So I see the ex-gay movement held it’s annual medicine show down in Orlando earlier this month…

Andrew Sullivan this morning:

Last night, it struck me that every single statement on gay rights by the GOP candidates, however brutal, could have been leavened by some small concession that gays are serving their country honorably, that gays are a part of many families and indeed the American family, that they should not be demonized by the majority, etc. But none of the candidates could say a single positive thing. Or rather they believed they could not survive a GOP primary by saying anything even vaguely positive about gay Americans. In some ways, that’s more telling.

If in the process of conducting your political campaign you give a silent consent to hate then you are just as much a part of the mob as if you had born one of their torches yourself and screamed for blood.   Anyone who cannot muster the moral backbone to denounce hate is unfit to be director of public parking, let alone president of the United States.   It is that simple.

[Posted on Truth Wins Out, May 23 2011…]

So somebody who just didn’t know that Bradlee Dean thinks homosexuals are responsible for the Holocaust, will molest 117 people before they’re caught, and that if American does not begin enforcing biblical law against homosexuality God will rise of a foreign enemy to do it, invited him to give the opening prayer for the Minnesota House of Delegates on the day republican speaker of the house Sam Zellers was ready to bring a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage to the floor…

The decision to allow anti-gay preacher Bradlee Dean to give the opening prayer before the Minnesota House on Friday sent shockwaves through the Legislature, and the reverberations from that decision continued over the weekend. Democrats filed a complaint on Sunday after House Speaker Kurt Zellers moved to strike Dean’s name from the official record…

They were shocked, shocked, that Dean would stoop to questioning President Obama’s Christianity…

Zellers, R- Maple Grove, restarted the House session and brought in a chaplain to redo the prayer. He also condemned Dean’s prayer in a floor statement.“Members, I can only ask for your forgiveness. That type of person will never ever be allowed on this House floor again as long as I have the honor of serving as speaker,” Zellers said.

Oh…but it was an honest mistake…

Rep. Ernie Leidiger, R-Mayer, confirmed that he invited Dean to give the House prayer. He said it was “an honest mistake” that Dean was invited on the same day that the constitutional amendment to ban same marriage could have been debated.

Honest mistakes…

He [Dean] said it wasn’t right to call him “anti-gay,” but he spoke admiringly of the time when homosexuality was illegal.

“We don’t enforce those laws anymore, and we wonder why we are going backwards,” Dean said. “If you were to ask me my position as far as enforcing the laws of sodomy in the state of Minnesota, I would say absolutely yes. Yeah. Yeah.”

Honest Mistakes…

I’ve told this story before, but those of you who’ve heard it will just have to bear up. In the 1992 election when I was making volunteer calls for Clinton, Mary Matalin made a major gaffe she had to apologize for quite publicly. (Doesn’t matter what it was.) I was riding down in the elevator with a high level political consultant (who didn’t know me from Adam, of course) and I smugly mentioned that Matalin had really stepped in it. He looked at me like I was a moron and said, “she got it out there, didn’t she?”

–Digby

Zellers brought up the anti-gay constitutional amendment the following day. It passed. And that type of person will never be allowed on the floor again, until the next time an honest mistake needs to be made.

Apparently Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown believe that gay people have to die so that marriage can be sacred.

Joe Jervis over at Joe.My.God has a post up containing a video of Brian Brown speaking at Sen. Ruben Diaz hate rally in the Bronx this afternoon. It’s worth a look to get a feel for the heated atmosphere Diaz, Brown and company feel is appropriate for addressing the place of their gay neighbors in society. At the 2:55 mark, Brown shouts the following out at the crowd:

“It changes what is taught in the schools. Kids as young as kindergarten are taught in Massachusetts that their parents are bigots because they believe marriage is the union of a man and a woman.”

It just isn’t possible by now, that Brown and Gallagher don’t know their claim that the curriculum of kindergarten in Massachusetts has anything to do with same-sex marriage is false. But the smear that The Homosexuals Are After Your Children has a long history, even before Anita Bryant embodied it with her Save Our Children campaign, which was not so much about saving children (certainly not any gay ones at least) then it was making sure gay citizens could loose their jobs simply for being gay. But if it’s not possible that Brown and Gallagher don’t know that Massachusetts isn’t teaching kindergarteners about same-sex marriages, it’s also not possible that they don’t know how useful it is to say that it is.

So here is Brown doubling-down on it. Not only is Massachusetts teaching kindergarteners about same-sex marriage, but their teachers are telling them that their parents are bigots. And he’s doing it in a community that’s already had some pretty spectacular anti-gay violence recently…

Bronx gang accused of torturing gay man and 3 others make first court appearance

Eight gay-hating Bronx gangbangers accused of one of the city’s most savage crimes in years appeared in court Sunday to face charges in what Mayor Bloomberg called an act of “pure evil.”

