The venue is owned by the Lynnwood Public Facilities District, a public taxing district that operates the convention center but is separate from the city.
“Our understanding is that they’re law-abiding. They have a right of free speech just like any other group,” said Mike Echelbarger, the board’s chairman.
“If we were talking about the (Ku Klux Klan) we’d have a totally different take on it. Of course we wouldn’t rent to the KKK,” he said.
Of course, they wouldn’t rent to the KKK. But as we reported earlier, they may as well. The rhetoric the Watchman use has often been violent, using the rhetoric of warfare in their speeches and writings. Founded by Redmond, Washington by preacher Kenneth Hutcherson, holocaust revisionist Scott Lively, and Latvian megachurch pastor Alexey Ledyaev, Watchmen on the Walls have gained a tremendous amount of influence in Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine and Russia. Ledyaev’s fomenting of anti-gay hatred in Riga, Latvia led to violence when skinhead and other demonstrators threw excrement and eggs at Gay Pride participants in 2006.
And as the SPLC recently reported, the Watchmen also represent an increasingly violent anti-gay movement among Slavic evangelical immigrants in several U.S. cities which have previously been known as being gay friendly. In July 2007, a group of Russian-speaking men killed Satender Singh, a 26-year-old gay Fijian of Indian near Sacramento, California. Two men, Andrey Vusik, 29, and Aleksandr Shevchenko, 21 were charged in connection with Singh’s death. Vusik fled to Russian in July and is being sought by the FBI. Ledyaev and Lively have refused to publicly condemn the killing.
Jim quotes Lively, who employs rhetoric chillingly similar to the eliminationist what the Third Reich once emplyed against Jews:
There is a war that is going on in the world. There is a war that is waging across the entire face of the globe. It’s been waging in the United States for decades, and it’s been waging in Europe for decades. It’s a war between Christians and homosexuals.
This is a war you haven’t seen yet. You’ve only seen a little bit of it, because Russia had been protected against the homosexual movement by the Communists. One of the few good things that the Soviet Union did is that it stopped the sexual revolution from infecting the Russian people. But all across the West, the sexual revolution changed the culture of the nations. The sexual revolution embraces the idea that there should be no limits on sexual conduct.
And this is the design of the Devil to destroy civilization, because civilization is based on the natural family. One man and one woman united in marriage bringing children into the world and training them to replace them in the next generation. That’s the foundation of civilization and the heart of Christian living.
And in the United States where the sexual revolution began, it was the homosexual political movement that designed this strategy to attack Christianity. The homosexual movement teaches sexual freedom, and its first target is the heterosexual people. The homosexual activists stayed hidden but they taught this philosophy through their activists. And out of the philosophy came the principalities and powers that is destroying the West: The pornography industry, the abortion industry, and the destruction of marriage through divorce.
These things are the product of a way of thinking. They deny the Truth of God. They deny the design of God for human beings. And their purpose is the change the cultures of the world.
Now, the homosexual movement has been winning this war in the United States, and it has been winning this war in Europe. And we’re looking at the future collapse of Western civilization. And Watchmen on the Walls is an organization to fight against this collapse. Watchmen On the Walls is an organization of men and women with courage, who will stand on the Truth of God and without compromise demand that the culture will follow the guidance of God. That marriage and family must be held at the highest level.
So Lively and his pal Ledyaev have been feeding this to the Slavic immigrant community in several west coast cities and it did its work. Two of their useful tools killed Satender Singh and Lively isn’t merely refusing to condemn the act, he’s making excuses for it:
Now, I’ve been working with the Russian community in Sacramento. And I want to tell you this is an example of how bad things are in the United States. Because we’ve come to a place in the United States where the homosexuals have achieved very high power. And they’ve begun to punish… They’ve begun to cause the political powers to punish anyone who says that homosexuality is wrong.
There was a situation in Sacramento a few weeks ago in a public park. There was a group of homosexuals and they were very drunk and one of the homosexual men was taking off his pants. And there were children in the park. And a Russian man went over to these homosexuals and he was rebuking them and there started a fight. And the Russian man punched the homosexual. [The audience starts to shout and applaud.] No, no, no, don’t… The man was very drunk… the homosexual was very drunk. He was very drunk and he fell down and he hit his head and he died. [Some in the audience start to applaud and laugh] No…. no…
Now the Russian man has been accused of murder and the FBI is seeking him. And all of the powers in Sacramento have been accusing all of the Russian community of being murderers. And the goal is to silence everyone who speaks against homosexuality. And this is a very dangerous situation because we don’t want homosexuals to be killed. We want them to be saved. Amen?
But that’s not what happened in the park. Singh and his friends, three couples including a pregnant woman, were taunted by a group of young slavs who hurled racist and homophobic insults at them. One of the Slavs called some friends on his cell phone and they came and joined the group just as Singh and his friends were leaving the park. There was no fight. One of the Slavs sucker punched Singh hard in the head and he fell and hit his head again on the sidewalk. He remained in a coma until eventually taken off life support.
Make no mistake…Lively is excusing murder there. Note not only the audience response to Lively’s telling them that the gay man was struck and died, but Lively’s half hearted attempt to quell their enthusiasm for murder. He’s not telling them their blood thirsty hatred is wrong, he’s telling them to shut up because his speech there is being recorded.
Burroway’s right, The Lynnwood Convention Center might as well be hosting a Ku Klux Klan gathering. The Watchmen On The Walls aren’t just some anti-gay right wing religious group. They are the public face of a violently anti-gay movement that has already killed at least one gay person. And that’s not the only act of violence associated with this Slavic religious community. People will die as a result of the hatred that will be passionately inflamed at The Lynnwood Convention Center on October 19, 20 and 21. They might be gay. They might be family or friend to a gay person. They may be straight and merely mistaken for being gay in the wrong place at the wrong time. But look at the rhetoric this movement employs. …this is the design of the Devil to destroy civilization…it was the homosexual political movement that designed this strategy to attack Christianity… We better wake up. This is a war. They aren’t using that word "war" metaphorically.
Someone will die as a result of what is said in the Lynnwood Convention Center in the coming weeks. Some of that blood will be on the hands of the The Lynnwood Convention Center Management. Just sayin…
Anyway, let’s see how the NYTimes does in fielding their latest gibberish.
when Democrats enlisted 12-year-old Graeme Frost, who along with a younger sister relied on the program for treatment of severe brain injuries suffered in a car crash, to give the response to Mr. Bush’s weekly radio address on Sept. 29, Republican opponents quickly accused them of exploiting the boy to score political points.
Then, they wasted little time in going after him to score their own.
In recent days, Graeme and his family have been attacked by conservative bloggers and other critics of the Democrats’ plan to expand the insurance program, known as S-chip. They scrutinized the family’s income and assets — even alleged the counters in their kitchen to be granite — and declared that the Frosts did not seem needy enough for government benefits.
OK. So they accused the kid’s family of fraud, essentially. How does the NYTimes do in fact-checking the asses of the right blogosphere?
The critics accused Graeme’s father, Halsey, a self-employed woodworker, of choosing not to provide insurance for his family of six, even though he owned his own business. They pointed out that Graeme attends an expensive private school. And they asserted that the family’s home had undergone extensive remodeling, and that its market value could exceed $400,000.
One critic, in an e-mail message to Graeme’s mother, Bonnie, warned: “Lie down with dogs, and expect to get fleas.” As it turns out, the Frosts say, Graeme attends the private school on scholarship. The business that the critics said Mr. Frost owned was dissolved in 1999. The family’s home, in the modest Butchers Hill neighborhood of Baltimore, was bought for $55,000 in 1990 and is now worth about $260,000, according to public records. And, for the record, the Frosts say, their kitchen counters are concrete.
Certainly the Frosts are not destitute. They also own a commercial property, valued at about $160,000, that provides rental income. Mr. Frost works intermittently in woodworking and as a welder, while Mrs. Frost has a part-time job at a firm that provides services to publishers of medical journals. Her job does not provide health coverage.
Under the Maryland child health program, a family of six must earn less than $55,220 a year for children to qualify. The program does not require applicants to list their assets, which do not affect eligibility.
In a telephone interview, the Frosts said they had recently been rejected by three private insurance companies because of pre-existing medical conditions. “We stood up in the first place because S-chip really helped our family and we wanted to help other families,” Mrs. Frost said.
That’s a pretty thorough refutation of every single accusation the wingnuts could come up with against the family. So, good. I myself would add that there never really was any reason to take their frenzied posts seriously in the first place: the crap about the private school, and their real estate assets supposedly affecting how much they could pay for health insurance, were obviously absurd from the start. There never was any need to "investigate" these claims: common sense should have said, "irrelevant."
In other words, if, as the NYT has it,
But what on the surface appears to be yet another partisan feud, all the nastier because a child is at the center of it, actually cuts to the most substantive debate around S-chip. Democrats say it is crucially needed to help the working poor — Medicaid already helps the impoverished — but many Republicans say it now helps too many people with the means to help themselves.
… It’s pretty clear that yes, the Frosts are a good example of the kind of people the program would help, and it’s also pretty clear that the reason the wingnuts went after them and their kitchen counters (!) was that their example is in fact a very persuasive one.
