Category: LGBTQ

OK, I Didn’t Live Blog the SOTU

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Though thankfully, because of my Eastern European Jewish heritage, I have no hangover.

That being said, I watched, and drank every time he cock-punched the DFH’s,* so most of my thoughts are probably not that valuable, or coherent.

That being said, he did call for the repeal of the Military’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy, and now Valerie Jarrett is saying that he is, “committed to getting it done.”

Now, let’s see what happens when Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman get all pissy about it.

See video (11:35, and the interview with Jarret starts at about 3:05, and the exchange on DADT is at about 10:45)

*Dirty F%$#ing Hippies.

I Can’t Believe That I am Saying This

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This is Cindy McCain In a Pro-Gay Marriage Ad

But, I offer my support and congratulations to Cindy McCain, yes, that Cindy McCain, John McCain’s wife:

Sen. John McCain’s wife Cindy McCain is the newest face of a pro-gay marriage campaign.

Posing with tape over her mouth and a “NOH8” logo on her face, Cindy McCain was photographed for the NOH8 Campaign, which protests Proposition 8, the California proposition passed in 2008 banning same-sex marriage. The proposition is currently being challenged in federal court.

McCain approached the campaign herself about her participation, the NOH8 Web site says. She has spoken out on behalf of gay rights before, though this is perhaps her most prominent show of support for the issue.

Now that she realizes that John McCain will never be President, she’s doing the right thing.

Better late than never.

(A big of meta: I am not using my “John Sidney McCain III” tag because Cindy is more than just an extension of her husband.)

It’s Put Up or Shut Up for Barack Obama

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David Bahati, author of the Ugandan “Kill the Gays” bill, and Ugandan Ethics and Integrity Minister James Nsaba Buturo are expected to come to the United States to attend the National Prayer Breakfast.

Let’s be clear: These people are proposing genocide against gays in Uganda.

They should not be granted a visa.

If Barack Obama does not want a diplomatic dispute over this, I think that he is wrong, but he then has another option: Be the first President since Dwight Eisenhower not to attend the breakfast, saying that he will not break bread with them.

If he does neither, he is immoral, and he is a coward, and he does not deserve the public trust.

It is possible that Obama will take steps to prevent this, such as pressuring “The Family”, the secretive Christo-Fascist group that has organized the prayer breakfasts, to dis-invite them.

But if he sits down to break bread with people who are this deeply evil, he is giving his personal imprimatur to genocide, and anyone who supports gay rights should not support him.

Positively Nixonian

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It’s Called Lying Like a Rug

In support the idea that he will put his name to anything marked healthcare reform, barack Obama gave an interview to the Washington Post, and he told a complete and utter lie:

Those elements are in the House and Senate versions of the legislation; their competing proposals will have to be reconciled in conference committee next year. The House bill includes a government-run insurance plan favored by progressive Democrats; the Senate version does not. “I didn’t campaign on the public option,” Obama said in the interview.

(emphasis mine)

It takes about 15 minutes on Google and Youtube to see that it’s a lie, see the video on the right.

It certainly wasn’t something that he pushed hard during the campaign, unlike, for example, his support for repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and family benefits for gay couples, where his administration is now aggressively fighting to prevent real progress.

With this level of hypocrisy, it’s no wonder that Drew Westen, a psychologist, neuroscientist, and political scientist whose book The Political Brain was widely considered to be the bible of the Obama campaign just wrote a scathing article condemning Obama’s unwillingness to lead:

As the president’s job performance numbers and ratings on his handling of virtually every domestic issue have fallen below 50 percent, the Democratic base has become demoralized, and Independents have gone from his source of strength to his Achilles Heel, it’s time to reflect on why. The conventional wisdom from the White House is those “pesky leftists” — those bloggers and Vermont Governors and Senators who keep wanting real health reform, real financial reform, immigration reform not preceded by a year or two of raids that leave children without parents, and all the other changes we were supposed to believe in.

Somehow the president has managed to turn a base of new and progressive voters he himself energized like no one else could in 2008 into the likely stay-at-home voters of 2010, souring an entire generation of young people to the political process. It isn’t hard for them to see that the winners seem to be the same no matter who the voters select (Wall Street, big oil, big Pharma, the insurance industry). In fact, the president’s leadership style, combined with the Democratic Congress’s penchant for making its sausage in public and producing new and usually more tasteless recipes every day, has had a very high toll far from the left: smack in the center of the political spectrum.

