So I see Rex Wockner, and Andrew Sullivan are in agreement with John Aravosis that transgendered people have basically hijacked the gay rights movement. Dan Savage is at least on board with the transgender free Barney Frank/HRC bill that just passed the house. Somehow, it’s…unsurprising…to see the "No Fems" contingent bellyaching that they just don’t get the transgendered. Here’s Wockner giving it his best attempt…
I’ve been sitting here sort of picking my own brain and asking myself if gay and trans people do in fact have some crucial thing in common. I’ve read tons of opinion pieces and blog posts on the ENDA war in recent weeks, but none of them really opened my eyes. What do I have in common with a guy who wants to remove his willy, grow breasts, become a woman and get married to a man? From where did this relatively new concept of "the LGBT community" come?
Any deeper then this and Wockner is in danger of getting his own reality TV series. Wille. Wille. You know, not all transgendered persons go the sex reassignment surgery route, but I wouldn’t expect anyone in the "No Fems" crowd to have picked up on that. Geeze…and I used to think I had a problem with things female, my libido and my emotions being so relentlessly polarized toward the male sex. But the worst I ever was, was indifferent. I didn’t dislike girls and I don’t now, they just don’t register on my radar like guys do. I like guys. I like being a guy. I like being around guys. I like being made sweet sweet love to by guys. But there really are males, heterosexual ones too amazingly enough, who just get deeply anxious when confronted with anything even vaguely suggestive of femininity, and never more so then when it’s within another guy. I guess they’re afraid of their own dicks falling off or something if they get too close. Notice Wockner’s problem is with "a guy who wants to remove his willy, grow breasts" and "become a woman". Notice further that he’s saying this right after talking up Shannon Minter, born female, now living as a man.
I do, in fact, count myself among those Americans who still don’t fully understand and "get" the whole concept of being born in completely the wrong body. I’ve asked Shannon for a personal, one-on-one crash-course the very next time we’re within range of each other on the national map.
Probably because Shannon is butching it up and Wockner can deal with that better then with a person born male but who considers themselves female. Well let me say I don’t "get" what the goddamned problem is here. Has Wockner, after all this time, never pondered what makes some people gay and others straight? There is a mountain of evidence building now, that sexual orientation is innate, something in our biology, that draws us to mate to our own sex. It’s not in our willies, but in our heads. Is it really that hard to look at this, and consider then that gender expression may also work in some similar way? And for Christ’s sake it’s not like issues of gender haven’t been animating American politics ever since…oh…the feminist movement. I know that serious questioning of whether gender expression is more nature or nurture, biological or sociological, have been tracking alongside the same questions regarding sexual orientation since at least my own teen years and I’m older then any of these three deep thinkers (Aravosis doesn’t seem to be thinking about any of this at all so much as machine gun jerking his knee…)
I think my eureka moment came some decades ago while reading an article on boys who had been born with deformed or missing genitals and were, shortly after birth, surgically assigned a female gender and raised as girls. Tragically, horribly, it didn’t work. There was one boy in particular, who said he’d kept on reflexively trying to pee standing up all through his childhood. That opened my eyes. As it turns out, it’s not what we have between our legs that makes us masculine or feminine, it’s what we have between our ears.
What T’s have in common with LGB’s is that primary opposition to all of you comes from your subversion of proper, binary, complementary gender roles. You may be quite different from the inside, but from the outside you look similar. I heard my southern baptist grandfather give a sermon in which one of the ills of the modern world was "men not wanting to be men." I’m pretty sure he had gays in mind.
Surely you know this.
To which Sullivan reliably babbles…
If we are defined by those who hate us, LGBT makes some sense, although it could also include straight women who don’t conform to traditional roles, straight men in the same position, and so on, which would mean LGBTSFSMQ or something. My point is that the respective experiences of being gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender are very distinct and different. And I do not define myself primarily by shared victimhood. Indeed, as many angry LGBTQWhatever readers have insisted, I am not a victim. I am a privileged, white sexist patriarchal rich HIV-positive-with-meds guy. So why, then, pray, am I still regarded (in your acronym at least) as a part of your "community"?
Not to worry Andrew, a lot of gay folk don’t regard you as being part of our community either. Not after you swooned over the man who vowed to veto any attempt to repeal the Texas sodomy laws because he thought they were a valid expression of the morality of the majority of Texans. But, no you drooling moron, the entire point of anti-discrimination laws Is how other people view us, not how we view ourselves.
Yes, yes…we’re all different from one another in so many little ways. Men and women from other men and women. Whites and blacks and Asians from other whites and blacks and Asians. Gays from other gays. How many different sub groups within that vast rainbow of humanity that are homosexual? Bigotry on the other hand, ignorantly lumps people together. Since when did prejudice ever make sense? No, the color of your skin doesn’t say anything about the content of your character. Neither does your sexual orientation. Neither does your gender. Neither does your gender expression. And as for why ‘T’s are part of this movement too, well let’s let Jack Chick explain something you need very much to understand:
Now, look at that. No…Really Look At It. Anti-discrimination laws aren’t about how minorities see themselves. What they address is how popular prejudices view and treat minorities. Look At That Image. This is what the bigots see, when they look at us. They don’t see difference one between the ‘GL’s, the ‘B’s and the ‘T’s you idiot. They don’t even admit there is such a thing as sexual orientation. let alone something called transgender. To them, it’s all sex perversion. You’re a man and you’re having sex with other men and that means as far as they’re concerned, that you’re acting like a woman. Never mind you don’t think you are. It’s not about what you think. Butch it up until you’re growing hair on your palms and it still won’t matter to them. They see a man making himself into a woman. They see gender non-conformity. In my 8th grade sex ed class back in 1969, I was taught that as a literal truth: that homosexual men think they’re really women. You’ll always be a fairy to the bigots Sullivan.
