This may be the most compelling of the “It Gets Better” series. Evangelist Oral Roberts had a gay son who committed suicide. Randy Roberts Potts is Oral’s grandson and, like his late uncle, he is gay. This is his story in his own words.
Good news gay people! Former Pres. Bill Clinton is finally feelin’ your pain. And while we love the former president, and totally respect the longevity of his marriage, and fully realize that the only ones who know what’s really going on in a relationship are the two people in it…Well, still, as far as him making any statements on marriage…Just saying.
After leading the effort to stop the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the Senate yesterday — a repeal he supported in 2006 — Sen. John McCain had a temper tantrum during an interview with reporters Kerry Eleveld from the Advocate and Chris Geidner of Metro Weekly, who dared confront him with facts about DADT that were counter to the false narrative he’d been promoting.
“I don’t care what you say! And I don’t care what others say,” he barked, when reporters pointed out that, contrary to DADT policy, service personnel had been sought out for dismissal because they were gay. When the reporters continued to press him, he went into a juvenile rant, railing, “It is not the policy, it is not the policy, it is not the policy You can say that it is the policy, sir, if you choose to. It is not the policy.”
Under DADT, the military is not supposed to investigate personnel who are merely suspected of being gay — that’s the “don’t ask” part. But it does happen — and John McCain knows it does.
In an interview with Rachel Maddow on MSBNC last night, Major Mike Almy, who was dismissed after his personal emails were hacked by the military, called McCain on his B.S.:
Ga Ga: “I am here to be a voice for my generation, not the generation of the senators who are voting, but for the youth of this country, the generation that is affected by this law, and whose children will be affected. We are not asking you to agree with, or approve of the moral implications of homosexuality.”
There is so much wrong with these assumptions that it’s hard to know where to start (many Guard members are in their 30s, 40s, and even 50s, and why NOT ask the senators to stop declaring homosexuality is immoral?) but as the aunt of a 12-year-old, I know that Ga Ga is correct that she speaks for youth, and her heart is definitely in the right place on this one.
FLASHBACK: Here’s a clip of from CNN’s “Larry King Live” from 2006 in which Bill Maher outs Ken Mehlman during the live broadcast:
CNN edited out Maher’s mention of Mehlman’s name in the re-broadcast.
The fact that Ken Mehlman is gay was one of the worst kept secrets in modern politics — now he has come out of the closet in an interview with the Atlantic’s Mark Ambinder:
Ken Mehlman, President Bush’s campaign manager in 2004 and a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, has told family and associates that he is gay.
Mehlman arrived at this conclusion about his identity fairly recently, he said in an interview. He agreed to answer a reporter’s questions, he said, because, now in private life, he wants to become an advocate for gay marriage and anticipated that questions would arise about his participation in a late-September fundraiser for the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), the group that supported the legal challenge to California’s ballot initiative against gay marriage, Proposition 8.
“It’s taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life,” Mehlman told Ambinder. Mehlman also said his friends and family have been “wonderful and supportive,” and that coming out has made him a “happier and better person”
“It’s something I wish I had done years ago,” Mehlman said.
You and a few million others, Ken.
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This is a factoid I have tried to get out there for a while now — and it’s shocking that it was Chuck Todd, one of the main regurgitators of conventional wisdom in the Beltway kool kids club, who put it on TV.
It’s wrong to base protecting people’s rights on polling, but if that’s how it is going to be done now, then it should at least be consistent.
At around minute 2:50:
DAVID BOIES: It’s easy to sit around and debate and throw around opinions that appeal to people’s fear and prejudice — cite studies that either don’t exist or don’t say what you say they do. In a court of law, you’ve got to come and you’ve got to support those opinions. You’ve got to stand up, under oath and under cross-examination. And what we saw at trial is that it’s very easy for the people who want to deprive gay and lesbian citizens of the right to [marry] to make all sorts of statements in campaign literature — or in debate where they can’t be cross-examined, But when they come into court, and they have to defend those opinions under oath and under cross-examination, those opinions just melt away.
And that’s what happened here. There simply wasn’t any evidence. There weren’t any of those studies — there weren’t any empirical studies. That’s just made up. That’s junk science. And it’s easy to say that on television, but a witness stand is a lonely place to lie and when you come into court, you can’t do that.
And that’s what we proved. We put fear and prejudice on trial, and fear and prejudice lost.
From Trump’s “stolen election” lies, we can’t get no relief,
He carps on about stolen votes, but he never names the thief.
Somebody needs to tell this guy
Americans aren’t buying his lies,
And that he’s turned us into the United States of Disbelief.