They stand accused of torturing and terrorizing a gay man, his older brother and two teenagers over the course of many hours Oct. 3 in Morris Heights.

“Is it true you’re a fag?” ringleader Idelfonso (Cheto) Mendez allegedly demanded of his bound victims before punching them in the face.

Prosecutors said he repeated the query and the punch over and over again.

Straight Teen Killed in Queens Gay-Bash Attack

Anti-gay bias attacks don’t always target gays. Sometimes violent perpetrators screaming anti-gay epithets target straight men instead. Such may have been the case in the March 12 beating death in Queens, New York, of 18-year-old Anthony Collao, a heterosexual recent high school graduate, reported the New York Daily News on March 15.

Several young men who reportedly broke windows, scrawled on the walls with red markers, and made hand gestures associated with gangs invaded a party hosted by two gay men. The men also reportedly attacked and beat Collao while hurling anti-gay epithets, the article said.

The news account said that Collao tried to avoid violence by leaving the party once the four intruders entered. The gang chased him down, the article said, threw him up against a car, and pummeled him mercilessly. Collao was reportedly was reportedly punched, kicked, and stomped. One assailant was said to be carrying a pipe.

Four suspects were later placed under arrest. One of the young men was wearing Collao’s baseball cap, and the other three were “covered in blood.”

Do you really think that Ruben Diaz doesn’t know about any of this? Or Brian Brown?

“Kids as young as kindergarten are taught in Massachusetts that their parents are bigots because they believe marriage is the union of a man and a woman…”

The homosexuals are coming for your children!!! This is the kind of thing that gets people gay bashed and killed. And NOM’s utter indifference to the climate of violence this sort of rhetoric can enable speaks volumes. Perhaps it’s true that Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown do not hate gay people. Perhaps. Clearly they regard hate as a useful tool. It gets people to the voting booth. It gets their checkbooks opened up.

A few months ago Maggie, you asked, rhetorically, “Do I have blood on my hands?” And you know, I’ve been wondering why you didn’t bother wearing your wedding ring to the DOMA hearings a few weeks ago. They say the wedding ring embodies the continuous flow of love, a never-ending circle symbolizing eternity, where there is no beginning or end, the gold symbolizing purity…gold being one of the noble elements that are said to be incorruptible. But the spilling of innocent blood corrupts everything it touches. That simple, elegant and beautiful symbol of eternal love…you’re turning it into a thing of shame Maggie. I don’t think very many couples want their wedding vows sealed with a ring of blood.

The only thing that leaps out at me upon viewing President Obama’s “long form” Hawaiian birth certificate, is it looks structurally a lot like my California one. I’m guessing they all used the same ready-made government forms company back then. Oh…you want our Form 417B rev-c62-1011-A product. We have a special on that this week…purchase a million and you get a handy desk calendar embossed with your initials free of charge…

Well…I for one was expecting a sheet of paper at least five or six feet in length given all the fuss.   Some progressive commentators are alternately wondering why Obama gave in to the kooks and why he would want to put this particular republican clown show to rest.   Hahahaha…you can never shut up the kooks.   This is beautiful actually.   Here’s what’s going to happen: the kooks will, as they always do, simply reinvent their conspiracy theories, come up with new ones that explain why the old ones were right all along, babble even more loudly that Obama isn’t an American, is really a secret Muslim, is bringing atheism and shara law to the U.S., and thereby drag themselves even further into insanityland and the republican party with them since that’s essentially their base now.   What’s the RNC going to do…them them to STFU?   They can’t…they’ll loose a critical part of their base they can’t win elections without: the lunatics.

What Obama just did was poke a stick at the kook nest while acting all presidential and everything and all the democrats have to do now is pass the popcorn and sit back and watch.   Bet he does it again right before the GOP convention too.

[Update…]   On Twitter, Atrios shouts “Huzzah…the kerners are back.”   Yes…they’re questioning the typewriter lettering.   See…I told you…

Ah…the predictable backlash against the backlash against the backlash has begun…

Lawyers question firm’s decision to ditch gay marriage case

Atlanta-based law firm King & Spalding won plaudits Monday from gay activists for backing out of an agreement to argue to uphold the federal ban on gay marriage. But a day later the reviews were a bit more bruising in  the legal community.

Top lawyers and law professors, with some notable exceptions, called it an embarrassing blunder by the prestigious firm or  a betrayal of a client and legal principles. Others think King & Spalding, whose clients include General Electric and Coca-Cola, may have backed out because the firm fears the fallout from leading an anti-gay legal fight.

