The anti-gay religious right is mounting Yet Another protest against the Day Of Silence, itself a protest against anti-gay violence in schools. First it was the misnamed Day Of Truth. Now it’s the Golden Rule Day. Jim Burroway over at Box Turtle Bulletin writes about the competing religious right activity, and sums it up pretty thoroughly here…
More than a year ago, I attended a Love Won Out conference in Phoenix put on jointly by Exodus International and Focus On the Family. That’s where I heard Focus’s Mike Haley address anti-LGBT violence in a Q&A session:
I think, too, we also have to be just as quick to also stand up when we do see the gay and lesbian community being come against as the Body of Christ. We need to be the first to speak out to say that what happened to Matthew Shepard was a terrible incident and should never happen again. And that we within the Body of Christ are wanting to protect that community and put our money where our mouth is…
That was a real “Wow!” moment for me. I thought finally, someone gets it. I can’t tell you how encouraged I was to hear Mike Haley say that. It was an ultimate Golden Rule moment. And I can’t begin to describe how disappointed I’ve been since then.
One year later, Lawrence King was killed in cold blood on February 12 in front of his teachers and classmates. Since then, conservative Christians leaders have celebrated seventy-three consecutive Days of Silence.
Emphasis mine. You should go read the whole thing. Day of Silence? How about seventy-three Days of Silence after a 15 year old gay boy was shot in the head.
That says it all. Can we please stop talking about their "sincerely held religious beliefs" now? This isn’t about faith. This isn’t about how much they love God. It’s about how much they hate us.
Slog reader Price makes a good point about the FLDS saga—DNA tests to determine whose kids are whose are underway—in Eldorado, Texas. These polygamists have been all over cable news and the front pages of American newspapers for weeks now. Says Price…
WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?
Where’s the outrage from the “marriage should be between one man and one woman” crowd about this nonsense in Eldorado? You’d think they would be up in arms about this. Aren’t these people DESTROYING all marraige for normal straight couples
When I was in South Carolina before that state’s primary for Real Time with Bill Maher, I asked a religious conservative—a supporter of Mike Huckabee—who was the bigger sinner: a gay man married to one man or a polygamist married to a hundred women. He didn’t even hesitate: the gay man. You hear very little from the one-man-and-one-woman shriekers for the same reason you heard so little from them during the decades straight people spent redefining marriage for themselves. After straight people redefined marriage to a point that it no longer made any logical sense to exclude same-sex couples from the institution’s rights and responsibilities, suddenly marriage had to be defended from the gays. Activists that want to “save marriage” have never been motivated by what they’re for (one man and one woman) but what they’re against (gay sex, love, desire, etc.).
This has been another edition of What Dan Savage Said. Can we stop talking about the sincerely held religious beliefs of the anti-gay opposition now?
So I’m reading this story about some Italian jackass former football general manager bloviating about gays in football…
Moggi: Gays Should Be Banned From Football
The 70-year-old was widely regarded as the best transfer guru in Serie A before he received a five-year ban from football in the summer of 2006 for his alleged role in the Calciopoli scandal.
Despite being out of the game Moggi still regularly has his say on current affairs, and he has had some controversial things to say about homosexuals.
“I don’t know if footballers are against gays in the team, I certainly am,” he stated.
“I can quietly confirm that, in the clubs where I have been, I have never had them, never.
“I would never have wanted a homosexual player. Even today I wouldn’t buy one. Supposing I were to make a mistake and I found one of them, he would be the first to go.
“I am a little old-fashioned. But I know the football world and its insides. You cannot live within it as a gay. A homosexual cannot be a footballer.
“In calcio there are no homosexuals, neither between players nor among directors. It’s not racism, its fact. Football has a particular environment; you get naked in the dressing room.
“I have no gay friends. I go out with other people. But I have to say that homosexuals are very intelligent people, they have the capacity to see things differently.”
Former Juventus general manager Luciano Moggi has again stated that he was the only person to defend the club before, during and after the Calciopoli crisis.
Moggi was one of Calcio’s shrewdest transfer gurus up until the Calciopoli crisis in the summer of 2006.
The 70-year-old received a five-year ban from football for his alleged role in the scandal, meaning that he cannot return until 2011, by which time he will be 74.
Moggi has always maintained that Calciopoli was a conspiracy, involving Inter Milan, as well as other important figures.
“I looked to defend a business that, in practice, had no parents. Gianni and Umberto Agnelli died and Juventus were left without a father or a mother,” he explained.
“We didn’t have the funds because shareholders weren’t putting money into the club and we didn’t have the television on our side. We were a step behind the others.
“RAI was of Roma and we won’t speak of who Sky and Mediaset belong to. We had to make do with what we had and look strong even if we weren’t.”
Moggi has always been painted as something of a shady and mysterious figure, but he says this is an unfair assessment. “I was arrogant, but it is not a crime,” he said.
