Tag: Gay Politics

Florida Rep Says Gay Students Need Psychological Treatment

Trish

A Republican Florida state lawmaker was right on target when he brought up the need for psychological treatment regarding homosexuality in high school students. Somebody does need to see a shrink.

But it’s not the kids.

“After telling him my story he proceeded to say he was repulsed by homosexuals and we needed extensive psychological treatment”

The idiot in question, Rep. Alan Hays (Umatilla), a retired dentist, reportedly implied to students lobbying for an anti-bullying law, the “Jeffrey Johnston Stand Up For All Act,” that being homosexual is fair game for taunts.

The bill named for a Cape Coral teenager who killed himself in 2005 after being bullied at school would define “bullying” and direct schools to set up clear rules for how to handle threatening behavior…

The bill defines “sexual, religious or racial harassment” as bullying, but makes no mention of sexual orientation.

Its sponsor, Rep. Nick Thompson of Fort Myers, said that is because the bill is broad enough to cover all forms of harassment.

But critics said it intentionally left out homosexuals so conservative Republican lawmakers would vote for the bill.

Didn’t work, according to one of the students.

“After telling him my story he proceeded to say he was repulsed by homosexuals and we needed extensive psychological treatment,” said Jessica Osborn, 22, a University of Central Florida student and one of the three coalition members who met with Hays. Hays confirmed Tuesday he met with the students but said he couldn’t recall saying he was “repulsed” by homosexuals.

“I did tell them that they needed some psychological treatment,” said Hays, who said he first asked them if they wanted to hear his views on homosexuality.

The bill’s sponsors say the three biggest topics of derision among high schoolers are gender, race, and sexual orientation. Personal experience by the author bears that out, although I would replace gender with body weight/puberty development issues. Either way, a bill that deals with bullying but doesn’t include homosexuality is a stupid bill.

If ‘Immorality’ Is the Military Standard, Why Are Adulterers Allowed to Serve?

Jon Ponder

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Peter Pace equated gay people with adulterers in his now infamous statement in which he described homosexuality as immoral:

Here is another example of the mad mix of cynicism and hypocrisy that is the hallmark of the Bush era. Enlistments are down, so the military is “allowing” its gay members to serve. When enlistments are back up — or the war ends — they’ll start the persecutions again.

“I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts,” Pace said in a wide-ranging discussion with Tribune editors and reporters in Chicago. “I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way.

“As an individual, I would not want [acceptance of gay behavior] to be our policy, just like I would not want it to be our policy that if we were to find out that so-and-so was sleeping with somebody else’s wife, that we would just look the other way, which we do not. We prosecute that kind of immoral behavior,” Pace said.

The difference, of course, is that adulterers are not routinely prevented from serving in the military.

Adding salt in the wound, new figures out today suggest that the military is not persecuting gay service members as agressively as they have in the past:

According to preliminary Pentagon data, 612 homosexuals were discharged in fiscal 2006, fewer than half the 1,227 who were discharged in 2001. On average, more than 1,000 service members were discharged each year from 1997 to 2001, but in the past five years that average has fallen below 730.

Here is another example of the mad mix of cynicism and hypocrisy that is the hallmark of the Bush era. Enlistments are down, so the military is “allowing” its gay members to serve. When enlistments are back up — or the war ends — they’ll start the persecutions again.

McCain Supports Military’s Permanent Gay Purge

Jon Ponder

Remind me why this guy is called a maverick — all I see is a George Bush clone, only older:

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) claims that “military leaders” he’s talked to about the ban on gay servicemembers say, “‘Generally, overall, it’s working.’ … And right now we’ve got the best military we’ve ever had – the most professional, best trained, equipped and the bravest. And so I think it’s logical to leave this issue alone. I really do.” Currently, the U.S. Army’s readiness for war “has eroded to levels not witnessed by our country in decades,” and since Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell went into effect, the Pentagon has dismissed more than 11,000 servicemembers, many in key specialty skills such as training in Arabic.

