Atrios points to this post on Lawyers, Guns and Money with the comment, Tiny Penis Syndrome…sadly, it does explain a lot. Yes, but not everything…
I just finished teaching an upper-division US history course in which my students read — and I swear I’m not making this up — Kim Du Toit’s repellant 2003 essay on "The Pussification of the Western Male". The class had just finished Gail Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization (1995), a marvelous examination of the cultural transformations of gender between the 1880s and World War I. We used du Toit as a companion piece to the chapters on Teddy Roosevelt and the psychologist G. Stanley Hall — each of whom were, in their own ways, as anxious as du Toit about what they perceived to be the devaluation of masculinity.
…
Hall, for his part, was preoccupied not with adult masculinity but rather with the incipient manhood of youth. Believing that developing children rehearsed the cultural evolution of the human race, he insisted that young boys should not be deterred from expressing "the instinct of the savage."
Boys are naturally robbers; they are bandits and fighters by nature. A scientific study has been made of boys’ societies . . . . In every instance these societies have been predatory. All of the members thirsted for blood, and all of their plans were for thievery and murder
Allow the young boy to beat the shit out of his companions, Hall suggested, and his mental and physical development will proceed in a smooth and healthy fashion. Divert him from his natural course Hall warned, and you will produce "a milk-sop, a lady-boy, or a sneak." Such a child "lacks virility, [and] his masculinity does not ring true." Perhaps he will — as Hall himself did — grow up to be a chronic masturbator, a helpless slave to "the lonely vice."
That passage of Hall’s rang familiar in my ear. Not so much for the words, as the sensibility that male youth is by its nature savage and brutal and that cultivating that savage, brutal nature is the task of every great civilization. I’d heard all that somewhere before. So I did a little digging and it wasn’t long before I found it…
"My teaching is hard. Weakness has to be knocked out of them. In my [elite schools] a youth will grow up before which the world will shrink back. A violently active dominating, intrepid, brutal youth – that is what I am after". Youth must be all those things. It must be indifferent to pain. There must be no weakness or tenderness in it.I want to see once more in its eyes the gleam of pride and independence of the beast of prey. Strong and handsome must my young men be. I will have them fully trained in all physical exercises. I intend to have an athletic youth – that is the first and the chief thing. In this way I shall eradicate the thousands of years of human domestication. Then I shall have in front of me the pure and noble natural material. With that I can create the new order.
"I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is ruin to my young men. I would have them learn only what takes their fancy. But one thing they must learn – self-command! They shall learn to overcome the fear of death, under the severest tests. That is the intrepid and heroic stage of youth. Out of it comes the stage of the free man, the man who is the substance and essence of the world, the creative man, the god-man. In my [elite schools] there will stand as a statue for worship the figure of the magnificent, self-ordaining god-man; it will prepare the young men for their coming period of ripe manhood."
Emphasis mine. I’d heard these words of Hitler’s first in my own youth, sitting in a junior high school history class watching a documentary produced in 1956 titled, The Twisted Cross. I was a bookish little kid even back then, and when the scenes of Nazi mobs burning books came on screen I was completely horrified. When the scenes of the concentraton camps came on screen later I felt that, yes, the one led right to the other. Where books are burned, people are soon after. But the scenes of Htiler and Himmler inspecting the ranks of young soldiers, while the narrator intoned those words from Hitler Speaks, chilled me to the bone. My junior high school years were when I experienced the worst bullying of my life, and I didn’t have to think hard about what living in Hitler’s Third Reich was like when I heard that. Great if you were part of the ruling thug caste…not so much if you were everyone else. I remembered that documentary so vividly that decades later when I saw a videotape of the if for sale and took it home to watch, I was amazed at how detailed my memory of it actually was after all those years.
Maybe it really is all about penis envy. But I don’t recall any of my childhood bullies feeling their threatened manhood by me. What I saw in their faces was contempt. Contempt for anyone they could beat the crap out of, whether by themselves or with the help of their gang. When you have no brains to speak of, when even a cinderblock could add 2 plus 2 more accurately then you, all you have left is brute force to live by, and for some that is the only standard of value they know for taking their measure, and everyone else’s too. The contempt for effete intellectuals is no envy. It really is contempt. So what if you can grow food. So what if you can turn dirt into steel. So what if you can cure disease. If I can beat the crap out of you, then I’m the better man. Because then I can simply take everything you have. That really is the thinking going on there.
And never mind that no amount of force, no advantage in weapons, no military superiority ever gave a single penny’s worth of value to a dollar. The criminal mindset, unable to distinguish between creating wealth and stealing it, regards all creation as theft, all theft as creation. All that matters in the end, is can you take it away from someone else. If you can, then it’s rightfully yours. If the other guy can’t hold onto it, then it was never his to begin with. Might makes right. Any other standard of morality is literally incomprehensible to them. When you’re too stupid to know how modern civilization really works, you’re also too stupid to know it.
That is the essential fascist mindset. When you hear some moron babbling on and on about…
The feminization of males
Effete Intellectualism
Military glory
…all rolled together in one tightly packed little ball of bitterness, you can be pretty sure of what you’re dealing with. What dimwits like Du Toit and all the other right wing kultar kampfers think they’re selling America is this…
…but what what you always get is this:
There’s what not deterring young men from expressing "the instinct of the savage" gets you, right there. Look at it. There’s your savage manly man’s promise land.
At least Fox doesn’t own nearly all the TV stations in most places. But in many parts of the country, a Clear Channel radio station in one format or another is all you get.
When the republicans set out to abolish FCC media monopoly rules, many people warned that it would lead to a stifling of variety on the airwaves. Sure enough, only those of us who can afford now to have a satellite radio in the car can get something approximating the breadth that was once there to be found on the radio dial. Clear Channel has single handedly killed radio for most of us. But it would be a mistake to think that it’s just about peddling junk music to the lowest common denominator for profit. Oh, no. Consider the new Bruce Springsteen album, Magic, which has been a hit just about everywhere…except on radio for some strange reason. Fox News attempts to spin it thusly…
Bruce: Magic Refused Radio Play
Bruce Springsteen should be very happy. He has the No. 1 album, a possible Grammy for Best Album of the Year for "Magic," an album full of singles and a sold-out concert tour.
Alas, there’s a hitch: Radio will not play "Magic." In fact, sources tell me that Clear Channel has sent an edict to its classic rock stations not to play tracks from "Magic." But it’s OK to play old Springsteen tracks such as "Dancing in the Dark," "Born to Run" and "Born in the USA."
Just no new songs by Springsteen, even though it’s likely many radio listeners already own the album and would like to hear it mixed in with the junk offered on radio.
Why? One theory, says a longtime rock insider, "is that the audience knows those songs. Of course, they’ll never know these songs if no one plays them."
"Magic," by the way, has sold more than 500,000 copies since its release on Oct. 2 and likely will hit the million mark. That’s not a small achievement these days, and one that should be embraced by Clear Channel.
But what a situation: The No. 1 album is not being played on any radio stations, according to Radio & Records, which monitors such things. Nothing. The rock songs aren’t on rock radio, and the two standout "mellow" tracks — "Magic" and "Devil’s Arcade" — aren’t even on "lite" stations.
The singles-kinda hits, "Radio Nowhere" and "Living in the Future" — which would have been hits no questions asked in the ’70s, ’80s and maybe even the ’90s, also are absent from Top 40.
No shit sherlock. Here’s the opening lyrics to Radio Nowhere…
I was tryin’ to find my way home
But all I heard was a drone
Bouncing off a satellite
Crushin’ the last lone American night
This is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?
This is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?
I was spinnin’ ’round a dead dial
Just another lost number in a file
Dancin’ down a dark hole
Just searchin’ for a world with some soul
This is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?
This is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?
Is there anybody alive out there?
Sound like the sort of thing your friendly neighborhood republican media monopoly wants played on Their Radio Stations??? Here’s Living In The Future…
Woke up Election Day, skies gunpowder and shades of gray
Beneath a dirty sun, I whistled my time away
Then just about sundown
You come walkin’ through town
Your boot heels clickin’
Like the barrel of a pistol spinnin’ ’round
Don’t worry Darlin’, now baby don’t you fret
We’re livin’ in the future and none of this has happened yet
Don’t worry Darlin’, now baby don’t you fret
We’re livin’ in the future and none of this has happened yet
The earth it gave away, the sea rose toward the sun
I opened up my heart to you it got all damaged and undone
My ship Liberty sailed away on a bloody red horizon
The groundskeeper opened the gates and let the wild dogs run
I’m rollin’ through town, a lost cowboy at sundown
Got my monkey on a leash, got my ear tuned to the ground
My faith’s been torn asunder, tell me is that rollin’ thunder
Or just the sinkin’ sound of somethin’ righteous goin’ under?
Clear Channel will play this kind of thing when hell freezes over, or President Nice Job Brownie grows a conscience, whichever comes first. This sort of thing doesn’t fit very well into their format. For Bruce to get any airplay on Clear Channel, he needs to be more positive. Give the audience something like this…
The phrase "brought to you by Clear Channel" is partly cut off there, but this is what Clear Channel was splashing all over the nation’s highways after president Junior launched his excellent adventure in Iraq. Says it all, doesn’t it?
What to do? Columbia Records is said to be readying a remixed version of "The Girls in their Summer Clothes," a poppy Beach Boys-type track that has such a catchy hook fans were singing along to it at live shows before they had the album. Bruce insiders are hopeful that with a push from Sony, "Girls" will triumph.
I’m not so sure.