None of us, the ‘GL’s, the ‘B’s and the ‘T’s behave according to the gender expectations of the majority. That’s why we’re discriminated against. That’s the stinking rotten core of it, along with a healthy dose of misogyny. Men rule, women serve men, wives gracefully submit to their husbands who are the head of the household and all is right with the world. Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Transgendered people all throw that nice neat little "natural order" into question and they can’t deal with it. But you need to understand that the problem from their perspective isn’t that you’re homosexual. Many of them insist there is no such thing as a homosexual to begin with, merely damaged heterosexuality. Their problem is that you’re a man who, by having sex with other men, makes himself into a woman. That’s the thinking going on here. They see no distinction, zero, zilch, nada, between a transgendered individual and a homosexual. None.
And this is why any anti-discrimination law that does not include gender expression in it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. Incrementalism is fine I suppose, when it actually gets you somewhere. Civil Unions before marriage. Okay…I can dig that. I don’t like it but I can dig it. At least Civil Unions are a step forward; at least they’re something. The EDNA passed last week is nothing but hot air and a bunch of preening politicans and HRC lobbyists patting themselves on the back for appearing to be doing something when all along they were too goddamned timid to actually fight for something honestly worthwhile because that might be risky. You know…behaving like democrats always do these days. Any bigot with half a brain can simply say they fired you because you weren’t conforming to their company gender norms, not because of your homosexuality. And Barney Frank has given them the green light to do that, by insisting that the law Specifically omits gender expression as a protected catagory. Lambda Legal has been all over this big honking loophole, and Frank and HRC (say…I thought you didn’t like them Andrew) went ahead and did it anyway.
But then…why someone who doesn’t believe in anti-discrimination laws in the first place is bellyaching about including ‘T’s, when he thinks ‘G’s and ‘L’s and ‘B’s shouldn’t be protected classes either is beyond me. I guess you just have to jerk your knee at every fucking thing that liberals are for, or that you imagine they’re for. The guy who once said that liberals might mount a fifth column against the war on terror is certainly no stranger to how bigots think is he? And I see that the candidacy of Hillary Clinton has you back to nearly full time snarling at the Clintons again hasn’t it? Jesus Christ you are one big fucking bundle of surly knee jerk reflexes aren’t you?
Instead of writing the transgendered out of EDNA, maybe Barney should have just written "No Fems…" into it. That would have made you guys happy, wouldn’t it?
No fems please…we’re all manly cocksuckers here. Hey…don’t get me wrong…I’m a big fan of Y chromosomes myself. Just not the big stupid ones.
We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.
-Ben Franklin
Dogged by political scandal in his first term, Gov. Ernie Fletcher of Kentucky, a Republican, lost his bid for re-election yesterday to Steve Beshear.
Looks like Teh Gay couldn’t drive the rubes to the poles this time. Things are looking up in Virginia too, of all places. I was reading an interesting view about how the current sub prime mortgage crisis may be a factor in the elections. The McMansion suburbs have been a republican stomping ground for the past decade and now a lot of those people are loosing their houses or finding themselves suddenly under debt loads they cannot bear. The problem for the republicans in all that is that those folks are educated enough to know that the republican greed reflex is largely responsible for the mortgage system collapse and they’re probably closely following its ripples through all their other investments too. It can’t be fun reading the financial news these days knowing that you voted for the idiots who are now running the economy like they’d been given a license to steal.
And you thought republicans really meant all that stuff about small government and fiscal responsibility. Never mind the price of oil…gold is now at an absolutely incredible eight-hundred and forty-one dollars an ounce as of last night. When Bush took office it was selling for around two-hundred sixty. The Canadian dollar is worth more then the U.S. dollar and the Australian dollar is inching close. The national debt has skyrocketed. So have foreclosure rates. People in upscale neighborhoods in southern California are taking care of the lawns of homes that haven’t sold in months, so the neighborhood won’t look like a slum. And now they’re finding squatters in some of those homes. I’ll bet a lot of red neighborhoods in the McMansion suburbs turned blue this election.
"Greed is good", they said. People should have paid more attention. No, greed is not good. Greed eats this year’s seed and doesn’t care if there’s any left to plant next year. Greed squeezes what the market will bear out of it, and doesn’t care if what the market will bear keeps getting smaller and smaller every year. Greed doesn’t favor the short term gain over the long run investment because it doesn’t admit there is any such thing as tomorrow. There is only now. Right now. I want it Right Now. "Greed is good", is the economic theology of seven year olds.
People claim to be shocked by Mr. Bush’s general fiscal irresponsibility. But conservative intellectuals, by their own account, abandoned fiscal responsibility 30 years ago. Here’s how Irving Kristol, then the editor of The Public Interest, explained his embrace of supply-side economics in the 1970s: He had a “rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems” because “the task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority — so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.”
People claim to be shocked by the way the Bush administration outsourced key government functions to private contractors yet refused to exert effective oversight over these contractors, a process exemplified by the failed reconstruction of Iraq and the Blackwater affair.
But back in 1993, Jonathan Cohn, writing in The American Prospect, explained that “under Reagan and Bush, the ranks of public officials necessary to supervise contractors have been so thinned that the putative gains of contracting out have evaporated. Agencies have been left with the worst of both worlds — demoralized and disorganized public officials and unaccountable private contractors.”
People claim to be shocked by the Bush administration’s general incompetence. But disinterest in good government has long been a principle of modern conservatism. In “The Conscience of a Conservative,” published in 1960, Barry Goldwater wrote that “I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size.”