Newt Was Committing Adultery While Pushing Anti-Gay Marriage Act

Jon Ponder

In the fall of 1996, while the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was being debated, four politicians who were key to its becoming law were adulterers, including two who were involved in adulteries while the bill was being debated.

Gingrich dumped second wife Marianne in 1999 after she had received an alarming medical diagnosis. She should have seen it coming. Newt famously broke up with his first wife to marry her while the first wife was in treatment for cancer.

The world has long known that Pres. Clinton, who signed the bill in September 1996, was having an affair at the time with Monica Lewinsky. But now, for the first time, then-House Speaker Newton Leroy Gingrich has acknowledged that he was having an affair with his current wife, Calista Biseck, while he was married to his second wife, Marianne.

Gingrich confessed his adultery in an interview this week with James Dobson, a professional homophobe who heads Focus on the Family, one of the nation’s most virulent anti-gay organizatons.

Sources say the affair had been ongoing at least three years (and possibly for five years) prior to his divorce in 1999. In any case, it is clear that while Gingrich was cheating on his wife, in his role as Speaker he put the passage of DOMA at the top of the agenda for the House six weeks before the 1996 presidential elections.

And that was the real point. DOMA was a cynical election-year ploy devised by Republicans to drive a wedge between Pres. Clinton and his supporters in the gay community. DOMA presented Clinton with two bad options. If he vetoed it, Republicans would use it to enflame their homophobic base. If he signed it, he would risk dampening support from gays on election day. In the raw calculus of politics, Clinton chose the least risky option and signed it.

The other two adulterous politicians were recently retired Sen. Bob Dole, who was the GOP presidential nominee that year, and who had admitted to having an affair while married to his first wife — and then-Rep. Bob Barr, who first proposed DOMA, and who reportedly was unfaithful during at least one of his three marriages.

Gingrich apparently dumped second wife Marianne after she had received an alarming medical diagnosis in 1999. In true Newt fashion, the Speaker notified his wife that he was ending the marriage during a phone call while Marianne was with her family celebrating her mother’s 84th birthday. Marianne Gingrich should have seen it coming. Gingrich famously broke up with his first wife to marry her while the first wife was in treatment for cancer.

Gingrich is considering running for president in 2008.

Rod Majors: The Latest Rightwing Gay Media Whore – And Porn Star

Jon Ponder

Cpl. Matt Sanchez (left) with unidentifed man at CPAC, inset: Rod Majors

Ted Haggard bought one. Jeff Gannon was one — and now so is Cpl. Matt Sanchez, a U.S. Marine and the darling of CPAC and rightwing luminaries like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly.

What is it with rightwingers and gay prostitutes?

Cpl. Sanchez became a hero to the radical fringe recently when he claimed he’d been called a “baby killer” by liberals on the Columbia University campus, supposedly because he was wearing his U.S Marines uniform.There is apparently no evidence anything of the sort happened — and yet CPAC awarded Sanchez the Jeanne Kirpatrick Academic Freedom Award at its annual creepfest this year.

What they didn’t know is that Rod Majors, the conservative Marine’s evil twin, has appeared in at least a dozen gay porno films and admitted today that he also worked as a male escort who charged $250 for out calls.

Read More:

  • Joe.My.God. broke the story.
  • Andy Towle says he dated Rod Majors a few years ago.
  • Media Matters’ Max Blumenthal writes about the scandal at Huffington Post.
  • And here’s an interview with Rod Majors on a porn industry site. (Not for the easily offended!)

Dogpile Metasearch Engine Pulls Ads Off Coulter Site

Trish

What a relief! I was muy dismayed earlier this week when I found out my favorite metasearch engine, Dogpile, advertised on Ann Coulter’s web site.