You say that like it’s a bad thing…

King & Spalding’s announcement it would not represent congressional House Republicans in their quest to defend court challenges to the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)  and the subsequent decision of Paul Clement, the lawyer  in the case, to quit the firm and take it  elsewhere was the talk Tuesday among Yale University Law School faculty, said Lawrence Fox, a Yale professor and expert in legal ethics. DOMA defines marriage “for federal tax, Social Security and other purposes” as only a union between a man and a woman.

“We really go down a bad road if we say law firms can’t take on (controversial)  matters or people will assume you have those views,” said Fox. “I’m going to walk into my class today and I’m going to use this. I’m tearing up my lesson plan …  to talk about this case.”

The nice thing about working in an ivory tower is what you do doesn’t have to have any relationship to the world outside.   Tenure.   It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who have to live there, in the world of the commoners, it’s only they who remember the panic that set in back in 1993 when the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples could not constitutionally be denied the right to marry.   It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who remember how the party of Lincoln and Fred Phelps pushed through congress the Defense Of Marriage Act to protect American heterosexuals from the damaging effects of having to live in a world where the sordid, brief and barren sexual assignations of homosexuals had the same legal standing as their noble unions of male and female.   It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who remember how the man who stood in front of them and said “I have a vision for America and you’re part of it” signed that bill into law in the dead of night, somewhat less then three years after he folded on his promise to let gay servicemen serve openly and with dignity.   It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who watched as the new republican majority in congress, elected on campaign pledges of jobs, set about immediately to work reassuring their base that the meager gains gay Americans had made while the democrats were in control would not stand, and that they would be steadfast in opposing president Obama’s plan to impose The Gay Agenda on America.

It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who read the steady stream of news reports of same-sex couples beaten down and destroyed by this nation’s abject capitulation to bigotry, month after month, year after year.

Gay couple’s immigration plight: Ailing New Yorker may be torn from spouse over visa

A gay Long Island couple who have played by the immigration rules for more than a decade are stuck in a Catch-22 that could tear them apart just when they need each other most.

New Yorker Edwin Blesch, 70 and his South African husband, Tim Smulian, 65, have been spending six months on Long Island and six months abroad to comply with Smulian’s tourist visa.

But Blesch, who has HIV, suffered several mini-strokes and other complications and is now unable to travel safely.

Smulian is his primary caregiver – but has no way to stay here permanently.

Immigration Officials To Gay Binational Couples: Just Kidding, No Deportation Holds

It’s unclear what will happen to the couples already profiled by major news sources, like Monica Alcota and Cristina Ojeda. The one thing that is clear is that this is a sad day for binational same-sex couples, and for everyone who values America’s tradition of being a place where people can come from anywhere in the world to make a home. Like so many other things, that seems to be a privilege reserved for straight people.

It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who remember their names…names like Laurel Hester.   Not law professors in ivory towers.

Here is a law firm that proudly touted its support for gay Americans in their struggle for equality.   Suddenly it is, in a very high profile way, part of the republican party’s DOMA circus.   Suddenly every attorney, every clerk, every secretary, every intern working for this law firm is under a gag order…not simply to refrain from speaking about the case, but never to breath so much as a word against DOMA.   Imagine that instead of Teh Gay this case was about defending a congressional ban on Jewish ownership of businesses.   How many eyebrows would be raised when a law firm that touted its opposition to antisemitism, suddenly took on the congressional defense of that law, and gagged its partners and staff from ever speaking a word against the segregation of Jews?   Who would complain when the law firm withdrew and the jackass antisemitic partner who dragged them into that despicable case left to pursue it on his own, that the Jews had gone too far?

But conscience, and a sense of basic human decency wanders in a lot of people, even now, when it comes to the persecution of gay Americans.   Suddenly persecuting minorities becomes some abstract thing, less important, less real, then the right of republicans to conduct a great circus show of defending marriage against the forces of Obama and Satan, and demonize a segment of America for votes.   The constant rain of gay blood on the streets isn’t even on their moral radar…

HRC is right to fight vigorously to overturn DOMA, which deprives gays and lesbians of many of the rights enjoyed by their heterosexual counterparts. But it sullies itself and its cause by resorting to bullying tactics.

So says The Washington Post.   Bullying tactics?

Details Of Brutal Hate Crime Attack On Damian Furtch Emerge

A gay man was attacked outside a West Village McDonalds for doing nothing more than wearing pink shoelaces and bright clothing, according to the victim.

Damian Furtch, 26, was pummeled early Sunday by two suspects shouting anti-gay epithets, police said.