Clear Channel seems to have sent a clear message to other radio outlets that at age 58, Springsteen simply is too old to be played on rock stations. This completely absurd notion is one of many ways Clear Channel has done more to destroy the music business than downloading over the last 10 years. It’s certainly what’s helped create satellite radio, where Springsteen is a staple and even has his own channel on Sirius.
It’s not just Springsteen. There is no sign at major radio stations of new albums by John Fogerty or Annie Lennox, either. The same stations that should be playing Santana’s new singles with Chad Kroeger or Tina Turner are avoiding them, too.
Like Springsteen, these "older" artists have been relegated to something called Triple A format stations — i.e. either college radio or small artsy stations such as WFUV in the Bronx, N.Y., which are immune from the Clear Channel virus of pre-programming and where the number of plays per song is a fraction of what it is on commercial radio.
Republican radio network Clear Channel, a monopoly in many cities and a dominant player in most of the rest, isn’t interested. Is it because Springsteen has been an outspoken campaigner for Democrats and progressives? Clear Channel has taken a political stand with its programming in the past. Just think back to their boycott of the Dixie Chicks. Oh, no… not way back, just back to when they released their most recent album. Despite being one of the top 10 best-selling American albums of the year– across all genres and demographics– radio studiously ignored it. There were maybe half a dozen country stations that even played it at all. What Clear Channel did to the Dixie Chicks is a watertight case for the need to break the media companies up into a thousand pieces. (John Sununu disagrees; he’s pro-censorship.) I spoke with an old friend who heads a record company and preferred to speak off the record.
"When you have artists like the Dixie Chicks and Bruce Springsteen who have overtly spoken out against this Administration, they are taken to task in spite the clear and undeniable indications from the marketplace that people want to hear their music. What seems to be happening– if sales are any kind of a barometer of what the marketplace is– is that these politically-connected radio networks like Clear Channel are not looking to succeed as radio stations as much as pushing forward some political agenda.
Another friend of mine distinctly recalls the Senate hearings on radio consolidation in light of the Dixie Chicks boycott where Barbara Boxer and John McCain heard testimony including an internal Clear Channel memo threatening "Just wait and see what happens if Springsteen tries this." I guess we’re seeing that right now.
He is the nicest right-wing evangelical powerhouse you’ve never heard of. Jim Daly grew up the last of five children in what anyone would call a broken home. His mother died when he was 10 and he lived with, in turn, a stepfather, a foster family, his own alcoholic father and his divorced brother. He came to Jesus in high school, under the guidance of a football coach. His recent memoir, "Finding Home," has barely made a dent on the best-seller lists. Nevertheless, in 2005, Daly got the job of president and CEO of Focus on the Family, and although he denies this, it’s clear that he was picked to be the yin to James Dobson’s yang. While Dobson continues to threaten in the press, Daly chats amiably with a reporter about the fall weather. He sticks to the hard line on policy issues—gay marriage is bad for families, he says—but his presentation is all soft edges. "I’m sure there are wonderful gay parents out there; there’s a poster child for everything." If one of his boys turned out to be gay, he says, "I’d love him."
Sure he would. He’d love him right into an ex-gay camp. It’s telling of the relentless animus the religious right has toward gay people, that Miller considers a Pew study showing opposition to gay marriage has crept down a tad among white evangelicals under 30, to 76 percent, as a sign of growing tolerance. Yes. And mount Everest is still growing too but I wouldn’t try watching it.
But there’s this little tidbit also…
According to a new study by the Barna Research Group, 80 percent of churchgoers between the ages of 16 and 29 believe that the term "anti-homosexual" describes Christianity, and they complain that they don’t get enough guidance from their pastors in how to apply Christ’s message of love to their gay friends.
I’ve seen this statistic cited elsewhere recently. Well I just can’t imaging why young people would describe Christianity as "anti-homosexual"…
One of the Seven Straight Nights for Equal Rights gatherings was held on October 8 in Greenville, South Carolina, and Faith in America has passed on photos and coverage of what transpired there, as those at the vigil faced protesters from a local church.
When the voices of straight allies unite with those of their gay and lesbain friends, family and co-workers, the shrill voices of religion-based bigotry can’t stand up against reason and heart-felt conviction. That’s what happened last Monday in downtown Greenville, S.C.
It was a beautiful night for Seven Straight Nights for Equal Rights in Greenville, S.C. on Oct. 8. But when a van full of anti-gay protesters from a Greenville community church showed up, the special event’s celebratory mood was maligned by the anti-gay group’s attitudes of intimidation and confrontation.
The good men and women of faith arrived at the protest bearing signs that read God Abhors You. There’s a video over at Pam’s House Blend.
Strolling back and forth yelling out that gay and lesbian people were doomed to hell, one of the leaders of anti-gay protesters continued his booming tirade of hate toward gay and lesbian citizens.
After the initial intimidation – which is what the protesters were all about – several of the people gathered for the Seven Straight Nights event approached the protesters and began questioning the message and their tactics.
Jon and Dawn Kennedy were two of those people at the celebration. Their brother, Sean Kennedy, died May 16, 2007 in Greenville, S.C., after being struck by a man who reportedly called Sean a faggot before striking Sean with such force that it crushed the bones in his face. Sean died from the one fatal blow.
Sean’s mother was present at Seven Straight Nights and was one of the event’s several speakers, including Faith In America Executive Director Jimmy Creech.
When Sean’s brother and sister politely told the leader of the anti-gay protesters that their brother was killed and that their hateful speech promotes violence toward gay and lesbian people, the protester flatly and unemotionally told Jon and Dawn Kennedy that their brother "was burning in hell right now."
I realize that these people are not representative of the whole of Christianity. But the silence in the pews toward this kind of thing is telling.
If you have friends who seem to think that violence against gay and lesbian citizens isn’t pervasive in our society, you need to introduce them to Erin Davies and her Fagbug.
Erin Davies, a student at Sage College in New York, was targeted by anti-gay vandals when her VW Beetle was sprayed with the words "U R gay" and fag" in mid-April, most likely because the vehicle has a rainbow sticker affixed to its bumper. The incident occurred on the national "Day of Silence" in which students across the country use silence as a means to bringing awareness to intolerance and homophobia.
Instead of having the car cleaned up, Davies says she plans to use it to spread a message of tolerance and take it on a cross-country trip this summer with the hateful messages still emblazoned across its windows.
Erin attended the Seven Straight Nights for Equal Rights in Greenville, S.C. last week and it was there that she reported the awful news that she had been the victim of another painful – and potentially serious attack – in her hometown of Tampa, Fla.
On Oct. 4, just a week before arriving in Greenville, S.C., someone threw a brick through the window of her home in Tampa and the back window of her car parked there.
This is what Love The Sinner, Hate The Sin buys you. Not tolerance for the homosexual, but tolerance for bigotry. You cannot arouse religious passions against couples in love, without giving license to hate. This isn’t murder we’re talking about here. It isn’t violence. It isn’t theft. To denounce acts of violence, crimes of greed, the hurtful, harmful, things people to To their neighbors, is to condemn hatefulness. To denounce couples in love is to condemn love itself and that gives hate free reign to do what it will, because only love can stand against hate. Once you have destroyed love, you have unchained hate and hate obeys no one. It throws the brick through Erin Davies automobile. It laughs in Jon and Dawn Kennedy’s faces, and tells them their brother is burning in hell. It ties a 112 pound college student tied to a fence, tortures him, then leave him to die alone on the cold Wyoming plains. That is what Love The Sinner, Hate The Sin buys you. Not absolution, but blood. On your hands.
I’m terribly sorry if all this puts you in a theological bind. But the bible says… Yes. And it says we shouldn’t suffer witches to live either. And then it turns around and says Love Thy Neighbor. Over here is God flooding the earth, killing everyone and everything on it, including by the way, all its little children. Over there is Jesus, warning people not to harm a hair on a little child’s head or face the wrath of God. The bible can have its cake and eat it too. Unfortunately, you can’t. Those people vitriolically condemning homosexuals and their families and friends, Are the face of Christianity in America, until you give it a better, more loving one. And you can’t. Not until you start loving your gay neighbor. And as long as you hold to the belief that the love between same sex couples is a sin, you don’t. All you can do is watch impotently, while they are eaten by wolves you cannot speak out wholeheartedly against. Or you can wash, wash your hands of it all, and look the other way.
Brown County GOP Chairman Donald Fleischman has resigned his post, says a spokesperson, after being accused of enticement and fondling of an underage boy, reports the Green Bay Press-Gazette Saturday.
Fleischman, 37, is free after posting a $20,000 bond on September 28. "My client is innocent of the charges," says attorney Jeff Jazgar, who "declined to discuss specifics."
"Our plan is to get some witnesses to testify and present enough information to dismiss the case."
The boy was found by police in Fleischman’s home on two occasions in late 2006 while being sought as a runaway from Ethan House, a home for at-risk youth. Now 17, he says he stayed with Fleischman at his house and a cabin, where he was provided with alcohol and cannabis, and regularly fondled.
On November 19, 2006, according to a September 7th complaint obtained from the WisPolitics Courtwatch Blog, the boy in question was found hiding in a bedroom closet, and a pipe was found in the house, which tested positive for THC. Shortly after, on December 8, 2006, Fleischman said he was trying to convince the boy, discovered again in the home, to turn himself in as a runaway.
Fleischman faces two counts of child enticement, two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a child, and one count of exposing himself to a child. He returns to court on October 29.
It’s been like a week doesn’t go by that some GOP operative or religious right nutcase turns up in the middle of some kind of sex scandal. And they’re lecturing us on sexual conduct?