What’s costing the president and courting danger for Democrats in 2010 isn’t a question of left or right, because the president has accomplished the remarkable feat of both demoralizing the base and completely turning off voters in the center. If this were an ideological issue, that would not be the case. He would be holding either the middle or the left, not losing both.

What’s costing the president are three things: a laissez faire style of leadership that appears weak and removed to everyday Americans, a failure to articulate and defend any coherent ideological position on virtually anything, and a widespread perception that he cares more about special interests like bank, credit card, oil and coal, and health and pharmaceutical companies than he does about the people they are shafting.

………

Leadership means heading into the eye of the storm and bringing the vessel of state home safely, not going as far inland as you can because it’s uncomfortable on the high seas. This president has a particular aversion to battling back gusting winds from his starboard side (the right, for the nautically challenged) and tends to give in to them. He just can’t tolerate conflict, and the result is that he refuses to lead.

………

What’s they’re seeing is weakness, waffling, and wandering through the wilderness without an ideological compass. That’s a recipe for going nowhere fast — but getting there by November.

(emphasis mine)

As I’ve said before, the problem is that he believes that he is likable enough that he can bring people together even when there is no common ground, and the idea of people actually having honest differences of opinion, or of having legitimate political reasons for opposing his policies, appears to be completely beyond him.

Barack Obama: Hating te Gay Since 2007*

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Yes, the group most likely to be thrown under a bus by Barack Obama, the LGBT community, just got thrown under the bus again going through back-flips to defy a Federal Judge’s order on this:

Because she is a federal employee, Golinski’s benefits are overseen by the Office of Personnel Management, which effectively serves as the human resources department for about 1.9 million federal workers nationwide. Golinski’s insurer, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, declined to provide health benefits for her legal spouse, Amy Cunninghis, but ninth circuit chief judge Alex Kozinski said that violated the court’s guarantee of equal employment opportunity and that same-sex spouses were entitled to benefits under the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan.

OPM attorneys consulted with the Department of Justice on this case, and the key to the case, according to the OPM official, was that Kozinski was presiding over an administrative proceeding that’s an internal employee grievance procedure — he was not serving in his official capacity as a ninth circuit judge.

I suppose that he’s better for Gays than the Christo-Fascist right, which was actively working for a death penalty for gays in Uganda until Rachael Maddow outed their murderous efforts, and that he figures that the LGBT community knows that it has no where else to go, but such a calculus is repugnant, immoral, and evil.

Let me quote Joseph Nye Welch:

Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

I support Howard Dean for President in 2012…………………Hell I support anyone who opposes Barack Obama in the primaries† in 2012.

*The Donnie McClurkin episode.
†This offer does not apply to Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, or Paris Glendenning. Note that side effects of an endorsement from Matthew Saroff can include:

  • Losing elections
  • Voting irregularities
  • An extremely hostile press corps
  • Embarrassing Youtube clips

Do not operate a political campaign under the influence of a Matthew Saroff endorsement, and avoid heavy consumption of alcohol.

Republican Family Values

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Former Missouri House Speaker Rod Jetton*, a Republican who fought to keep a law criminalizing gay sex in that state, has been charged with felony assault for beating and choking his girlfriend during a sexual encounter.

His defense, it appears is that, “she did not use the agreed on ‘safe word’ to end the activities”, but she is accusing him of having drugged her.

You can find excerpts of the police report here.

*Sounds like a pr0n star name.

Just Heard on Maddow

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It appears that the two Ugandan legislators who have been the driving force for putting forward a bill to apply the death penalty for homosexuality intend to come to the United States next year to attend the National Prayer Meeting, as they did last year.

The kicker is that Barack Obama attended it this year and is expected to attend it next year.

The appropriate response to these folks is to deny them entry to the USA, but my guess is that he won’t do that, and if they show up, he’ll probably talk anyway, spouting something about the need for people to talk.

This is What an Interview is Supposed To Be

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Rachael Maddow, does her homework, has the bigot’s books in front of her, and tears him to bits when he lies.