Most Americans know perfectly damn well just how messed up our heathcare system is, and they want relief from the constant stress this mess imposes upon them, and they’d really think it is kind of neat that you might not have to lose your home because your kids get in a serious car wreck. What are their "arguments," anyway? That it’s too costly? When money is shamelessly being flushed away by this administration on all sorts of harebrained schemes, most notably the wildly unpopular Iraq debacle, how’s that one going to fly? That it could lead to eeek socialism booga booga? When people might think to themselves, "is this constant worry over healthcare, which causes me to make constant sacrifices and affects even so basic a question as what do I want to do with my life and what kind of a family do I want to have, actually what American liberty is supposed to be all about? Constant fear?"
You can see why they decided to fling slime on the Frosts’ kitchen counters instead.
Reading the article, this all seems to me pretty clear, though naturally I’d like it spelled out more firmly.
But the real news in the article is this:
Republicans on Capitol Hill, who were gearing up to use Graeme as evidence that Democrats have overexpanded the health program to include families wealthy enough to afford private insurance, have backed off.
An aide to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, expressed relief that his office had not issued a press release criticizing the Frosts.
And that is good news. If the GOP party leaders are backing off, then the media very likely won’t feel the need to plaster the Frosts all over the damn place over essentially nothing. And that is a Good Thing.
The progressive blogs started fighting back at once on this, and it looks like it made a difference. Now the noise from the right wing sewer isn’t going unchallenged by the time it percolates up to the corporate news rooms. This is good. This is very good. The radical right has spent decades building this noise machine. But it’s starting to look like other voices are finally, Finally, making themselves heard in the echo chamber.
But there’s more to this story then the simple fact that the right is lying about the Frosts. This little smear campaign illustrates perfectly how the radical right has been looking America in the eye and lying about itself, about its purpose, its values, its motives, for decades. Juan Cole (soon to be an ex-republican) sums it all up pretty well here…
I was talking to Tim via AOL IM, and I decided it was probably worthwhile to bring this up for everyone. One of the things that is so surprising (for me, at least) about the whole Graeme Frost episode is that rather than make their case against this program with their vicious assault against this family, they Malkin/Freeper/Limbaugh brigade are doing just the opposite. Rather than expose this family as a bunch of frauds and lazy slackers and welfare queens, they are making the family’s case.
If you look through this family’s dossier, it appears they are doing everything Republicans say they should be doing- hell, their story is almost what you would consider a checklist for good, red-blooded American Republican voters: they own their own business, they pay their taxes, they are still in a committed relationship and are raising their kids, they eschewed public education and are doing what they have to do to get them into Private schools, they are part of the American dream of home ownership that Republicans have been pointing to in the past two administrations as proof of the health of the economy, and so on.
In short, they are a white, lower-middle-class, committed family, who is doing EVERYTHING the GOP Kultur Kops would have you believe people should be doing. They aren’t gay. They aren’t divorced. They didn’t abort their children. They aren’t drug addicts or welfare queens. They are property owners, entrepeneurs, taxpayers, and hard-working Americans. I bet nine times out of ten in past elections, if you handed this resume to a pollster, they would think you were discussing the prototypical Republican voter. Hell, the only thing missing from this equation is membership to a church and an irrational fear of Muslims and you HAVE the prototypical Bush voter.
They are, however, not without fault. They are unable to afford insurance through normal means (and now that they have pre-existing conditions, probably couldn’t get traditional insurance anyway), and managed to get several of their family members injured in a traumatic accident. And, it appears, those are the big blind spots for compassionate conservatism. That, and the real big sin- allowing themselves to advocate for a policy that the Decider was going to veto. Here it is, so you can see their grievous sin that requires they be destroyed:
“Hi, my name is Graeme Frost. I’m 12 years old and I live in Baltimore, Maryland. Most kids my age probably haven’t heard of CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program. But I know all about it, because if it weren’t for CHIP, I might not be here today.
“CHIP is a law the government made to help families like mine afford healthcare for their kids. Three years ago, my family was in a really bad car accident. My younger sister Gemma and I were both hurt. I was in a coma for a week and couldn’t eat or stand up or even talk at first. My sister was even worse. I was in the hospital for five-and-a-half months and I needed a big surgery. For a long time after that, I had to go to physical therapy after school to get stronger. But even though I was hurt badly, I was really lucky. My sister and I both were.
“My parents work really hard and always make sure my sister and I have everything we need, but the hospital bills were huge. We got the help we needed because we had health insurance for us through the CHIP program.
“But there are millions of kids out there who don’t have CHIP, and they wouldn’t get the care that my sister and I did if they got hurt. Their parents might have to sell their cars or their houses, or they might not be able to pay for hospital bills at all.
“Now I’m back to school. One of my vocal chords is paralyzed so I don’t talk the same way I used to. And I can’t walk or run as fast as I did. The doctors say I can’t play football any more, but I might still be able to be a coach. I’m just happy to be back with my friends.
“I don’t know why President Bush wants to stop kids who really need help from getting CHIP. All I know is I have some really good doctors. They took great care of me when I was sick, and I’m glad I could see them because of the Children’s Health Program.
“I just hope the President will listen to my story and help other kids to be as lucky as me. This is Graeme Frost, and this has been the Weekly Democratic Radio address. Thanks for listening.”
Pretty strong stuff. I can see why this rabid dog needs to be put down with the full force of the wingnutosphere. And it just goes downhill from there. We learn from our intrepid “reporters” on the right that $45,000 is now rich, which is news to me and everyone else who remember mocking Democrats when they tried to claim $100k combined income was considered rich. You righties do remember that, don’t you?
I think the property was valued at around $225,000. I dunno, I have no sympathy for them. Looks like they have more than enough money for luxuries they won’t sacrifice, yet they expect everyone else to sacrifice for them. My family had to sell our house because we couldn’t afford to keep it, have one used minivan and a clunker my husband uses to get back and forth to work, and until this past weekend we didn’t have a television because it was a luxury we couldn’t justify spending on. No private schools for my 3 kids- can’t even afford daycare. Yet we manage to afford health insurance, keep our rental home comfy, and have food on the table. I’m content with what I have and certainly don’t want anyone else paying for what I can afford, after cutting out the luxuries.
15 years ago, when my then-wife and I discovered we were going to have a child – I had a job with no health insurance.
I changed jobs – period. I was stupid and willing to go without insurance for myself – but with my child there was no way I was going to risk it.
These parents have the same opportunity.
They chose not to find jobs that offered health insurance – and they chose to spend their money elsewhere.
Then, when tragedy strikes, they’re held up as models of “what’s wrong with this country”.
Sorry – but they should be held up as models of “What’s wrong with many Americans”.
My bad- they don’t have any advice other than “SUCKS TO BE YOU” or “SELL YOUR HOUSE” or “GET ANOTHER JOB.” Because, as we all know, the hallmark of responsibility is making your children homeless so they can maybe get healthcare. Nobody even pointed to the numerous charities that we conservatives are supposed to expect to fill the gap so the government doesn’t have to pay for things. Instead, it was taunts, catcalls, contempt, and jealousy (because these folks are in SUCH an enviable situation).
I simply can not believe this is what the Republican party has become. I just can’t. It just makes me sick to think all those years of supporting this party, and this is what it has become. Even if you don’t like the S-Chip expansion, it is hard to deny what Republicans are- a bunch of bitter, nasty, petty, snarling, sneering, vicious thugs, peering through people’s windows so they can make fun of their misfortune.
I’m registering Independent tomorrow.
For the record, I was raised in a family of Rockefeller republicans. I registered republican at age 18, as soon as 18 year olds were given the vote back in the early 70s. I switched to democrat in the 1990s, because I got tired of gay folks like myself being used as baseball bats against democrats. I figured if the party regarded me as the ultimate weapon against democrats, I might as well be one. Mr. Cole…your gay and lesbian neighbors have known what a bunch of bitter, nasty, petty, snarling, vicious thugs, peering through people’s windows, the republican grassroots are for a long, long time now. Reagan delivered them into power. Bush taught them that to the victor belong the spoils.
Nonetheless, progressive types persist in deluding themselves that there are vast masses of the "needy" out there that only the government can rescue. An editorial in Canada’s biggest-selling newspaper today states:
A total of 905,000 people visited food banks across the Greater Toronto Area in the past year.
The population of Toronto is about two-and-a-half million. Is the Star suggesting one in three citizens of one of the wealthiest municipalities on earth depends on "food banks"? Or is it the same one thousand people getting three square meals a day there? Or ten thousand people swinging by a couple of times a week? And, in that case, how many of them actually "depend" on food banks? Only the Star knows. But the idea that 905,000 Torontonians need food aid is innumerate bunk.
(emphasis added)
Now, I don’t know anything about the Star article in question, but anyone who’s not a wingnut engaged in "fact-checking" can plainly see that the "Greater Toronto Area" would have a larger population than "Toronto." Since wingnut research is done entirely with The Google, let’s consult the oracle:
The Greater Toronto Area (widely abbreviated as the GTA) is the most populous metropolitan area in Canada. The GTA is a provincial planning area with a population of 5,555,912 at the 2006 Canadian Census.[1]
5.6 million vs 2.5 million. OK, the actual figure is only 220% higher than Steyn’s.