The beating was the third bias attack in the neighborhood since October.

Bullying Tactics?

Gay Bash Benefits Gay Bashing Victim

On February 22, around 11:00 p.m., Shortell was walking home to his apartment on Kent Avenue and North Fourth Street, a walk that never felt unsafe to him before, when he was brutally attacked by a group of four teenagers. The details were fuzzy after that and as a result of the incident, Shortell suffered a fractured chin and nose; eye sockets and cheekbones, requiring ten hours of immediate surgery, several days in the hospital, and a month of recovery since.

Bullying tactics?   Bullying tactics?   Here’s the problem: the scapegoats aren’t taking it anymore.   They’re fighting back.   Where is the outrage in the corporate news media…the comfortable McMansion in the rich white suburbs corporate news media?   Once again, it’s directed at gay Americans.   For standing up for their human dignity.   For defending themselves against hate.   For fighting back.   Republicans inciting hatred for votes is just Business As Usual.   Gays asking businesses to walk the walk not just talk the talk on civil rights is front page news!   How dare they.   Don’t they know their place anymore?   What is this world coming to, when even homosexuals demand to be treated with respect?   Who told the them they had a right not to be bullied?   It certainly wasn’t us.

[Posted over at Truth Wins Out…]

“Why stop at transgender identity? Why not species identity — someone wants to get in touch with their inner horse.”
-Matt Barber, speaking at The Awakening

Lest you think it was all bile and venom at The Awakening, they also discussed ways of approaching homosexuals from a Christian perspective. “We have to reach out to those trapped in lifestyle that ultimately leads to death,” said Cynthia Dunbar, assistant law professor at Liberty University. Ryan Sorba, chairman of the Young Conservatives of California who threw a fit at gay participation at last year’s CPAC, offered these helpful insights for Christians wishing to reach out to homosexuals:

“‘Gay’ is a left-wing socio-political construct designed to create grounds for fundamental rights [based on] whimsical capricious desires. Gay identity does not exist.”

According to the article he then proposed several alternatives to “gay” including, “same-sex attraction”, “same-sex intercourse”, “unnatural vice” and the ever popular “sodomy”. Later it was proposed that gays also be called “anti-Christian.” But in a reaching out kind of way.

Whatever they were awakening there at Liberty University it wasn’t their conscience. Perhaps they should have held a seance instead.

[Posted over at Truth Wins Out…]

Understand this one thing if you understand nothing else: It isn’t just about marriage…

FRC Outraged That US Opposes The Criminalization Of Homosexuality

On Monday, the State Department issued a joint statement in the UN’s Human Rights Council opposing the criminalization of homosexuality. Currently, well over 70 countries impose criminal penalties for gays and lesbians, and the statement has the support of 84 countries. According to the Family Research Council, however, the US is committing a great injustice by condemning the criminalization of people because of their sexual orientation. The FRC dubs it “Operation International Tolerance,” complete with a picture of Obama wearing a rainbow helmet

And here comes the double-speak…

Obviously, FRC believes that homosexuals and transgenders shouldn’t be subjected to violence. But this resolution goes well beyond that to endorsing a behavior that dozens of member nations oppose. No binding document of international law has ever recognized a universal “human right” to engage in sex with a person of the same gender. And although even the U.N. admits that “resolutions” like this one “aren’t legally binding,” they do help to create a legal norm.

[Emphasis mine] As though rounding up gay people and locking them behind bars isn’t an intrinsically violent act. But pay attention to that business about legal norms. In his 1990 essay The Hypocrites of Homosexualty Orson Scott Card acknowledges what most other right wing culture warriors only soft peddle in public: that sodomy laws exist mainly to create a climate of fear among gay people…

Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society’s regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.

The goal of the polity is not to put homosexuals in jail. The goal is to discourage people from engaging in homosexual practices in the first place…

This can’t be emphasized enough: right wing culture warriors really do want homosexuality criminalized. This fight isn’t just about marriage, hospital visitation rights, the ability of gay Americans to hold down a job, get a professional license, or walk into a restaurant and expect the same service anyone else gets. It’s about fear. Gay people must be afraid. Every minute of every day, we must be afraid. And we are not. And that makes them angry. They are angry that we can live our lives openly, that we don’t have to worry about being turned into the police by some neighbor or co-worker with a grudge and get thrown in jail. They hate it that we don’t have to be afraid.

Because a fearful homosexual is a good homosexual. A fearful homosexual isn’t merely one who does not agitate for civil rights. We must be afraid just to live our lives openly. The closet must be our world. It must go back to this, all over again:

“If only we didn’t hate ourselves so much…if only we could just not hate ourselves quite so very much…” -Michael, The Boys In The Band

We must hate ourselves, at least as much if not more then they hate us. Because then we will never know the one thing we must never be allowed to know: what it is to be loved, and to love another… wholeheartedly… joyfully… body and soul.

