If one reads the news coverage following pretty much any Love Won Out conference it quickly becomes obvious they are attended primarily by family, friends and clergy rather than actual ex-gays or gays. As I’ve stood at the driveways to churches where Love Won Out is hosted I’ve seen too many cars pass by with children in the back seat, looks of sheer fear and dread on their faces, their parents unable to reconcile their faith with their child’s sexuality.
I’ve seen that horrific spectacle myself, while standing on a protest line outside of Love In Action. Last summer I watched while one car drove out of Love In Action with a very young, very miserable looking teenage boy in the back seat. He put a a spiral notebook up to his face to hide it as the car approached the picket line, his parents sat in the front seats with angry faces. Not five minutes before, I had been told by one of the protest organizers that an LIA staffer had assured him there were no underage kids attending Refuge that year. And as it turns out, John Smid, the child abusing leader of that little cult, is trolling the Exodus Love Won Out conferences for fresh blood…
“I go to every Love Won Out conference,” Smid said, “and 60% of those who attend are parents. It’s primarily a ministry to parents, that’s their goal.”
Which is just as a lot of us thought. Parents are really the only significant growth opportunity left to the ex-gay snakeoil salesmen. Especially fundamentalist parents who can be terrified into forcing their kids into undergoing ex-gay therapy. Which John insists really does work…
“The world is bombarding us with the lie that [homosexuals] should not change, cannot change, that it’s harmful to change,” said John Smid of Love in Action (LIA). “The media is bombarding people with those lies.”
The wall is yellow John.
He said parents want to know how to build a respectful relationship with their children, which is necessary before they can help their children escape the tentacles of a homosexual lifestyle.
Oh really? I was at the protest against the Love Won Out conference in Silver Spring last year, and a former "client" of John’s, Lance Carroll, was there on the protest line too. Lance was also at the Love In Action protest in Memphis last summer, and spoke to reporters there about his experience as an unwilling participant in John’s Refuge program for teens. Like other teens who have been through the "program", Lance was forced into it by his parents, a situation that John happily goes along with, I guess in the name of building respectful relationships. But what was really heartbreaking about Lance’s story, was what happened to him after he left LIA. His situation at home became even more abusive, to the point where the boy was being beaten up and he had to get the hell out of there. Now there’s a respectful relationship for you. And it only cost his parents $10,000.00.
Lance expressed the hope several times to me while standing on that picket line, that John would come out and talk to him. Of course he didn’t. If you don’t acknowledge the people in your life that you have failed, then you can say you have not failed anyone. And cash the checks with a somewhat clear conscience.
Smid says family involvement is crucial to give the client the best shot at restoration in his or her life. Many other ministries have used LIA’s materials to start their own outreach, notable among them Focus on the Family’s Love Won Out conferences. Not only did Focus on the Family adopt LIA materials and resources, but the ministry was pioneered by LIA graduates.
Materials let it be said, created by someone whose own family life is somewhat less then perfect, apparently. This is something I hadn’t heard before, but it’s strikingly unsurprising:
“Healing from the causes of homosexuality takes time,” Smid said. Again, his own experience brings a poignant focus on the needs he still faces in his restoration process. One of his deepest prayers is to reach reconciliation with his daughters. Those dysfunctional family relationships – consequences of his own poor choices – now fuel his passion for LIA to serve the whole family.
So to recap: he’s a self loathing gay man who spent his entire life running away from what he is, he’s on somewhat less then good terms with his own children, and he’s getting thousands of dollars from the parents to teach them, he claims, how to build respectful relationships with their gay children. Swell. Next time my roof needs fixing I think I’ll call a carpenter whose house has fallen apart. Sure…I can hold a hammer. Watch me hit myself in the head with this one. Watch me do it again…
You see this over and over again in this struggle…people who are thoroughly obsessed with fighting the homosexual demon, that turn out to have painful family lives. Maybe it’s a gay kid they loath. Maybe it’s a gay parent. Maybe it’s a failed marriage. Maybe it’s their own failure to be the parents their kids need them to be. But whatever it is in their own family lives they’re unhappy with, rather then accept responsibility for it they turn outward, looking for scapegoats. And for thousands of years, gay people have played the role of human scapegoats for the intimate failures of heterosexuals…and those who wish they were heterosexual. I wonder if John was having trouble with his daughters the day he told Tom Ottosen "I would rather you commit suicide than have you leave Love In Action wanting to return to the gay lifestyle." What I don’t wonder now is what John would have told Ottosen’s parents had he actually done that. Nothing. The man who could not so much as bring himself to walk over to Lance Carroll and acknowledge Lance felt so badly about how he was treated inside Love In Action…not even to apologize for it, just to acknowledge it…would have said nothing to Ottosen’s parents if their son had died as a result of John’s advice. Of that I am absolutely certain. The man who instructs his unwilling charges that they have to "be honest, authentic, and real", has a long familiarity with running away from his own issues.
"I’m looking at that wall and suddenly I say it’s blue," Smid said, pointing to a yellow wall. "Someone else comes along and says, ‘No, it’s gold.’ But I want to believe that wall is blue. Then God comes along and He says, ‘You’re right, John, [that yellow wall] is blue.’ That’s the help I need. God can help me make that [yellow] wall blue."
The wall is yellow John.
"Basically, their form of therapy is conditioning. It’s a negative reinforcement of shame. Anything that you connect to homosexuality, you connect to shame within yourself. You internalize this hatred toward yourself, this homophobia, this embarrassment…two months, every day, morning and evening, they would take turns. A person would get up and you would literally shame them for their feelings…"
-Lance Carroll
You don’t build respectful relationships on such a foundation as this. You can’t. When you rip apart someone from within like this, you aren’t doing it to make them a better person. You do it, to punish them for existing. You do it, so they will never rise above you, will never become the fully realized human beings that you never could yourself. The staringly obvious thing about this assault on gay teens is that it isn’t about healing them, let alone bringing their families together. Just look at the indifference toward them after they’ve left the "program". This is about destroying the person within. Nothing else. John Smid is doing nothing more noble and righteous then making himself a willing pawn in the big boy’s Kultar Kampf, so he can fill the void inside of him with the lost hopes and dreams of young adults and helpless teenagers. Probably, they remind him of himself the day he took his own hopes and dreams around behind the barn and killed them. The big boys, the rich and powerful of the American hard core right wing, do it out of a bottomless hatred of the human spirit, which does not willingly accept their whips and chains. But for the likes of John, it is more personal, more focused, more intimate. Every light he manages to snuff out within a young person’s heart, justifies the choices he made in life that left darkness inside his own. That’s why he does it. In a larger sense, that’s why they all do it. It matters not if it leaves a family in ruins. Just so long as it leaves the kid’s heart in ruins.