Bush is not incompetent. He’s been dead-on target every moment, every second he’s been in power, doing Exactly what the right has always promised America it would do once it got its hands on the levers of power. Of course financial institutions all over the world are trembling now at the scale of the losses in the sub-prime mortgage fiasco. They don’t matter. Finance is predicated on a notion that both the secular and religious right categorically reject: that there’s such a thing as tomorrow. Greed is good. Or to put it succinctly:
SCHADENFREUDE ALERT….The New York Times reports today that a group of conservative authors, including Swift Boat nutball Jerome Corsi, is suing right-wing darling Regnery Publishing. The lead plaintiff is Richard Miniter, author of Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush Is Winning the War on Terror,who apparently got his hands on a royalty statement he wasn’t supposed to see:
"It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance." He added: "Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?"
….The authors, who say in the lawsuit that [Regnery’s parent company] has been "unjustly enriched well in excess of one million dollars," are seeking unspecified damages. But Mr. Miniter said, "We’re not looking for a payoff; we’re looking for justice."
Well, we’re all looking for justice, aren’t we? But if a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, what do you call a conservative who’s come face to face with the naked face of vertically integrated capitalism?
You got what you voted for. The problem wasn’t that you didn’t read the fine print. You didn’t read the bold print.
Going into the home stretch in in the Kentucky gubernatorial election, the Republicans appear to have brought out one last card: Paranoia against gays.
The state GOP is now sending a robo-call throughout the state featuring none other than Pat Boone, warning that as a Christian he is concerned that Democratic nominee Steve Beshear, who has been way ahead in the polls, will work for "every homosexual cause."
"Now do you want a governor who’d like Kentucky to be another San Francisco?" Boone asks. "Please re-elect Ernie Fletcher."
And at a campaign stop last night, the Lexington Herald-Leader reports, the Republican nominee for Lt. Governor made a direct attack upon the Democratic ticket: "Do you want a couple of San Francisco treats or do you want a governor?"
(Emphasis mine) So the republican candidate gets way behind in the polls and he starts waving the Gay Menace. This is what republicans do to win elections, and never mind how many gay Americans it gets killed. Talking Points Memo has a recording of Fletcher’s robo call. You may recall that on April 11 of last year Fletcher, declared Diversity Day in Kentucky, and on the same day eliminated anti-discrimination protections for gay state and local government workers.
I wrote a post a few days back about wanting a door I could walk through from time to time. Don’t assume that means I’m not just as pissed off at all of you as I was. In fact, I might even be More pissed off now then I was. Because it just never stops with the republicans. It just never stops.
I don’t expect everyone who knows me to agree with me on every political issue. But if you can vote republican while they’re doing this to gay people to win elections then you are not my friend. It really is that simple. I’ve got a bullseye on my back, along with ever other gay American citizen, and it’s not gutter crawling maggots like Ernie Fletcher who put it there, it’s all of you who told the republicans they can incite passions toward gay people as often and as crudely as they like and you’ll still vote for them.
So don’t ask. Just…don’t.
When the roll call of the gay bashed for this election cycle is read and I’m lucky enough not to be on it that’ll be no thanks to the likes of any of you.
(Union City, New Jersey) Two workers at a Burger King in Union City have been charged with assault and a hate crime in connection with the beating of a gay couple outside the restaurant.
Christopher Soto and Angel Carbaballo, who have since been fired by the chain, are scheduled to appear in court this week.
The victims, both in their 40s, have not been named.
When the couple asked for a refund for a menu item that the counter person discovered was not available, another counter person then asked who wanted the refund – “The faggots over there?”
The couple left the restaurant, but a group of Burger King employees allegedly followed them to a side street and beat them mercilessly, though not fatally.
The employees made repeated anti-gay slurs during the beating according to the indictment.
Someone calling themselves Mrs du Toit responds to my post yesterday on the Nazification Of The Western Male. I’ve no way of establishing the authenticity of the commenter, but I reply back in the comments.
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.
Elections Must Be Coming Up…I See The Republicans Are Dusting Off Their Gay Menace Fliers
Via Pam’s House Blend… What does a vulnerable republican politician do when a gay challenger threatens to unseat him…? Why…make him look like he’s a predatory homosexual child molester of course…
In the neighboring state to the north, the District 39 race in Virginia is getting ugly, thanks to Republican State Senator James J. "Jay" O’Brien Jr. In a desperate bid to pander to the wingnut vote, he decided that sending out a flyer that says, among other things, that his Democratic opponent
"George Barker wants to take time away from core academic subjects like math, science, and reading to teach children to accept the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Lifestyle (GLBT)."
It’s no surprise that this flyer (PDF) was paid for by the Republican Party of Virginia.
What would have surprised me is if the republicans hadn’t stooped to it. This is the party that simply cannot win elections without the bigot vote.
It’s clear that the right wing is ratcheting up the homo-hate as Barker has received the endorsement of the Washington Post.
Republican Sen. James J. "Jay" O’Brien Jr. is an affable incumbent, but his scant command of policy and legislative issues has failed to impress. His Democratic rival, George L. Barker, a health-care planner, would make a far more able, detail-oriented and effective senator in this district straddling the Fairfax-Prince William line.
Barker also has strong support from educators (I’m sure O’Brien feels they are part of the Homosexual Agenda anyway).
More from the heinous mailer — he certainly telegraphs his priorities:
George Barker went on to say that he would vote for legislation that would teach Virginia students about the "GLBT" lifestyle during school hours — regardless of their family’s own beliefs. Barker also said he would "guarantee" his support for "GLBT" clubs in public schools.
…George Barker worked very hard in terms of opposing the marriage amendment, and be strongly in favor of gay rights, be [sic] he shouldn’t impose his values on elementary school children.
A question for O’Brien – I suppose that kids in your state don’t need to know about tolerance and families that are different, you know — like that of little Samuel Cheney, a resident of Virginia and son of loyal Republican Mary Cheney.