Because love stays the course. Because love can move mountains. Because the one thing you never want the scapegoat to be able to do, is move mountains.

The pushback from the right started almost immediately, and with all the acid vitriol by which they inflamed the violent passions that almost certainly led to the shooting in Arizona last Saturday in the first place.   You could watch the bogus Jared Lee Loughner Facebook pages…the ones where he admits his loathsome liberal tendancies…being created and deleted as fast as the Facebook administrators could catch them going up.   You can really tell they learned their lesson from the killing of Matthew Shepard.   If now was then, they’d have been calling Shepard a meth using sex addict and McKinney and Henderson a couple of drugged out psychopaths and the killing a Tragic robbery gone bad long before the body had a chance to get cold, let alone buried.   And as always, a key ingredient in the smokescreen building are the uncertainties, inevitable so close to the event itself, if not for far, far beyond it.   What actually did motivate the killer?   Was he a leftist or a hard core Tea Partier?   Did he read Marx or Hitler?   Did he surf The New Republic or Daily KOS?   And if we can’t answer those basic questions then dare you lay blame for this horrible, horrible tragedy at the feet of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party you treasonous America hating liberals.

And so on…and so forth…

What does it mean to “lay the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords at the feet of Palin and the Right”?   That they gave the killer the gun and some money and sent him on his way?   That they deliberately incited this specific killer to this specific act?     That they fueled a dangerous climate of violence against their political opponents, deliberately, to intimidate their political opposition without particularly caring if any one of them actually got killed, because long ago they stopped seeing the opposition as their neighbors, their fellow Americans, but rather as an enemy to be defeated by any means necessary, and if one of them Did get killed it would teach the rest a lesson?

“Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: ‘Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!'”
-Sarah Palin via Twitter

Angle: I feel that the Second Amendment is the right to keep and bear arms for our citizenry. This not for someone who’s in the military. This not for law enforcement. This is for us. And in fact when you read that Constitution and the founding fathers, they intended this to stop tyranny. This is for us when our government becomes tyrannical…

Manders: If we needed it at any time in history, it might be right now.

Angle: Well it’s to defend ourselves. And you know, I’m hoping that we’re not getting to Second Amendment remedies. I hope the vote will be the cure for the Harry Reid problems.

Responsibility.   If our fingerprints are not actually on the murder weapon itself then we are not responsible.   It is immoral for you to use this National Tragedy for partisan political advantage.   And if our violent eliminationist rhetoric did happen to motivate that poor psycho to pack a gun and kill an elected officeholder we’ve placed our crosshairs on, well then logically liberals are the ones who are responsible.   Because if it wasn’t for all that ACLU liberal freedom of speech stuff he would never have heard us talking about 2nd amendment remedies for adverse election outcomes.   Responsibility.

What is life without regret? Via Alvin McEwen, here’s one I’ll take to my grave…

Paul Cameron : ‘ Prop 8 trial was lost because supporters were scared to use my work’

In September of this year, [Paul] Cameron posted a long, rambling diatribe on his web page of his organization, The Family Research Institute, entitled Prop 8 Decision — Triumph of ‘Scientifically Proven Sameness’.

Cameron’s theory that Germany didn’t loose World War I it was stabbed in the back by Jews and traitors at home the Proposition 8 defense lost because they didn’t use the good stuff, is one you had to see coming the moment the trial ended. The anti-gay industrial complex lives in its own world, its own mutually self referencing echo chamber, where all their comfortable conceits regarding heterosexual superiority are never allowed to collide with the slightest bit of cold hard reality. The instant they had to come out of that world and explain themselves in a court of law all their cherished fairytales went up in smoke.

Here’s a cartoon I did at the time…

It was a moment gay Americans had been waiting decades for. The sight alone, of so many straight media pundits scratching their heads at how utterly empty the anti-gay position actually is when you look at it closely was intensely satisfying. Oh…did you think they were arguing in good faith…? But if you even tarried momentarily with the thought that this might cause the kook pews to reconsider things a bit, ask themselves an uncomfortable question or two about what they know and how they know it, perhaps even feel a twinge of shame over what they’ve been doing all these years to innocent people, you do not know the breed.