On the January 15 edition of Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, host Bill O’Reilly said of Shawn Hornbeck — who was abducted at the age of 11, held for four years, and recently found in Missouri — that "there was an element here that this kid liked about this circumstances" and that he "do[esn’t] buy" "the Stockholm syndrome thing." O’Reilly also said: "The situation here for this kid looks to me to be a lot more fun than what he had under his old parents. He didn’t have to go to school. He could run around and do whatever he wanted." When fellow Fox News host Greta Van Susteren pointed out that "[s]ome kids like school," O’Reilly replied: "Well, I don’t believe this kid did."
The following day, during his "Talking Points Memo" segment, O’Reilly responded to viewer mail criticizing his comments about Hornbeck. O’Reilly concluded: "I hope he did not make a conscious decision to accept his captivity because" his kidnapper "made things easy for him. No school, play all day long."
But then…it makes everything about right wingers make sense when you think about it. Digby puts the pieces together here…
I think this is one of the defining aspects of conservatism. They have a stunted sense of empathy and an undeveloped ability to understand abstract concepts. It makes them unable to fashion any solutions to common problems, which they blame on "poor character" because they cannot visualize themselves ever being in a vulnerable or unlucky position through no fault of their own. Until it happens to them or someone they know, in which case they never question their philosophy as a whole but merely apply a special exemption to whichever particular problem or risk to which they have personally been exposed.
Empathy is not some altruistic concept. In fact, it’s quite selfish and designed to make humans better able to survive. It allows a person to walk in another’s shoes so that they might have an inkling of what it would be like if that person’s experience became their own. It is necessary to understand how to head off problems that you might someday have to confront and it is certainly necessary to fully understand other necessary concepts such as justice, fairness and love.
I’m not drawing any conclusions from this [Warning…PDF file], but it’s interesting. It seems that when they test psychopaths, they find that they can’t understand abstract concepts. I’m just saying.
That PDF from Crime Times Digby links to is really interesting…
Psychopaths are callous, glib, superficial, and impulsive; lack empathy for others; and display no guilt or remorse for their harmful acts. One reason for these traits, research suggests, is that psychopaths have difficulty understanding emotions. However, a new study indicates that psychopaths are impaired not just in the emotional realm, but more broadly, in understanding abstract information in general.
Sound familiar?
In particular, the psychopaths showed clear deficits in activating one brain area, the right anterior superior temporal gyrus, when processing abstract stimuli. This region failed to differentiate normally between abstract and concrete stimuli.
The researchers say, “These data support the hypothesis that there is an abnormality in the function of the right anterior superior temporal gyrus in psychopathy.”
“Perhaps,” the researchers say, “psychopathic individuals have difficulty engaging in cognitive functions that involve material that has no concrete realization in the external world. We might speculate that complex social emotions such as love, empathy, guilt and remorse may be a form of more abstract functioning. Thus, difficulties in processing and integrating these conceptually abstract representations to regulate or modulate behavior would be [seen] in these individuals.”
I’ve always wondered about this, particularly regarding the hard core homophobes. How is it that any decent person could stick a knife in the hearts of loving couples, do everything possible in their power to gut them of their capacity, not just to love each other, but to trust anyone, let alone love anyone? How is it they can look you right in the eye and tell you to your face that marriage doesn’t have anything to do with love…that it’s just about making babies and nothing more? How is it, they can throw helpless gay teens into ex-gay camps where they’ll be taught to fear and loath their sexual nature, how do they pray to God above that if their kid can’t be made into a heterosexual, at least dear god make them incapable of loving someone of their own sex? How does anyone do this to a kid and say they’re doing it out of love? Well…maybe this is why.
Look at what O’Reilly is saying up there again. How do you look into the camera at millions of viewers and tell them you think that kid was enjoying himself? How do you do it with an air of plain talk common sense? The only answer I can think of is, you do it like that because you simply cannot fathom what that kid must have been going through. Empathy. You could swim in the open sewer of that man’s conscience forever and not find a single shred of it anywhere.
Or in any of them. This is why appealing to their better nature isn’t bloody likely to buy you anything.
There is a new movie out that I absolutely cannot fathom ever watching; Alpha Dog. As I understand it, the film dramatizes the true life kidnapping and murder of a 15 year old boy. I glanced at a review of it, which gave a few details. The victim was the brother of an older teen who owed a drug debt. Murder was not the original intent, only to make the brother pay up. The kid was taken to a house where he eventually began to enjoy the drugs and the scene and party it up a bit himself, not taking too seriously the situation he was in because his kidnappers were other kids not much older then he was. He thinks he is making friends with them.
But then the kidnapper talks with his lawyer and realizes the magnitude of the crime he’s committed, and step-by-step, feels backed into a corner where actually killing the kid looks like the only thing he can do. The review I read remarked on how uneasy you feel watching the whole situation unfold, watching that kid in the company of his kidnappers, enjoying their company, not taking too seriously the situation he’s in, hoping that what what you just know is going to happen won’t And then it does. I can’t watch that. Just thinking about it now as I type this, is stressing me out. I feel an urgent need to get that kid the hell out of there, by any means necessary. And I can’t. It’s too late. It’s many years too late. I think about how I was blissfully enjoying my own life, while this fifteen year old was in the company of kids who would eventually murder him and it just stresses me out. No way am I going to watch that movie.
On June 26, 2006 I initially left voice messages for Alan Chambers of Exodus International and another national ex-gay leader about inappropriate incidents that affected youth at an Exodus member ministry. I will not go into the details at this time, but I shared three specific situations that happened within the previous year. The shocking details of the third situation compelled me to contact Alan and this other national leader. In my initial messages I said that I would rather discuss this privately, but if they did not wish to talk, then I would initiate a public discussion.
Peterson Toscano, after all he’s been through in his life, is one of the most inwardly calm and decent people I’ve ever met. His style is not to be confrontational, but to speak to a person’s conscience, to their better nature, and try to work together with them to resolve problems. He would not be making this matter public if there was any other way. But Exodus doesn’t seem to want to address the issue. For half a year, he has been trying to get Exodus to agree to some basic guidelines for protecting the kids in their "programs". Now it looks like he’s just getting the brush-off.