If you’re not familiar with a metasearch engine, also known as an aggregator, check it out. Dogpile — and the rest — put your search terms out there on many, many single engines, like the G-site and the Y-site, for examples, and give you the results from all of them, all at once. Plus, there’s a neat little mascot dog that wags its tail while you type in the box. Can’t beat that.

You can see why I was pretty heartbroken about the skank site ads. But before I unbookmarked Dogpile for good, I sent them an email and asked them to pull their ads from Harpy.com. At first, they said they were still mulling it over. I conferred with Jon, who suggested I help them clarify things by asking if they would have so much trouble deciding what to do if Coulter had used the n-word instead of the f-word in a public forum.

Very quickly, I was informed Dogpile had decided to pull its advertising from the Coulter site. Hooray!

The next time you’re trying to find something online, use Dogpile. I wish they had never been on Coulter’s site to begin with, but I applaud their decision to rectify the mistake.

Ann Coulter Calls John Edwards a ‘Faggot’

Jon Ponder

Ann Coulter at the rightwing CPAC creepfest today:

“I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.”

We really need to hear what the Cheneys think about this — not just Mary and her spouse, Heather Poe, but the parents, Dick and Lynne.

Owners of Seattle Sonics and Seattle Storm Donated $1 Mil to Anti-Gay Fund

Jon Ponder

Another tale of rank homophobia in professional sports. Just two weeks after retired NBA player Tim Hardaway told an interviewer that he “hated” gay people, campaign finance forms from the 2004 election cycle reveal that Tom Ward and Aubrey McClendon, two of the owners of the NBA Seattle Sonics and the WNBA Seattle Storm, provided nearly 100 percent of the funding, over $1 million, for Americans United to Preserve Marriage a group run by professional homophobe Gary Bauer:

These same millionaires recently asked Washington’s left-leaning legislature for a $300 million tax break.

The campaign finance records I’ve reviewed show that Sonics/Storm co-owner Tom Ward has contributed $475,000 to Gary L. Bauer’s Americans United to Preserve Marriage.

And another Sonics/Storm co-owner, Aubrey McClendon, contributed $625,000.

Both men made their first contributions to the group, $250,000 apiece, on September 8, 2004 — the day after the group was formed.

As I said, the controversial group doled out $1,056,962 in the 2004 election cycle, which means Storm owners Ward and McClendon basically bankrolled the whole thing. Indeed, records show that between the 2004 and 2006 cycles the group spent $1.3 million total while Ward and McClendon’s donations total $1.1 million.

These same millionaires recently sought a huge tax break from the Washington state legislature:

The millionaires who’ve turned to this state’s left-leaning Legislature to authorize a $300 million tax subsidy for a new basketball arena have been playing right-wing politics. Two members of the new Sonics ownership group are heavyweight financiers of a national political group dedicated to banning gay marriage.

A spokesman for the teams’ owners said the two men have a right to their opinions:

“People are entitled to have their views, they are not views that I happen to agree with … but they are not trying to impose them on anyone out here,” [Jim] Kneeland said.

“I won’t argue that some of the owners may have more conservative political views than the norm out here; one of the things that they agreed to when they bought the team is that they would leave their politics at the state line,” Kneeland said. “They have done that. They were not involved in the election cycle out here last year and have no intention of doing so.”

It is a fact of life that gay women are among the biggest fans of women’s sports, so on a marketing level, at the very least, you’d think these bubbas would have more sense than to fund a group the sole purpose of which is to deny rights to gay people.

I doubt you’ll see too many gay women at future Storm games — in fact, the team is likely facing a boycott. As the man said, everyone has a right to their views.

Preacher Arrested for Gay Sex Invitation Claims No Law Was Broken

Jon Ponder

Early last year, Rev. Lonnie Latham, a Baptist preacher who railed against the evils of homosexuality, was arrested for inviting a male undercover cop in a seedy part of Oklahoma City up to his motel room for oral sex. Latham’s trial is underway now, and his lawyer’s opening gambit is interesting in light of the fact that many of Latham’s co-religionists would make homosexuality illegal if they could:

Latham’s attorney, Mack Martin, filed a motion to have the misdemeanor lewdness charge thrown out, saying the Supreme Court ruled in the 2003 decision Lawrence v. Texas that it was not illegal for consenting adults to engage in private homosexual acts.