No, they fled right back into the echo chamber at speeds that would have made Einstein’s jaw drop, and started bellyaching that the rest of the world Can’t Handle The Truth…

To be sure, homosexual activists have been building a ‘scientific case’ that homosexuality is irrelevant to marriage or successful child rearing — and also unrelated to child molestation, etc. — by publishing quasi-bogus conclusions appended to empirical studies in the journals of the major psychiatric professions, or by getting these associations to make exculpatory pronouncements. Consistent with Judge Walker’s legal argument, most of these studies purport to ‘prove’ that the outcomes and consequences of homosexuality are no different than the outcomes and consequences of heterosexuality.

Since a trove of such studies exist, then if what ‘science’ is is what gets published in peer-reviewed professional journals or declared by professional associations, the homosexuals ‘win.’ After all, homosexual sympathizers have generated more pro-gay conclusions based on social science studies than conclusions in studies that refute their ‘proof.’

And Guess Who Happens To Possess such a treasure trove of studies that refute their ‘proof’. Go on…guess…

We at Family Research Institute (FRI), of course, have ‘skin in this game.’ As researchers, we have published more extensively on homosexuality in peer-reviewed scientific journals than any one else on ‘our side.’

Peer-reviewed scientific journals like Psychological Reports which is to peer review as due diligence was to banks during the mortgage bubble. Or as Jim Burroway put it…

Of the thirty-four articles he’s published since 1986, all but five have appeared in the relatively obscure Psychological Reports. The others appeared in the journals Omega, Adolescence, Journal of Psychology, and the Journal of Biosocial Science. All of these journals rank very poorly among social science journals according to Journal Citation Reports, which measures the importance of a journal according to how often articles in that journal are mentioned in other journals — and thus its “impact” among social scientists. All of these journals rank in the lower half among social science journals. Most of them, including Psychological Reports, rank near the bottom.Psychological Reports claims to be a peer-reviewed journal, although editor Doug Ammons adds that “no reviewer has a veto right.” This is in sharp contrast to other, more respected peer-reviewed journals which will refuse to publish an article if serious objections are raised during the peer-review process.

Psychological Reports also differs from the other more respectable journals in another very important way: it charges its authors a fee $27.50 per page to publish. That’s why most professionals dismiss Psychological Reports as a “vanity journal,” one that will publish just about anything as long as the author is willing to pay the fee.

Let’s hear it for peer review. I mean…what’s more peer then a wad of cold hard cash?

So Cameron’s complaint is that Proposition 8 lost at trial because the defense was too afraid to put him on the witness stand, where he would have stood up for Real Science not fake Social Studies Science and swept everyone off their feet with such scientific brilliance even teh gay would have had to admit He Speaks Truth About Homosexual. I for one, truly regret this. I will go to my grave sorry Paul didn’t get his day in court. Really. Honestly. It would have been so absolutely Wonderful to watch Olson and/or Boies cross examine him. A pair of lions ripping apart a hapless gazelle while Maggie Gallagher watches with a look on her face like she’s about to vomit.

In my dreams I can just picture it happening…starting with “Mr. Cameron, do you recall speaking to a group in Lincoln Nebraska during the time that city was considering adding sexual orientation to their human rights ordinance? Do you recall telling them that a 4 year old boy had his genitals almost severed during a homosexual act in the restroom of the Gateway Mall…?”

“In a court of law you’ve got to come in and you’ve got to support those opinions, you’ve got to stand up under oath and cross-examination. And what we saw at trial is that it’s very easy…to make all sorts of statements and campaign literature, or in debates where they can’t be cross-examined. But when they come into court and they have to support those opinions and they have to defend those opinions under oath and cross-examination, those opinions just melt away. And that’s what happened here. There simply wasn’t any evidence, there weren’t any of those studies. There weren’t any empirical studies. That’s just made up. That’s junk science. It’s easy to say that on television. But a witness stand is a lonely place to lie…” -David Boies

Damn. Life just isn’t fair.

Rand Paul, white heterosexual tea party candidate won his contest last night, and among cheering white heterosexual supporters announced to the world…

I have a message – a message from the people of Kentucky, a message that is loud and clear and does not mince words: We’ve come to take our government back!

Our government.   Our government.   Our government.   This from the man who said it was wrong for government to force businesses to obey civil rights laws because it was a violation of individual liberty, but who also thinks government should be in the business of controlling women’s bodies, dictating what is and what is not marriage and what is and what is not a family.   So when speaks of “the people” and utters the phrase “our government” it’s pretty easy to tell that “the people” are not necessarily his neighbors in this life but merely his own kind.   White.   Heterosexual.   Oh…and rich.   Very very rich.

Thus, the Louisiana Courier Press reported during the campaign…

Along with college and university students, Paul is courting the libertarian-leaning Republicans who got excited about his father. But to win a Kentucky primary, he’ll need social conservatives, and University of Kentucky political scientist Stephen Voss said he must be careful as he tries to appeal to both.