These little slights-of-hand aren’t clumsy or accidental.
Sorry, no sale. The Democrats chose to outsource their airtime to a Seventh Grader. If a political party is desperate enough to send a boy to do a man’s job, then the boy is fair game.
So says Mark Steyn of the National Review. Firedoglake has more…
Why are all these high traffic wingnut blogs (and far right Fox News) attacking this 12 year old boy and his family? This may well be the lamest excuse I have ever heard in my life for attacking two children who were severely injured in a car accident and their parents who couldn’t afford health insurance for them. I mean honestly, this propaganda fishing expedition disguised as “questions” doesn’t pass the smell test, and Malkin and her cronies know it:
Asking questions and subjecting political anecdotes to scrutiny are what journalists should be doing.
First of all, you weren’t scrutinizing, you were harassing the family at their place of business and their home, and then you kept on harassing them and egged your readers to do the same. Your gin up a phony distraction from your bad press because ”the GOP doesn’t care about poor children“ conservative bloggers and pundits decided that the ends justifies the means in cleaning up after George Bush’s latest mess — even if it meant sacrificing the daily lives of a couple of injured children in the fray. Secondly, you weren’t even close to following the code of ethics that professional journalists require in this situation to “minimize harm,” so you can call yourself the ethically-challenged political hacks that you are and be done with it.
None of you political hatchet cronies give a rat’s ass about minimizing harm for these children, one of whom suffered a severe brain injury in the car accident and can’t possibly fight back against this crass, thoughtless tactic. And on top of that, you are liars.
Which really says it all about how much they believe themselves in their own ideology. A political movement that claims to have access to certain truths about morality and governance that so-called "leftists" and "socialists" are trying to suppress has to resort to lies to get it’s point across? So where’s all this Truth you guys claim you have over progressives? No. No. They lie, starting with their declared moral and political values, because if they told the truth, that all they really believe in is Might Makes Right, and the absolute rule of the rich and powerful, they’d never get anywhere. They’re scum. Or as Digby says…
This is so loathesome I am literally sick to my stomach. These kids were hurt in a car accident. Their parents could not afford health insurance — and sure as hell couldn’t get it now with a severely handicapped daughter. And these shrieking wingnut jackasses are harassing their family for publicly supporting the program that allowed the kids to get health care. A program, by the way, which a large number of these Republicans support as well.
They went after Michael J. Fox. They went after a wounded Iraq war veteran. Now they are going after handicapped kids. There is obviously no limit to how low these people will go.
It has come to this: Democrats give a twelve year old boy airtime on their weekly address to relate his story about what happened to him and his family when she was in an automobile accident, and they couldn’t afford to pay the bills without the kind of federal help that President Nice Job Brownie just vetoed, and the Bush republican grassroots immediately begin Swift-Boating his family.
Whiskey Fire has some good notes on the obscenity Here. The gutter is bitching about the fact that they own a 3000 square foot rowhouse in Baltimore, that their father owns his own cabinet making business, that the kids are going to a private school with a 20,000 a year tuition. No part of that family’s life is now escaping the smear machine’s attention…right down to the kitchen counter tops…
The current market value of their improved 3,040 SF home at 104 S Collington Ave is unknown but 113 S COLLINGTON AVE, also an end unit, sold for $485,000 this past March and it was only 2,060 SF. A photo taken in the family’s kitchen shows what appears to be a recent remodeling job with granite counter tops and glass front cabinets.
Yeah, and the current market value of my little 1500 sq foot Baltimore rowhouse is about $240,000 but just six years ago I was able to buy it for $89,900, because that was what it’s market value was then. One reason the housing market is still so hot here in Baltimore is that prices in the surrounding suburbs, and Washington D.C., are simply insane. So people of modest means are buying up Baltimore rowhouses in the neighborhoods are that are still fairly safe. One Whiskey Fire commenter puts it thusly:
Let me get this straight. This guy’s a cabinet maker, and these geniuses are leering about how nice his cabinets are?
Given that those people basically live in downtown Baltimore, I’d be willing to bet that they bought a a rundown house in a gentrifying neighborhood on the cheap so that Mr. Frost, who is good with his hands, can fix the place up and they can turn the house around for a profit. His business, which is a couple of blocks away in downtown Baltimore, basically comes from all the people fixing up all the old brownstones in the area.
In the meantime, he has to send his kids to school and the public schools in Baltimore don’t really seem like the ideal option. So he looks around, and finds that he can send them to a private school using their assistance program.
But given that $45000 dollars, while a decent living all things considered, isn’t a whole hell of a lot of money, especially when there are six mouths to feed, after everything’s said and done with he just can’t make things work with health insurance (when it comes down to it, after the mortgage, food, clothes and all the rest of the expenses of raising a family, even another $600 is no small potatos).
Then the children get into a catasrophic accident, the family is suddenly looking at medical bills it can’t pay. They are in such bad straits that the school is doing fundraisers for them. This government program helps them; makes their lives better in a fundamental way.
And these jokers are pissed off about it.
Amazing.
I have a next door neighbor who is doing just that on his rowhouse. He’s a building contractor of some sort, and he redid his own kitchen and it is just fabulous. But you’d expect it to be, or you wouldn’t be wanting him to do your kitchen too. And I have another neighbor who is by no means wealthy, and trying hard to keep his own kids in the Friends school here in Baltimore, rather then public school. The public schools here in the city, thanks in large measure to republican scorched earth attacks on racial equality, cities, and public education, are teetering on the verge of collapse.
So this self employed father does his best to provide for his family, and give his kids a decent education, on $45,000 a year, and his kids are nearly killed in an automobile accident and that family suddenly finds themselves looking into an almost bottomless pit of medical expenses…and the gutter puppies at Powerline and The Free Republic, and professor InstaJackass, think there’s something suspicious about this? No. No. Absolutely not. They know goddamn well there’s nothing wrong with this family’s story. Nothing factually wrong that is. But it was very politically incorrect, and for that the family must not only suffer, it must be publicly run through the wringer as an example to others who might be considering speaking out.
For the Bush base, the Party is the only truth, the only religion, the only morality. When the right wing talks about virtue and morality, what they’re talking about is fealty to the party. Nothing else. That’s how you can run a propaganda steamroller over a twelve year old boy’s family, because she dared to ask the nation to look, really look, at what happened to them.
[Update…] Graeme Frost is a boy, not a girl, as I’d originally written. Obviously I didn’t listen to the radio address that started all this. Sorry guy…
Daily KOS has some facts the Freepers don’t want you to know…
Graeme has a scholarship to a private school. The school costs $15K a year, but the family only pays $500 a year.
His sister Gemma attends another private school to help her with the brain injuries that occurred due to her accident. The school costs $23,000 a year, but the state pays the entire cost.
They bought their “lavish house” sixteen years ago for $55,000 at a time when the neighborhood was less than safe.
Last year, the Frost’s made $45,000 combined. Over the past few years they have made no more than $50,000 combined.
The state of Maryland has found them eligible to participate in the CHIP program.
So Graeme’s sister is actually in a private school because she’s still struggling with injuries from the automobile accident. And their Baltimore rowhouse was bought for considerably less then what it’s worth now…a fact which would only be surprising to someone who didn’t know that housing prices have risen dramatically in the past few years. But see what the Freepers did. They took the current value of the house and related it as though that represented the income level of the owners. They took the cost of tuition at the schools the kids are going to, and related it as though they’d just proven that was what the family was actually paying. They even put photos of the family kitchen under the microscope.
Michelle Malkin, who once posted the names and home phone numbers of University of California students who had organized a protest against military recruiters on campus, is now stalking the family of Graeme Frost. And surely she’s not the only wingnut that wants to get this family somehow, some way, for speaking out, for putting human faces on the American health care crisis. They say that this family is not deserving of support, because it is not destitute. But that something like an automobile accident can drive an essentially middle-class, small business family into destitution is emblematic of Exactly what’s wrong with our health care system. The political movement that waves "family values" as a banner has now officially made American families another enemy in the kulturkampf. The political movement that enshrined free market capitalism as a moral standard more righteous then the Sermon On The Mount has now officially declared small businessmen are the enemy. We are all on the front line now. We are all targets. But of course, we always were.
[Update II…] You gotta love the comments the gutter is leaving on progressive blogs on this. The suggestion being floated now is that the Frost family should have sold their house to pay for their children’s medical expenses. They bought the house for 55 grand and now its worth almost half a million and so the kook pews are saying that means the family is rich and they’re just milking the system like a bunch of liberal welfare junkies. I’ve seen one of them suggest the family sell the house and rent a 1 thousand square foot apartment to make ends meet.
Let’s deconstruct this. The family of six, whose father is a self employed cabinet maker, is making somewhat less then 50 grand a year. The house is 3 thousand square feet, which is good for a family of six. I once rented a 750k sq foot apartment and that rent was costing me by the time I moved out in 2001 800 dollars a month. And that was a One Bedroom apartment. The two bedrooms, which were 1200 sq feet, rented for over a thousand a month. Rents in Baltimore have skyrocketed as the value of homes have skyrocketed, and I doubt you could find a decent 1k sq foot apartment in Baltimore for less then the mortgage this family is currently paying on their house. And it would be at most two bedrooms, which isn’t enough for a family of six.