“This is a perverse distraction from the issue at hand,” said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Reid, D-Nev. “Instead of debating the merits of providing health care to children, some in GOP leadership and their right-wing friends would rather attack a 12-year-old boy and his sister who were in a horrific car accident.”
Manley cited an e-mail sent to reporters by a Senate Republican leadership aide, summing up recent blog traffic about the boy’s family. A spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., declined to comment on Manley’s charge that GOP aides were complicit in spreading disparaging information about Frosts. (emphasis mine)
In my experience, if you are not participating in something, you deny it outright to kill the story.
Mitch McConnell is the Republican Minority Leader in the Senate and sponsor of the Orwellian-named “Families First” legislation which would actually decrease the number of kids covered for benefits. Classy. Is someone in his office coordinating a dirty tricks PR advance against a 12 year old child? Have they been helping the story along, doing oppo on this child and his family and feeding it out through the wurlitzer to their corporate media buddies so their hands appear publicly clean while the wingnuts launder their slime tactics for them? As Digby asks, has the Senate Republican Minority leaders office frequently been used as a laundering point of contact for wayward freepers and random wingnuttery at large? Yes or no.
You often wonder sometimes, where the winger blogs are getting their information from.
Anyway, let’s see how the NYTimes does in fielding their latest gibberish.
when Democrats enlisted 12-year-old Graeme Frost, who along with a younger sister relied on the program for treatment of severe brain injuries suffered in a car crash, to give the response to Mr. Bush’s weekly radio address on Sept. 29, Republican opponents quickly accused them of exploiting the boy to score political points.
Then, they wasted little time in going after him to score their own.
In recent days, Graeme and his family have been attacked by conservative bloggers and other critics of the Democrats’ plan to expand the insurance program, known as S-chip. They scrutinized the family’s income and assets — even alleged the counters in their kitchen to be granite — and declared that the Frosts did not seem needy enough for government benefits.
OK. So they accused the kid’s family of fraud, essentially. How does the NYTimes do in fact-checking the asses of the right blogosphere?
The critics accused Graeme’s father, Halsey, a self-employed woodworker, of choosing not to provide insurance for his family of six, even though he owned his own business. They pointed out that Graeme attends an expensive private school. And they asserted that the family’s home had undergone extensive remodeling, and that its market value could exceed $400,000.
One critic, in an e-mail message to Graeme’s mother, Bonnie, warned: “Lie down with dogs, and expect to get fleas.” As it turns out, the Frosts say, Graeme attends the private school on scholarship. The business that the critics said Mr. Frost owned was dissolved in 1999. The family’s home, in the modest Butchers Hill neighborhood of Baltimore, was bought for $55,000 in 1990 and is now worth about $260,000, according to public records. And, for the record, the Frosts say, their kitchen counters are concrete.
Certainly the Frosts are not destitute. They also own a commercial property, valued at about $160,000, that provides rental income. Mr. Frost works intermittently in woodworking and as a welder, while Mrs. Frost has a part-time job at a firm that provides services to publishers of medical journals. Her job does not provide health coverage.
Under the Maryland child health program, a family of six must earn less than $55,220 a year for children to qualify. The program does not require applicants to list their assets, which do not affect eligibility.
In a telephone interview, the Frosts said they had recently been rejected by three private insurance companies because of pre-existing medical conditions. “We stood up in the first place because S-chip really helped our family and we wanted to help other families,” Mrs. Frost said.
That’s a pretty thorough refutation of every single accusation the wingnuts could come up with against the family. So, good. I myself would add that there never really was any reason to take their frenzied posts seriously in the first place: the crap about the private school, and their real estate assets supposedly affecting how much they could pay for health insurance, were obviously absurd from the start. There never was any need to "investigate" these claims: common sense should have said, "irrelevant."
In other words, if, as the NYT has it,
But what on the surface appears to be yet another partisan feud, all the nastier because a child is at the center of it, actually cuts to the most substantive debate around S-chip. Democrats say it is crucially needed to help the working poor — Medicaid already helps the impoverished — but many Republicans say it now helps too many people with the means to help themselves.
… It’s pretty clear that yes, the Frosts are a good example of the kind of people the program would help, and it’s also pretty clear that the reason the wingnuts went after them and their kitchen counters (!) was that their example is in fact a very persuasive one.
Most Americans know perfectly damn well just how messed up our heathcare system is, and they want relief from the constant stress this mess imposes upon them, and they’d really think it is kind of neat that you might not have to lose your home because your kids get in a serious car wreck. What are their "arguments," anyway? That it’s too costly? When money is shamelessly being flushed away by this administration on all sorts of harebrained schemes, most notably the wildly unpopular Iraq debacle, how’s that one going to fly? That it could lead to eeek socialism booga booga? When people might think to themselves, "is this constant worry over healthcare, which causes me to make constant sacrifices and affects even so basic a question as what do I want to do with my life and what kind of a family do I want to have, actually what American liberty is supposed to be all about? Constant fear?"
You can see why they decided to fling slime on the Frosts’ kitchen counters instead.
Reading the article, this all seems to me pretty clear, though naturally I’d like it spelled out more firmly.
But the real news in the article is this:
Republicans on Capitol Hill, who were gearing up to use Graeme as evidence that Democrats have overexpanded the health program to include families wealthy enough to afford private insurance, have backed off.
An aide to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, expressed relief that his office had not issued a press release criticizing the Frosts.
And that is good news. If the GOP party leaders are backing off, then the media very likely won’t feel the need to plaster the Frosts all over the damn place over essentially nothing. And that is a Good Thing.
The progressive blogs started fighting back at once on this, and it looks like it made a difference. Now the noise from the right wing sewer isn’t going unchallenged by the time it percolates up to the corporate news rooms. This is good. This is very good. The radical right has spent decades building this noise machine. But it’s starting to look like other voices are finally, Finally, making themselves heard in the echo chamber.
But there’s more to this story then the simple fact that the right is lying about the Frosts. This little smear campaign illustrates perfectly how the radical right has been looking America in the eye and lying about itself, about its purpose, its values, its motives, for decades. Juan Cole (soon to be an ex-republican) sums it all up pretty well here…
I was talking to Tim via AOL IM, and I decided it was probably worthwhile to bring this up for everyone. One of the things that is so surprising (for me, at least) about the whole Graeme Frost episode is that rather than make their case against this program with their vicious assault against this family, they Malkin/Freeper/Limbaugh brigade are doing just the opposite. Rather than expose this family as a bunch of frauds and lazy slackers and welfare queens, they are making the family’s case.
If you look through this family’s dossier, it appears they are doing everything Republicans say they should be doing- hell, their story is almost what you would consider a checklist for good, red-blooded American Republican voters: they own their own business, they pay their taxes, they are still in a committed relationship and are raising their kids, they eschewed public education and are doing what they have to do to get them into Private schools, they are part of the American dream of home ownership that Republicans have been pointing to in the past two administrations as proof of the health of the economy, and so on.
In short, they are a white, lower-middle-class, committed family, who is doing EVERYTHING the GOP Kultur Kops would have you believe people should be doing. They aren’t gay. They aren’t divorced. They didn’t abort their children. They aren’t drug addicts or welfare queens. They are property owners, entrepeneurs, taxpayers, and hard-working Americans. I bet nine times out of ten in past elections, if you handed this resume to a pollster, they would think you were discussing the prototypical Republican voter. Hell, the only thing missing from this equation is membership to a church and an irrational fear of Muslims and you HAVE the prototypical Bush voter.
They are, however, not without fault. They are unable to afford insurance through normal means (and now that they have pre-existing conditions, probably couldn’t get traditional insurance anyway), and managed to get several of their family members injured in a traumatic accident. And, it appears, those are the big blind spots for compassionate conservatism. That, and the real big sin- allowing themselves to advocate for a policy that the Decider was going to veto. Here it is, so you can see their grievous sin that requires they be destroyed:
“Hi, my name is Graeme Frost. I’m 12 years old and I live in Baltimore, Maryland. Most kids my age probably haven’t heard of CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program. But I know all about it, because if it weren’t for CHIP, I might not be here today.
“CHIP is a law the government made to help families like mine afford healthcare for their kids. Three years ago, my family was in a really bad car accident. My younger sister Gemma and I were both hurt. I was in a coma for a week and couldn’t eat or stand up or even talk at first. My sister was even worse. I was in the hospital for five-and-a-half months and I needed a big surgery. For a long time after that, I had to go to physical therapy after school to get stronger. But even though I was hurt badly, I was really lucky. My sister and I both were.
“My parents work really hard and always make sure my sister and I have everything we need, but the hospital bills were huge. We got the help we needed because we had health insurance for us through the CHIP program.
“But there are millions of kids out there who don’t have CHIP, and they wouldn’t get the care that my sister and I did if they got hurt. Their parents might have to sell their cars or their houses, or they might not be able to pay for hospital bills at all.
“Now I’m back to school. One of my vocal chords is paralyzed so I don’t talk the same way I used to. And I can’t walk or run as fast as I did. The doctors say I can’t play football any more, but I might still be able to be a coach. I’m just happy to be back with my friends.
“I don’t know why President Bush wants to stop kids who really need help from getting CHIP. All I know is I have some really good doctors. They took great care of me when I was sick, and I’m glad I could see them because of the Children’s Health Program.
“I just hope the President will listen to my story and help other kids to be as lucky as me. This is Graeme Frost, and this has been the Weekly Democratic Radio address. Thanks for listening.”