“This is a difficult tightrope to walk,” said Voss, who nonetheless believes Paul may be the front-runner right now. “When he’s talking economics and money, he is philosophically a libertarian. When he talks about social issues, he’s sending guarantees to the right wing that he’s not libertarian.”

Paul says he opposes abortion without exception, not even in cases of rape, incest or the health of the expectant mother. He also opposes marriages between gay and lesbian couples. At the same time, he voices staunch opposition to government intruding in the private lives of citizens.

A Difficult Tightrope To Walk… No, not a tightrope, a deception.     There are two kinds of “libertarian”.   There’s the useful tools who really believe that crap.   I was one of those back in the late 70s and moved around in Libertarian circles, working on campaigns, getting bored shoppers to sign our petitions, and that was where I saw that I was basically just a useful tool for the other sort of Libertarian.   The faux ones.   The rich right wingers and hard core John Birchers who saw libertarian rhetoric as a good way to bamboozle voters, especially young voters.   I first saw it when a vigorous argument broke out in the ranks after the U.S. supreme court decision in Hardwick v. Bowers upheld the state’s sodomy laws.   I was aghast and fully expected my comrades in the movement to be also.   But…no.   It was all about “state’s rights” many of them said.   But, but…says I…surely the states don’t have the right to toss grown adults in jail for simply for having sex either, no matter how strongly others may disapprove.   Individual liberty and all that.   No, no, I was told over and over.   “State’s rights”.   “State’s rights”.   “State’s rights”.

It was a slogan I had come to know well from the fight over race segregation in America, and I knew perfectly well even at a young age just what it was code for, along with that other famous code phrase of the time.   We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.

I got your libertarian America right here…

…and here…

…and here…

…and here…

…and here.

And I got your “libertarian” senator right here…

Le Dance Pathetique…as choreographed by Carl Paladino…

Un…

Now, in addition, I have a nephew…I have people working for me who are gay.

Deux…

Never had a problem with any of them…

Trois…

…never had a problem in any sense with their lifestyle…

Quatre…

…and we’ve talked about it often.

Cinq…

I talk to them about the discrimination that they suffer and I’m sensitive to it.

Six…

The discrimination that they suffer is very, very difficult and I’m totally sensitive to it.

Sept…

I want to clearly define myself. I have of no reservations about gay people at all…

Huit…

…none.

Neuf…

I feel that marriage is only between a man and a woman.

Dix…

That’s not how God created us and that’s not the example that we should be showing our children.

Onze…

I don’t want them to be brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option.

Douze…

I oppose the homosexual agenda, whether they call it marriage, civil unions or domestic partnership. Marriage is between a man and a woman – period.

Le Curtian…Applaus a vous…

After decades of demonizing gay people and blasting devotion of same-sex couples as fraudulent, Maggie Gallagher suddenly surprises everyone by announcing she thinks she has a heart…

“The suicide of that teen was not only a tragedy it was a crime. The young people who violated laws out of mindless desire to bully or embarrass or whatever the heck kids do this stuff will be prosecuted and probably jailed, I hope. Nothing in the press accounts suggest the kids who did this were motivated by homophobia, and the cruelty of cyberbullying is causing teen suicides among those who are not gay, as well. I do not think the absence of gay marriage is the cause of these tragedies or its presence will resolve them. We can make this a symbol of all our other fights, or we can try to save all our kids, gay and straight, from this kind of ugly and mindless cruelty. My heart goes out to the family of the young man. God bless him and them.” – Maggie Gallagher, commenting on NOM’s blog.

Ugly mindless cruelty?   Like this…?

“A group of San Francisco first-graders took an unusual field trip to City Hall on Friday to toss rose petals on their just-married lesbian teacher – putting the public school children at the center of a fierce election battle over the fate of same-sex marriage,” the front page story by Jill Tucker begins.

In fact, the parents who decided to surprise the beloved schoolteacher didn’t put the children “at the center of a fierce election battle” – the Chronicle did for sensationalism.

According to blogger Paul Hogarth in his Oct. 24 dissection of the piece for Beyond Chron and Daily Kos (“SF Chronicle Jeopardizes Marriage Equality”),  Tucker said that “the parents who organized the trip actively sought media coverage—and the paper decided on its own that it was ‘news’ enough to deserve front-page treatment.”

Since lesbian weddings were legal then, one can image that the parents might have expected any coverage to go in the back with the other wedding announcements. On Oct. 26 two aggrieved parents sent a letter to the Yes on 8 campaign and the Chronicle complaining about their children “being exploited and used as pawns” by the Yes campaign which downloaded the front page picture from the Chronicle’s website to use in their ads.