The non-violent work that I do involves attempting to connect with people to create a "win-win" situation if at all possible. Building relationships, shedding assumptions, believing the best in people are all part of my Christian testimony. Joe Brummer outlines some of these non-violent steps in his most recent post. I don’t hate Alan or Exodus. I have used much restraint in hopes of seeing real change.
Some of us who feel we have been wounded by the ex-gay ministries and the anti-gay church may have sometimes wish to do them harm and to think the worse, to malign them the way that we feel they malign the LGBT community. For me Jesus’ teachings is that I should seek to do good and speak out against injustice but not exact revenge.
Perhaps some people would love there to be a major Exodus scandal. I want to see one avoided.
Do I wish them harm? Here’s what I wish. In a just society anyone who participated in forcing a gay kid into one of these places would be in jail, along with the other child molesters. That’s my wish. But the possibility of a scandal of this nature disturbs me so deeply that I have to step back from this fight periodically, for the sake of my own sanity. I think that’s why a lot of people hold this fight at arm’s length. It’s just too emotionally stressfull. You want to get those kids the hell out of there and you can’t. The law is against you. There’s nothing you can do but watch in a kind of growing gut wrenching horror. Ever since the Memphis protests, ever since I read that Refuge Rule Book Zach Stark posted, I’ve felt like I was watching a situation unfold, watching gay kids being put into camps run by men with no training other then religious dogma, no understanding of human sexuality, and no respect for the sexual nature of these kids, hoping that what what you just know is going to happen won’t And when it does, I am not going to be happy, I am going to be sick.
Peterson Toscano is one of the most decent people I have ever met. I hope his way of conflict resolution has the desired effect. I trust, since he actually knows more about this environment from first-hand experience then I’ll ever know in a lifetime, that he knows what he’s dealing with. I hope I am wrong: He believes there is a better nature within these people that can be reached. I think they’re rotten to the core. I think they’ve taken their conscience around behind the barn and killed it. I hope I am wrong. I hope I won’t see happen, what I just know is going to happen. But I don’t think even a sex abuse scandal will cause these people to reconsider what they are doing to kids. They’re on a mission from God, and God is never wrong.
People already know there is a potential for abuse here. This isn’t rocket science. And yet nothing is done, and kids are still being shoveled into it. Perhaps the reason for that is because the people involved in running these places Don’t Care. Exodus is not about helping people out of homosexuality…it is about fighting against gay civil rights. It’s about enforcing the pariah status of homosexual people. That is what Exodus is about. You may disagree, but that’s the only scenario where this behavior, this practical if not rhetorical indifference to the welfare of the kids in it, Makes. Any. Sense.
You think that any sane parent, even one that was vehemently opposed to homosexuality (I know…I know… It’s like being vehemently opposed to left-handedness…), would be disturbed to learn that their kids where being tossed into a mix of adults that included men who admitted to being sexual addicts and compulsives. You’d think that even these parents would be appalled to learn that some of these "former" sexual compulsives were staff members themselves, who could at any time get their kid alone somewhere on campus for a little private counseling. You’d think.
But then you watch these parents come and go in and out of Exodus "Love Won Out" conferences, you see them taking part in the larger anti-gay political agenda, and you listen to them mouth the same filthy lies about gay people we’ve all heard over and over thousands of times like a mantra of hate, and you realize that…yes…they probably wouldn’t care anyway. For a lot of these parents, I am convinced, these ex-gay camps aren’t a last resort to changing their kid’s sexual orientation at all. They’re punishment, pure and simple. What the religious right likes to call "tough love" and what otherwise decent people call child abuse. They want the kid to suffer, so they’ll never forget how much their own parents hate them for turning out to be faggots. Not necessarily suffer actual physical sexual abuse…no. Of course not. But the environment they’re being tossed into is primed for just that kind of thing to happen. It cannot be defused without gutting them of their mission, which is not to cure, but to enable the social and political abuse of these kids, and the adults they will grow into. You cannot enable the one, without some degree of indifference for the other. And it is of a piece with the indifference of the religious right to anti-gay violence in general. Here is Randy Thomas of Exodus, in an ad campaign against hate crime laws:
Of course, yes, many parents, not vehement about homosexuality, are simply terrified into sending their kids into these camps. They’re afraid for their kids, afraid because of the lies they’ve been taught by the religious right about homosexuals and homosexuality, afraid for their immortal souls. The last thing in the world these parents want is for their kid to be sexually abused while in one of these things. They trust in the people who run these camps, being righteous men and women of God. But the horrible nature of these places is that sexual abuse is in fact, what these places do. It is what they are meant to do.
We know instinctively that sexual abuse isn’t simply a matter of the physical act alone. It is a dagger plunged into their heart of the one who suffers it. We know this. And yet, we loose sight of it when it comes to what the ex-gay ministries do. We think of the child abuser as a monster, acting in pure selfish contempt and greed. We picture them as evil, vicious, brutal thugs. But greed has many faces. Consider for a moment instead, the victim. What do we often see in the victims of sexual abuse, and in particular, in the kids who have suffered it. Withdrawal. Guilt. Shame. Alienation. Self destructiveness. Guilt. Shame. A fear of sex and sexual intimacy that can work against any intimate human relationship they might attempt throughout their lives. Shame. Guilt. Shame. Shame. And shame. And what do we see in gay kids who have been taught to fear and loath their sexuality? Exactly the same things.
To methodically teach a gay kid to fear and loath their sexual nature is to do to them essentially what a rapist does to their victims, but without the physical act. And worse: because the child molester is universally condemned in our society and in human societies all over the world, but the people running these camps are held in high esteem as doing the work of God. For gay kids who internalize the message these camps do their damnest to put into them, there is no refuge from shame, not even the slightest comfort that what was done to them was a profound and unforgivable crime. To the contrary, the sense that they were to blame for what happened to them, is brutally re-enforced by the culture around them, particularly if they come from fundamentalist families.
What kind of people do this? Monsters? Perhaps. But not necessarily. There is hate, and there is greed. Sometimes they dance together. Sometimes they dance alone. Sometimes greed wears a face that seems compassionate and loving, until you realize that it’s the face of a vampire. There is love that is selfless and giving, and rejoices in the happiness of the beloved. And there is that greed that is selfish and needy and possessive and wears love like a mask, to hide a bottomless indifference to the damage it does.