Pretty strong stuff. I can see why this rabid dog needs to be put down with the full force of the wingnutosphere. And it just goes downhill from there. We learn from our intrepid “reporters” on the right that $45,000 is now rich, which is news to me and everyone else who remember mocking Democrats when they tried to claim $100k combined income was considered rich. You righties do remember that, don’t you?
I think the property was valued at around $225,000. I dunno, I have no sympathy for them. Looks like they have more than enough money for luxuries they won’t sacrifice, yet they expect everyone else to sacrifice for them. My family had to sell our house because we couldn’t afford to keep it, have one used minivan and a clunker my husband uses to get back and forth to work, and until this past weekend we didn’t have a television because it was a luxury we couldn’t justify spending on. No private schools for my 3 kids- can’t even afford daycare. Yet we manage to afford health insurance, keep our rental home comfy, and have food on the table. I’m content with what I have and certainly don’t want anyone else paying for what I can afford, after cutting out the luxuries.
15 years ago, when my then-wife and I discovered we were going to have a child – I had a job with no health insurance.
I changed jobs – period. I was stupid and willing to go without insurance for myself – but with my child there was no way I was going to risk it.
These parents have the same opportunity.
They chose not to find jobs that offered health insurance – and they chose to spend their money elsewhere.
Then, when tragedy strikes, they’re held up as models of “what’s wrong with this country”.
Sorry – but they should be held up as models of “What’s wrong with many Americans”.
My bad- they don’t have any advice other than “SUCKS TO BE YOU” or “SELL YOUR HOUSE” or “GET ANOTHER JOB.” Because, as we all know, the hallmark of responsibility is making your children homeless so they can maybe get healthcare. Nobody even pointed to the numerous charities that we conservatives are supposed to expect to fill the gap so the government doesn’t have to pay for things. Instead, it was taunts, catcalls, contempt, and jealousy (because these folks are in SUCH an enviable situation).
I simply can not believe this is what the Republican party has become. I just can’t. It just makes me sick to think all those years of supporting this party, and this is what it has become. Even if you don’t like the S-Chip expansion, it is hard to deny what Republicans are- a bunch of bitter, nasty, petty, snarling, sneering, vicious thugs, peering through people’s windows so they can make fun of their misfortune.
I’m registering Independent tomorrow.
For the record, I was raised in a family of Rockefeller republicans. I registered republican at age 18, as soon as 18 year olds were given the vote back in the early 70s. I switched to democrat in the 1990s, because I got tired of gay folks like myself being used as baseball bats against democrats. I figured if the party regarded me as the ultimate weapon against democrats, I might as well be one. Mr. Cole…your gay and lesbian neighbors have known what a bunch of bitter, nasty, petty, snarling, vicious thugs, peering through people’s windows, the republican grassroots are for a long, long time now. Reagan delivered them into power. Bush taught them that to the victor belong the spoils.
It has come to this: Democrats give a twelve year old boy airtime on their weekly address to relate his story about what happened to him and his family when she was in an automobile accident, and they couldn’t afford to pay the bills without the kind of federal help that President Nice Job Brownie just vetoed, and the Bush republican grassroots immediately begin Swift-Boating his family.
Whiskey Fire has some good notes on the obscenity Here. The gutter is bitching about the fact that they own a 3000 square foot rowhouse in Baltimore, that their father owns his own cabinet making business, that the kids are going to a private school with a 20,000 a year tuition. No part of that family’s life is now escaping the smear machine’s attention…right down to the kitchen counter tops…
The current market value of their improved 3,040 SF home at 104 S Collington Ave is unknown but 113 S COLLINGTON AVE, also an end unit, sold for $485,000 this past March and it was only 2,060 SF. A photo taken in the family’s kitchen shows what appears to be a recent remodeling job with granite counter tops and glass front cabinets.
Yeah, and the current market value of my little 1500 sq foot Baltimore rowhouse is about $240,000 but just six years ago I was able to buy it for $89,900, because that was what it’s market value was then. One reason the housing market is still so hot here in Baltimore is that prices in the surrounding suburbs, and Washington D.C., are simply insane. So people of modest means are buying up Baltimore rowhouses in the neighborhoods are that are still fairly safe. One Whiskey Fire commenter puts it thusly:
Let me get this straight. This guy’s a cabinet maker, and these geniuses are leering about how nice his cabinets are?
Given that those people basically live in downtown Baltimore, I’d be willing to bet that they bought a a rundown house in a gentrifying neighborhood on the cheap so that Mr. Frost, who is good with his hands, can fix the place up and they can turn the house around for a profit. His business, which is a couple of blocks away in downtown Baltimore, basically comes from all the people fixing up all the old brownstones in the area.
In the meantime, he has to send his kids to school and the public schools in Baltimore don’t really seem like the ideal option. So he looks around, and finds that he can send them to a private school using their assistance program.
But given that $45000 dollars, while a decent living all things considered, isn’t a whole hell of a lot of money, especially when there are six mouths to feed, after everything’s said and done with he just can’t make things work with health insurance (when it comes down to it, after the mortgage, food, clothes and all the rest of the expenses of raising a family, even another $600 is no small potatos).
Then the children get into a catasrophic accident, the family is suddenly looking at medical bills it can’t pay. They are in such bad straits that the school is doing fundraisers for them. This government program helps them; makes their lives better in a fundamental way.
And these jokers are pissed off about it.
Amazing.
I have a next door neighbor who is doing just that on his rowhouse. He’s a building contractor of some sort, and he redid his own kitchen and it is just fabulous. But you’d expect it to be, or you wouldn’t be wanting him to do your kitchen too. And I have another neighbor who is by no means wealthy, and trying hard to keep his own kids in the Friends school here in Baltimore, rather then public school. The public schools here in the city, thanks in large measure to republican scorched earth attacks on racial equality, cities, and public education, are teetering on the verge of collapse.
So this self employed father does his best to provide for his family, and give his kids a decent education, on $45,000 a year, and his kids are nearly killed in an automobile accident and that family suddenly finds themselves looking into an almost bottomless pit of medical expenses…and the gutter puppies at Powerline and The Free Republic, and professor InstaJackass, think there’s something suspicious about this? No. No. Absolutely not. They know goddamn well there’s nothing wrong with this family’s story. Nothing factually wrong that is. But it was very politically incorrect, and for that the family must not only suffer, it must be publicly run through the wringer as an example to others who might be considering speaking out.
For the Bush base, the Party is the only truth, the only religion, the only morality. When the right wing talks about virtue and morality, what they’re talking about is fealty to the party. Nothing else. That’s how you can run a propaganda steamroller over a twelve year old boy’s family, because she dared to ask the nation to look, really look, at what happened to them.
[Update…] Graeme Frost is a boy, not a girl, as I’d originally written. Obviously I didn’t listen to the radio address that started all this. Sorry guy…
Daily KOS has some facts the Freepers don’t want you to know…
Graeme has a scholarship to a private school. The school costs $15K a year, but the family only pays $500 a year.
His sister Gemma attends another private school to help her with the brain injuries that occurred due to her accident. The school costs $23,000 a year, but the state pays the entire cost.
They bought their “lavish house” sixteen years ago for $55,000 at a time when the neighborhood was less than safe.
Last year, the Frost’s made $45,000 combined. Over the past few years they have made no more than $50,000 combined.
The state of Maryland has found them eligible to participate in the CHIP program.
So Graeme’s sister is actually in a private school because she’s still struggling with injuries from the automobile accident. And their Baltimore rowhouse was bought for considerably less then what it’s worth now…a fact which would only be surprising to someone who didn’t know that housing prices have risen dramatically in the past few years. But see what the Freepers did. They took the current value of the house and related it as though that represented the income level of the owners. They took the cost of tuition at the schools the kids are going to, and related it as though they’d just proven that was what the family was actually paying. They even put photos of the family kitchen under the microscope.
Michelle Malkin, who once posted the names and home phone numbers of University of California students who had organized a protest against military recruiters on campus, is now stalking the family of Graeme Frost. And surely she’s not the only wingnut that wants to get this family somehow, some way, for speaking out, for putting human faces on the American health care crisis. They say that this family is not deserving of support, because it is not destitute. But that something like an automobile accident can drive an essentially middle-class, small business family into destitution is emblematic of Exactly what’s wrong with our health care system. The political movement that waves "family values" as a banner has now officially made American families another enemy in the kulturkampf. The political movement that enshrined free market capitalism as a moral standard more righteous then the Sermon On The Mount has now officially declared small businessmen are the enemy. We are all on the front line now. We are all targets. But of course, we always were.
[Update II…] You gotta love the comments the gutter is leaving on progressive blogs on this. The suggestion being floated now is that the Frost family should have sold their house to pay for their children’s medical expenses. They bought the house for 55 grand and now its worth almost half a million and so the kook pews are saying that means the family is rich and they’re just milking the system like a bunch of liberal welfare junkies. I’ve seen one of them suggest the family sell the house and rent a 1 thousand square foot apartment to make ends meet.
Let’s deconstruct this. The family of six, whose father is a self employed cabinet maker, is making somewhat less then 50 grand a year. The house is 3 thousand square feet, which is good for a family of six. I once rented a 750k sq foot apartment and that rent was costing me by the time I moved out in 2001 800 dollars a month. And that was a One Bedroom apartment. The two bedrooms, which were 1200 sq feet, rented for over a thousand a month. Rents in Baltimore have skyrocketed as the value of homes have skyrocketed, and I doubt you could find a decent 1k sq foot apartment in Baltimore for less then the mortgage this family is currently paying on their house. And it would be at most two bedrooms, which isn’t enough for a family of six.