So in other words, to pay the medical bills incurred because their children were in an automobile accident, and still stay right with the kook pews, this middle class working family should sell the house that’s big enough to raise four kids in, and which they can afford the mortgage on, and move everyone into a one bedroom apartment that will cost them more to rent, and which they’ll never own, and which is too small to raise a family of four children in.
Actually, this is Exactly what would have happened to this family were it not for the Maryland CHIP program. They would have lost their home, and been forced into a downward spiral that so many working poor are. Their living expenses would have gone up, even as their standard of living went down. I never realized how much my own family had been nickeled and dimed to death until I bought my house, and saw all the tax and economic breaks I was suddenly getting.
And the Bush republicans think this is the Right policy. They really think that pushing middle class families into poverty by medical bills is better then having a national health care system that would keep them, and their children out of poverty.
The next time a Bush republican utters the words "Family Values" in your presence, laugh in their face. Oh, and do the same whenever you hear them start yapping about the virtues of small business.
How Much You Want To Bet Ahmanson Is Giving Them Money Too…
Obviously American thugboys aren’t up to the job, so at least in the Pacific states, the hard right is reaching down a little deeper into the gutter. Here comes the next phase in the right wing’s anti-gay jihad: the brownshirts. Only this time, they’re Russian…
On the first day of July, Satender Singh was gay-bashed to death. The 26-year-old Fijian of Indian descent was enjoying a holiday weekend outing at Lake Natoma with three married Indian couples around his age. Singh was delicate and dateless — two facts that did not go unnoticed by a party of Russian-speaking immigrants two picnic tables away.
According to multiple witnesses, the men began loudly harassing Singh and his friends, calling them "7-Eleven workers" and "Sodomites." The Slavic men bragged about belonging to a Russian evangelical church and told Singh that he should go to a "good church" like theirs. According to Singh’s friends, the harassers sent their wives and children home, then used their cell phones to summon several more Slavic men. The members of Singh’s party, which included a woman six months pregnant, became afraid and tried to leave. But the Russian-speaking men blocked them with their bodies.
The pregnant woman said she didn’t want to fight them.
"We don’t want to fight you either," one of them replied in English. "We just want your faggot friend."
One of the Slavic men then sucker-punched Singh in the head. He fell to the ground, unconscious and bleeding. The assailants drove off in a green sedan and red sports car, hurling bottles at Singh’s friends to prevent them from jotting down the license plate. Singh suffered a brain hemorrhage. By the next day, hospital tests confirmed that he was clinically brain dead. His family agreed to remove him from artificial life support July 5.
Outside Singh’s hospital room, more than 100 people held a vigil. Many were Sacramento gay activists who didn’t know Singh personally, but who saw his death as the tragic but inevitable result of what they describe as the growing threat of large numbers of Slavic anti-gay extremists, most of them first- or second-generation immigrants from Russia, the Ukraine and other countries of the former Soviet Union, in their city and others in the western United States.
In recent months, as energetic Russian-speaking "Russian Baptists" and Pentecostals in these states have organized to bring thousands to anti-gay protests, gay rights activists in Sacramento have picketed Slavic anti-gay churches, requested more police patrols in gay neighborhoods and distributed information cards warning gays and lesbians about the hostile Slavic evangelicals who they say have roughed up participants at gay pride events. Singh’s death was the realization of their worst fears.
You should read this whole article, particularly if you’re gay, or have gay friends or family living on the west coast. I’m sure not all Russian immigrants are this violent, but some are affiliated with a church, and a movement, that specifically targets gay people for violence, in exactly the same way the brownshirts once targeted Jews. Understand, this isn’t random violence due to an endemic hatred of gay people. This is organized violence, and it’s organized from within their church…
Gay rights activists blame Singh’s death on what they call "The West Coast connection" or the "U.S.-Latvia Axis of Hate," a reference to a virulent Latvian megachurch preacher [Alexey Ledyaev] who has become a central figure in the hard-line Slavic anti-gay movement in the West. And indeed, in early August, authorities announced that two Slavic men, one of whom had fled to Russia, were being charged in Singh’s death, which they characterized as a hate crime.
A growing and ferocious anti-gay movement in the Sacramento Valley is centered among Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking immigrants. Many of them are members of an international extremist anti-gay movement whose adherents call themselves the Watchmen on the Walls. In Latvia, the Watchmen are popular among Christian fundamentalists and ethnic Russians, and are known for presiding over anti-gay rallies where gays and lesbians are pelted with bags of excrement. In the Western U.S., the Watchmen have a following among Russian-speaking evangelicals from the former Soviet Union. Members are increasingly active in several cities long known as gay-friendly enclaves, including Sacramento, Seattle and Portland, Ore.
Vlad Kusakin, the host of a Russian-language anti-gay radio show in Sacramento and the publisher of a Russian-language newspaper in Seattle, told The Seattle Times in January that God has "made an injection" of high numbers of anti-gay Slavic evangelicals into traditionally liberal West Coast cities. "In those places where the disease is progressing, God made a divine penicillin," Kusakin said.
The anti-gay tactics of the Slavic evangelicals in the U.S. branch of the Watchmen movement are just as crude and even more physically abusive than Fred Phelps’ infamous Westboro Baptist Church, and they’re rooted in gay-bashing theology that’s even more hardcore than the late Jerry Falwell’s. Slavic anti-gay talk radio hosts and fundamentalist preachers routinely deliver hateful screeds on the airwaves and from the pulpit in their native tongue that, were they delivered in English, would be a source of nationwide controversy.
And surprise, surprise, Oregon holocaust revisionist Scott Lively (he of The Pink Triangle fame) is now their "envoy". Lively, as it turns out, and unsurprisingly, also has a connection to the Christian Reconstructionists…
The executive director of the OCA at that time was Scott Lively, a longtime anti-gay activist who is now the chief international envoy for the Watchmen movement. Lively also is the former director of the California chapter of the anti-gay American Family Association and the founder of both Defend the Family Ministries and the Pro-Family Law Center, which claims to be the country’s "only legal organization devoted exclusively to opposing the homosexual political agenda."
The Watchmen movement’s strategy for combating the "disease" of homosexuality calls for aggressive confrontation. "We church leaders need to stop being such, for lack of a better word, sissies when it comes to social and political issues," Lively argues in a widely-circulated tract called Masculine Christianity. "For every motherly, feminine ministry of the church such as a Crisis Pregnancy Center or ex-gay support group we need a battle-hardened, take-it-to-the-enemy masculine ministry like [the anti-abortion group] Operation Rescue."
Lively identifies "the enemy" as not only homosexuals, but also what he terms "homosexualists," a category that includes anyone, regardless of sexual orientation, who "actively promotes homosexuality as morally and socially equivalent to heterosexuality as a basis for social policy."
When he personally confronts the enemy, Lively practices what he preaches when it comes to "battle-hardened" tactics. He recently was ordered by a civil court judge to pay $20,000 to lesbian photojournalist Catherine Stauffer for dragging her by the hair through the halls of a Portland church in 1991.
Lively occasionally writes for Chalcedon Report, a journal published by the Chalcedon Foundation, the leading Christian Reconstructionist organization in the country. (Reconstructionists typically call for the imposition of Old Testament law, including such draconian punishments as stoning to death active homosexuals and children who curse their parents, on the United States.)
Washington State homophobic preacher Ken Hutcherson, who tried to single handedly torpedo that state’s antidiscriminaton law, is also on board with Ledyaev’s brownshirts…
In addition to Lively and Robertson, Ledyaev has cultivated the support of Rev. Ken Hutcherson, the African-American founder of Antioch Bible Church, a Seattle-area megachurch. "Hutch," as the ex-NFL player is known, played a key role in persuading Microsoft to temporarily withdraw its support for a Washington bill that would have made it illegal to fire an employee for their sexual orientation. In 2004, his "Mayday for Marriage" rally drew 20,000 people to the Seattle Mariner’s Safeco Field to oppose legalizing same-sex marriage.
One of Ledyaev’s nephews saw Hutcherson speak in Seattle at a March 2006 debate on gay rights and arranged a meeting with the Latvian pastor. By the end of the year, Hutcherson, Ledyaev and Lively had teamed up with Vlad Kusakin, the editor of The Speaker, to form an international alliance to oppose what Hutcherson characterizes as "the homosexual movement saying they’re a minority and that they need their equal rights."
They took the name Watchmen on the Walls from the Old Testament book of Nehemiah, in which the "watchmen" guard the reconstruction of a ruined Jerusalem. The cities they guard over today, say the contemporary Watchmen, are being destroyed by homosexuality.
"Nehemiah stood by the destroyed city of Jerusalem. So are we standing these days by the ruins of our legislative walls," Ledyaev says on the Watchmen website. "Defending Christianity begins with the restoration of the walls which is where the watchmen should stand up." The group’s mission is "to bring the laws of our nations in[to] full compliance with the law of God."