Peterson has been trying hard to raise awareness of the potential for something worse then what he’s already discovered happening in these camps, and he’s made little headway judging from his post. He would greatly disagree with me on this I’m sure, but the problem as I see it is they’d have to care first, and you can’t care about what happens to kids physically without caring about what happens to them spiritually too. And the problem with that is it raises too many uncomfortable questions. Questions that call into doubt the very existance of these camps. Better not to ask them.
This is all of a piece. Note that none of these places keep any follow-up statistics on their "clients". As Wayne Besen found out while investigating them for his book, Anything But Straight, they can’t tell you their success rate because they don’t know it themselves. They don’t know how many of their "clients" stay heterosexual. They don’t know how the bond between parent and child does after a kid is run through their "program". They don’t know anything at all about the sexual, let alone the emotional health of their "clients" one, two, three years or more after they’ve been in the "program". They don’t want to know. The anecdotal evidence after all, is bad enough. I’ve heard the stories first-hand, from kids who have lived it. And the recurring theme through all of it is that none of these places seemed to give a good goddamn what happened to them after they’d gone through their "program".
This isn’t rocket science. Following up should not only be easy, but for people who are acting out of love for the kids it should be imperative. They should be critically intent on knowing how well they are doing their job. Are the kids better for having been though the program, or not? Are we doing anything wrong? Could we do better? Yet, they don’t want to know.
This blindness to the sexual safety of the kids in their custody is telling, in precisely the same vein. You need to pay attention to this. The great crimes against humanity don’t happen because of people who shake their fists at God and hoist the Jolly Roger. They happen, because of indifference to the humanity of their victims. Elie Wiesel, who survived the extermination camps of the thousand year Reich, captures it perfectly here:
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The claim of the ex-gay camps is that they do what they do to kids out of love. To that, Peterson Toscano says taking steps to protect young people from abuse while in these camps is not only good business, but shows a genuine love for them. But there’s the problem.
Arline Isaacson of the Massachusetts Gay & Lesbian Political Caucus, said she believes political opponents such as Mineau are acting in good faith. But she said any campaign against gay marriage inevitably draws virulently anti-gay activists from out of state who will say hateful and destructive things. Groups such as Mineau’s have to take responsibility for that, she said.
"It’s naive at best to think it won’t happen," Isaacson said.
Are you nuts? Those people are about as much good faith as a used car dealer selling models pulled from last year’s flood. This guy has it Exactly right:
Tom Lang of Know Thy Neighbor.org, a sponsor of the vigil, said he’s skeptical of calls for civility in the debate because gay marriage opponents aren’t honest about the real reason they oppose gay marriage: "They don’t like gay people."
"The dialogue can’t exist unless they’re honest and they come clean about how they really feel about gay people," he said. "We’d like them to just admit it."
But of course…they won’t.
Mineau said his group isn’t against gay people, but rather for promoting the man-woman model of marriage as the best way for society to raise children.
"That’s what we should all be esteeming for," he said. "We shouldn’t try to deconstruct it."
Well let’s deconstruct you instead asshole. The man-woman model of marriage is the best, because homosexual relationships are inferior to heterosexual ones. We should all be esteeming for it because homosexuality is a choice and a bad one at that since it’s inferior to heterosexuality. And since the man-woman model is the best and a homosexual one inferior, that means that homosexual households damage the children in them. And since homosexuality is a choice that means that gay people are deliberately choosing to do damage to children. That is what you managed to say in just two short sentences. But without actually saying it outright, of course. And you’re not against gay people.
Good faith. Good faith. Any more of this good faith and the churches up there might as well start selling flood cars.
MFI and VoteOnMarriage.org – the ballot question committee seeking to advance the Massachusetts marriage amendment – has endeavored to advance a campaign that refrains from name calling and does not denigrate individuals. However, as many political pundits predict, the same sex marriage debate, much like the abortion debate, will be with us for decades and MFI sees a need and an opportunity to work with leaders on all sides to promote justice in the way we discuss our differences.
"The tone and rhetoric around this public policy issue has escalated to a frenzied level, too often with shouting that does nothing promote understanding. Denouncing individuals as bigots does not bring people with honest differences together. We would like to work with our opponents to raise the quality of the dialogue," said Kris Mineau, president, Massachusetts Family Institute and spokesman, VoteOnMarriage.org
…Even as this initiative beings to take shape, MFI and VoteOnMarriage.org will continue to urge supporters of the marriage amendment to be respectful of human differences and always maintain a dialogue that affirms the dignity of every person.
You know how this works…right? We stop calling them bigots, and they get to keep calling us AIDS spreading child molesting family destroying abominations in the eyes of God.
Honest differences? There is nothing honest about these people. Nothing. And especially nothing honest about their calls for mutual respect and civility. Every time you hear something like this coming out of an anti-gay hate machine, you know they’re talking to the heterosexual majority, not the gay people they’re busy bashing. They didn’t place that press release in the local gay papers. This call for mutual respect wasn’t addressed to the gay people they’re trying to take the right to marry away from. This is window dressing for the big vote in a couple years. They need to convince just enough voters that voting to take away their neighbor’s right to marry doesn’t mean they’re jumping in bed with bigots. That’s what this is about. Nothing else.
Picture a bunch of white racists pleading with black Americans for mutual respect while arguing for segregated schools and neighborhoods. Picture a bunch of antisemites insisting they want a dialog about the Nuremberg laws that affirms the dignity of every person. It’s to laugh.
Apparently Ex-Gay-For-Pay Randy Thomas, membership director of Exodus, and staunch opponent of hate crime laws, is getting a bit tired of being harassed for what he is…
There is something to be said about having a public blog. I love to blog. I have made some amazing friends and had wonderful conversations over the years. I like posting pictures and artwork and discussing important topics (overcoming homosexuality only being one of millions of important topics.) Even so, having a personal "public" blog is also time intensive. Especially when you have so many people willing to harass you and your loved ones because they don’t agree with you. :) So, at this point, this blog is going to be completely private and posts will only be visible to my VOX neighborhood, friends and family…
Scott over at Reality Cubed has a pretty good retort up to all this, to which I can only add that it’s grotesque watching someone who played his part in a right wing propaganda offensive against hate crime laws, with gusto, bellyaching now about being harassed because, because, because they don’t agree with him. Honestly you pathetic gutter crawling maggot, I don’t give a flying fuck what your opinions are about homosexuals and homosexuality. Out of the lifestyle are you? Fine. Whatever. And for the record I don’t think people should be harassing you online, except I strongly suspect what you consider harassment is simply the kind of eminently expectable ill will people get in return when they keep spitting in their neighbor’s faces, and trashing their lives. Be nice if your kind would stop inciting religious passions against gay people, and then encouraging the police and the courts to keep looking the other way when they start taking it out on us violently though, wouldn’t it? Ask this Milwaukee Lesbian what being harassed feels like, you drooling moron.