Here’s what the republican party is sending to voters in Virginia, to make sure they get the message that the homo running against their boy wants to molest their children…
They’re not calling the gay candidate a child molester outright, but look at the imagery in that flier and tell me that they’re not fear mongering a gay man and child sexual abuse there, right there, with that close up image of the back of that small boy and that shirt collar pulled down the back of his neck, right up in the reader’s face.
It’s despicable. But that’s how republicans win elections these days. From the gutter. Problem is, that’s also how they govern. The party that thinks the only way it can win elections is fear mongering, also seems to think it can eavesdrop on Americans at will, without all that rule of law stuff getting in the way. The party that thinks the only way it can win elections is to appeal to the lowest prejudices within us, also seems to think that it can govern just fine thank-you, in complete secrecy and without any accountability. The party that thinks the only way it can win elections is to call gay men child molesters, seems to think George Bush unilaterally drag the country into whatever war he likes, and shovel your kids into it. You get the government you vote for. You vote your fears, you get a government that makes sure you have lots to be afraid of.
The venue is owned by the Lynnwood Public Facilities District, a public taxing district that operates the convention center but is separate from the city.
“Our understanding is that they’re law-abiding. They have a right of free speech just like any other group,” said Mike Echelbarger, the board’s chairman.
“If we were talking about the (Ku Klux Klan) we’d have a totally different take on it. Of course we wouldn’t rent to the KKK,” he said.
Of course, they wouldn’t rent to the KKK. But as we reported earlier, they may as well. The rhetoric the Watchman use has often been violent, using the rhetoric of warfare in their speeches and writings. Founded by Redmond, Washington by preacher Kenneth Hutcherson, holocaust revisionist Scott Lively, and Latvian megachurch pastor Alexey Ledyaev, Watchmen on the Walls have gained a tremendous amount of influence in Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine and Russia. Ledyaev’s fomenting of anti-gay hatred in Riga, Latvia led to violence when skinhead and other demonstrators threw excrement and eggs at Gay Pride participants in 2006.
And as the SPLC recently reported, the Watchmen also represent an increasingly violent anti-gay movement among Slavic evangelical immigrants in several U.S. cities which have previously been known as being gay friendly. In July 2007, a group of Russian-speaking men killed Satender Singh, a 26-year-old gay Fijian of Indian near Sacramento, California. Two men, Andrey Vusik, 29, and Aleksandr Shevchenko, 21 were charged in connection with Singh’s death. Vusik fled to Russian in July and is being sought by the FBI. Ledyaev and Lively have refused to publicly condemn the killing.
Jim quotes Lively, who employs rhetoric chillingly similar to the eliminationist what the Third Reich once emplyed against Jews:
There is a war that is going on in the world. There is a war that is waging across the entire face of the globe. It’s been waging in the United States for decades, and it’s been waging in Europe for decades. It’s a war between Christians and homosexuals.
This is a war you haven’t seen yet. You’ve only seen a little bit of it, because Russia had been protected against the homosexual movement by the Communists. One of the few good things that the Soviet Union did is that it stopped the sexual revolution from infecting the Russian people. But all across the West, the sexual revolution changed the culture of the nations. The sexual revolution embraces the idea that there should be no limits on sexual conduct.
And this is the design of the Devil to destroy civilization, because civilization is based on the natural family. One man and one woman united in marriage bringing children into the world and training them to replace them in the next generation. That’s the foundation of civilization and the heart of Christian living.
And in the United States where the sexual revolution began, it was the homosexual political movement that designed this strategy to attack Christianity. The homosexual movement teaches sexual freedom, and its first target is the heterosexual people. The homosexual activists stayed hidden but they taught this philosophy through their activists. And out of the philosophy came the principalities and powers that is destroying the West: The pornography industry, the abortion industry, and the destruction of marriage through divorce.
These things are the product of a way of thinking. They deny the Truth of God. They deny the design of God for human beings. And their purpose is the change the cultures of the world.
Now, the homosexual movement has been winning this war in the United States, and it has been winning this war in Europe. And we’re looking at the future collapse of Western civilization. And Watchmen on the Walls is an organization to fight against this collapse. Watchmen On the Walls is an organization of men and women with courage, who will stand on the Truth of God and without compromise demand that the culture will follow the guidance of God. That marriage and family must be held at the highest level.
So Lively and his pal Ledyaev have been feeding this to the Slavic immigrant community in several west coast cities and it did its work. Two of their useful tools killed Satender Singh and Lively isn’t merely refusing to condemn the act, he’s making excuses for it:
Now, I’ve been working with the Russian community in Sacramento. And I want to tell you this is an example of how bad things are in the United States. Because we’ve come to a place in the United States where the homosexuals have achieved very high power. And they’ve begun to punish… They’ve begun to cause the political powers to punish anyone who says that homosexuality is wrong.
There was a situation in Sacramento a few weeks ago in a public park. There was a group of homosexuals and they were very drunk and one of the homosexual men was taking off his pants. And there were children in the park. And a Russian man went over to these homosexuals and he was rebuking them and there started a fight. And the Russian man punched the homosexual. [The audience starts to shout and applaud.] No, no, no, don’t… The man was very drunk… the homosexual was very drunk. He was very drunk and he fell down and he hit his head and he died. [Some in the audience start to applaud and laugh] No…. no…
Now the Russian man has been accused of murder and the FBI is seeking him. And all of the powers in Sacramento have been accusing all of the Russian community of being murderers. And the goal is to silence everyone who speaks against homosexuality. And this is a very dangerous situation because we don’t want homosexuals to be killed. We want them to be saved. Amen?
But that’s not what happened in the park. Singh and his friends, three couples including a pregnant woman, were taunted by a group of young slavs who hurled racist and homophobic insults at them. One of the Slavs called some friends on his cell phone and they came and joined the group just as Singh and his friends were leaving the park. There was no fight. One of the Slavs sucker punched Singh hard in the head and he fell and hit his head again on the sidewalk. He remained in a coma until eventually taken off life support.