No…but fixing football games is, isn’t it? Here’s the Wiki entry on what they’re referring to in that article as the "Calciopoli crisis"…
The 2006 Italian football scandal (Italian more common names: Calciopoli or Moggiopoli, sometimes referred to as Calciocaos) involved alleged match fixing in Italy’s top professional football leagues, Serie A and Serie B. The scandal was uncovered in May 2006 by Italian police, implicating league champions Juventus, and other major teams including A.C. Milan, Fiorentina, Lazio, and Reggina when a number of telephone interceptions showed a thick network of relations between team managers and referee organisations. Juventus were the champions of Serie A at the time. The teams have been accused of rigging games by selecting favourable referees.
…
The scandal first came to light as a consequence of investigations of Naples prosecutors on the Italian football agency GEA world. Transcripts of recorded telephone conversations published in Italian newspapers suggested that during the 2004-05 season, Juventus general manager Luciano Moggi had conversations with several officials of Italian football to influence referee appointment. The name Calciopoli is a pun on Tangentopoli, [rough English translation:Bribesville], a corruption-based attitude starting in the early 80s and ending with the Mani Pulite investigation in the early 90s, led by, among others, Antonio di Pietro. Another very common name for Calciopoli is Moggiopoli after the name of Luciano Moggi. Also Calciogate, a pun on Watergate, is used. Calcio means football in Italian.
So here’s a guy babbling about how gays should be banned from football, who has himself been banned from the game for fixing games. How…unsurprising. I doubt he was cheating for money so much as to stand in the winner’s circle as though he’d actually earned his place there and not cheated his way to it. That’s exactly how bigots go through life. A genuine crook will, when caught, take some smirking pride in putting one over on you. A bigot will deny how they tilted the scales and fixed the game to the very end, insisting that they’re perfectly honorable and respectable people and endlessly pass the blame for the damage they do onto someone else. It’s not about having the trophy, it’s about knowing deep down inside what a runt you are and bitterly resenting anyone and everyone who can achieve that which you cannot, and fixing the game as a way of revenge.
The US army doubled its use of "moral waivers" for enlisted soldiers last year to cope with the demands of the Iraq war, allowing sex offenders, people convicted of making terrorist threats, and child abusers into the military, new records released yesterday showed.
The army gave out 511 moral waivers to soldiers with felony convictions last year. Criminals got 249 army waivers in 2006, a sign that the demand for US forces in Iraq has forced a sharp increase in the number of criminals allowed on the battlefield.
The felons accepted into the army and marines included 87 soldiers convicted of assault or maiming, 130 convicted of non-cannabis-related drug offences, seven convicted of making terrorist threats, and two convicted of indecent behaviour with a child. Waivers were also granted to 500 burglars and thieves, 19 arsonists and nine sex offenders.
SANTA BARBARA, Calif., April 21 (AScribe Newswire) — New information released today by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee shows that in 2006 and 2007 Americans who were convicted of serious crimes including sexual offences, manslaughter, "terrorist threats including bomb threats", burglary, kidnapping or abduction, aggravated assault and sexual assault were allowed into the military under moral waivers granted by the services.
According to the data given to the committee by the Department of Defense, the Army allowed the most waivers in 2006 and 2007. During this period, moral or felony waivers were given to 3 soldiers who had been convicted of manslaughter. One soldier was allowed in following a kidnapping or abduction conviction, 11 were convicted of arson, 142 convicted of burglary, 3 who were convicted of indecent acts or liberties with a child, 7 who were convicted of rape, sexual assault, criminal sexual assault, incest or other sex crimes and 3 who were convicted of terrorist threats including bomb threats.
So…let me get this straight. Letting gay people serve will harm the moral and readiness of our armed forces…but allowing child molesters and rapists to wear the uniform won’t. Look at this. No…really look at it. The leaders of the armed forces of the United States of America would really rather be saluted by rapists and child molesters then by a homosexual.
Well…this explains why Iraq is pretty much FUBAR doesn’t it? It wasn’t just Rumsfeld and Bush. They had help running our military into the ground from all the country club thugs in the pentagon executive suites. And it explains all this too…
All the culture warriors, all the fine culture warriors who fought to keep gay people out of the armed forces… All the righteous men and women of high moral standards and values… And in the end they turned out to be nothing more then a pack of street thugs, dragging America into their gutter…into that open sewer they call virtue…
I had to take a closer look. The column from Craig Smith begins promisingly…
Before you know it November will be upon us, and we will be required to choose a new president. But as in all elections, we will also vote on certain proposals and ballot initiatives. So I suspect it is only a matter of time before we hear the voices of the gay and lesbian community demanding the right to government-sanctioned "marriage," and this year I am all for it!
Homosexuals should enjoy the same rights and privileges married couples have experienced since the beginning of time: To be able to love and cherish, to have and to hold, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, ’till death do they part.