Randy’s the guy on the…er…far right…in the ad below, produced by Exodus in their offensive in late 2005 against hate crime laws protecting gay people from what happened to Angela Emanule above, and countless others, like James Maestas, who was beaten so badly in Santa Fe earlier in the same year Exodus produced this ad, that his lungs were burned by his own stomach acid.
Here’s Randy hobnobbing with Karl Rove…
And, just to remind everyone, here’s how Rove likes winning elections in swing states…
The gay kid wasn’t there, but the man managed to kill his 17 year old friend who was. And republicans sure do seem like they’re perfectly willing to live with the consequences of demonizing homosexuals for votes, so long as it keeps winning them elections. And you’ll keep helping them do it won’t you Randy? Like…by spreading the damnable lie that we think our lives are more valuable then anyone else’s. All that ad did was generate more hate toward gay people. But…that’s what it was for. You know what Randy? Your name was on the knife that killed Kristofer King.
David Brooks says Nanci Pelosi is some kind of hereditary plutocrat, like George W. Bush:
A snit in first class – Opinion – International Herald Tribune: I have a dream that [Nancy] Pelosi, who was chauffeured to school as a child…. I dream of a great harmonic convergence among the obscenely rich…. [But] I know that both Bush and Pelosi are part of an upper-income whirlwind of strife….
This week, witness Pelosi going on her all-about-me inauguration tour, which is designed to rebrand her as a regular Catholic grandma from Baltimore. Members of the middle classes never have to mount campaign swings to prove how regular they are, but these upper-bracket types can’t help themselves, and they always lay it on too thick…
Here is a photo of Nancy Pelosi’s childhood home in Baltimore:
Nancy Pelosi grew up at the far end of this block of Albemarle Street in Baltimore. San Francisco Chronicle photo by Michael Macor.
Here’s a photo of the Bushes’ summer house on Walker Point:
Daughters of ethnic Democratic mayors in the 1950s did get driven to school. But hereditary plutocrats they were not.
I live not far from where Pelosi grew up and I can attest to the fact that this is not a neighborhood full of "obscenely rich" people. It is Baltimore’s little Italy…thoroughly Baltimore working class. People live in the usual Baltimore row houses there, and yes, some of those row houses are very nice, but there are nothing near the palatial splendor you see in the Walker Point photo. Pelosi got driven to school because she was the mayor’s daughter, not because their family was filthy rich like the Bush clan.
But Brooks, without a doubt, knows this. What he’s counting on is that you don’t. He can just say…oh…she was chauffeured to school as a child, just like the silver spoon brat in the White House now. My next door neighbors drive their boy to the Friend’s School here in Baltimore every day and they live in the same working class Baltimore rowhouse neighborhood I do. Maybe Brooks thinks that gives them the same childhood George Bush had too. Maybe Brooks thinks that makes us all Obscenely Rich here in Medfield. On the other hand, maybe Brooks is just pulling the same kind of fast one that the book that made him famous, Bobos In Paradise is full of.
As I made my journey, it became increasingly hard to believe that Brooks ever left his home.“On my journeys to Franklin County, I set a goal: I was going to spend $20 on a restaurant meal. But although I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu—steak au jus, ‘slippery beef pot pie,’ or whatever—I always failed. I began asking people to direct me to the most expensive places in town. They would send me to Red Lobster or Applebee’s,” he wrote. “I’d scan the menu and realize that I’d been beaten once again. I went through great vats of chipped beef and ‘seafood delight’ trying to drop $20. I waded through enough surf-and-turfs and enough creamed corn to last a lifetime. I could not do it.”
Taking Brooks’s cue, I lunched at the Chambersburg Red Lobster and quickly realized that he could not have waded through much surf-and-turf at all. The “Steak and Lobster” combination with grilled center-cut New York strip is the most expensive thing on the menu. It costs $28.75. “Most of our checks are over $20,” said Becka, my waitress. “There are a lot of ways to spend over $20.”
The easiest way to spend more than $20 on a meal in Franklin County is to visit the Mercersburg Inn, which boasts “turn-of-the-century elegance.” I had a $50 prix-fixe dinner, with an entrée of veal medallions, served with a lump-crab and artichoke tower, wild-rice pilaf and a sage-caper-cream sauce. Afterward, I asked the inn’s proprietors, Walt and Sandy Filkowski, if they had seen Brooks’s article. They laughed.
I called Brooks to see if I was misreading his work. I told him about my trip to Franklin County, and the ease with which I was able to spend $20 on a meal. He laughed. “I didn’t see it when I was there, but it’s true, you can get a nice meal at the Mercersburg Inn,” he said. I said it was just as easy at Red Lobster. “That was partially to make a point that if Red Lobster is your upper end?” he replied, his voice trailing away. “That was partially tongue-in-cheek, but I did have several mini-dinners there, and I never topped $20.”
Let’s be civil here: David Brooks is a goddamned liar. He does it for money. Perhaps he believes in the republican party cause. Perhaps he has his own emotional stake in the American Kultar Kampf. But the first thing to remember about him, is that he lies for money. Really…that’s all you need to know about him.
Via Steve Gilliard…via Firedoglake… How do you sell advertising space on a radio station that openly calls for liberals to be killed? Why…you sell it to them as Disney programming, of course…
Evenin’, fellow firedogs! Tonight I’m going to attempt to get us all up to speed about a situation that I suspect we’re going to be hearing a lot about in the near future. This story was brought to my attention by ¡El Gato Negro!.
Where to begin? First we’ll go to A. J. Kandy, who blogs at King Marketing:
ABC/Disney operates a US-wide network of radio stations and affiliates. One of these affiliates, San Francisco’s KSFO, is a die-hard right-wing talk shop whose rabidly eliminationist hosts have publicly endorsed (if not outright revelled in) torture and engaged in hate speech of all stripes. However, the station is sold to its advertisers as a “Disney” station, with all the connotations of family-friendliness that entails. [Bruce here – the emphasis is mine…]
Self-described “fifth-tier blogger” Spocko decided to “out” KSFO to its national advertisers with a polite letter-writing campaign, and by exposing their hate speech on his blog with short audio clips and transcripts (which falls under the Fair Use statutes.)