During the past year, the Watchmen have met twice in the United States, first in Sacramento, then in Bellevue, Wash. They gathered to strategize against same-sex marriage and build a political organization to fight "gay-straight alliances" in public schools and push for the boycott of textbooks that mention homosexuality in any context other than total condemnation.
The group has also convened outside America. In the summer of 2006, the Watchmen and their supporters gathered in Riga, Latvia, to "protect the city from a homosexual invasion." Gay rights activists in Europe counter that it’s gays who need protection from the Latvian capital, not the other way around.
And, indeed, the city is a hotbed of violent homophobia. In 2005, for example, a group of 100 gay activists, most of them from Western Europe and Scandinavia, traveled to Riga to hold a gay rights march that was widely viewed as the first real test of Latvia’s official commitment to freedom of assembly, a requirement for its tentative admission to the European Union in 2004. Under heavy police escort, the gay rights demonstrators walked a few blocks through a gauntlet of ultranationalists, neo-Nazi skinheads, elderly women and youths wearing "I Love New Generation" T-shirts. They were pelted with eggs, rotten tomatoes and plastic bags full of feces.
The mayor of Riga at the time was Janic Smits, a close friend of Pastor Ledyaev and a prominent member of his New Generation Church. During a parliamentary debate on whether sexual orientation should be covered under a national ban on discrimination, Smits quoted the Old Testament: "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them." Last year, Smits was elevated to chair the Latvian Parliament’s Human Rights Commission.
Ledyaev and Lively have both refused to publicly condemn the murder of Satender Singh. The message in that should be as crystal clear to the rest of us, as it is to their followers: Go, and do likewise…
But let it be said that the thuggishness of their flock isn’t limited to attacks on gay people. In the comments to this AlterNet story, one person writes:
I taught in Sacramento. When we had the National Day of Silence at our school, aside from the traditional fundamentalist groups that opposed it, the Russian immigrant kids were down right rude, requiring removal from the class because they couldn’t respect people’s differences. Russian gangs in Sacramento, especially the Rancho Cordova area has been responsible for auto theft and chop shop operations, meth labs, and numerous murders. They are heavily connected through their church, and most of them will tell you that its because of the suppression in the former Soviet Union that their parents experienced. So, what you get is not just a born again mentality, but a born again and uber-survivorish type adherence to their version of scripture.
They are heavily connected through their church. Looks like Ken Hutcherson has found his brothers in Christ. And so the face of the man who once said that to love God, and love your neighbor as yourself, was the highest commandment, is twisted into a gangsters leer. If you thought the insular hatred of the bible belt south was the bottom of the gutter, you were wrong. It has no bottom.
Our right simply to live, never mind to get married or hold down a job, has always been subject to the whims of hate. Now that violent hate is being given an International organization from which to operate, and grow, and thrive. By men of god. In the name of Jesus. But it would be a profound mistake to give this a Russian face. There is violent anti-gay hate in many more parts of the world then Russia. The men who are now developing, and those who are financing, this international anti-gay terrorism force have a large pool of potential soldiers to draw from. They’ve been unsuccessful at turning the western world against its gay sons and daughters, so now they’re reaching out to the east, and the third world. So Ahmanson brings the African church to America, if the American church won’t do his bidding. So he, or other like minded right wing billionaires, may well be reaching out to Russia, and other nations, for willing murderers, to bring the war on gay people back to a satisfactory pace. The new weapon against the American dream of liberty and justice for all, are the people of the lands where the Dream is unknown, or even hated as virulently as the American right hates it.
Your argument boils down to the assertion that America really does accept transgendered people far more than I’m willing to realize and therefore we’d have no problem passing a trans-inclusive ENDA. Great. I’m game. Show me the votes. Show me that you have the votes to pass a trans-inclusive ENDA, that the bill won’t go down in flames, that Democrats won’t be forced en masse to vote in favor of some hideously anti-trans amendment lest they lose their jobs next election, and I’m there for you. You think this is some easy game, that we actually have the votes, but some of us simply don’t like you and find you icky and that’s why we’re concerned. Fine, then I’ll call your bluff. I adore you. Now prove to me that you have the votes to pass ENDA and that your strategy won’t kill this legislation for the next two decades, and you have my support. You have two weeks, which should be ample time considering all of us are lying about there not being enough votes to pass ENDA with trans inclusion.
This is sickening. No John, you don’t "adore" the transgendered. And reading this unmitigated bullshit you call a response I don’t think you even see human beings when you look at them, let alone people who are your neighbors. They’re speed bumps on the road to your place at the table is all they are. Your place at the table. Not ours, everyone’s. Your EDNA is a classified ad reading "No fems, freaks or fatties". Your EDNA is an gay nightclub with a doorman that keeps out all the uncool people. Your EDNA is a circuit party for a-listers only. And that’s your America too, isn’t it John? Why the fuck are you even bothering to call yourself a democrat?
Nothing worse in this poor world then a moron without a conscience, and you’re case in point aren’t you? Prove to You that the votes are there to pass a trans-inclusive ENDA…did you say? How about you prove the votes are there get one actually enacted into law. Bush is going to veto it, the republicans are going to uphold it, and you and every other braying inside the beltway jackass fucking knows that. If anyone is committing political theater here John, it’s you. And oh that it was meaningless. You’re proving not just to the transgendered community, but to all our heterosexual friends, people who have stood at our side, often at great personal cost, that we are as cheap, petty and insular as the homophobic bigots who are the reason we need EDNA. You’re proving to our straight allies that our struggle isn’t about anything more noble and righteous then getting ours, even if we have to put an elbow in the side of a few friends along the way. You’re proving to them that we really are the self absorbed, narcissistic, vainglorious pricks the religious right keeps saying we are.
I’m 54 years old, and I have been fired many times for being gay, back when doing that to gay people was utterly unremarkable. I think I know a thing or two about what it’s like to have to live and work and try to fucking earn a living under those conditions. My lifetime income when all is said and done and my body is laid to rest, will probably work out to around half what it would have been had I simply been more attracted to girls then guys. I’ve had employers tell me to my face that I was being let go because there wasn’t any place for homosexuals in their company. I’ve had them make pathetic excuses for letting me go when we all knew perfectly well the reason why. I’ve had them just show me the door, only to be told later by a co-worker what the problem was. There were times when I had to mow lawns to make ends meet.
I have always laughed at those "studies" that prove that homosexuals make more money then the average American. Where the hell did mine go then? Don’t tell Me I don’t know what’s at stake here if EDNA doesn’t pass. I fucking lived it for decades! Maybe someday you’ll grow a conscience and realize that’s exactly why I cannot look my transgendered neighbors in the face and tell them they’re holding me back and they have to get in line behind me. Who would you do that for John? Who would you get in the back of the bus for?
WASHINGTON, Sept. 20 — The Senate approved a resolution on Thursday denouncing the liberal antiwar group MoveOn.org over an advertisement that questioned the credibility of Gen. David H. Petraeus, the American commander in Iraq.
MoveOn.org, with 3.2 million members, has become a powerful force in Democratic politics and the advertisement it paid for, which appeared in The New York Times, has come under sharp attack from Congressional Republicans and others as unpatriotic and impugning the integrity of General Petraeus.
Damn those dastardly democrats! Impugning the integrity of a war veteran! Is there no low they won’t sink too!!!
Like…oh…this for instance…?
At a White House news conference, President Bush called the advertisement disgusting and said it was an attack not only on General Petraeus but also on the entire American military.
I got your disgusting right here Junior…
You want a civil debate on the issues? Fuck Off! pls? kthxbye…
The “values voters” seem (so far) to be obsessed about homosexuality. And the candidates that showed up to pander are playing right along. They all weighed in on how to oppose “the homosexual agenda” with only Ron Paul hedging his anti-gay attitudes in terms of libertarianism.
Libertarianism…did you say…?
Every single candidate present would veto ENDA, would support a federal marriage amendment, and would support healthcare policies that would reward a “moral” lifestyle.
Emphasis mine. Ron is the kind of libertarian who would have (and probably did as far as I know) joined in the celebrations over the supreme court decision in Hardwick v. Bowers back in 1986, which upheld the sodomy laws. It was a "state’s rights" thing see. Now of course, it’s Let’s Let The Federal Government Define What Is And What Is Not A Family.
State’s Rights. Libertarianism.
[Update…] In the comments to that post, Ron Paul’s supporters note that Paul is apparently "on the record" as being against FMA. However, that seems not to have been a record Paul was willing to share with the Values Voters. Apparently he weaseled his way around the question.
See…this is the thing I noticed even back in the 1970s about many libertarians. You can appeal to a lot of people by saying the government should get the hell out of (insert what government does that you despise most here), so long as you mute the part about wanting to dismantle (insert what government does that you really like here). And almost without exception those libertarians who did that, turned out to be mostly right wing conservatives, wrapping themselves in libertarian language, trying to convince liberals that government is more a source of all our troubles, then a means to any good end. They’ve been singing that tune since…oh…back around when the feds started desegregating the public schools…
I won’t deny that there are libertarians who would be perfectly willing to get up on that Values Voter stage, look that audience right in the eye, and tell them if they want the government to leave them alone, it has to leave their neighbors alone too. They’d be tossing those votes away of course, but they’d say it. Paul apparently, couldn’t bring himself that day to stand on…you know…principle. There’s probably a reason for that.