“Now, my client’s being prosecuted basically for having offered to engage in such an act, which basically makes it a crime to ask someone to do something that’s legal,” Martin said.

Both sides agree that there was no offer of money, but prosecutor Scott Rowland said there is a “legitimate governmental interest” in regulating offers of acts of lewdness.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma has filed a brief alleging that Latham’s arrest also violated his right to free speech.

Before his arrest on January 3, 2006, Rev. Latham was a member of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention and preached against civil marriage rights for gays and supported a resolution calling on gays and lesbians to reject their “sinful, destructive lifestyle.”

But Rev. Latham is not on trial for hypocrisy, unfortunately, or for sleazy and stupid behavior. He’s on trial for offering legal sex to a stranger, who happened to be a cop.

If he’d made the same offer on the Internet or in a bar, rather than on a street corner, he would have gotten what he wanted without having to give up his pulpit — or his hypocrisy.

Does Bush’s Homophobe Base Know His Longtime Sidekick Is Gay?

Jon Ponder

If you know the name Israel Hernandez, you probably know him as “Altoids Boy,” the young man in charge of George W. Bush’s breath mints. (He says his real Dubya-assigned nickname is Izzy.)

Hernandez was 23 when he signed on as the Charlie Young to Bush’s Jed Bartlet 14 years ago, and is like a member of Bush’s family.

Izzy is also gay:

Izzy, now 37, travels the world on the government dime as an assistant secretary of commerce, which, frankly, is the sort of job a pol would give a crony’s ex-mistress.

Israel Hernandez was a fresh-faced college graduate from the Texas border town of Eagle Pass in the summer of 1993 when he landed a job in Dallas as the personal aide to the part-owner of the Texas Rangers George W. Bush.

Together, they spent months driving the dusty back roads of the Lone Star State to promote the team, Mr. Hernandez behind the wheel of Mr. Bush’s Lincoln Town Car.

“He would speak to a rotary or chamber and say, ‘You need to come to the ballpark and we’ll make it Athens, Texas, Day. We’ll put you in your own special section; we can say ‘Welcome Athens, Texas,’ on the big screen; you can come to batting practice, ‘’ Mr. Hernandez recalled…

Mr. Hernandez, who is so close to the Bushes that he moved in with them in Dallas after his apartment was burglarized,

Do the homo-haters in Bush’s conservative Christian base know that he used to travel all over hell and half of Texas with a hot young gay dude, and that same young homo also lived with the Bushes in Texas?

Despite evidence to the contary, George Bush is not gay. He is a hyporcrite. He attacks gay people in order to gain poltical advantage — leaving millions of his unsmart-American base with the impression that he hates queers as much as they do.

How do Republicans do it? How do they send their political goons out to whack gay people in the afternoon and then sit down to dinner with their Izzy Hernandezes, Mary Cheneys, Ken Mehlmans and, who knows, Josh Boltens and Condi Rices?

Worse still, how do these self-loathing gay people square the circle in their own minds that they are lap dogs to the masters of the same people who spend their days ensuring their continued oppression and disenfranchisement?

For his loyal years of service, Izzy, now 37, travels the world on the government dime as an assistant secretary of commerce, which, frankly, is the sort of job a pol would give a crony’s ex-mistress.

Good for him. I’m sure he deserves a reward after years of service to such an unpleasant, aristorcratic boor.

Obviously, Izzy has reconciled himself to the fact that this man to whom he devoted his youthful time and energy has done more to hobble the cause of gay civil rights than anyone else in our time — but I, for one, can’t imagine how.

Update: Corrected name of West Wiing character. Thanks, West Wing Fan!