This, of course, is what we call citizen action, and most of us know the drill by now. We write to advertisers and once in a blue moon, they write us back, pat us on the head and tell us that they’ll take our suggestion under advisement, then go on their merry way without changing a thing. This was not the case, however, with Spocko. From a guest post at BlogIntegrity, Spocko himself can tell us what happened next:
In mid-December I got confirmation that a major national advertiser, VISA, pulled their ads from the Melanie Morgan and Lee Rogers show, based on listening to audio clips I provided them. I also think that FedEx, AT&T and Kaiser are considering pulling their ads. Visa isn’t the first advertiser who has left KSFO, multiple advertisers have left the station, especially from the Brian Sussman show. In July of this year when KSFO lost MasterCard as an advertiser someone from KSFO “outed” me on a counter-blog (which I won’t link to). This same person has also threatened me with local and federal criminal action for using the audio (which I clearly used under the fair use portion of copyright law). And because they have suggested violence toward me (in addition to talking about suing me "for everything I have”) I have chosen to remain anonymous.
As Thers has said,
Hooray, for Thers!! Oh, uh, ahem. Sorry. You were saying, Spocko?
95 percent of blog fights don’t mean anything, but I think this one does since KSFO is using the full weight and force of an ABC/Disney lawyer and copyright law against a private citizen blogger. I dared to use the audio content in question for nonprofit educational purposes (I don’t even have ads on my blog!), and thus under the protection of the Fair Use Doctrine set forth in Section 107 of the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C.§107.
IN THE LATEST SKIRMISH BETWEEN big media and a blogger, The Walt Disney Company has succeeded in shutting down the Web site "Spocko’s Brain."
On the site, blogger and media critic "Spocko" took issue with on-air comments made by right-wing talk show hosts at Bay Area ABC affiliate radio station KSFO. He posted audio files of hosts’ comments on his Web site, and also began a letter-writing campaign that, he says, resulted in advertisers fleeing the station.
But Tuesday, Spocko’s Internet service provider, 1&1 Internet, pulled the plug on the blog–a move prompted by a Dec. 22 cease-and-desist letter from ABC Radio claiming that material on Spocko’s Brain violated Disney’s copyright.
And that’s where things stand right now. Many of us are now familiar with ABC/Disney’s strong-arm fascism-in-mouse-ears tactics from the "Path to 9/11" debacle earlier this year. Here’s what you can do to help our fellow blogger, Spocko:
1. The KSFO hate clips are all up at Online BlogIntegrity. Collect ’em all. Share with your friends. Spread them around. It’s a veritable cornucopia of Right Wing Hate Speech. (Listen at your own risk.)
2. Go here and scroll down to "What Can You Do?" and follow the instructions. Spocko has provided us with a step-by-step plan to alert the blogging world, the MSM (if they’ll listen), and KSFO’s advertisers to the current situation.
I urge you all to get involved. This is an example of how we can effectively fight the tide of hateful bile that pollutes our airwaves and rots the brains of millions of overly credulous talk-radio listeners. We, of course, support the wingnuts’ right to say whatever they want to say, but they must be prepared to face the real-world consequences of stoking the fires of ethnic, political, and religious hatred. If that means losing the support of their advertisers and cutting into their six-figure salaries, well, then, hurrah! We win.
Thank you and good night.
If those clips get taken down email me and I’ll pass them along to you. Here’s some excerpts from the menu at Online Blogintegrity…
Somebody at Disney needs to get their head screwed on straight. This isn’t anything Disney should want its brand associated with. Yet they’re apparently marketing that station to advertisers as a Disney station. It’s like putting the Disney logo on a burning cross at a Klan rally. Why are they doing this? Is someone in marketing there just completely brain dead or what?
I can appreciate wanting to attract an audience. But some audiences you should probably just walk away from, regardless of whether or not it adversely impacts the shareholder bottom line. The kind that think ridiculing a congressman’s racial make-up is funny, for example. If Disney owns this station, then they either need to make it reflect their corporate values, or they need to sell it.
In the meantime, the least the rest of us can do is inform the advertisers of what it is they’re buying into, when they buy into the Disney brand. Read this from the blogger Disney is going after, for more info on how. If that post gets taken down email me and I’ll send you a copy of it.
Who would have guessed that answering a few census questions could make you a participant in battling the "homosexual agenda"?
Napa resident Marcia Zwick never imagined this when she recently received a large, important-looking envelope in the mail. She works as a legal secretary and is accustomed to handling official documents.
"I’m a reasonably intelligent person," Zwick said. "I couldn’t tell what this really was."
The answer isn’t readily apparent.
"U.S. Taxpayer Census," the envelope says on the outside in big letters. "Do Not Tamper: Reply Within 5 Days."
Inside is an official-looking questionnaire. "This U.S. Taxpayer Census has been specially commissioned to gather public opinion in America’s ‘grassroots’ about the new Social Security Preservation Act (HR 219) now pending in the U.S. Congress," it says.
"This Census is individually registered under your name to represent Napa public opinion in California 01 voting district. So it is critical you return it — even if you are undecided about some answers."
In reality, the "Census" is a mailer from something called the Christian Seniors Association. And of the nine questions it asks, six involve a slanted look at Social Security and three involve donating money to the right-wing organization.
What the mailer doesn’t tell you, though, at least not in so many words, is that any funds contributed to the Christian Seniors Association will in fact go to its parent group, the Traditional Values Coalition.
Cute. This from the man who routinely calls gay people sexual predators and pedophiles. They’re the folks responsible for this bit of fragrant web advertising:
The mailer from the Christian Seniors Association only hints at broader public-policy goals. An accompanying letter explains that the organization was started several years ago as an alternative to the AARP.
…
It’s not until you get to the fine print on the back of the association’s Census form that you learn the organization "is a division of Traditional Values Coalition" and that "all contributions are combined to help pay Traditional Values Coalition expenses."