The Fine Art Of Inciting Violence While Preaching Decency
Of course you knew that it isn’t only gay folk that the mayor of Fort Lauderdale is contemptuous of…
"Atheists and Criminal Lobbying Union" regarding the meaning of the acronym ACLU.
New Times, October 26, 2000
"I’m supposed to subsidize some schlock sitting on the sofa and drinking a beer, who won’t work more than 40 hours a week?" (On a proposed affordable housing ordinance)
Sun-Sentinel, May 20, 2006
Regarding a proposal to reduce greenhouse gases, calling it "hate-America stuff" concocted by "a bunch of scientists meeting in Paris who’ve had too much wine.”
Sun-Sentinel May 9, 2007
“The Scum-Sentinel is an advertising tabloid newsblog. They hire reporters and they make them churn out stories without making them get into anything in depth. They do that to feign a resemblance to a real newspaper so that they can sell advertising. And the Sentinel tries to lecture me about affordable housing? I tell people that the day I take advice from a company that has vagrants selling their products in the middle of the street, we’re all in trouble."
New Times, April 21, 2006
“I think a strong rope and a stiff tree would be better than wasting all that electricity.”
New Times (Broward Palm Beach Edition), October 26, 2000
As they say, scratch a homophobe and you find a rat’s nest of assorted other prejudices and cheap bar stool conceits. And given his steady and sure record of flipping the middle finger to his critics, I sorta figured he’d make some aggressive asshole comeback to the county commissioners act last week, of voting him off the tourism board. What I didn’t expect was that he’d surround himself with men dressed in paramilitary uniform, calling for a cleansing of sin from Fort Lauderdale…
Anti-gay Mayor Jim "250K robo-potty" Naugle has so polarized matters in Fort Lauderdale that press conferences and demonstrations are getting tense, according to Jeff Black of UNITE Fort Lauderdale, which is sponsoring a Faith Press Conference today, will feature speakers from many denominations and religions to discuss unity, inclusiveness, and acceptance.
Inclusiveness was not on the agenda on Tuesday as members of homophobic black churches, stood with Mayor Naugle at City Hall preaching they are going to take back the city, removing the sin and sinners. Religious men — in paramilitary gear — were also standing aside the mayor bleating that "the depth of sexual sin in Broward County necessitates an old-fashioned spiritual revival." From Jeff’s email to me:
They escorted me from the front door to the elevator when I entered the building today for this press conference, and stood ‘post’ at the elevator lobby. The video is frightening, worse was I was standing in the room with these people and worried what was going to happened next.
An initial check into who or what the Koinonia Worship Center is, turned up only a MySpace page…
I tried to find out information on the group but was only able to find a MySpace profile which included an audio track. The audio track is of a military leader talking to a subordinate and explaining how they are in the battle to take back what they have lost for the black man while in the background you hear gun fire and battle sounds.
What I’m hearing on this page is scary. "Special OPS (operations) Units" of the church. References to "Exercising Spiritual Authority"?
Nice. Until today I thought Naugle was just another homophobic barstool buffoon. But no…he’s a thug; a grown man with a schoolyard bully’s sense of justice and the moral scruples of your average drug syndicate gangster. Watching that video, there is no mistaking what he’s doing in it for what it is. Bracketed by men in paramilitary uniform calling for spiritual warfare, saying they will "take back the land" and that "God hates the act of homosexuality" and telling the mayor "we will fight with you", James Naugle stood in the mayor’s office and made a threat. He said to the Gay community, and to any heterosexuals who might be thinking of standing in solidarity with us, get off my back faggots…or you’ll be sorry.
Ninth Commandement? What Ninth Commandment…? (continued)
Oregon Magazine, they of such informative and thoughtful jourmalmalism like Hippies History Channel History is a Bad Trip ("They (the hippies) were all Leftists. Teenagers, young adults, old folks driving a spray-painted VW van — they were all the same."), the hard hitting online magazine bearing a picture of John Wayne standing in front of an American flag with the quote, "Now, just why in the HELL do I have to press ‘1’ for English?", brings us this alarming news about the Vast Homosexual Conspiracy…
Florida Mayor Jim Naugle has been under rapid fire assault from homosexual activists and liberal media for asking people simply to obey the law and to be responsible and respectful to families and children.
No shit…this crap showed up in Google News. And not just buried somewhere in the "all 3791 news articles" link, but right on the fucking news home page. I’ve noticed lately that whatever algorithm Google uses to determine what stories actually make the front page, it’s tracking a tad to the right…particularly when it comes to news regarding the gay community. Next thing I know I’ll be seeing press releases from PFOX. Oh…wait…I have. But more on that later…
Naugle, you may recall, is the prize jackass who in his last term as Mayor of Fort Lauderdale Florida, decided to go on an anti-gay jihad, accusing gay folks of making Broward County the nation’s AIDS capital and having public orgies in the beach toilets, despite being inconveniently contradicted on both counts by the Largest HIV/AIDS Healthcare Provider in the United States and his own police department. The Broward County Commissioners voted unanimously last week to remove the mayor from his seat on the tourism board for the damage he’s been doing to the attractiveness of the oceanside city to tourists, that they’ve worked so hard to cultivate since Naugle decided that Fort Lauderdale didn’t need to be a Spring Break destination anymore.
But the man has his defenders, at least in the "Now, just why in the HELL do I have to press ‘1’ for English" crowd, and Oregon Magazine would like us all to know that, in fact, having sex in public is just what the militant homosexual agenda is all about…
Members of the activist community in Fort Lauderdale and elsewhere are actually coming out in defense of public "gay"
sex. The homosexual legal group, LAMBDA Legal calls such public sex a civil right in their "little black book," and encourages such behavior.
The lousy formatting on that paragraph is theirs because I wouldn’t want to be accused of altering any of their breathless prose. And don’t bother clicking on the link they’ve provided because like the paragraph formatting and a lot of everything else that’s on the pages of Oregon Magazine, it’s a tad fucked up. But if you go to the Lamba Legal web site, and search for it, you can find the pamphlet they’re talking about, Here.
While Lambda Legal and other groups are fighting against the ways police target men who have sex with men, having sex where others might see you and take offense can subject you to arrest, publicity and other serious consequences. If you feel unsafe, you should leave.
Nowhere in that document is having sex in public called a civil right. The document is full of warnings about the risks involved, both legal and to your health, and the low probability of successfully fighting the charges.
Be aware that undercover cops may be “cruising” to arrest you. A cop doesn’t have to tell you he’s a cop, even if you ask. If you’re cruising for sex and an undercover cop hits on you, what you do can still be a crime. Don’t count on proving the cop “entrapped” you (which is difficult). Talk to your lawyer if you think you were set up.
How you can read the words "what you do can still be a crime" and think they say "public sex is a civil right", I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect it has something to do with wondering why you have to press ‘1’ for English. And it doesn’t sound very encouraging to me either. On the other hand if you’re the kind that thinks that just telling the accused that they still have…you know…constitutional rights…amounts to encouraging crime then maybe your mileage varies. Or maybe you’re just a dickwad. Say…what was that you folks were saying about hippies ….? Oh…yeah…
Hey, hippie. You want to see an authoritarian style, regimented, intolerant government? They’re all over the place. One type is dedicated to the ideas of Marx. The other is dedicated to the ideas of Islamic extremism.
Oh heaven forfend America should become anything like a Marxist dictatorship where people don’t have…you know…the right to talk to an attorney or anything…
And speaking of lying conniving dickwads…over at Ex-Gay Watch, it looks like they’ve caught PFOX telling another whopper giving people the facts about militant homosexuality…
This past Tuesday, PFOX posted some disturbing news. While innocently offering “materials on same-sex attraction and tolerance for the ex-gay community to a hungry public” at the Arlington County Fair, Arlington Va (Aug 15-19), they claim their representatives were viciously attacked, both verbally and physically, by “gay activists” who had also set up a booth at the fair.
Wow…that’s just so…so Wrong! Damn those militant homosexuals!
Since PFOX stated that the police were “summoned” and that they “ejected the gay man off the fairgrounds” we decided to check with the Arlington County Police Department. Focus on the Family reports through CitizenLink that “Officers kicked the gay activists out of the fair and encouraged the PFOX volunteer to press charges, but he chose not to.” So depending on the account, we have one or more officers responding to a complaint of assault, recommending that the victim file charges, and then ejecting one or more “gay activists” from the fairgrounds. Surely the Arlington PD would know if one or more of their officers participated in such an action. What good would it do to eject them if others in charge were not also made aware so they could make sure they didn’t come back?
We contacted the Arlington PD and ended up speaking with John Lisle of the Media Relations/Legislative Affairs Office. He had no initial knowledge of such an incident. After checking briefly, he again said that no one was aware of such an incident. So we sent a copy of the PFOX statement to him at which time he agreed to check more thoroughly. After over two days of research, there was nothing he could add to his statement; no report exists and no one recalls such an incident.
Whoops!