But this is a Wing Nut Daily column of course, so actually Smith is being sarcastic here. His real point is…
Thus I suspect if married gay couples honored their vows, within two to three generations we would not have any more gay babies being born. Given most gay people say they didn’t choose to be gay but were born gay, it would eliminate innocent people being born into a world that homosexuals deem so hostile toward them. It would settle once and for all the argument that homosexuality is genetic and not a choice. Nature, not nurture. If there is no procreation, there is no passing of genes and, thus, the species does not survive.
Darwin would have been right!
…
Let’s get serious. Homosexuality is a choice. And the choices people make are their business. What goes on in your bedroom is your choice. But when a group or person attempts to force society into condoning their choice or demands that their choice be taught to future generations as a "normal" lifestyle, I have a problem.
If you want to take the position that homosexuality is not a choice, then let’s experiment with my idea. We will know rather quickly who is right and who is wrong for nature itself proves the whole genetic argument invalid.
We’re having a Darwin moment here I see…
From: Bruce Garrett
To: Craig Smith
Subject: Darwin and Homosexuality
You write, "If you want to take the position that homosexuality is not a choice, then let’s experiment with my idea. We will know rather quickly who is right and who is wrong for nature itself proves the whole genetic argument invalid".
You need to take a little better interest then this in how the natural world really works. Perhaps this AP article from 1999 will help you out a tad…
Why Do Peacocks Stick Together in Avian `Singles Bar’?
Groups of peacocks strut their stuff in hopes of attracting the finest peahens, but only a few lucky guys will find a willing mate in the wild kingdom’s equivalent of a singles bar.
Scientists have long wondered why the unsuccessful peacocks stick around the same group year after year when the hens tend to select the same few males each breeding season.
Research published Thursday in the journal Nature suggests a sound evolutionary reason: Many of the bird buddies within individual groups are brothers. By working together, the brothers are increasing the odds that their genes will be passed to another generation.
"By helping your relatives to attract mates, your genes are spread," said Marion Petrie, a researcher at Britain’s University of Newcastle, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
The research sheds light on why some peacocks seem unconcerned with sex and are content to be hangers-on in the animal singles scene: Larger groups of peacocks attract more females, so some of the peacocks are there just to make the group bigger.
"The benefits of helping closely related dominants to attract more females may outweigh the subordinate males’ own meager mating opportunities," said Cornell University researcher Paul Sherman in an accompanying Nature commentary.
Petrie and her colleagues studied about 200 free-ranging peafowl in Whipsnade Park north of London. Using DNA fingerprinting, the researchers found birds inside the strutting groups are more likely to be related to each other than those outside the group.
But how do the related birds find each other? That’s unclear, but it is not because the peacock brothers grew up together.
In fact, the researchers found that when peacock brothers were separated before hatching, and then were released into Whipsnade Park when they were yearlings, the brothers still tended to group together.
The mechanism by which the birds found their relatives is unclear. It could be by odor, feather patterns or the sounds the birds make.
"There is some way in which kin can be associated, which doesn’t require learning or environmental clues," Petrie said. "They didn’t know their fathers or mothers. They could not possibly learn who their brothers were. They had no reference points to where they were born, but they still found each other."
If you don’t pass on your genes, but you help your siblings pass on theirs, your family genes get passed on, and that’s good enough as far as natural selection is concerned. If you help make your family, or your tribe look desirable, then the genes in that pool, which likely include a good many of yours too, get to go a few more rounds. If a trait is recessive, not everyone in the group needs to express it, for it to get passed along too, with all the others. If this is not true, then the mating rituals of Peacocks would not look the way they do.
Here’s a little something else to ponder when considering Darwin and homosexuality: the humble prostate gland. When you massage it, which is what happens during a certain kind of male to male sex, you can bring a human male to a right dandy orgasm. I doubt that massaging any other gland in the human body will produce anything other then pain, let alone sexual pleasure, but that one particular gland, in that one particular part of the male anatomy is different that way. You need to pay attention to that, because militant homosexuality didn’t do that, godless secularism didn’t do that, the Warren court didn’t do that, millions of years of adaptive evolution gave that to every human male who ever walked this earth, whether they had any use for it or not. And let’s be honest here, most don’t. The vast majority of human males have utterly no use for that.
Yet there it is.
So…actually, you’re probably sitting on all the proof you need for the genetic argument at this very moment.
—
Bruce Garrett
Baltimore, Maryland.
I was too polite to tell him that as long as he’s got his head up his ass he should look around.
"In Paraguay we are at T-9 days to national elections. The ruling party has been in power for nearly 61 years (including more than 30 years of dictatorship). Now the state-run ADSL company is hijacking the DNS nationwide of a site that denounces the corruption in the party."
…provoked this comment…
Paraguay is a country ruled by a conservative coalition.
Which only goes to show what my old bolshie Uncle Ivan used to say. "Kid," he’d say, "nobody believes in capitalism. Nobody believes in socialism. It’s socialism for me, and capitalism for you!" Ivan may have been a red, but he was a cynic first and foremost, and that keeps you honest.