So in other words, to pay the medical bills incurred because their children were in an automobile accident, and still stay right with the kook pews, this middle class working family should sell the house that’s big enough to raise four kids in, and which they can afford the mortgage on, and move everyone into a one bedroom apartment that will cost them more to rent, and which they’ll never own, and which is too small to raise a family of four children in.
Actually, this is Exactly what would have happened to this family were it not for the Maryland CHIP program. They would have lost their home, and been forced into a downward spiral that so many working poor are. Their living expenses would have gone up, even as their standard of living went down. I never realized how much my own family had been nickeled and dimed to death until I bought my house, and saw all the tax and economic breaks I was suddenly getting.
And the Bush republicans think this is the Right policy. They really think that pushing middle class families into poverty by medical bills is better then having a national health care system that would keep them, and their children out of poverty.
The next time a Bush republican utters the words "Family Values" in your presence, laugh in their face. Oh, and do the same whenever you hear them start yapping about the virtues of small business.
How Much You Want To Bet Ahmanson Is Giving Them Money Too…
Obviously American thugboys aren’t up to the job, so at least in the Pacific states, the hard right is reaching down a little deeper into the gutter. Here comes the next phase in the right wing’s anti-gay jihad: the brownshirts. Only this time, they’re Russian…
On the first day of July, Satender Singh was gay-bashed to death. The 26-year-old Fijian of Indian descent was enjoying a holiday weekend outing at Lake Natoma with three married Indian couples around his age. Singh was delicate and dateless — two facts that did not go unnoticed by a party of Russian-speaking immigrants two picnic tables away.
According to multiple witnesses, the men began loudly harassing Singh and his friends, calling them "7-Eleven workers" and "Sodomites." The Slavic men bragged about belonging to a Russian evangelical church and told Singh that he should go to a "good church" like theirs. According to Singh’s friends, the harassers sent their wives and children home, then used their cell phones to summon several more Slavic men. The members of Singh’s party, which included a woman six months pregnant, became afraid and tried to leave. But the Russian-speaking men blocked them with their bodies.
The pregnant woman said she didn’t want to fight them.
"We don’t want to fight you either," one of them replied in English. "We just want your faggot friend."
One of the Slavic men then sucker-punched Singh in the head. He fell to the ground, unconscious and bleeding. The assailants drove off in a green sedan and red sports car, hurling bottles at Singh’s friends to prevent them from jotting down the license plate. Singh suffered a brain hemorrhage. By the next day, hospital tests confirmed that he was clinically brain dead. His family agreed to remove him from artificial life support July 5.
Outside Singh’s hospital room, more than 100 people held a vigil. Many were Sacramento gay activists who didn’t know Singh personally, but who saw his death as the tragic but inevitable result of what they describe as the growing threat of large numbers of Slavic anti-gay extremists, most of them first- or second-generation immigrants from Russia, the Ukraine and other countries of the former Soviet Union, in their city and others in the western United States.
In recent months, as energetic Russian-speaking "Russian Baptists" and Pentecostals in these states have organized to bring thousands to anti-gay protests, gay rights activists in Sacramento have picketed Slavic anti-gay churches, requested more police patrols in gay neighborhoods and distributed information cards warning gays and lesbians about the hostile Slavic evangelicals who they say have roughed up participants at gay pride events. Singh’s death was the realization of their worst fears.
You should read this whole article, particularly if you’re gay, or have gay friends or family living on the west coast. I’m sure not all Russian immigrants are this violent, but some are affiliated with a church, and a movement, that specifically targets gay people for violence, in exactly the same way the brownshirts once targeted Jews. Understand, this isn’t random violence due to an endemic hatred of gay people. This is organized violence, and it’s organized from within their church…
Gay rights activists blame Singh’s death on what they call "The West Coast connection" or the "U.S.-Latvia Axis of Hate," a reference to a virulent Latvian megachurch preacher [Alexey Ledyaev] who has become a central figure in the hard-line Slavic anti-gay movement in the West. And indeed, in early August, authorities announced that two Slavic men, one of whom had fled to Russia, were being charged in Singh’s death, which they characterized as a hate crime.
A growing and ferocious anti-gay movement in the Sacramento Valley is centered among Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking immigrants. Many of them are members of an international extremist anti-gay movement whose adherents call themselves the Watchmen on the Walls. In Latvia, the Watchmen are popular among Christian fundamentalists and ethnic Russians, and are known for presiding over anti-gay rallies where gays and lesbians are pelted with bags of excrement. In the Western U.S., the Watchmen have a following among Russian-speaking evangelicals from the former Soviet Union. Members are increasingly active in several cities long known as gay-friendly enclaves, including Sacramento, Seattle and Portland, Ore.
Vlad Kusakin, the host of a Russian-language anti-gay radio show in Sacramento and the publisher of a Russian-language newspaper in Seattle, told The Seattle Times in January that God has "made an injection" of high numbers of anti-gay Slavic evangelicals into traditionally liberal West Coast cities. "In those places where the disease is progressing, God made a divine penicillin," Kusakin said.
The anti-gay tactics of the Slavic evangelicals in the U.S. branch of the Watchmen movement are just as crude and even more physically abusive than Fred Phelps’ infamous Westboro Baptist Church, and they’re rooted in gay-bashing theology that’s even more hardcore than the late Jerry Falwell’s. Slavic anti-gay talk radio hosts and fundamentalist preachers routinely deliver hateful screeds on the airwaves and from the pulpit in their native tongue that, were they delivered in English, would be a source of nationwide controversy.
And surprise, surprise, Oregon holocaust revisionist Scott Lively (he of The Pink Triangle fame) is now their "envoy". Lively, as it turns out, and unsurprisingly, also has a connection to the Christian Reconstructionists…
The executive director of the OCA at that time was Scott Lively, a longtime anti-gay activist who is now the chief international envoy for the Watchmen movement. Lively also is the former director of the California chapter of the anti-gay American Family Association and the founder of both Defend the Family Ministries and the Pro-Family Law Center, which claims to be the country’s "only legal organization devoted exclusively to opposing the homosexual political agenda."
The Watchmen movement’s strategy for combating the "disease" of homosexuality calls for aggressive confrontation. "We church leaders need to stop being such, for lack of a better word, sissies when it comes to social and political issues," Lively argues in a widely-circulated tract called Masculine Christianity. "For every motherly, feminine ministry of the church such as a Crisis Pregnancy Center or ex-gay support group we need a battle-hardened, take-it-to-the-enemy masculine ministry like [the anti-abortion group] Operation Rescue."
Lively identifies "the enemy" as not only homosexuals, but also what he terms "homosexualists," a category that includes anyone, regardless of sexual orientation, who "actively promotes homosexuality as morally and socially equivalent to heterosexuality as a basis for social policy."
When he personally confronts the enemy, Lively practices what he preaches when it comes to "battle-hardened" tactics. He recently was ordered by a civil court judge to pay $20,000 to lesbian photojournalist Catherine Stauffer for dragging her by the hair through the halls of a Portland church in 1991.
Lively occasionally writes for Chalcedon Report, a journal published by the Chalcedon Foundation, the leading Christian Reconstructionist organization in the country. (Reconstructionists typically call for the imposition of Old Testament law, including such draconian punishments as stoning to death active homosexuals and children who curse their parents, on the United States.)
Washington State homophobic preacher Ken Hutcherson, who tried to single handedly torpedo that state’s antidiscriminaton law, is also on board with Ledyaev’s brownshirts…
In addition to Lively and Robertson, Ledyaev has cultivated the support of Rev. Ken Hutcherson, the African-American founder of Antioch Bible Church, a Seattle-area megachurch. "Hutch," as the ex-NFL player is known, played a key role in persuading Microsoft to temporarily withdraw its support for a Washington bill that would have made it illegal to fire an employee for their sexual orientation. In 2004, his "Mayday for Marriage" rally drew 20,000 people to the Seattle Mariner’s Safeco Field to oppose legalizing same-sex marriage.
One of Ledyaev’s nephews saw Hutcherson speak in Seattle at a March 2006 debate on gay rights and arranged a meeting with the Latvian pastor. By the end of the year, Hutcherson, Ledyaev and Lively had teamed up with Vlad Kusakin, the editor of The Speaker, to form an international alliance to oppose what Hutcherson characterizes as "the homosexual movement saying they’re a minority and that they need their equal rights."
They took the name Watchmen on the Walls from the Old Testament book of Nehemiah, in which the "watchmen" guard the reconstruction of a ruined Jerusalem. The cities they guard over today, say the contemporary Watchmen, are being destroyed by homosexuality.
"Nehemiah stood by the destroyed city of Jerusalem. So are we standing these days by the ruins of our legislative walls," Ledyaev says on the Watchmen website. "Defending Christianity begins with the restoration of the walls which is where the watchmen should stand up." The group’s mission is "to bring the laws of our nations in[to] full compliance with the law of God."
During the past year, the Watchmen have met twice in the United States, first in Sacramento, then in Bellevue, Wash. They gathered to strategize against same-sex marriage and build a political organization to fight "gay-straight alliances" in public schools and push for the boycott of textbooks that mention homosexuality in any context other than total condemnation.
The group has also convened outside America. In the summer of 2006, the Watchmen and their supporters gathered in Riga, Latvia, to "protect the city from a homosexual invasion." Gay rights activists in Europe counter that it’s gays who need protection from the Latvian capital, not the other way around.