So this ersatz seniors organization really exists mostly to funnel old people’s money over to TVC. You have to figure that’s because scaring them with the gay bogyman isn’t opening up their checkbooks like it used to. Picture Lou spending money old people gave to him out of their fixed incomes thinking it was going to a campaign for senior’s issues, on his splendid little war on homosexuality instead. I guess screwing old people isn’t ungodly if all you rape them for is their money. You know…that stuff they use to put food in their mouths and a roof over their heads and buy their medicine with. Who the hell made Lou Sheldon a reverend? John Gotti?
When I discuss the Left’s embrace of New Anger with people across the political spectrum, two not very satisfactory explanations keep coming up. One is that the party that is out of power has more to gripe about. Yes, but that doesn’t explain why the Left gravitated to a form of anger that exacerbated its unpopularity. Nor, why the Right, in similar circumstances kept its New Anger aficionados on the margins.
The New Anger. The left gravitiates to it. Even though it makes them unpopular. The right would never do such things…
Fortunately for liberals, the Iraqis executed Saddam Hussein the exact same week that former President Ford died, so it didn’t seem strange that Nancy Pelosi’s flag was at half-staff.
Civility. Why are you liberals so angry? Why can’t you be more civil?
So they’re going to allow a vote on the anti-gay marriage amendment in Massachusetts. I was worrying about this when I saw all the Boston newspapers start bloviating about how the legislature had a "responsibility" to let the vote happen, after the state supreme court ruled they couldn’t force the vote, and that they had a "duty" and so on.
Does anymore seriously believe that our enemies, if the positions had been reversed, wouldn’t have used precisely the same tactics to prevent a vote, if doing it would take away our right to marry? Would they have fucking cared what the newspapers said? We are in a knife fight with these people, and you win a knife fight by fighting to win, not by playing by a set of rules designed specifically to allow the enemy to keep taking swings at you while you just stand there with your hands behind your back. You go into a fight with these people to win by any means necessary, or don’t bother fighting them because they’ll laugh in your face and kick your balls. They’re dancing in Massachusetts now, because they can figure now that in a couple years they’ll be able to cut the ring fingers off the gays in their state. And if you thought the religious right was triumphalist before, just wait until they can crow that they turned back sodomite marriage in Massachusetts.
To the cowards who previously voted to adjourn rather then vote, and then switched sides yesterday, all I have to say to you is I hope your own marriages suffer the same fate as ours. About half of heterosexual marriages fail anyway don’t they? Piss on your hopes, your dreams, and every moment of awestruck joy you ever felt as a couple.
"[W]e are leaving ourselves vulnerable to infiltration by those who want to mold the United States into the image of their religion, rather than working within the Judeo-Christian principles that have made us a beacon for freedom-loving persons around the world."
— Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA), in an op-ed published in today’s USA Today, explaining why he believes the United States should refuse immigrants from the Middle East.
You may recall, this is the wanker who pitched a fit when congressman elect Keith Ellison announced he would take the oath of office in a ceremony using the Koran, instead of the Bible, and then went on to pitch a fit about Muslim immigrants pouring into the United States, and then went on to avow that he would never take the oath on the "Kor-Ran" (I watched him on a newscast…that’s how he keeps pronouncing it) and that he only wanted to "…draw attention to the need to acknowledge the Bible as the basis of America’s moral values. Judeo-Christian values are the greatest single protection against another Holocaust".
Well Virgil…it’s really swell that you’re so busy defending American from people who want to mold it into the image of their religion. Now…how about you go find yourself a mirror and tell it to the gutter crawling jackass you see in there. Kor-Ran. Kor-Ran. Kor-Ran.
Like I said the other day when certain readers groused about the attention this blog gives to homosexuality, it is one of the central issues of our time, and the response to it is cleaving the Christian churches. People who complain about the time conservatives spend on the issue wouldn’t complain if we were taking the Andrew Sullivan gay liberationist line. It’s that we don’t do so that they dislike. If we can’t say something nice and cheerful, we shouldn’t say anything at all.
But the issue — the issues — won’t go away.
No shit Sherlock. That’s because knuckle dragging jackasses like you can’t let go if it. It matters to you, that somewhere, someway, somehow, there are gay people in this world who don’t fear and loath their sexual nature, the way louts like you think they should.
Rod Dreher, he who knows that homosexuals can pray the gay away because he himself was cleansed by God (or was it just getting old) of his lustful feelings toward…no, not men, but Betty Blue (no…I’m not kidding…just read his article), wants us to know he feels Compassion for all those poor suffering gay Evangelicals The New York Times profiled the other day. Not that he feels any particular need to treat them as if they were as human as he is mind you, with the same basic human needs for love and intimate companionship that gutter crawling louts like him need to stop demonizing. He has Compassion…Compassion I tell you.
Whatever your stance on homosexuality and religion, you have to have a heart of stone not to feel for men and women caught in this dilemma. For me, it brought to mind something my friend David Morrison told me over a decade ago, about the world he found as he left gay activism and committed himself to living as a chaste Christian faithful to Scripture and tradition.
As it happens, David Morrison was once a friend of mine too. But that was back in his gay activist days, when we were both volunteers on Jon Larimore’s Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau BBS system (David was mostly a theoretical volunteer, since I ended up doing 90 percent of the work he’d also volunteered for). In those days he wore his pride like, as he once said, "an anthem". But over the years we all watched him fall, first into a profoundly reactionary brand of conservatism, and then (surprise, surprise) into an even more reactionary brand of religion. I remember vividly the day he posted to the general forum, that as far as God was concerned none of us were any better then Hitler. He had a boyfriend back then, or so he always claimed. I’ve often wondered how the boyfriend took David’s bellyflop into the gutter. When he later wrote a column for the New York Post, titled "What Crime Of Hate And Anger?" (issue of November 5, 1998) in which he averred that Matthew Shepard had it coming, because he had a history of risky sexual flirting with strangers, I couldn’t have been less surprised:
Newsweek called what happened in Cody last summer a miscalculation on Shepard’s part and it may turn out that he similarly miscalculated in Laramie. But whether he did or did not miscalculate, Americans should think long and hard about the making the feeling of repugnance at an unwanted sexual advance subject to additional penalties under the law.
Angry, yes. But not surprised. You can read the article in full here on Eutopia. (There is also a response in that issue of Eutopia to my letter to the Post. Note the theocrat’s reliable retort that "certitude of experience" must answer to "certitude of truth".)
That was the David we’d all come to know and loath on GLIB. If he’d said the Pink Triangles were a sensible reaction to the repugnance of unwanted sexual advances I couldn’t have been less surprised.