In the end, there is only one thing that really matters in any system: transparency. At least if the system is supposed to be run for the benefit of the people who live under it. You can be all for the proletariat, or all for the free market, but if you’re pulling the wool of the peoples’ eyes, you aren’t any different from anybody else running a con behind high sounding priciples.
Well I believe in a free market because I don’t think that human beings can plan an economy any better then we can plan the weather. But a free market needs a rule of law and a means of preventing the power of money from subverting that rule of law, or that free market won’t remain free for very long, it’ll degenerate into oligarchy.
But that’s the republican ideal, isn’t it? For decades now anyone with half a brain could see that republicans favored oligarchy over all other forms of government. They claim to believe in both free markets and the rule of law and I think seven years plus of George Bush has pretty well decisively proved otherwise. Nothing disturbs the status-quo more then free market capitalism, when it isn’t turning it upside down. Nothing. And nothing locks the human potential in chains and thereby preserves the status-quo better then crony capitalism, which is to say, republican party economics.
The state religion of Oligarchy is God Loves The Rich. Its economic theory is To The Victors Belong The Spoils. Its theory of government is Might Makes Right. Vis:
On Thursday in the National Press Club in Washington, a crowd gathered to witness the presentation of the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling to Lieutenant Commander Matthew Diaz. The story of Matthew Diaz was chronicled in this space repeatedly (also here and here). It is a story of courage, fortitude, conviction and suffering. Joe Margulies introduced the honoree with clarity:
no one can think it is fun when you sit in a courtroom as an accused, and a United States prosecutor points an accusatory finger at your chest and calls you a criminal and tells you that you have betrayed your oath and you have betrayed your country, and you have endangered the safety of the men and women that you swore to share your burdens with. And no one can think it is fun when you have to sit with your heart pounding in your chest as the jury files back into the room with a piece of paper folded in its hands, and that piece of paper holds your fate. And no one can think it is fun when that jury, your peers, pronounces you guilty. And no one can think it is fun when you have to face that same jury that will sentence you for what may be many years; many years that you will be away from your family, your life in tatters, your career ruined.
Matthew Diaz served his country as a staff judge advocate at Guantánamo. He watched a shameless assault on America’s Constitution and commitment to the rule of law carried out by the Bush Administration. He watched the introduction of a system of cruel torture and abuse. He watched the shaming of the nation’s uniformed services, with their proud traditions that formed the very basis of the standards of humanitarian law, now torn asunder through the lawless acts of the Executive. Matthew Diaz found himself in a precarious position—as a uniformed officer, he was bound to follow his command. As a licensed and qualified attorney, he was bound to uphold the law. And these things were indubitably at odds.
Diaz resolved to do something about it. He knew the Supreme Court twice ruled the Guantánamo regime, which he was under orders to uphold, was unlawful. In the Hamdan decision, the Court went a step further. In powerful and extraordinary words, Justice Kennedy reminded the Administration that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions was binding upon them, and that a violation could constitute a criminal act. One senior member of the Bush legal team, informed of the decision over lunch, was reported to have turned “white as a sheet” and to have immediately excused himself. For the following months, Bush Administration lawyers entered into a frenzied discussion of how to protect themselves from criminal prosecution.
One of the crimes the Administration committed was withholding from the Red Cross a list of the detainees at Guantánamo, effectively making them into secret detainees. Before the arrival of the Bush Administration, the United States had taken the axiomatic position that holding persons in secret detention for prolonged periods outside the rule of law (a practice known as “disappearing”) was not merely unlawful, but in fact a rarified “crime against humanity.” Now the United States was engaged in the active practice of this crime.
The decision to withhold the information had been taken, in defiance of law, by senior political figures in the Bush Administration. Diaz was aware of it, and he knew it was unlawful. He printed out a copy of the names and sent them to a civil rights lawyer who had requested them in federal court proceedings.
Diaz was aware when he did this that he was violating regulations and that he could and would, if caught, be subjected to severe sanction. What he did was a violation of law, even as it was an effort to cure a more severe act of lawlessness by the Government. Diaz violated the law in precisely the same sense as Martin Luther King reminds us, in the Letter from Birmingham Jail, that his arrest was based on a violation of law. That everything the Nazis did in Germany was lawful. And that every act of the Hungarian freedom fighters was a crime. In terms of the moral law, however, Diaz was on the side of right, and the Bush Administration and the Pentagon had, by engaging in the conduct that the Supreme Court condemned, placed themselves on the side of lawlessness, corruption and dishonor.
Diaz was charged, tried and convicted for disclosing “secrets.” For the Bush Administration, any information which would be politically embarrassing or harmful to it is routinely classified “secret.” In this fashion the Administration believes it can use criminal sanctions against those who disclose information it believes will be politically damaging. The list of detainees at Guantánamo, which by law was required to be disclosed, was classified as “secret.”
Diaz spent six months in prison and left it bankrupt and without a job. In addition to his sentence, the Pentagon is working aggressively to have Diaz stripped of his law license so he will not be able to practice his profession. The Bush Administration has sought to criminalize, humiliate and destroy Diaz. Its motivation could not be clearer: Diaz struck a blow for the rule of law. And nothing could be more threatening to the Bush Administration than this.