And, indeed, the city is a hotbed of violent homophobia. In 2005, for example, a group of 100 gay activists, most of them from Western Europe and Scandinavia, traveled to Riga to hold a gay rights march that was widely viewed as the first real test of Latvia’s official commitment to freedom of assembly, a requirement for its tentative admission to the European Union in 2004. Under heavy police escort, the gay rights demonstrators walked a few blocks through a gauntlet of ultranationalists, neo-Nazi skinheads, elderly women and youths wearing "I Love New Generation" T-shirts. They were pelted with eggs, rotten tomatoes and plastic bags full of feces.
The mayor of Riga at the time was Janic Smits, a close friend of Pastor Ledyaev and a prominent member of his New Generation Church. During a parliamentary debate on whether sexual orientation should be covered under a national ban on discrimination, Smits quoted the Old Testament: "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them." Last year, Smits was elevated to chair the Latvian Parliament’s Human Rights Commission.
Ledyaev and Lively have both refused to publicly condemn the murder of Satender Singh. The message in that should be as crystal clear to the rest of us, as it is to their followers: Go, and do likewise…
But let it be said that the thuggishness of their flock isn’t limited to attacks on gay people. In the comments to this AlterNet story, one person writes:
I taught in Sacramento. When we had the National Day of Silence at our school, aside from the traditional fundamentalist groups that opposed it, the Russian immigrant kids were down right rude, requiring removal from the class because they couldn’t respect people’s differences. Russian gangs in Sacramento, especially the Rancho Cordova area has been responsible for auto theft and chop shop operations, meth labs, and numerous murders. They are heavily connected through their church, and most of them will tell you that its because of the suppression in the former Soviet Union that their parents experienced. So, what you get is not just a born again mentality, but a born again and uber-survivorish type adherence to their version of scripture.
They are heavily connected through their church. Looks like Ken Hutcherson has found his brothers in Christ. And so the face of the man who once said that to love God, and love your neighbor as yourself, was the highest commandment, is twisted into a gangsters leer. If you thought the insular hatred of the bible belt south was the bottom of the gutter, you were wrong. It has no bottom.
Our right simply to live, never mind to get married or hold down a job, has always been subject to the whims of hate. Now that violent hate is being given an International organization from which to operate, and grow, and thrive. By men of god. In the name of Jesus. But it would be a profound mistake to give this a Russian face. There is violent anti-gay hate in many more parts of the world then Russia. The men who are now developing, and those who are financing, this international anti-gay terrorism force have a large pool of potential soldiers to draw from. They’ve been unsuccessful at turning the western world against its gay sons and daughters, so now they’re reaching out to the east, and the third world. So Ahmanson brings the African church to America, if the American church won’t do his bidding. So he, or other like minded right wing billionaires, may well be reaching out to Russia, and other nations, for willing murderers, to bring the war on gay people back to a satisfactory pace. The new weapon against the American dream of liberty and justice for all, are the people of the lands where the Dream is unknown, or even hated as virulently as the American right hates it.
Before there was an Internet, there were computer BBSs. It was on a gay BBS, the Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau (GLIB), that I finally found my little subset of the gay community, and began settling in. It was during one of our GLIB happy hour gatherings that I had my eyes opened about transgendered folk. This was sometime in the late 1980s as I recall. A group of us were sitting at the bar and this really cute guy, not a GLIB member but a friend of one, joined us. He seemed almost a stereotypical D.C. K Street type. He had on his Power Office Worker suit and tie, and his expensive walking sneakers because it was rush hour and you leave your good shoes at the office and put on your Nikes for walking to your Metro stop. And he had his Franklin-Covey Day Planner with him, and as he chatted with his friends there, I kid you not, he would glance in his appointment pages to see where his free time was.
At the time I was working as a contract software developer, and as this was a time before PDAs were mated to cell phones, I also had a paper day planner, mostly so I could keep track of my billable hours. Mine was the Daytimer product, largely because it had twenty-four hour day pages, and my workdays were anything but nine to five. And being a techno-geek, and more interested in the technology of managing time then actually managing my own, I asked this guy what he liked about the Franklin-Covey product. After a while he and I were enjoying a nice chat. I about the technology of time management, and he about how busy his life was.
Eventually he went off to make a phone call. As I sat at the bar a GLIB member who knew him came over to me and asked me what I thought of him. He’s real cute, I said. But a bit too much K street for me. Does he have any friends, I asked jokingly, or are they all business contacts? The GLIB member asked if I knew ‘he’ was really ‘she’.
I was stunned. I hadn’t a clue. Not clue one. He was, I was told, female, but living as a guy because that’s what he felt he was. He’d had no surgery, not even merely cosmetic, and apparently had no interest in it. He was just living as a man, because that’s what he felt he was really, regardless of the physical sex he was born as. And when he came back and sat down next to me, and we resumed our conversation, even knowing that he was physically female, I could not help but believe, somewhere deep in my gut, that I was talking to another guy and it wasn’t an act. He just gave off guy vibes.
That was, I think, when I saw for myself that there really could be a difference between the sex of your body, and the sex of your mind, and that it was something distinct from one’s sexual orientation. But that’s not to say that the struggle of transgendered folk is separate from our own.
Homosexual. Bisexual. Transgendered. What do these people have in common? One thing: we don’t fit the gender stereotypes of the majority, and that has had profoundly negative consequences for our lives. This is why we need EDNA, and why it’s at root, our struggle for equality. All of us. Not some of us. Our life struggles are different in the particulars, the obstacles we face are not always the same ones, but the hate has, I am convinced, a common root. People who hate gays and who would deny us jobs, housing, a decent life, the freedom to be, hate transgendered folk just as much, just as deeply, just as passionately, and really don’t see a distinction between us. We’re all sexual deviants, and they wish us all gone from this world.
As a point of clarity for the community: The recent version is not simply the old version with the transgender protections stripped out — but rather has modified the old version in several additional and troubling ways.
In addition to the missing vital protections for transgender people on the job, this new bill also leaves out a key element to protect any employee, including lesbians and gay men who may not conform to their employer’s idea of how a man or woman should look and act. This is a huge loophole through which employers sued for sexual orientation discrimination can claim that their conduct was actually based on gender expression, a type of discrimination that the new bill does not prohibit.
Do you see the problem with leaving out protections for transgendered folk now? If your employer can fire you for not acting like a normal All-American heterosexual, as opposed to simply for being gay, or bi, then the bill does exactly nothing.
Let me reiterate…the problem isn’t that we’re homosexual, the problem is that we don’t conform to the gender norms of the majority. You can’t craft a law that protects homosexuals, and not the transgendered, and end up with a law that actually protects homosexuals. It has to outlaw discrimination based on gender expression, real or perceived, or it won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on.
I have to say I’ve lost a lot of respect for Barney Frank in this. His reputation is as a shrewd politician, and in fact he tried to justify doing this to ENDA on the grounds that it made better political sense. It was something he averred, that he could get more agreement on…maybe enough republican agreement that Bush would either sign it, or his veto could be overridden. Damn Barney… God Damn… Haven’t you fucking learned yet, that when you shake hands with these people, you need to count your fingers afterward…?
This version of ENDA states without qualification that refusal by employers to extend health insurance benefits to the domestic partners of their employees that are provided only to married couples cannot be considered sexual orientation discrimination. The old version at least provided that states and local governments could require that employees be provided domestic partner health insurance when such benefits are provided to spouses.
In the previous version of ENDA the religious exemptions had some limitations. The new version has a blanket exemption under which, for example, hospitals or universities run by faith-based groups can fire or refuse to hire people they think might be gay or lesbian.
The problem with negotiating in good faith with people who have no conscience, should be obvious. Even to people on Capital Hill. Or so you’d think anyway.
Then Jesus Said, “Hey Everyone…Let’s All Sit On This Side Of The Table…”
Seeing yet another outraged headline from some right wing crank site, about the so-called anti-Christianism of the annual Folsom Street Fair, coming across my Google News Digest, finally made my gorge rise enough that I started looking through Google images for other parodies of da Vinci’s Last Supper to post here. I’d come close to doing it the other day when I saw Andrew Sullivan bloviating about the Ad being a provocation. You can always tell that Sullivan’s taken his stupid pills, when he starts channeling the likes of William Donohue. I was scanning Google for other examples of anti-Christian blasphemy, like this one of Christ as a medical marijuana advocate, and the truly bizarre painting titled Frida Kahlo’s Last Supper (I have No idea…), but I soon found that Dan Savage had beaten me to it. Though he Did miss this little collection of Last Supper Cartoons.
Allow me to gratuitously join in the…provocation. Here’s the image, from the Folsom Street Fair program that’s giving the kook pews vapors…
"The bread and wine representing Christ’s broken body and lifegiving blood are replaced with sadomasochistic sex toys in this twisted version of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper," says Concerned Women For America. "’Gay’ activists disingenuously call Christians ‘haters’ and ‘homophobes’ for honoring the Bible, but then lash out in this hateful manner toward the very people they accuse". Kiss my ass. Listening to CWA yap, yap, yap about people not having respect for Christianity is like listening to Al Capone giving advice on fighting crime. I’m no fan of the S&M subculture by any means. My libido doesn’t go there, I’m not into it, I don’t grok it at all, it completely grosses me out. But S&M is by no stretch particular to gay folk, as any casual stroll through the world of heterosexual sex fantasies will quickly show you, and I’ll endure lectures on hate from a lot of people, but not from Concerned Women For America. Hate…did you say? Hate? Let me hear CWA denounce Paul Cameron’s The Medical Consequences Of What Homosexuals Do and I might consider listening to them talk about hate.