Make no mistake…Lively is excusing murder there. Note not only the audience response to Lively’s telling them that the gay man was struck and died, but Lively’s half hearted attempt to quell their enthusiasm for murder. He’s not telling them their blood thirsty hatred is wrong, he’s telling them to shut up because his speech there is being recorded.
Burroway’s right, The Lynnwood Convention Center might as well be hosting a Ku Klux Klan gathering. The Watchmen On The Walls aren’t just some anti-gay right wing religious group. They are the public face of a violently anti-gay movement that has already killed at least one gay person. And that’s not the only act of violence associated with this Slavic religious community. People will die as a result of the hatred that will be passionately inflamed at The Lynnwood Convention Center on October 19, 20 and 21. They might be gay. They might be family or friend to a gay person. They may be straight and merely mistaken for being gay in the wrong place at the wrong time. But look at the rhetoric this movement employs. …this is the design of the Devil to destroy civilization…it was the homosexual political movement that designed this strategy to attack Christianity… We better wake up. This is a war. They aren’t using that word "war" metaphorically.
Someone will die as a result of what is said in the Lynnwood Convention Center in the coming weeks. Some of that blood will be on the hands of the The Lynnwood Convention Center Management. Just sayin…
“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.
Sorry, no sale. The Democrats chose to outsource their airtime to a Seventh Grader. If a political party is desperate enough to send a boy to do a man’s job, then the boy is fair game.
So says Mark Steyn of the National Review. Firedoglake has more…
Why are all these high traffic wingnut blogs (and far right Fox News) attacking this 12 year old boy and his family? This may well be the lamest excuse I have ever heard in my life for attacking two children who were severely injured in a car accident and their parents who couldn’t afford health insurance for them. I mean honestly, this propaganda fishing expedition disguised as “questions” doesn’t pass the smell test, and Malkin and her cronies know it:
Asking questions and subjecting political anecdotes to scrutiny are what journalists should be doing.
First of all, you weren’t scrutinizing, you were harassing the family at their place of business and their home, and then you kept on harassing them and egged your readers to do the same. Your gin up a phony distraction from your bad press because ”the GOP doesn’t care about poor children“ conservative bloggers and pundits decided that the ends justifies the means in cleaning up after George Bush’s latest mess — even if it meant sacrificing the daily lives of a couple of injured children in the fray. Secondly, you weren’t even close to following the code of ethics that professional journalists require in this situation to “minimize harm,” so you can call yourself the ethically-challenged political hacks that you are and be done with it.
None of you political hatchet cronies give a rat’s ass about minimizing harm for these children, one of whom suffered a severe brain injury in the car accident and can’t possibly fight back against this crass, thoughtless tactic. And on top of that, you are liars.
Which really says it all about how much they believe themselves in their own ideology. A political movement that claims to have access to certain truths about morality and governance that so-called "leftists" and "socialists" are trying to suppress has to resort to lies to get it’s point across? So where’s all this Truth you guys claim you have over progressives? No. No. They lie, starting with their declared moral and political values, because if they told the truth, that all they really believe in is Might Makes Right, and the absolute rule of the rich and powerful, they’d never get anywhere. They’re scum. Or as Digby says…
This is so loathesome I am literally sick to my stomach. These kids were hurt in a car accident. Their parents could not afford health insurance — and sure as hell couldn’t get it now with a severely handicapped daughter. And these shrieking wingnut jackasses are harassing their family for publicly supporting the program that allowed the kids to get health care. A program, by the way, which a large number of these Republicans support as well.
They went after Michael J. Fox. They went after a wounded Iraq war veteran. Now they are going after handicapped kids. There is obviously no limit to how low these people will go.
It has come to this: Democrats give a twelve year old boy airtime on their weekly address to relate his story about what happened to him and his family when she was in an automobile accident, and they couldn’t afford to pay the bills without the kind of federal help that President Nice Job Brownie just vetoed, and the Bush republican grassroots immediately begin Swift-Boating his family.
Whiskey Fire has some good notes on the obscenity Here. The gutter is bitching about the fact that they own a 3000 square foot rowhouse in Baltimore, that their father owns his own cabinet making business, that the kids are going to a private school with a 20,000 a year tuition. No part of that family’s life is now escaping the smear machine’s attention…right down to the kitchen counter tops…
The current market value of their improved 3,040 SF home at 104 S Collington Ave is unknown but 113 S COLLINGTON AVE, also an end unit, sold for $485,000 this past March and it was only 2,060 SF. A photo taken in the family’s kitchen shows what appears to be a recent remodeling job with granite counter tops and glass front cabinets.
Yeah, and the current market value of my little 1500 sq foot Baltimore rowhouse is about $240,000 but just six years ago I was able to buy it for $89,900, because that was what it’s market value was then. One reason the housing market is still so hot here in Baltimore is that prices in the surrounding suburbs, and Washington D.C., are simply insane. So people of modest means are buying up Baltimore rowhouses in the neighborhoods are that are still fairly safe. One Whiskey Fire commenter puts it thusly:
Let me get this straight. This guy’s a cabinet maker, and these geniuses are leering about how nice his cabinets are?
Given that those people basically live in downtown Baltimore, I’d be willing to bet that they bought a a rundown house in a gentrifying neighborhood on the cheap so that Mr. Frost, who is good with his hands, can fix the place up and they can turn the house around for a profit. His business, which is a couple of blocks away in downtown Baltimore, basically comes from all the people fixing up all the old brownstones in the area.
In the meantime, he has to send his kids to school and the public schools in Baltimore don’t really seem like the ideal option. So he looks around, and finds that he can send them to a private school using their assistance program.