When republicans tell you that they love free markets and hate big government, look around:
Dean Baker has a nice rant about the disappearance of reliance on "market forces" now that the Princes of Wall Street are staring disaster in the face without government help:
What Happened to "Free-Market" Conservatives (or Neo-liberals)?: With the housing bubble in full meltdown, our political leaders are busily ignoring all the things they have said about the market over the last quarter century and looking to throw all the money that they can find to sustain the bubble. This would be comical, if it weren’t so painful.
Remember all the steel workers and autoworkers who lost their jobs due to trade agreements that were supposed to advance economic efficiency over the last quarter century? How about the workers in the airline, trucking, and telecommunications industry who lost jobs due to deregulation, which was also supposed to increase economic efficiency?
Well, it’s a new day. Nothing these people (or their economists) said matters anymore. It housing bubble support time!
For years, economic policy was supposed to be guided by market principles. If our autoworkers couldn’t compete with their counterparts in Mexico or China, who got paid $1 an hour, then it would be inefficient to have trade protection that would keep them employed here. The same applied to regulations that might keep high paying jobs in key sectors of the economy. Educated people all knew that interfering with the market was harmful to the economy, and if we ever forgot this basic truth, the Washington Post regularly ran sanctimonious editorials to remind us.
Well, it’s a new day. The housing bubble is melting down and Congress and the Fed are throwing money everywhere. After all, this isn’t about auto workers and truckers, it’s about Wall Street banks, and the politicians are pulling out all the stops to come to the rescue. In addition to the money that the Fed is throwing at the banks through subsidized loans at its discount window, it is also granting free insurance to the investment banks — a gift that is potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
Now Congress is jumping into the act. Remember way back in the fall when they couldn’t find $7 billion to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program? Well, now Congress can finds hundreds of billions of dollars to support a housing bubble. It’s a worthy goal. After all, the Wall Street crew might lose their shirts if the housing bubble continues to meltdown.
Congress will not be able to support the housing bubble indefinitely, but they might be able to do it long enough to allow the big boys to cash out and pass more of their bad loans onto the taxpayers and other suckers.
The political support for this bailout package may make it unstoppable, but if it does go through, we should be clear that there are new rules. In the post bailout world, anyone who makes claims about forcing workers or the poor to take pay cuts or do without benefits in the name of economic efficiency is simply a fool or liar.
Anyone who cared about economic efficiency would be yelling at the top of their lungs against this bailout. Anyone who can throw untold hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars at the rich to save their hides, has no concerns about economic efficiency, they just want to help the rich. In such a world, the rest of us have the right to demand the same sort of handouts from the government. And those who stand in the way are simply lackeys of the rich and powerful, who pretend to care about principles of economics.
Traditional Values = Forced Abortions And Prostitution
Bob Schaffer, Republican senate candidate for Colorado, is having his little vacation jaunts with convicted briber Jack Abramoff exposed on the pages of the Denver Post today. It’s smarmy for more reasons then the photos of him and his wife enjoying the lap of luxury on the dime of a group of Mariana Island sweat shop owners…
That’s Schaffer and his wife doing a little parasailing. Supposedly they’re investigating the conditions in the island sweat shops pending legislation to bring them under tighter U.S. regulation. The Mariana Island sweat shop owners were Abramoff’s biggest contributors. They’re about as sorded a bunch of republican bankrollers as you’re likely to find. As Joshua Marshall writes over at Talking Points Memo…
The Marianas program is notorious around the world for forced abortion, slavery, child prostitution, beatings and having the overwhelmingly female foreign workers houses in shacks with no plumbing surrounded by barbed wire.
And here’s Schaffer on his whirlwind tour of the sweatshops…
Schaffer later reported that the workers there all seemed happy. How…unsurprising. The Denver Post reports…
At the time, those alleged abuses and a push by the Clinton administration led to a flurry of congressional action. Several bills passed the Senate that would have brought the islands’ factories under stricter American laws, but the legislation failed in the House.
Hired by factory owners and the government of the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, Abramoff and his firm were paid more than $11 million over nine years to fend off those efforts, according to reports.
In a 2001 memo to the Marianas governor meant to justify millions in fees, Abramoff singles out the relationships built with members of the House Resources Committee, which has jurisdiction over U.S. protectorates. He points to the lavish trips for dozens of lawmakers and family members to build goodwill. And he says his connections ultimately scuttled dangerous legislation like the bill proposed by then-Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, which would have toughened the islands’ labor and immigration laws.
"We then stopped it cold in the House," the memo boasts.
"In the end, this all-out public relations and lobbying blitz brought the (Mariana Islands) back from the brink of legislative disaster," the lobbyist wrote.