It’s a symptom of how the conversation about religion and spirituality has degenerated here in America, that people, even normally sane people, are treating a 15th Century wall painting (it isn’t actually a fresco) as though it’s a page right out of the bible. Iconic it may well be, but that speaks to the skill of the painter, one of the true masters of the art form. It’s Leonardo’s version, not Matthew’s, not Mark’s, not Luke’s, not King James’, not Cyrus Scofield’s. And it’s not a particularly realistic representation of the event either (Hey everyone…let’s all sit on This side of the table…). As I’m told some of the figures in the painting are supposedly representations of politicians who lived during Leonardo’s time, the painting may itself have elements of parody in it. The fact is that this Folsom Street Fair graphic is just one of hundreds, if not thousands, of parodies of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous work that have been created over the years. If anyone has a right to be offended here, it’s Leonardo’s ghost.
And…you have to laugh sometimes…Leonardo, if he wasn’t gay himself, certainly sets you wondering about it. Charged (and acquitted) of sodomy as a young man, he never married, and once said that "the act of procreation and anything that has any relation to it is so disgusting that human beings would soon die out if there were no pretty faces and sensuous dispositions". And what did he consider a pretty face? Take a look at the figure of John in The Last Supper. It’s probably his pupil Salai, whom Leonardo fondly and often painted. Another pupil, Melzi, the 15 year old son of a Lombard aristocrat, became his life companion, traveling with the painter and Salai (who was said to have been greatly jealous of the younger student at first), and remaining with the painter until his death. If Leonardo was alive today, Matt Barber would be bellyaching that The Last Supper, with its androgynous John practically swooning at Jesus’ side, was a hate filled anti-Christian parody of…er…The Last Supper.
Now, the sentiment in these works strikes me as a profoundly beautiful one. If I’d been allowed to see more imagery like this in church as a young gay man myself, I might still be calling myself a Baptist today. But again, it just strikes me as funny that the kook pews are whipping themselves into a sanctimonious lather about the sacredness to them of a genre of religious art, that itself has a rich history of homosexual overtones. Have any of these jackasses looked, really looked, at some of these Last Supper paintings?
The original intent of the forum, according to Coalition of Conscience director Dr. Michael Brown, was to have an open and honest dialogue between the Coalition of Conscience and members of the Charlotte-area gay & gay-friendly clergy.
Brown said he had invited members of the clergy from thirteen area churches – including the New Life Metropolitan Community Church, MCC of Charlotte, Myers Park Baptist Church, St. Martin’ & St. Peter’s Episcopal Churches, Holy Covenant UCC and Jay Bakker’s Revolution Church. Brown also said up to 500 personal invitations to the event were handed out at the Pride Charlotte festival at the end of August. He also noted that this was his third or fourth attempt at organizing a public discussion on issues of sexuality & Christianity with members of the Charlotte-area LGBT community.
…
“We want to open a door of grace to the gay & lesbian community. We are convinced from the Scriptures that Jesus is against homosexual practice. We are equally convinced that Jesus died for homosexual and heterosexual alike,” Brown said, “We know there is a lot of misunderstanding. We know that a lot of gays and lesbians have been driven out of churches as if homosexuality was the worst of all sins…. Just by saying, ‘Let’s talk about it,’ hopefully we can break a wall down there.”
Oh how…neighborly…
Uhm…well…sort of….
At the beginning of the forum, however, Brown made his point very clear: One cannot be gay & Christian, or rather, one cannot be a self-affirming gay person and Christian:
“If you mean, can I be a devoted follower of Jesus while struggling with unwanted sexual desires, while saying I know these are wrong, I resist them, I don’t give into them, I do not practice homosexuality, I’m celibate and I’m abstaining from these things and my goal is to be pure in front of the Lord, but I’m still struggling with these things… Can you be gay and follow Jesus? In that sense, yes. And that’s the same as a heterosexual struggling with lust, desire, temptation outside of wedlock. However, if you mean can I practice homosexuality? Can I engage in romantic and same-sex relationships and does God endorse those things and can I be a follower of Jesus at the same time? The answer is absolutely, categorically no. The Scripture leaves no room to question that.”
(Emphasis mine…) Oh. Well there’s nothing to talk about after all then is there?
The “values voters” seem (so far) to be obsessed about homosexuality. And the candidates that showed up to pander are playing right along. They all weighed in on how to oppose “the homosexual agenda” with only Ron Paul hedging his anti-gay attitudes in terms of libertarianism.
Libertarianism…did you say…?
Every single candidate present would veto ENDA, would support a federal marriage amendment, and would support healthcare policies that would reward a “moral” lifestyle.
Emphasis mine. Ron is the kind of libertarian who would have (and probably did as far as I know) joined in the celebrations over the supreme court decision in Hardwick v. Bowers back in 1986, which upheld the sodomy laws. It was a "state’s rights" thing see. Now of course, it’s Let’s Let The Federal Government Define What Is And What Is Not A Family.
State’s Rights. Libertarianism.
[Update…] In the comments to that post, Ron Paul’s supporters note that Paul is apparently "on the record" as being against FMA. However, that seems not to have been a record Paul was willing to share with the Values Voters. Apparently he weaseled his way around the question.
See…this is the thing I noticed even back in the 1970s about many libertarians. You can appeal to a lot of people by saying the government should get the hell out of (insert what government does that you despise most here), so long as you mute the part about wanting to dismantle (insert what government does that you really like here). And almost without exception those libertarians who did that, turned out to be mostly right wing conservatives, wrapping themselves in libertarian language, trying to convince liberals that government is more a source of all our troubles, then a means to any good end. They’ve been singing that tune since…oh…back around when the feds started desegregating the public schools…
I won’t deny that there are libertarians who would be perfectly willing to get up on that Values Voter stage, look that audience right in the eye, and tell them if they want the government to leave them alone, it has to leave their neighbors alone too. They’d be tossing those votes away of course, but they’d say it. Paul apparently, couldn’t bring himself that day to stand on…you know…principle. There’s probably a reason for that.
Ex-Gay Watch follows up on a previous post that…er…Questions PFOX…
As a follow-up to our previous post on this matter, we have gathered more information in our investigation of claims made by Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX) here.
Yesterday, we spoke with Jackie Abrams, Vice Chair of the Arlington County Fair. According to Abrams, no physical altercation occurred, police were never called and no one was ejected from the fairgrounds – she was emphatic and certain. “I was in radio contact with the other board members during the Fair, and definitely would have known if the police had been summoned. It did not happen [her emphasis],” said Abrams. She added that her calls to PFOX, and specifically to PFOX president Regina Griggs, had gone unanswered.
They got it out there…why on earth would they want to help anyone prove that it was bullshit? The faithful now have something to bark about…that some wicked militant homosexual activist had attacked their peaceful respectful effort to educate people about the truth of homosexuality…and just you never mind that it never actually happened. Since when does an organization that was born on lies, built on a bedrock of lies, and does nothing but lie through its teeth about homosexuals and homosexuality constantly, meticulously, relentlessly, suddenly stop lying?
???
Of course they lie. Does a bear shit in the woods? Is the pope Catholic? Does PFOX lie? Yes…it’s good, it’s necessary, to expose their lies whenever, wherever they pop up. But on the other hand if by now it’s surprising you that someone from PFOX would make such brazenly false accusations about something involving homosexuals, then I guess it must also be a constant surprise to you that the sky is blue and water is wet.
Meanwhile…via Ex-Gay Watch, Truth Wins Out has some food for thought for all you parents out there, thinking about sending your gay kids off to ex-gay camp…
Truth Wins Out is reporting that Chris Austin, a longtime ex-gay counselor from Irving, Texas, was convicted today of sexually assaulting a client. Austin, a previous speaker for both Evergreen International and the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), has been accused of sexual assault on a client before. In 2001, Mark Hufford made similar accusations:
Hufford accused Austin of engaging in improper sexual behavior that included “oral copulation and fondling” during counseling sessions that spanned more than a year. The psychologist, who also teaches in the church’s Sunday School, had convinced Hufford to participate in “touch therapy.” The therapy gradually progressed to nude sessions and physical intimacy, he said.
I’m assuming the victims in both cases were legally adults, but it’s worth bearing in mind that outfits such as Evergreen and Exodus and Love In Action all claim to be ministries so they don’t have to submit to the licensing and oversight regulations that real hospitals and doctors must. Literally Anyone can claim to be a professional in the treatment of Same Sex Attraction Disorder. It’s like being a palm reader, only you get to make your customers tell you their sexual fantasies and participate in touch therapy…
The Fine Art Of Inciting Violence While Preaching Decency
Of course you knew that it isn’t only gay folk that the mayor of Fort Lauderdale is contemptuous of…
"Atheists and Criminal Lobbying Union" regarding the meaning of the acronym ACLU.
New Times, October 26, 2000
"I’m supposed to subsidize some schlock sitting on the sofa and drinking a beer, who won’t work more than 40 hours a week?" (On a proposed affordable housing ordinance)
Sun-Sentinel, May 20, 2006
Regarding a proposal to reduce greenhouse gases, calling it "hate-America stuff" concocted by "a bunch of scientists meeting in Paris who’ve had too much wine.”
Sun-Sentinel May 9, 2007
“The Scum-Sentinel is an advertising tabloid newsblog. They hire reporters and they make them churn out stories without making them get into anything in depth. They do that to feign a resemblance to a real newspaper so that they can sell advertising. And the Sentinel tries to lecture me about affordable housing? I tell people that the day I take advice from a company that has vagrants selling their products in the middle of the street, we’re all in trouble."
New Times, April 21, 2006
“I think a strong rope and a stiff tree would be better than wasting all that electricity.”