But given that $45000 dollars, while a decent living all things considered, isn’t a whole hell of a lot of money, especially when there are six mouths to feed, after everything’s said and done with he just can’t make things work with health insurance (when it comes down to it, after the mortgage, food, clothes and all the rest of the expenses of raising a family, even another $600 is no small potatos).
Then the children get into a catasrophic accident, the family is suddenly looking at medical bills it can’t pay. They are in such bad straits that the school is doing fundraisers for them. This government program helps them; makes their lives better in a fundamental way.
And these jokers are pissed off about it.
Amazing.
I have a next door neighbor who is doing just that on his rowhouse. He’s a building contractor of some sort, and he redid his own kitchen and it is just fabulous. But you’d expect it to be, or you wouldn’t be wanting him to do your kitchen too. And I have another neighbor who is by no means wealthy, and trying hard to keep his own kids in the Friends school here in Baltimore, rather then public school. The public schools here in the city, thanks in large measure to republican scorched earth attacks on racial equality, cities, and public education, are teetering on the verge of collapse.
So this self employed father does his best to provide for his family, and give his kids a decent education, on $45,000 a year, and his kids are nearly killed in an automobile accident and that family suddenly finds themselves looking into an almost bottomless pit of medical expenses…and the gutter puppies at Powerline and The Free Republic, and professor InstaJackass, think there’s something suspicious about this? No. No. Absolutely not. They know goddamn well there’s nothing wrong with this family’s story. Nothing factually wrong that is. But it was very politically incorrect, and for that the family must not only suffer, it must be publicly run through the wringer as an example to others who might be considering speaking out.
For the Bush base, the Party is the only truth, the only religion, the only morality. When the right wing talks about virtue and morality, what they’re talking about is fealty to the party. Nothing else. That’s how you can run a propaganda steamroller over a twelve year old boy’s family, because she dared to ask the nation to look, really look, at what happened to them.
[Update…] Graeme Frost is a boy, not a girl, as I’d originally written. Obviously I didn’t listen to the radio address that started all this. Sorry guy…
Daily KOS has some facts the Freepers don’t want you to know…
Graeme has a scholarship to a private school. The school costs $15K a year, but the family only pays $500 a year.
His sister Gemma attends another private school to help her with the brain injuries that occurred due to her accident. The school costs $23,000 a year, but the state pays the entire cost.
They bought their “lavish house” sixteen years ago for $55,000 at a time when the neighborhood was less than safe.
Last year, the Frost’s made $45,000 combined. Over the past few years they have made no more than $50,000 combined.
The state of Maryland has found them eligible to participate in the CHIP program.
So Graeme’s sister is actually in a private school because she’s still struggling with injuries from the automobile accident. And their Baltimore rowhouse was bought for considerably less then what it’s worth now…a fact which would only be surprising to someone who didn’t know that housing prices have risen dramatically in the past few years. But see what the Freepers did. They took the current value of the house and related it as though that represented the income level of the owners. They took the cost of tuition at the schools the kids are going to, and related it as though they’d just proven that was what the family was actually paying. They even put photos of the family kitchen under the microscope.
Michelle Malkin, who once posted the names and home phone numbers of University of California students who had organized a protest against military recruiters on campus, is now stalking the family of Graeme Frost. And surely she’s not the only wingnut that wants to get this family somehow, some way, for speaking out, for putting human faces on the American health care crisis. They say that this family is not deserving of support, because it is not destitute. But that something like an automobile accident can drive an essentially middle-class, small business family into destitution is emblematic of Exactly what’s wrong with our health care system. The political movement that waves "family values" as a banner has now officially made American families another enemy in the kulturkampf. The political movement that enshrined free market capitalism as a moral standard more righteous then the Sermon On The Mount has now officially declared small businessmen are the enemy. We are all on the front line now. We are all targets. But of course, we always were.
[Update II…] You gotta love the comments the gutter is leaving on progressive blogs on this. The suggestion being floated now is that the Frost family should have sold their house to pay for their children’s medical expenses. They bought the house for 55 grand and now its worth almost half a million and so the kook pews are saying that means the family is rich and they’re just milking the system like a bunch of liberal welfare junkies. I’ve seen one of them suggest the family sell the house and rent a 1 thousand square foot apartment to make ends meet.
Let’s deconstruct this. The family of six, whose father is a self employed cabinet maker, is making somewhat less then 50 grand a year. The house is 3 thousand square feet, which is good for a family of six. I once rented a 750k sq foot apartment and that rent was costing me by the time I moved out in 2001 800 dollars a month. And that was a One Bedroom apartment. The two bedrooms, which were 1200 sq feet, rented for over a thousand a month. Rents in Baltimore have skyrocketed as the value of homes have skyrocketed, and I doubt you could find a decent 1k sq foot apartment in Baltimore for less then the mortgage this family is currently paying on their house. And it would be at most two bedrooms, which isn’t enough for a family of six.
So in other words, to pay the medical bills incurred because their children were in an automobile accident, and still stay right with the kook pews, this middle class working family should sell the house that’s big enough to raise four kids in, and which they can afford the mortgage on, and move everyone into a one bedroom apartment that will cost them more to rent, and which they’ll never own, and which is too small to raise a family of four children in.
Actually, this is Exactly what would have happened to this family were it not for the Maryland CHIP program. They would have lost their home, and been forced into a downward spiral that so many working poor are. Their living expenses would have gone up, even as their standard of living went down. I never realized how much my own family had been nickeled and dimed to death until I bought my house, and saw all the tax and economic breaks I was suddenly getting.
And the Bush republicans think this is the Right policy. They really think that pushing middle class families into poverty by medical bills is better then having a national health care system that would keep them, and their children out of poverty.
The next time a Bush republican utters the words "Family Values" in your presence, laugh in their face. Oh, and do the same whenever you hear them start yapping about the virtues of small business.