Sapphocrat, who blogs at LavenderLiberal, complained vociferously about the Chronicle’s failure to put the field trip into the larger context of the Creative Arts Charter School’s philosophy.

But the damage was done. In an in-depth interview with me after Prop 8 passed, campaign consultant Steve Smith said they were winning back the critical undecided women’s vote until the Yes ad featuring the Chronicle story on the lesbian teacher.

That post by Karen Ocamb centers on the roll of the San Francisco Chronicle in instigating the successful Yes On 8 attack ads which used that teacher’s wedding as a hook for their The Homos Are Invading Your Schools To Turn Your Kids Gay message.   But lurking in the background of her story is this simple, brutal fact: Maggie Gallagher and her fellow travelers in the Proposition 8 battle used the love those kids had for their teacher as a knife to cut their teacher’s ring finger off.

But she wants to save kids from mindless cruelty.   Right.   And Osama Bin Laden wants to save them from terrorist attacks.

More cartoons on The Cartoon Page…and many more in the archives I’ve been neglecting to update for so long…

Le Dance Pathetique…as choreographed by Florida Governor Charlie Crist…

Un…

I’m a live and let live kind of guy…

Deux…

I think if partners want to have the opportunity to live together, I don’t have a problem with that…

Trois…

And I think that’s where most of America is.

Quatre…

So I think that you know, you have to speak from the heart about these issues.

Cinq…

They are very personal.

Six…

They have a significant impact on an awful lot of people…

Sept…

…and the less the government is telling people what to do, the better off we’re all going to be.

Huit…

….partners living together, I don’t have a problem with.

Neuf…

Question: Now that you’re trying to occupy the political center, are you still in favor of a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage?
Governor Crist: I feel the same way, yes, because I feel that marriage is a sacred institution, if you will.

Dix…

But I do believe in tolerance.

Le Curtian…Applaus a vous…

Ken Mehlman, former republican party chair, is out and proud.   Well…out anyway…

Ex-GOP national chairman Ken Mehlman says he’s gay

Mehlman, manager of the 2004 Bush/Cheney re-election campaign, came out to Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic. “It’s taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life,” Mehlman said in the interview. “Everybody has their own path to travel, their own journey and for me over the past few months, I’ve told my family, friends, former colleagues and current colleagues and they’ve been wonderful and supportive.”

The article goes on to say Mehlman wants to work for same-sex marriage.   That would be helpful.   Mehlman worked for years to get anti-gay bigots elected. He ran the reelection campaign of Bush The Junior, waving the gay scarecrow at voters despite the fact that he himself was one…

But he was, and probably still is, a party loyalist, and as Garrison Keillor said after Norm Coleman won in the almost-as-ugly 2002 election (which also saw Max Cleland, a triple-amputee Vietnam veteran loose to slimeball Saxby Chambliss), they are Republicans first and Americans second. If the party tells you it wants to put a knife in your back, you offer to do it yourself as a show of loyalty.

But let it be said they are not completely incapable of regret. In 2005 Mehlman apologized for decades of GOP race baiting…

“Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization,” Mehlman said at the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”

This was happening back when some pundits were thinking republicans could peel some of the black vote away from the democratic party on social (read: anti-gay) issues, which makes Mehlman’s offering this apology more then a little grotesque. But if all you’re noticing about this is its tang of political opportunism, you’re missing that he’s offering this apology for deliberately polarizing the nation to win elections, just a year after they’d waged the most homophobic campaign in American history. Here’s a cartoon I did at the time…

That was the summer I stood in a protest line outside an ex-gay ministry in Memphis Tennessee, where a gay teen had been committed against his will by his own parents. There I heard the stories of other gay kids and young adults either forced into ex-gay therapy or on their own because they were terrified of being homosexual, in a climate of anti-gay fear, loathing and hate ginned up over the years by among others, Ken Mehlman. He had an election to win you see, and never mind the damage done to this country in the process. Neighbor had to hate neighbor. Parents had to loath their own flesh and blood, children had to see that loathing in the faces of their own fathers and mothers, and remember having seen it for the rest of their lives, so George Bush could be president. To the party loyalist the ends justify the means. You must be willing to destroy some families, to win an election on Family Values.

I’m glad Mehlman is finally at some sort of inner peace with the person he is. For one thing, people who are disgusted with their sexual nature, gay or straight, tend to take that disgust out on others. But no one, not even Republican’s first and Americans second, should feel forced to live their lives in the closet. But it isn’t unreasonable to expect those republicans to work a little harder now to make this an America where nobody else has to either. There’s a lot of damage out there, with their names on it.