.
And Fred is still free to spread his message of hate. Just not at funerals. The first amendment doesn’t give you the right to come into my house and scream in my face. Goodness knows telephone solicitors, door to door salesmen and politicians every election year would be in heaven if it did. There are public and private spaces and if a funeral isn’t a private space I don’t know what is.
Fred’s known all these years what he’s doing isn’t about anything more righteous then how much he hates the world he lives in and how badly he wants to make it suffer for making him hate it. It’s not that God Hates Fags, but that Fred does. It’s not that God Hates Fag Enablers, but that Fred does. It’s not that God Hates America, but that Fred does. And nothing gets a hater’s goat more then knowing that the objects of their contempt also happen to be a lot smarter then they are. Fred could out hate anyone, but he couldn’t out think a brick, and he knew it and it must have turned the worm inside of him all the more knowing it. You need brainpower, you need audacity and nerve, to really destroy your enemies. But Fred knew the most he could ever manage was pissing people off and he settled for doing that because at least making people angry gave him a small measure of power over them. It’s the chickenshit’s revenge, as befitting the chickenshit pulpit thumper of a congenital congregation. When the only people you see in your pews are your own family, that’s a message straight from God Almighty Himself that it’s time to close your book of sermons, walk out the door and go look for some honest work. But Fred didn’t have it in him to wield a mighty sword against his enemies, let alone raise a mighty voice to God from his pulpit. So he settled for mooning the world he hated, and everyone in it possessing that half a brain he himself had never been blessed with, just out of range. Well, today he got his ass kicked…
Snyder sobbed when he heard the verdict, while members of the church greeted the news with tightlipped smiles.
That’s how people who are perpetually constipated look. Fred isn’t a prophet, he’s Kaopectate for the soul.
Elections Must Be Coming Up…I See The Republicans Are Dusting Off Their Gay Menace Fliers
Via Pam’s House Blend… What does a vulnerable republican politician do when a gay challenger threatens to unseat him…? Why…make him look like he’s a predatory homosexual child molester of course…
In the neighboring state to the north, the District 39 race in Virginia is getting ugly, thanks to Republican State Senator James J. "Jay" O’Brien Jr. In a desperate bid to pander to the wingnut vote, he decided that sending out a flyer that says, among other things, that his Democratic opponent
"George Barker wants to take time away from core academic subjects like math, science, and reading to teach children to accept the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Lifestyle (GLBT)."
It’s no surprise that this flyer (PDF) was paid for by the Republican Party of Virginia.
What would have surprised me is if the republicans hadn’t stooped to it. This is the party that simply cannot win elections without the bigot vote.
It’s clear that the right wing is ratcheting up the homo-hate as Barker has received the endorsement of the Washington Post.
Republican Sen. James J. "Jay" O’Brien Jr. is an affable incumbent, but his scant command of policy and legislative issues has failed to impress. His Democratic rival, George L. Barker, a health-care planner, would make a far more able, detail-oriented and effective senator in this district straddling the Fairfax-Prince William line.
Barker also has strong support from educators (I’m sure O’Brien feels they are part of the Homosexual Agenda anyway).
More from the heinous mailer — he certainly telegraphs his priorities:
George Barker went on to say that he would vote for legislation that would teach Virginia students about the "GLBT" lifestyle during school hours — regardless of their family’s own beliefs. Barker also said he would "guarantee" his support for "GLBT" clubs in public schools.
…George Barker worked very hard in terms of opposing the marriage amendment, and be strongly in favor of gay rights, be [sic] he shouldn’t impose his values on elementary school children.
A question for O’Brien – I suppose that kids in your state don’t need to know about tolerance and families that are different, you know — like that of little Samuel Cheney, a resident of Virginia and son of loyal Republican Mary Cheney.
Here’s what the republican party is sending to voters in Virginia, to make sure they get the message that the homo running against their boy wants to molest their children…
They’re not calling the gay candidate a child molester outright, but look at the imagery in that flier and tell me that they’re not fear mongering a gay man and child sexual abuse there, right there, with that close up image of the back of that small boy and that shirt collar pulled down the back of his neck, right up in the reader’s face.
It’s despicable. But that’s how republicans win elections these days. From the gutter. Problem is, that’s also how they govern. The party that thinks the only way it can win elections is fear mongering, also seems to think it can eavesdrop on Americans at will, without all that rule of law stuff getting in the way. The party that thinks the only way it can win elections is to appeal to the lowest prejudices within us, also seems to think that it can govern just fine thank-you, in complete secrecy and without any accountability. The party that thinks the only way it can win elections is to call gay men child molesters, seems to think George Bush unilaterally drag the country into whatever war he likes, and shovel your kids into it. You get the government you vote for. You vote your fears, you get a government that makes sure you have lots to be afraid of.
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