How Much You Want To Bet Ahmanson Is Giving Them Money Too…
Obviously American thugboys aren’t up to the job, so at least in the Pacific states, the hard right is reaching down a little deeper into the gutter. Here comes the next phase in the right wing’s anti-gay jihad: the brownshirts. Only this time, they’re Russian…
On the first day of July, Satender Singh was gay-bashed to death. The 26-year-old Fijian of Indian descent was enjoying a holiday weekend outing at Lake Natoma with three married Indian couples around his age. Singh was delicate and dateless — two facts that did not go unnoticed by a party of Russian-speaking immigrants two picnic tables away.
According to multiple witnesses, the men began loudly harassing Singh and his friends, calling them "7-Eleven workers" and "Sodomites." The Slavic men bragged about belonging to a Russian evangelical church and told Singh that he should go to a "good church" like theirs. According to Singh’s friends, the harassers sent their wives and children home, then used their cell phones to summon several more Slavic men. The members of Singh’s party, which included a woman six months pregnant, became afraid and tried to leave. But the Russian-speaking men blocked them with their bodies.
The pregnant woman said she didn’t want to fight them.
"We don’t want to fight you either," one of them replied in English. "We just want your faggot friend."
One of the Slavic men then sucker-punched Singh in the head. He fell to the ground, unconscious and bleeding. The assailants drove off in a green sedan and red sports car, hurling bottles at Singh’s friends to prevent them from jotting down the license plate. Singh suffered a brain hemorrhage. By the next day, hospital tests confirmed that he was clinically brain dead. His family agreed to remove him from artificial life support July 5.
Outside Singh’s hospital room, more than 100 people held a vigil. Many were Sacramento gay activists who didn’t know Singh personally, but who saw his death as the tragic but inevitable result of what they describe as the growing threat of large numbers of Slavic anti-gay extremists, most of them first- or second-generation immigrants from Russia, the Ukraine and other countries of the former Soviet Union, in their city and others in the western United States.
In recent months, as energetic Russian-speaking "Russian Baptists" and Pentecostals in these states have organized to bring thousands to anti-gay protests, gay rights activists in Sacramento have picketed Slavic anti-gay churches, requested more police patrols in gay neighborhoods and distributed information cards warning gays and lesbians about the hostile Slavic evangelicals who they say have roughed up participants at gay pride events. Singh’s death was the realization of their worst fears.
You should read this whole article, particularly if you’re gay, or have gay friends or family living on the west coast. I’m sure not all Russian immigrants are this violent, but some are affiliated with a church, and a movement, that specifically targets gay people for violence, in exactly the same way the brownshirts once targeted Jews. Understand, this isn’t random violence due to an endemic hatred of gay people. This is organized violence, and it’s organized from within their church…
Gay rights activists blame Singh’s death on what they call "The West Coast connection" or the "U.S.-Latvia Axis of Hate," a reference to a virulent Latvian megachurch preacher [Alexey Ledyaev] who has become a central figure in the hard-line Slavic anti-gay movement in the West. And indeed, in early August, authorities announced that two Slavic men, one of whom had fled to Russia, were being charged in Singh’s death, which they characterized as a hate crime.
A growing and ferocious anti-gay movement in the Sacramento Valley is centered among Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking immigrants. Many of them are members of an international extremist anti-gay movement whose adherents call themselves the Watchmen on the Walls. In Latvia, the Watchmen are popular among Christian fundamentalists and ethnic Russians, and are known for presiding over anti-gay rallies where gays and lesbians are pelted with bags of excrement. In the Western U.S., the Watchmen have a following among Russian-speaking evangelicals from the former Soviet Union. Members are increasingly active in several cities long known as gay-friendly enclaves, including Sacramento, Seattle and Portland, Ore.
Vlad Kusakin, the host of a Russian-language anti-gay radio show in Sacramento and the publisher of a Russian-language newspaper in Seattle, told The Seattle Times in January that God has "made an injection" of high numbers of anti-gay Slavic evangelicals into traditionally liberal West Coast cities. "In those places where the disease is progressing, God made a divine penicillin," Kusakin said.
The anti-gay tactics of the Slavic evangelicals in the U.S. branch of the Watchmen movement are just as crude and even more physically abusive than Fred Phelps’ infamous Westboro Baptist Church, and they’re rooted in gay-bashing theology that’s even more hardcore than the late Jerry Falwell’s. Slavic anti-gay talk radio hosts and fundamentalist preachers routinely deliver hateful screeds on the airwaves and from the pulpit in their native tongue that, were they delivered in English, would be a source of nationwide controversy.
And surprise, surprise, Oregon holocaust revisionist Scott Lively (he of The Pink Triangle fame) is now their "envoy". Lively, as it turns out, and unsurprisingly, also has a connection to the Christian Reconstructionists…
The executive director of the OCA at that time was Scott Lively, a longtime anti-gay activist who is now the chief international envoy for the Watchmen movement. Lively also is the former director of the California chapter of the anti-gay American Family Association and the founder of both Defend the Family Ministries and the Pro-Family Law Center, which claims to be the country’s "only legal organization devoted exclusively to opposing the homosexual political agenda."
The Watchmen movement’s strategy for combating the "disease" of homosexuality calls for aggressive confrontation. "We church leaders need to stop being such, for lack of a better word, sissies when it comes to social and political issues," Lively argues in a widely-circulated tract called Masculine Christianity. "For every motherly, feminine ministry of the church such as a Crisis Pregnancy Center or ex-gay support group we need a battle-hardened, take-it-to-the-enemy masculine ministry like [the anti-abortion group] Operation Rescue."
Lively identifies "the enemy" as not only homosexuals, but also what he terms "homosexualists," a category that includes anyone, regardless of sexual orientation, who "actively promotes homosexuality as morally and socially equivalent to heterosexuality as a basis for social policy."