But Dreher thinks David is a fine young man, because David is the only kind of homosexual a moral runt like Dreher can tolerate: a self castrating one.
Looking back, after eight years of seeking to live chastely as a Christian, I believe my time at Trinity represented a turning point in my early Christian life. While I had accepted intellectually the claims of the historic Christian creeds and experienced a deep emotional conviction of Christ’s reality and love, Christianity’s doctrines and disciplines remained merely concepts. It was the witness of the Christians at Trinity Church that put flesh onto the bones of biblical phrases like "love thy neighbor" and "seventy times seven times."
You can love your neighbor, so long as you don’t love yourself…right David?
Sadly, most men and women living with same-sex attraction have had experiences more akin to Gail’s than mine….
Actually David, what a lot of us have had is experience being in love, and being loved, and sharing with the one you love all the wonderful, awesome, life affirming joy of sexual intimacy. And we resent it, when a gutter crawling slimeball like you, who just had to put another cigarette out on a dead gay kid’s body for the sake of your own cheapshit self hatreds, decides to lecture us on how sinful that perfectly human joy is.
Of course, Mr Thank You Jesus For Saving Me From The Clutches Of Betty Blue sees it differently…
In my view, that Episcopal church’s response to David, and to homosexuality, was authentically and beautifully Christian.
An authentic and beautifully Christian approach to homosexuality. Sorta like the one the Catholic Bishops took last month here in Baltimore:
AREN’T YOU PROUD of us? For most of this past week, as an overwhelmingly successful, lightning-quick Anglo-American military assault liberated Iraq’s capital city, and ordinary Baghdadis poured into the streets to kiss our GIs and stomp on pictures of Saddam Hussein, THE SCRAPBOOK has remained the soul of magnanimity and restraint.
Here in our office there’s this giant archive of newsclips, transcripts, and Internet postings we collected in the months preceding the war, wherein a world community of jackasses confidently predicted that the events lately unfolding on our television screens could not and would not ever take place. And you can imagine the temptation, we’re sure: A lesser SCRAPBOOK would throw open the file boxes and run through the streets with treasures like these, laughing hysterically.
"This invasion of Iraq, if it goes off, will join the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Desert One, Beirut, and Somalia in the history of military catastrophe. What will set it apart, distinguishing it for all time, is the immense–and transparent–political stupidity."
–Chris Matthews, San Francisco Chronicle, August 25, 2002
"Iraqis hate the United States government even more than they hate Saddam, and they are even more distrustful of America’s intentions than Saddam’s. . . . [I]f President Bush thinks our invasion and occupation will go smoothly because Iraqis will welcome us, then [he] is deluding himself."
–New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, October 4, 2002
ut being the soul of magnanimity and restraint, we’re not going to do any such thing. Instead, THE SCRAPBOOK is going to run through the streets, laughing hysterically at all the people who were so blinded by hatred of President Bush–or general anti-Americanism, or their own sheer foolishness–that they continued to prophesy doom even after the war had begun and was already being won. People like a certain former U.N. weapons inspector turned Baath party apologist turned peace-movement celebrity:
"The United States is going to leave Iraq with its tail between its legs, defeated….We do not have the military means to take over Baghdad and for this reason I believe the defeat of the United States in this war is inevitable. . . . [W]e will not be able to win this war, which in my opinion is already lost."
–Scott Ritter, on a South African radio station, March 25, 2003
t takes all kinds, of course. You’ve got your late-career journalist gasbag, phoning it in from the dinner-party front lines:
"With every passing day, it is more evident that the allies made . . . gross military misjudgments. . . . The very term ‘shock and awe’ has a swagger to it, no doubt because it was intended to discourage Mr. Hussein and his circle. But it rings hollow now."
–New York Times "news analyst" R.W. Apple Jr., March 30, 2003
You’ve got your war novelist, phoning it in from his experiences in Vietnam, 30 years ago:
"Visions of cheering throngs welcoming them as liberators have vanished in the wake of a bloody engagement whose full casualties are still unknown. . . . Welcome to hell. Many of us lived it in another era. And don’t expect it to get any better for a while."
–James Webb, in the New York Times, March 30, 2003
And you’ve got your usefully idiotic, broadcast-media war correspondent, phoning it in from wherever his Baath party minders want him to:
"The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. . . . Clearly the American war planners misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces. And I personally do not understand how that happened, because I’ve been here many times and in my commentaries on television I would tell the Americans about the determination of the Iraqi forces. . . . But me, and others who felt the same way, were not listened to by the Bush administration."
–Peter Arnett on Iraqi state television, March 30, 2003
How stupid those dirty anti-war hippies all were…
Do you see it there, in that Weekly Standard article? The bar stool swagger? The ritual chest thumping? The loutish bragging about how they were right and everyone else was wrong? It’s tempting for some folks to wonder why so many people misjudged the measure of George Bush. They didn’t. They had his measure exactly. He was their boy…full of the same toxic mix of cheapshit conceits and resentments they were. Imagine any one of these bloviating cretins in the White House instead of George Bush, ask yourself if it would make any difference whatever in the outcome, and you have the picture. They’re all cut from the same cloth. That’s why they supported him back in 2000. That’s why they still support him. He achieved the fantasy they’ve all dreamed of…being the one everyone has to take orders from, the one everyone has to listen to, the one nobody can ever contradict, because their word is law. The decider. If Junior fails now, then what does that make them?
The problem with brick brain louts like this is that you can rub their noses in their own shit forever and they’ll never admit it stinks. They’ll just dig in their heels and whine that they’re not to blame for anything, because it’s always, always, everyone else’s fault. Atrios is right. As long as Junior is in the White House, we’re not leaving Iraq, no matter how many American soldiers die, no matter how many innocent Iraqis die, no matter how many back doors the Wise Men Of Washington give him. Remember this?
"There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again."
He can’t end this war, any more then he could physically make himself say the words, "shame on me".
Larry Corrigan, a well-known activist in local Republican politics as a backer of U.S. Rep. Dave Reichert and King County Prosecuting Attorney Norm Maleng, was arrested Wednesday in an Internet sting for allegedly trying to arrange sex with a 13-year-old girl.
Reichert is pro-life and opposes the use of federal money for sex education. Reichert is against gay marriage and has promised to support an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning gay marriage.
Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. And a sexually ignorant thirteen year old girl, is a good thirteen year old girl…
This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.