Ex-Gay Watch was also rude enough to check with Denise Marshall Roller, the Event Manager for the fair, who said that their call was the first she had heard that there were any problems of that sort at the fair…and she was there. Most of the time she said, near the officer in charge. So it would appear that not only do militant homosexual activists go around attacking decent people who only want to expose the sordid truth about homosexuality, they can also warp the space time continuum to conveniently hide their evil deeds after the fact. Or maybe they have the power to cloud men’s minds…
You will remember nothing of this incident…there was no vicious attack…
the PFOX booth was not disturbed…no homosexuals were at
the PFOX booth…there is no such thing as a homosexual…
Next thing you know they’ll be bitching about Why The Hell Do I Have To Press ‘1’ For Heterosexual…?
We’re The Moral Values Party…The Party Is The Moral Value…
Glen Greenwald has a good post up about the somewhat different reactions from the kook pews to Larry Craig’s first outing, verses his second…
The reaction to the Larry Craig story provides one of the most vivid illustrations yet of how the right-wing movement works. Last October, just weeks before the midterm election, gay activist Mike Rogers reported that the married, GOP "family values" Senator repeatedly had sex with anonymous men in public bathrooms. His report was based on "extensive research," including interviews with several men whom Craig solicited for bathroom sex.
As Rogers argued at the time, the story was relevant — just as the Vitter prostitute story was — in light of Craig’s frequent political exploitation of issues of sexual morality and his opposition to virtually every gay rights bill. Rogers’ story, as a factual matter, seemed relatively credible, both because of his history of accurate outings and because there is no discernible reason why, if he were intent on fabricating, he would single out someone as obscure as Larry Craig, who was not even up for re-election.
Nonetheless, it is hard to overstate the intense fury that this pre-election report triggered from the Right — not at Senator Craig for engaging in this behavior, but at Rogers for reporting it.
The "Then" and "Now" examples Greenwald gives make it sickeningly clear that the problem for the Party Of Moral Values was the election, and not Craig’s behavior.
Last year, in excoriating Mike Rogers for reporting about Craig’s bathroom sex, Dean Barnett said:
I’m sorry if this topic causes embarrassment to Larry Craig and his family, but I assume by now they’ve figured out that politics in 2006 is a thoroughly rotten business. . . .
THE FIRST LEFT WING PATHOLOGY "OUTED" by the Craig story is the relentless meanness that characterizes modern day liberalism. . . .BUT MOST DAMNING OF THE LEFT is the casual assumption of group-think that this exercise demonstrates. The logic is that if you’re gay, you must therefore support gay marriage. What’s more, you must support everything that someone like Glenn Greenwald supports. To do otherwise evidences self-hatred and a betrayal of the cause.
But today, Barnett — based on reports of the exact same behavior from Craig — demanded that Craig resign from the Senate and said this:
AS TO THE SERIOUS QUESTION OF whether or not Senator Craig should resign, that one’s a no-brainer for someone like me who thought David Vitter should have stepped down. To lead millions of people, one needs at least a modicum of moral stature. Both politicians forfeited that stature when they engaged in their off-campus hijinks . . . .
Vitter falls into the same category. You can’t preen as a moralist and then seek out the services of a prostitute. If Vitter (or Craig or Clinton) had positioned themselves as libertarian libertines, then their private diddlings would have been none of our concern. But all three made a habit of saluting good old All-American family values. How a ranking public office-holder can be so thoroughly revealed as a hypocrite and still cling to his position is beyond me.
I would honestly pay money to watch someone try to reconcile those two positions. Last October, Barnett depicted Rogers as an "odious presence" for violating Craig’s privacy based on purely private behavior that was none of anyone’s business. Today, the same Barnett demands that Craig resign from the Senate, and invokes exactly the rationale which Rogers and other "outers" use to justify these disclosures ("How a ranking public office-holder can be so thoroughly revealed as a hypocrite and still cling to his position is beyond me").
Finally, and rather hilariously, Barnett defends Hewitt’s demand that Craig resign but Vitter need not as follows: "Where one draws the line on such matters is arbitrary, so I don’t think anyone’s being hypocritical if they say Vitter can stay and Craig must go."
Apparently, what matters is to have moral standards, even if they are completely incoherent, arbitrary and applied solely to suit one’s personal biases and political interests [Vitter’s resignation would be for heterosexual encounters and would lead to appointment of a Democratic replacement (hence Hewitt opposes it), while Craig’s resignation would be for gay sex and would lead to a GOP replacement (hence Hewitt favors it)]. It might be totally "arbitrary," says Barnett, but at least it is a moral standard.
Right. As Garrison Keillor said after the 2000 "election" of President Nice Job Brownie, they’re republicans first, and Americans second. What benefits The Party is morally right, because it benefits The Party. That’s the standard. Everything else from God to Abortion to Same Sex Marriage is just a hook to get the rubes into the voting booths. They don’t give a good goddamn about any of that. They just want power.
The Idaho Values Alliance–"Making Idaho the Friendliest Place in the World to Raise a Family"–is going to have a hard time swallowing the latest news about its beloved Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID), who pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct for lewd conduct in an airport restroom.
Here’s one page of the group’s site, a news update where it praises Craig for his "pro-life" vote on stem cell research, followed by a "Bonus Byte" on the perils of homosexuality and airport restrooms:
One of the tragic characteristics of the homosexual lifestyle is its emphasis on anonymous sex and multiple sexual partners. It is a little-acknowledged secret that many active homosexuals will have more than 1,000 sex partners over the course of a lifetime…
Figure at age 53 I should have had at least 6 or 7 hundred of those by now. I’ve laid down with exactly six guys in my entire lifetime. That’s one less then these kooks claim is the average for heterosexuals, and I figure one of those times really shouldn’t count because nothing really happened. So somebody, some royal son of a bitch, took my share of all that fabulous gay sex I keep hearing about…and when I get my hands on him I’m going to throttle him…
This sordid fact of homosexual life surfaced yesterday in an AP article yesterday that reports on the number of arrests police have made for indecent exposure and public sex acts in the restrooms at Atlanta’s airport, the busiest in the world. The increased restroom patrols, begun to apprehend luggage thieves, instead uncovered a rash of sex crimes. Airport restrooms have become so popular that men looking for anonymous sexual trysts with other men have advertised their airport availability on Craigslist. One such ad was from a man saying he was stuck at the airport for three hours and was looking for “discreet, quick action.”
He wouldn’t have been from Boise…by any chance…?
This Idaho Values Alliance was (until lately one would have to suppose) a big supporter of Larry Craig’s. Point of fact, according to Marshall…
What are the odds of a piece on airport restroom trysts appearing below a picture of Larry Craig in a conservative group’s newsletter, not to mention the reference to Craigslist?
See…this is what I meant in that last post, when I said that Craig was only behaving the way the right wing culture he was swimming in told him homosexuals behave. I won’t deny that there are gay people who are into the quick anonymous hooking up sex scene…but that’s no more the whole of gay life then Baltimore’s Block amounts to the whole of heterosexual life. Don’t tell me that there aren’t a lot of heterosexuals who get into all that crap too. Back in the 70s the only places where I could find copies of the local Washington gay paper (The Blade) and The Advocate, were seedy adult bookstores. I got an eyeful in those days of what heterosexuals were up to.
But crackpots like The Idaho Values Alliance aren’t saying merely that having sex in toilets is something most homosexuals do…they’re saying that To Be Homosexual, Is To Have Sex In Bathrooms. Or in other words, Homosexuals Don’t Love, They Just Have Sex. And tragically, a lot of gay people grow up believing that of themselves. Homosexuality doesn’t drag people into the gutter. Homosexuals are pushed into it. By…you know…decent god fearing people. Morally righteous people who have no trouble whatsoever teaching gay kids that homosexuality is nothing but cheap random empty sex in toilets, and then congratulating themselves on their heterosexuality when those kids grow up acting like they were taught to act.
Senators aren’t the only folks these days with their reputations in the toilet. American journalism is also looking pretty squalid. The chatter around the net, after Senator Larry Craig’s arrest and guilty plea for lewd conduct, was that reporter Dan Popkey of The Idaho Statesman had been working on a pretty explosive investigation into Craig’s past sexual conduct, and uncovered the arrest and guilty plea for lewd behavior last June, and that Popkey’s story got trashcanned after Craig’s lawyers sat down and had a little chat with the editor and the publisher of his home state newspaper.
Well…I guess on the principle that there’s no point in sitting on the story now, The Idaho Statesman has finally gone ahead and published what looks like a slightly updated version of Popkey’s story. Here it is:
Idaho senator pleads guilty to disorderly conduct after incident at Minnesota airport that echoes previous allegation of homosexual conduct.
…
In an interview on May 14, Craig told the Idaho Statesman he’d never engaged in sex with a man or solicited sex with a man. The Craig interview was the culmination of a Statesman investigation that began after a blogger accused Craig of homosexual sex in October. Over five months, the Statesman examined rumors about Craig dating to his college days and his 1982 pre-emptive denial that he had sex with underage congressional pages.
The most serious finding by the Statesman was the report by a professional man with close ties to Republican officials. The 40-year-old man reported having oral sex with Craig at Washington’s Union Station, probably in 2004. The Statesman also spoke with a man who said Craig made a sexual advance toward him at the University of Idaho in 1967 and a man who said Craig "cruised" him for sex in 1994 at the REI store in Boise. The Statesman also explored dozens of allegations that proved untrue, unclear or unverifiable.