It’s a well spent 17:56.

This rarely happens on the network shows, Jon Stewart excepted.*

It’s interviews like this that have me skipping Keith to make time for Rachael when I have a busy evening.

*Which raises the obvious question: Why the F%$# should we have to rely on a comedian for competently done interviews?

The Never Ending Battle of Obama and His Evil Minions&trade Against LGBT Civil Rights Continues….

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I Can’t, It Might Offend Bigots

Remember when I wrote that a political appointee at the Office of Personnel Management was instructing insurance companies not to write a policy for a woman’s wife in California, despite an instruction from the courts to do so?

Well, now Director of the Office of Personnel Management,and Obama political appointee John Berry is saying that he won’t follow the court order because he has no authority to do so.

Dude, when a court gives you an order, you cannot claim that you don’t have any authority.

You can appeal and ask for a stay, but that’s it. A court order is the authority to do so.

More Homophobe-phobic Crap for the Obama Administration

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I’m being as nice as possible when I say that Barack Obama and his administration is afraid of offending homophobic bigots.

That’s because the only other alternative hypothesis is that Barack Obama is a homophobic bigot, and while this is a simpler solution, and Occam’s razor cuts toward that, my sense is that they do not feel that the LGBT community has anywhere to go, so they will throw them under the bus to get a few votes.

It really does not matter, but their latest, where the office of personnel management is refusing to obey a court order to allow a woman to buy insurance for her spouse, at the insistence of the Obama administration is really a proverbial “bridge too far”.

The money quote here is here:

The order was not published, and garnered little or no notice at the time. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts moved to comply with the judge’s ruling, submitting Golinski’s insurance form to Blue Cross Blue Shield, and the case would have probably gone away — had the Obama Administration not stepped in. “After the AO submitted Ms. Golinski’s form, I thought this matter had concluded,” Kozinski wrote. “The Executive Branch, acting through the Office of Personnel Management, thought otherwise. It directed the insurance carrier not to process Ms. Golinski’s form 2809, thwarting the relief I had ordered. I must now decide what further steps are necessary to protect Ms. Golinski and the integrity of the Judiciary’s EDR [employee dispute resolution] plans.”

(emphasis mine)

This is not an accident, nor is it a Bush holdover, as Michelangelo Signorile notes that the “bombshell here is that the Office of Personnel Management was ordered by the White House to refuse to give a lesbian federal employee her court-ordered rights”.

They Can’t Even Get Arrested in This Town

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I am referring, of course to the group of Christo-Fascist bigot whack-doodles who call themselves that Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, who protested the expansion to the hate crimes law outside Department of Justice headquarters.

It turns out that the law requires, that one explicitly plan, or actively incite violence against a protected group, so they could not get themselves arrested, though they did attract counter protesters, who quickly owned them:

No hands were cuffed. In fact, the few cops in attendance were paying no attention to the speakers, instead talking among themselves and checking their BlackBerrys.

The evangelical activists had been hoping to provoke arrest, because, as organizer Gary Cass of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission put it, “we’d have standing to challenge the law.” But their prayers were not answered. Nobody was arrested, which wasn’t surprising: To run afoul of the new law, you need to “plan or prepare for an act of physical violence” or “incite an imminent act of physical violence.”

Instead of getting arrested, the ministers got something else: A couple of dozen gay activists, surrounding them with rainbow flags and signs announcing “Gaga for Gay Rights” and “I Am a Love Warrior.” By the end, the gay rights activists had taken over the lectern and the sound system and were holding their own news conference denouncing the ministers.

The kicker to all this:

Cass turned angrily to the AV guy. “We’re not on the clock, are we?” He turned with equal anger to Valk. “You guys gonna help us pay for the microphones?”

The gay activist smiled. “God,” he said, “works in mysterious ways.”

In this case, God took the form of Chuck Fazio, from DC Podiums. Fazio was hired by the religious conservatives to provide the sound system for the event, but upon learning of their cause, he decided to donate his proceeds to the gay rights activists and to give them a chance at the microphone before shutting down the amplifiers. “I don’t want bad karma,” he explained, noting with some pride that the lectern they were using was the same one used by Borat on a recent Washington visit.