When he personally confronts the enemy, Lively practices what he preaches when it comes to "battle-hardened" tactics. He recently was ordered by a civil court judge to pay $20,000 to lesbian photojournalist Catherine Stauffer for dragging her by the hair through the halls of a Portland church in 1991.
Lively occasionally writes for Chalcedon Report, a journal published by the Chalcedon Foundation, the leading Christian Reconstructionist organization in the country. (Reconstructionists typically call for the imposition of Old Testament law, including such draconian punishments as stoning to death active homosexuals and children who curse their parents, on the United States.)
Washington State homophobic preacher Ken Hutcherson, who tried to single handedly torpedo that state’s antidiscriminaton law, is also on board with Ledyaev’s brownshirts…
In addition to Lively and Robertson, Ledyaev has cultivated the support of Rev. Ken Hutcherson, the African-American founder of Antioch Bible Church, a Seattle-area megachurch. "Hutch," as the ex-NFL player is known, played a key role in persuading Microsoft to temporarily withdraw its support for a Washington bill that would have made it illegal to fire an employee for their sexual orientation. In 2004, his "Mayday for Marriage" rally drew 20,000 people to the Seattle Mariner’s Safeco Field to oppose legalizing same-sex marriage.
One of Ledyaev’s nephews saw Hutcherson speak in Seattle at a March 2006 debate on gay rights and arranged a meeting with the Latvian pastor. By the end of the year, Hutcherson, Ledyaev and Lively had teamed up with Vlad Kusakin, the editor of The Speaker, to form an international alliance to oppose what Hutcherson characterizes as "the homosexual movement saying they’re a minority and that they need their equal rights."
They took the name Watchmen on the Walls from the Old Testament book of Nehemiah, in which the "watchmen" guard the reconstruction of a ruined Jerusalem. The cities they guard over today, say the contemporary Watchmen, are being destroyed by homosexuality.
"Nehemiah stood by the destroyed city of Jerusalem. So are we standing these days by the ruins of our legislative walls," Ledyaev says on the Watchmen website. "Defending Christianity begins with the restoration of the walls which is where the watchmen should stand up." The group’s mission is "to bring the laws of our nations in[to] full compliance with the law of God."
During the past year, the Watchmen have met twice in the United States, first in Sacramento, then in Bellevue, Wash. They gathered to strategize against same-sex marriage and build a political organization to fight "gay-straight alliances" in public schools and push for the boycott of textbooks that mention homosexuality in any context other than total condemnation.
The group has also convened outside America. In the summer of 2006, the Watchmen and their supporters gathered in Riga, Latvia, to "protect the city from a homosexual invasion." Gay rights activists in Europe counter that it’s gays who need protection from the Latvian capital, not the other way around.
And, indeed, the city is a hotbed of violent homophobia. In 2005, for example, a group of 100 gay activists, most of them from Western Europe and Scandinavia, traveled to Riga to hold a gay rights march that was widely viewed as the first real test of Latvia’s official commitment to freedom of assembly, a requirement for its tentative admission to the European Union in 2004. Under heavy police escort, the gay rights demonstrators walked a few blocks through a gauntlet of ultranationalists, neo-Nazi skinheads, elderly women and youths wearing "I Love New Generation" T-shirts. They were pelted with eggs, rotten tomatoes and plastic bags full of feces.
The mayor of Riga at the time was Janic Smits, a close friend of Pastor Ledyaev and a prominent member of his New Generation Church. During a parliamentary debate on whether sexual orientation should be covered under a national ban on discrimination, Smits quoted the Old Testament: "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them." Last year, Smits was elevated to chair the Latvian Parliament’s Human Rights Commission.
Ledyaev and Lively have both refused to publicly condemn the murder of Satender Singh. The message in that should be as crystal clear to the rest of us, as it is to their followers: Go, and do likewise…
But let it be said that the thuggishness of their flock isn’t limited to attacks on gay people. In the comments to this AlterNet story, one person writes:
I taught in Sacramento. When we had the National Day of Silence at our school, aside from the traditional fundamentalist groups that opposed it, the Russian immigrant kids were down right rude, requiring removal from the class because they couldn’t respect people’s differences. Russian gangs in Sacramento, especially the Rancho Cordova area has been responsible for auto theft and chop shop operations, meth labs, and numerous murders. They are heavily connected through their church, and most of them will tell you that its because of the suppression in the former Soviet Union that their parents experienced. So, what you get is not just a born again mentality, but a born again and uber-survivorish type adherence to their version of scripture.
They are heavily connected through their church. Looks like Ken Hutcherson has found his brothers in Christ. And so the face of the man who once said that to love God, and love your neighbor as yourself, was the highest commandment, is twisted into a gangsters leer. If you thought the insular hatred of the bible belt south was the bottom of the gutter, you were wrong. It has no bottom.
Our right simply to live, never mind to get married or hold down a job, has always been subject to the whims of hate. Now that violent hate is being given an International organization from which to operate, and grow, and thrive. By men of god. In the name of Jesus. But it would be a profound mistake to give this a Russian face. There is violent anti-gay hate in many more parts of the world then Russia. The men who are now developing, and those who are financing, this international anti-gay terrorism force have a large pool of potential soldiers to draw from. They’ve been unsuccessful at turning the western world against its gay sons and daughters, so now they’re reaching out to the east, and the third world. So Ahmanson brings the African church to America, if the American church won’t do his bidding. So he, or other like minded right wing billionaires, may well be reaching out to Russia, and other nations, for willing murderers, to bring the war on gay people back to a satisfactory pace. The new weapon against the American dream of liberty and justice for all, are the people of the lands where the Dream is unknown, or even hated as virulently as the American right hates it.
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?
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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.