Craig, 62, was elected to Congress in 1980. Should he win re-election in 2008 and complete his term, he would be the longest-serving Idahoan ever in Congress. His record includes a series of votes against gay rights and his support of a 2006 amendment to the Idaho Constitution that bars gay marriage and civil unions.
The article is lengthy and pretty detailed and reading it you get a better grasp of the rest of the iceburg that was lurking under the news reports of Craig’s airport men’s room arrest. It starts with his sudden and head turning pre-emptive denial back in 1982 that he’d ever had sex with a congressional page, and flits from one men’s room to another…with a brief detour back to his college fraternity days.
Craig told the Statesman he was unaware of rumors about him being gay going back to his college days. Craig had about 150 fraternity brothers at Delta Chi during his U of I years.
The Statesman interviewed 41 of them. Of those 41, three said there were jokes about him being effeminate and possibly gay. Most said that had Craig been thought to be gay, he would have never become a leader in the fraternity and the student body.
As president of Delta Chi, Craig secured a $100,000 loan to remodel the fraternity house, instituted study hours, and blackballed members for drug use. They called him "Mother Craig" for his officiousness.
…
Most of Craig’s college friends say he was disciplined, studious and serious, even if he was awkward with women.
One woman who dated him off and on for a year asked not to be named, but said, "I don’t imagine that he ever held my hand. He was into the gotta-hold-the-door-for-the-woman sort of thing. But I always felt like I was an accessory. I might as well have been his briefcase."
Lady…the word is ‘beard’. One student who had been considering pledging with Craig’s fraternity told the reporter that Craig had taken him back to his room and made a pass at him. Craig denied it, as he denied the story of the man who said he cruised him at the REI store in Boise, and the man who said he’d had sex with Craig in the men’s room at Union Station in Washington D.C.
I want to feel some sympathy for Craig…the religious right’s long war on human sexuality has left a lot of Americans with twisted up sex lives…but I can’t. He made himself as much a part of the right wing machine as any Dobson or Falwell and whether that was his way of transferring his own self loathing onto everyone else, or he really does hate humanity as much as his neighbors in the kook pews, it doesn’t matter. While he was cruising the toilets for sex, he was busy bashing gay people who were trying to make something fine and decent and whole out of their lives. He tried to cut off our wedding rings, at the same time his own was peeping out from under toilet stall walls. It’s unforgivable.
But Craig is what you get when you apply the religious right’s teachings on homosexuality. He was everything the religious right said a homosexual should be. Self-loathing and dedicated to maintaining a heterosexual pretense regardless of the cost to himself, or to others.
In the May 14 interview, Craig and his wife listened to a four-minute excerpt of the Statesman’s interview with the 40-year-old man who first spoke to Rogers. At first, Craig objected to the man’s anonymity, but agreed to listen. The man’s voice was disguised.
Craig said the man is an activist. "The gay movement, we know it for what it is. It’s now aggressive and it’s liberal and it’s naming people to try to put them in compromising, difficult situations."
Suzanne Craig’s eyes reddened and filled with tears as she listened. After her husband’s denial, she said, "I’m incensed that you would even consider such a piece of trash as a credible source."
To which Craig added, "Jiminy God!"
I hope she saves a bit of the blame for all of this, for all the fundamentalist pulpit thumpers that keep screaming at Americans that sex is a shameful and dirty thing, and that there is nothing more shameful and dirty and perverted, then to be a homosexual. Craig was only doing that day in that men’s room, what they’d told him all his life that homosexuals do.
Roll Call is reporting that Sen. Larry Craig, an Idaho Republican, was arrested earlier this summer in a men’s room at the Minneapolis airport by an undercover officer investigating complaints about sexual activity. The Capitol Hill newspaper says it obtained the arrest report.
…
According to the incident report, Sgt. Dave Karsnia was working as a plainclothes officer on June 11 investigating civilian complaints regarding sexual activity in the men’s public restroom in which Craig was arrested.
Airport police previously had made numerous arrests in the men’s restroom of the Northstar Crossing in the Lindbergh Terminal in connection with sexual activity.
Karsnia entered the bathroom at noon that day and about 13 minutes after taking a seat in a stall, he stated he could see “an older white male with grey hair standing outside my stall.”
The man, who lingered in front of the stall for two minutes, was later identified as Craig.
“I could see Craig look through the crack in the door from his position. Craig would look down at his hands, ‘fidget’ with his fingers, and then look through the crack into my stall again. Craig would repeat this cycle for about two minutes,” the report states.
Craig then entered the stall next to Karsnia’s and placed his roller bag against the front of the stall door.
“My experience has shown that individuals engaging in lewd conduct use their bags to block the view from the front of their stall,” Karsnia stated in his report. “From my seated position, I could observe the shoes and ankles of Craig seated to the left of me.”
Craig was wearing dress pants with black dress shoes.
“At 1216 hours, Craig tapped his right foot. I recognized this as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct. Craig tapped his toes several times and moves his foot closer to my foot.
I moved my foot up and down slowly. While this was occurring, the male in the stall to my right was still present. I could hear several unknown persons in the restroom that appeared to use the restroom for its intended use. The presence of others did not seem to deter Craig as he moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot which was within my stall area,” the report states.
Craig then proceeded to swipe his hand under the stall divider several times, and Karsnia noted in his report that “I could … see Craig had a gold ring on his ring finger as his hand was on my side of the stall divider.”
Karsnia then held his police identification down by the floor so that Craig could see it. “With my left hand near the floor, I pointed towards the exit. Craig responded, ‘No!’ I again pointed towards the exit. Craig exited the stall with his roller bags without flushing the toilet. … Craig said he would not go. I told Craig that he was under arrest, he had to go, and that I didn’t want to make a scene. Craig then left the restroom.”
In a recorded interview after his arrest, Craig “either disagreed with me or ‘didn’t recall’ the events as they happened,” the report states.
Craig stated “that he has a wide stance when going to the bathroom and that his foot may have touched mine,” the report states. Craig also told the arresting officer that he reached down with his right hand to pick up a piece of paper that was on the floor.
“It should be noted that there was not a piece of paper on the bathroom floor, nor did Craig pick up a piece of paper,” the arresting officer said in the report.
* Voted YES on constitutional ban of same-sex marriage. (Jun 2006)
* Voted NO on adding sexual orientation to definition of hate crimes. (Jun 2002)
* Voted NO on expanding hate crimes to include sexual orientation. (Jun 2000)
* Voted YES on prohibiting same-sex marriage. (Sep 1996)
* Voted NO on prohibiting job discrimination by sexual orientation. (Sep 1996)
I could … see Craig had a gold ring on his ring finger as his hand was on my side of the stall divider.” If there’s one image you can take away from the George Bush years, one defining moment that sums up perfectly the condition of the right wing gutter, the moral compass of the William Bennett’s, James Dobsons, Jerry Falwells and Charles Krauthammers of the American right…here it is: the hand of a senator who voted for the federal marriage amendment, furtively moving under a toilet stall wall, the gold wedding band on his ring finger glinting in the pale florescent light as he tries to proposition the vice cop in the stall next to his. You could write volumes about the degeneracy of the American right wing, and not capture it as utterly, as elegantly, as that one profoundly sickening image does. It is perfect.
Marriage is a sacred thing the right insists…and so it is. For couples in love the wedding band is a symbol of one of this life’s most perfect joys. But to the right it is no more then a cheap status symbol…like owning a Bentley, or having white skin. Something to denote privilege, status, rank. Certainly nothing to do with love and desire, trust and devotion. Whether Larry Craig is a homosexual, or a heterosexual man with some pretty major sexual issues, it makes no difference. When he consigned the sex lives of his gay neighbors to the toilet, he consigned his own sex life there too. Love keeps no balance sheet, acknowledges no rank, bows to no prejudice. The one who doesn’t know this, has either never loved, or never loved anyone more then they loved rank and status. The ring knew where it belonged.
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Let me get this straight. This guy’s a cabinet maker, and these geniuses are leering about how nice his cabinets are?
Given that those people basically live in downtown Baltimore, I’d be willing to bet that they bought a a rundown house in a gentrifying neighborhood on the cheap so that Mr. Frost, who is good with his hands, can fix the place up and they can turn the house around for a profit. His business, which is a couple of blocks away in downtown Baltimore, basically comes from all the people fixing up all the old brownstones in the area.
In the meantime, he has to send his kids to school and the public schools in Baltimore don’t really seem like the ideal option. So he looks around, and finds that he can send them to a private school using their assistance program.
But given that $45000 dollars, while a decent living all things considered, isn’t a whole hell of a lot of money, especially when there are six mouths to feed, after everything’s said and done with he just can’t make things work with health insurance (when it comes down to it, after the mortgage, food, clothes and all the rest of the expenses of raising a family, even another $600 is no small potatos).
Then the children get into a catasrophic accident, the family is suddenly looking at medical bills it can’t pay. They are in such bad straits that the school is doing fundraisers for them. This government program helps them; makes their lives better in a fundamental way.
And these jokers are pissed off about it.
Amazing.