(emphasis mine)

Heh.

Texas May Have Outlawed Straight Marriage

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Barbara Ann Radnofsky, Democratic candidate for Texas Attorney General, gave a speech in which she said that the 2005 amendment to the Texas State Constitution bans all forms of marriage:

The amendment, approved by the Legislature and overwhelmingly ratified by voters, declares that “marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman.” But the troublemaking phrase, as Radnofsky sees it, is Subsection B, which declares:

“This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.”

Architects of the amendment included the clause to ban same-sex civil unions and domestic partnerships. But Radnofsky, who was a member of the powerhouse Vinson & Elkins law firm in Houston for 27 years until retiring in 2006, says the wording of Subsection B effectively “eliminates marriage in Texas,” including common-law marriages.

A strict reading of the law does seem to indicate that this is true, since marriage is a, “Legal status identical or similar to marriage,” it appears that marriage is illegal in Texas.

Oopsie.

The late, and much missed, Molly Ivins used to say that Texas was, “Mississippi with good roads,” but not it appears that it appears that Texas is “Mississippi with good roads, and no brains.”

Well, at least they are safe from zombie hordes.

The Boycott is Getting Results

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Following repeated actions by Barack Obama and his administration to do absolutely nothing about gay rights, including a particularly illuminating exchange between DNC Treasurer and Andrew Tobias, which I noted here.

Well, it appears that some people concluded that enough was enough, and John Aravosis launched a donor boycott of the DNC. (There is a particularly damning list of the bill of particulars at the link)

So, after months of everyone, including Barney Frank, saying that nothing could be done right now about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT), because the plate was too full, we now treated to the spectacle of that same Barney Frank saying that DADT will be repealed in next year’s defense authorization bill. (see also here)

Amazing that.

I think that if people are interested in gay civil rights, it needs to be understood that while Barack Obama and his administration may not be homophobic, they are hostile to the expenditure of any political capital on this matter.

Simply put, while they may not hate gays, they find the LGBT community inconvenient.

This means that the only way that anything is going to get done is if the LGBT community makes doing nothing even more inconvenient.

Obama Knifes Gays Again

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Not surprising, when he replaced the Gay friendly DNC chair (Howard Dean ) with yet another bible thumper (Tim Kaine)bible.

As I have said before, Barack Obama and His Stupid Minions™ are desperately afraid of offending homophobic bigots.

Well, the DNC was claiming that they sent those emails to folks in Maine, asking for support for Corzine in NJ, without any mention of the Hate Referendum in Maine by accident, but John Aravosis got a copy of an email sent to donors which proves that to be a lie.

Ironically enough, the email was from Andrew Tobias, who is the author of The Best Little Boy in the World, who later got involved in the comments section of the above thread, and blamed John for, “turning people against support of the Democrats,” ignoring Obama’s record on such things.

I think that it is absolutely clear now, between Donnie McClurkin, his reversals on DADT, inviting homophobes to offer prayers at the inauguration, and, of course, the disgraceful DOMA briefs that Barack Obama will do whatever is possible to avoid basic civil rights for gays.

I don’t know if it’s because he wants everyone to like him, and so does not want to offend anti-gay bigots (homophobia-phobia), or if he is homophobic himself.

It does not matter. There is a pattern here, and it’s not going to change.

Excerpt of email after the fold.

Email to donors:

1. An email went out asking activists to make calls to New Jersey. It was insensitive not to omit Mainers from that email. I apologize that no one thought to do that. I can’t imagine it could have cost No On One even a dozen votes, but I still wish someone would have thought of this in time to catch it. Mistake noted.

2. A different email went out to Mainers urging them to vote. As the only thing of substance anyone was voting on in Maine was Question One, and as Democratic activists vote our way, this was a small but positive effort to be helpful.

I would have liked to see that email discuss No One One directly, in case there may have been an email-enabled Organizing for America activist someplace in Maine who did NOT know where Maine Democrats stood on this issue. (Out of the country without Internet access until the night before the election?) But I’m told there was concern that advocating specifically for a ballot initiative, whether LGBT or otherwise, would set a precedent for every other ballot initiative. Bureaucracies are nervous about setting precedents.