Never mind for a moment, that these congressional representatives of The Party Of Moral Values had to know where the money was coming from. Never mind that they cheerfully turned a blind eye to forced abortions and prostitution in exchange for a good time on the dime of highly successful businessmen whose business model only happened to include forcing their employees to have abortions and go into prostitution. They’re congressmen after all. And…republicans. Is there a lower form of life then that? Actually…yes there is. Does the human gutter go any deeper? Actually, yes it does. And does it wear it’s righteousness on its sleeve? Tsk, tsk…Need you ask… Why…of course!
Abramoff for obvious reasons, had to conceal his payoffs to Schaffer. It would never do to have it look like the very sweatshops he was investigating paid for his trip…and parasailing lessons. So a third party payment was arranged. Guess who served as Abramoff’s willing frontmen?
Yes…those morally righteous bible believing god fearing Jesus loving save marriage from the homosexuals folks over at the Traditional Values Coalition…
In some cases, Abramoff — who is now in prison for fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to bribe public officials, none of it related to the Mariana Islands — took efforts to obscure the scope of that effort and his firm’s involvement.
Values Coalition paid for trip
Schaffer’s $13,000 trip was paid for by the Orange County, Calif.-based Traditional Values Coalition, which Schaffer described as a religious group "concerned with human rights."
"Whatever involvement (Abramoff) had with Traditional Values Coalition wasn’t known at the time," Wadhams said.
Later investigations have shown that in many instances, TVC — which claims to represent 43,000 churches — acted virtually as a political arm of Abramoff’s lobbying operation.
In one 2000 case investigated by The Washington Post, TVC lobbied heavily against a bill restricting online gambling that would have hurt one of Abramoff’s clients, eLottery Inc. In return, the report said, TVC received a check from the client for $25,000. Abramoff and TVC head Louis Sheldon had cooperated successfully so often that the now-jailed lobbyist began referring to him as "Lucky Louie," the newspaper reported. A TVC official didn’t return a phone call requesting comment.
What Are Traditional Values? While other pro-family groups may have their own specific definitions of what "traditional values" means, here’s what we consider to be traditional values:
A moral code and behavior based upon the Old and New Testaments. We believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and that the Lord has given us a rule book to live by: The Bible. We are committed to living, as far as it is possible, by the moral precepts taught by Jesus Christ and by the whole counsel of God as revealed in the Bible.
Moral precepts…did you say…? Oh…lookie here…
Right To Life: We believe that every human deserves the right to life—from conception to death—and that we do not have the right to kill unborn children nor to murder the elderly through active euthanasia.
You don’t say…
Homosexuality, Bi-Sexuality, Transgenderism, And Other Deviant Sexual Behaviors: The Bible clearly condemns all sexual behaviors outside of marriage between one man and one woman. Homosexual behavior is explicitly condemned in both the Old and New Testaments as an abomination and a violation of God’s standards for sexuality. We oppose the normalization of sodomy as well as cross-dressing and other deviant sexual behaviors in our culture.
You don’t say…
A U.S. Interior Department investigation found that pregnant workers were forced to get illegal abortions or lose their jobs. Some were recruited for factories but forced into the sex trade instead.
And you helped a bunch of Marianas sweat shop owners to pay off enough U.S. congressmen that their sweat shops could escape being regulated and thereby keep operating business as usual, which meant forcing their workers to get abortions and become prostitutes, and god knows what else. My, my…what traditional values you have there…
The Homosexual Movement And Pedophilia
The homosexual activist movement and organized pedophiles
are linked together by a common goal: To gain access to children for seduction into homosexuality.
How many of the women you’ve helped sweatshop owners force into prostitution were underage I wonder?
Via Box Turtle Bulletin… Now what the hell was this supposed to accomplish…?
We commented earlier on how the mainstream media omitted all mention of Major Alan Rogers’ orientation or of his efforts to overturn the military’s ban on open gay servicemen. We told you how the Washington Post ombudsman wrote a column to repair that deliberate exclusion. Now there’s a new twist.
The user on Monday redacted details about Rogers that appeared on the online encyclopedia site. Information that was deleted included Rogers’ sexual orientation; the soldier’s participation in American Veterans for Equal Rights, a group that works to change military policy toward gays; and the fact that Rogers’ death helped bring the U.S. military’s casualty toll in Iraq to 4,000.
And while the individual responsible isn’t known,
The IP address attached to the deletion of the details and the posted comments is 141.116.168.135. The address belongs to a computer from the office of the Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence (G-2) at the Pentagon. The office is headed by Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, who was present at Rogers’ funeral and presented the flag from Rogers’ coffin to his cousin, *Cathy Long.
The factual information has been reinstated in the Wikipedia entry.
* Long is the cousin that was unaware of Rogers’ orientation and thought it should be left out of the Post article.
Alan Rogers’ was a soldier and a gay man. He was dedicated to equal rights for gay soldiers. He kept his sexual orientation at least partly in the closet, so he could continue to serve. That is the devil’s bargan Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell demands of gay soldiers. He could have easily avoided the FUBAR that George Bush made of Iraq by coming out of the closet and getting his discharge. He didn’t. Whatever you think of Bush’s splendid little war, Alan Rogers’ was obviously proud of his service to the United States. While in uniform, bearing arms for the sake of his country, he made the ultimate sacrifice for his country. The least his country could do, is be proud of him too.