New Times (Broward Palm Beach Edition), October 26, 2000
As they say, scratch a homophobe and you find a rat’s nest of assorted other prejudices and cheap bar stool conceits. And given his steady and sure record of flipping the middle finger to his critics, I sorta figured he’d make some aggressive asshole comeback to the county commissioners act last week, of voting him off the tourism board. What I didn’t expect was that he’d surround himself with men dressed in paramilitary uniform, calling for a cleansing of sin from Fort Lauderdale…
Anti-gay Mayor Jim "250K robo-potty" Naugle has so polarized matters in Fort Lauderdale that press conferences and demonstrations are getting tense, according to Jeff Black of UNITE Fort Lauderdale, which is sponsoring a Faith Press Conference today, will feature speakers from many denominations and religions to discuss unity, inclusiveness, and acceptance.
Inclusiveness was not on the agenda on Tuesday as members of homophobic black churches, stood with Mayor Naugle at City Hall preaching they are going to take back the city, removing the sin and sinners. Religious men — in paramilitary gear — were also standing aside the mayor bleating that "the depth of sexual sin in Broward County necessitates an old-fashioned spiritual revival." From Jeff’s email to me:
They escorted me from the front door to the elevator when I entered the building today for this press conference, and stood ‘post’ at the elevator lobby. The video is frightening, worse was I was standing in the room with these people and worried what was going to happened next.
An initial check into who or what the Koinonia Worship Center is, turned up only a MySpace page…
I tried to find out information on the group but was only able to find a MySpace profile which included an audio track. The audio track is of a military leader talking to a subordinate and explaining how they are in the battle to take back what they have lost for the black man while in the background you hear gun fire and battle sounds.
What I’m hearing on this page is scary. "Special OPS (operations) Units" of the church. References to "Exercising Spiritual Authority"?
Nice. Until today I thought Naugle was just another homophobic barstool buffoon. But no…he’s a thug; a grown man with a schoolyard bully’s sense of justice and the moral scruples of your average drug syndicate gangster. Watching that video, there is no mistaking what he’s doing in it for what it is. Bracketed by men in paramilitary uniform calling for spiritual warfare, saying they will "take back the land" and that "God hates the act of homosexuality" and telling the mayor "we will fight with you", James Naugle stood in the mayor’s office and made a threat. He said to the Gay community, and to any heterosexuals who might be thinking of standing in solidarity with us, get off my back faggots…or you’ll be sorry.
Ninth Commandement? What Ninth Commandment…? (continued)
Oregon Magazine, they of such informative and thoughtful jourmalmalism like Hippies History Channel History is a Bad Trip ("They (the hippies) were all Leftists. Teenagers, young adults, old folks driving a spray-painted VW van — they were all the same."), the hard hitting online magazine bearing a picture of John Wayne standing in front of an American flag with the quote, "Now, just why in the HELL do I have to press ‘1’ for English?", brings us this alarming news about the Vast Homosexual Conspiracy…
Florida Mayor Jim Naugle has been under rapid fire assault from homosexual activists and liberal media for asking people simply to obey the law and to be responsible and respectful to families and children.
No shit…this crap showed up in Google News. And not just buried somewhere in the "all 3791 news articles" link, but right on the fucking news home page. I’ve noticed lately that whatever algorithm Google uses to determine what stories actually make the front page, it’s tracking a tad to the right…particularly when it comes to news regarding the gay community. Next thing I know I’ll be seeing press releases from PFOX. Oh…wait…I have. But more on that later…
Naugle, you may recall, is the prize jackass who in his last term as Mayor of Fort Lauderdale Florida, decided to go on an anti-gay jihad, accusing gay folks of making Broward County the nation’s AIDS capital and having public orgies in the beach toilets, despite being inconveniently contradicted on both counts by the Largest HIV/AIDS Healthcare Provider in the United States and his own police department. The Broward County Commissioners voted unanimously last week to remove the mayor from his seat on the tourism board for the damage he’s been doing to the attractiveness of the oceanside city to tourists, that they’ve worked so hard to cultivate since Naugle decided that Fort Lauderdale didn’t need to be a Spring Break destination anymore.
But the man has his defenders, at least in the "Now, just why in the HELL do I have to press ‘1’ for English" crowd, and Oregon Magazine would like us all to know that, in fact, having sex in public is just what the militant homosexual agenda is all about…
Members of the activist community in Fort Lauderdale and elsewhere are actually coming out in defense of public "gay"
sex. The homosexual legal group, LAMBDA Legal calls such public sex a civil right in their "little black book," and encourages such behavior.
The lousy formatting on that paragraph is theirs because I wouldn’t want to be accused of altering any of their breathless prose. And don’t bother clicking on the link they’ve provided because like the paragraph formatting and a lot of everything else that’s on the pages of Oregon Magazine, it’s a tad fucked up. But if you go to the Lamba Legal web site, and search for it, you can find the pamphlet they’re talking about, Here.
While Lambda Legal and other groups are fighting against the ways police target men who have sex with men, having sex where others might see you and take offense can subject you to arrest, publicity and other serious consequences. If you feel unsafe, you should leave.
Nowhere in that document is having sex in public called a civil right. The document is full of warnings about the risks involved, both legal and to your health, and the low probability of successfully fighting the charges.
Be aware that undercover cops may be “cruising” to arrest you. A cop doesn’t have to tell you he’s a cop, even if you ask. If you’re cruising for sex and an undercover cop hits on you, what you do can still be a crime. Don’t count on proving the cop “entrapped” you (which is difficult). Talk to your lawyer if you think you were set up.
How you can read the words "what you do can still be a crime" and think they say "public sex is a civil right", I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect it has something to do with wondering why you have to press ‘1’ for English. And it doesn’t sound very encouraging to me either. On the other hand if you’re the kind that thinks that just telling the accused that they still have…you know…constitutional rights…amounts to encouraging crime then maybe your mileage varies. Or maybe you’re just a dickwad. Say…what was that you folks were saying about hippies ….? Oh…yeah…
Hey, hippie. You want to see an authoritarian style, regimented, intolerant government? They’re all over the place. One type is dedicated to the ideas of Marx. The other is dedicated to the ideas of Islamic extremism.
Oh heaven forfend America should become anything like a Marxist dictatorship where people don’t have…you know…the right to talk to an attorney or anything…
And speaking of lying conniving dickwads…over at Ex-Gay Watch, it looks like they’ve caught PFOX telling another whopper giving people the facts about militant homosexuality…
This past Tuesday, PFOX posted some disturbing news. While innocently offering “materials on same-sex attraction and tolerance for the ex-gay community to a hungry public” at the Arlington County Fair, Arlington Va (Aug 15-19), they claim their representatives were viciously attacked, both verbally and physically, by “gay activists” who had also set up a booth at the fair.
Wow…that’s just so…so Wrong! Damn those militant homosexuals!
Since PFOX stated that the police were “summoned” and that they “ejected the gay man off the fairgrounds” we decided to check with the Arlington County Police Department. Focus on the Family reports through CitizenLink that “Officers kicked the gay activists out of the fair and encouraged the PFOX volunteer to press charges, but he chose not to.” So depending on the account, we have one or more officers responding to a complaint of assault, recommending that the victim file charges, and then ejecting one or more “gay activists” from the fairgrounds. Surely the Arlington PD would know if one or more of their officers participated in such an action. What good would it do to eject them if others in charge were not also made aware so they could make sure they didn’t come back?
We contacted the Arlington PD and ended up speaking with John Lisle of the Media Relations/Legislative Affairs Office. He had no initial knowledge of such an incident. After checking briefly, he again said that no one was aware of such an incident. So we sent a copy of the PFOX statement to him at which time he agreed to check more thoroughly. After over two days of research, there was nothing he could add to his statement; no report exists and no one recalls such an incident.
Whoops!
Ex-Gay Watch was also rude enough to check with Denise Marshall Roller, the Event Manager for the fair, who said that their call was the first she had heard that there were any problems of that sort at the fair…and she was there. Most of the time she said, near the officer in charge. So it would appear that not only do militant homosexual activists go around attacking decent people who only want to expose the sordid truth about homosexuality, they can also warp the space time continuum to conveniently hide their evil deeds after the fact. Or maybe they have the power to cloud men’s minds…
You will remember nothing of this incident…there was no vicious attack…
the PFOX booth was not disturbed…no homosexuals were at
the PFOX booth…there is no such thing as a homosexual…
Next thing you know they’ll be bitching about Why The Hell Do I Have To Press ‘1’ For Heterosexual…?
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Let me get this straight. This guy’s a cabinet maker, and these geniuses are leering about how nice his cabinets are?
Given that those people basically live in downtown Baltimore, I’d be willing to bet that they bought a a rundown house in a gentrifying neighborhood on the cheap so that Mr. Frost, who is good with his hands, can fix the place up and they can turn the house around for a profit. His business, which is a couple of blocks away in downtown Baltimore, basically comes from all the people fixing up all the old brownstones in the area.
In the meantime, he has to send his kids to school and the public schools in Baltimore don’t really seem like the ideal option. So he looks around, and finds that he can send them to a private school using their assistance program.
But given that $45000 dollars, while a decent living all things considered, isn’t a whole hell of a lot of money, especially when there are six mouths to feed, after everything’s said and done with he just can’t make things work with health insurance (when it comes down to it, after the mortgage, food, clothes and all the rest of the expenses of raising a family, even another $600 is no small potatos).
Then the children get into a catasrophic accident, the family is suddenly looking at medical bills it can’t pay. They are in such bad straits that the school is doing fundraisers for them. This government program helps them; makes their lives better in a fundamental way.
And these jokers are pissed off about it.
Amazing.