And I think his country Is proud. Even the piss ignorant jackasses who still believe in Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Some of them anyway. Probably not James Dobson or Sally Kern. But I think even louts like Charles Krauthammer would salute this man’s memory, just as he was. Maybe. However, as you can see, it is still far too much to ask of the stars and bars in their comfortable air conditioned pentagon offices, that they be proud of All their fallen heroes.
The organization collecting signatures for a proposed amendment banning same-sex marriage in California says it is close to meeting the requirement.
Protect Marriage says it has collected 881,000 of the 1.1 million signatures needed. The deadline for turning in the petitions to county registrars is April 21.
Registrars are then required to take a random sample of signatures to verify. If that sampling shows at least 10 percent more valid signatures than required the petitions will be certified and the measure will be placed on the November ballot.
"The numbers are good, solid," Ron Prentice, a spokesperson for Protect Marriage told The Christian Examiner, a conservative Christian publication.
"We are well toward our goal. There are thousands more yet to be counted with a steady stream still coming in."
Among the major donors to Protect Marriage are a group of San Diego County businessmen. Developer Doug Manchester alone has contributed $125,000 prompting gays to urge a boycott of his properties. Manchester owns the Manchester Grand Hyatt and the San Diego Marriott Hotel and Marina.
Mission Valley developer Terry Caster has donated $162,500, Carlsbad car dealer Robert Hoehn gave $25,000, and La Jolla businessman Roger Benson has given $50,000, according to state records.
It would just break my heart if the land of my birth did that to me. I’ve noted before that the only reason I can travel freely around the United States is that I’m single. If I had a spouse, there are many states in this so-called union that we simply could not set foot in because if one of us had a sudden health problem, or there was an accident, it would become a nightmare for both of us. Even with a so-called durable power of attorney, we could be denied the right to simply be with each other in a hospital…even with a medical directives document…we could be denied the power to make medical decisions for each other should one of us become suddenly incapacitated. Some state constitutional amendments, like Virginia’s are so stringently and thoroughly crafted to ostracize same sex couples from the protections of the law, that they can even be read to deny same sex couples the right to hold a joint checking account.
There are simply not that many people in this country who hate us enough to want to do that to us. The problem, like it was for another hated minority group over in Europe back in the 1920s and 30s, is that the rest of the nation doesn’t care enough to tell them to stop it. So when these amendments are put up to a vote, they stay home and allow hate to have its way. These are the people who say later, "We heard the rumors, but we didn’t believe them…"
Once upon a time I planned to move back to California after mom passed away. Then I got the job I do now, and my little Baltimore rowhouse, and I stayed in Maryland. But even now I think sometimes that when my time to retire comes, if it ever does, I’d like to spend the last years of my life back there where I was born. It’s a lovely state. It would break my heart if the day ever came that I couldn’t even visit California again.
I have a book on my desk waiting for me to read, titled, The Lavender Scare, about the persecution of gay government employees during the height of the cold war. So this story, via Talking Points Memo, caught my attention…
The Department of Justice’s inspector general continues to conduct its wide-ranging investigation of the U.S. attorney firings and the general politicization of the Department under Alberto Gonzales. And as we reported back in August of last year, one area of focus by investigators is allegedly political hiring practices by Monica Goodling. The inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility sent out a questionnaire to anyone who had interviewed for a job at the DoJ during Gonzo’s tenure. One thing investigators wanted to know about was whether the interviewer had asked about the applicant’s sexual orientation.
NPR today provides some more evidence that Goodling and her associates might have decided that being gay was a disqualifier. Leslie Hagen was the liaison between the Justice Department and the U.S. attorneys’ committee on Native American issues until her contract was suddenly discontinued in October of 2006.
And from NPR…
Justice Department e-mails obtained by NPR show that Gonzales’s senior counsel Monica Goodling had a particular interest in Hagen’s duties….
The Justice Department’s inspector general is looking into whether Hagen was dismissed after a rumor reached Goodling that Hagen is lesbian.
As one Republican source put it, "To some people, that’s even worse than being a Democrat."
Several people interviewed by the inspector general’s staff said investigators asked whether people drew a connection between the rumors and Hagen’s dismissal….
Someone who worked in Hagen’s office says that in a 2006 meeting, senior officials were told that Hagen’s contract would not be renewed because someone on the attorney general’s staff had a problem with Hagen. The problem, it was suggested during the conversation, was sexual orientation — or what was rumored to be Hagen’s sexual orientation.
One person at the meeting asked, "Is that really an issue?" But the decision had been made.
"To some people, that’s even worse than being a Democrat." The party of hate. It’s not always about cynical manipulation of people’s fears. A lot of them really do hate us that much.
Man…You Really Don’t Like Them Brown-Skinned Spanish Speaking Folks Do You…?
Via Media Matters… Lou Dobbs digs in a little deeper…
Dobbs asked if Obama is "pandering to ethnocentric special interests again" by accepting Richardson’s endorsement
Summary: Lou Dobbs introduced the March 21 edition of CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight by announcing: "Tonight, Senator [Barack] Obama wins the endorsement of the nation’s only Hispanic governor, Bill Richardson. Is Obama pandering to ethnocentric special interests again? We’ll have complete coverage." The subsequent report included no discussion of whether Obama is "pandering to ethnocentric special interests."
Well in lieu of the kid actually coming forward, it’s not much more then rumor. But it wouldn’t surprise me. Alan Keyes. Phyllis Schlafly. Pete Knight. Charles Socarides. And this commenter brings up something I hadn’t considered, but should have in light of what my travels among Ex-Gay survivors have taught me…
I see in this foolish woman much anger and resentment. Her beliefs are challenged within herself, because if she stands by them then she must accept her part in her son being a homosexual. She isn’t strong enough to do that. Instead, she has created a paranoid delusion that there is some vast conspiracy of gays infiltrating schools and governments to turn others gay and force their lifestyles on everyone. Her subconscious has created this great gay evil so she doesn’t have to blame herself…
Now that I look at it, I can see there’s probably a lot of that going on here. The reason they’ve become warriors against the gay menace, is that if there is no gay menace, then all they have left to explain why their kids are gay is what the pulpit thumpers have been pounding into them…that its poor parenting that makes a kid gay…that they’re the ones to blame…their children are going to hell because of them…
Geeze… I could almost feel sorry for her now. Can I? Nope. Still can’t…
We’ve Decided, After Much Prayer, To Stop Calling Them Stripes…
Behold, Exodus International’s ministry to persons afflicted with Same Sex Attractions…
…or Was at least, if you take their word for it. You know you can take them at their word don’t you…?
In August, 2007 after a lot of prayer, deliberation and listening to friends and critics alike — but mostly the Lord — we decided to back out of policy issues and our Director of Government Affairs took a position with another organization.
Jim Burroway has more Here. Peterson Toscano notes the shift in Exodus policy in his blog post Lovely Shifts And Dramatic Changes. Allow me to be the grouch here. Take another look at that anti-hate crime laws poster. It’s a damn lie. And they knew it was a damn lie while they were creating it. And in that, it is eminently typical of the quality of Exodus International’s relationship to honesty with regard to…well…goddamn near everything. Homosexuals… homosexuality… Teh Gay Lifestyle… ex-gay therapy… They have lied in the past. Brazenly. Ingeniously. Unashamedly. Unhesitatingly. But we can trust them now, can’t we?
Um….no. Let’s look at what’s being said here. Really look…
It may sound nuanced but we weren’t really involved in “politics.” We never worked for the direct election or defeat of a candidate.
No Alan…that doesn’t sound ‘nuanced’. It sounds duplicitous. Never mind that lobbying politicians and voters on policy issues is politics too, observe the telltale adjective…the Direct election or defeat of a candidate? I’m laughing in your face Alan. Exodus has always been a republican tool in election campaigns. Why have so many of Exodus’ "Change Is Possible" billboard campaigns been waged in swing states, with relatively small gay populations? You know goddamned well why. The republican candidate bashes the democrat over their stand on gay rights issues. You folks come along and tell the voters that homosexuals don’t have to be homosexual if they don’t want to anyway, thereby allowing the republican gay basher to blame gays for their own persecution, and the voters to tell themselves that by voting against gay rights they’re not hurting anyone, because the gays can always stop being gay when they’ve had enough.
The primary function of Exodus has always been to make political gay bashing palatable to voters. I mean…look…you don’t actually Change very many homosexuals do you? If I ran a corporation whose main product failed miserably so often I’d have gone out of business long ago. But Change isn’t your product. Animus toward homosexuals is your product. And by that measure, you’re still worth the money the religious right spends on you, if not quite as much as before.
Ever since John Smid had that brilliant idea of dragging gay teenagers into ex-gay therapy against their will, you folks have had to endure a lot more critical scrutiny then before, and one fall out of that is that people are starting to notice all the political activism you’re doing tends to contradict your ersatz message of love. You’re more effective for the anti-gay right when people really believe that all you’re trying to do is help all those poor victims of Same Sex Attraction Disorder who hate themselves because…well…because of all the goddamned lies your kind likes to spread about them. Hence, the costume change. And notice how it went from "We are not a political organization" to "We are not a political organization Anymore." Nice. But…yes…you are…
One area that we found to be incredibly beneficial was simply sharing our stories with lawmakers. If and when there are opportunities to do that we will.
The word for that is Lobbying Alan.
I know…I know…it’s So Hard to remember what words really mean after spending so many years as a mindless cog a lie factory…isn’t it. But they Do mean things, existence exists, reality is real, and when all is said and done that’s the enemy you’ve been fighting all your life right there, not teh gay, not teh liberal, not teh secular.
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