Weirdly Mixed Night For Gay Republicans

There aren't going to be all that many Democratic freshmen next year. Seth Moulton's win in MA-06 yesterday was one of the bright spots. The district is the northeast corner of the state where the 495 and the 95 join up and head up into New Hampshire. It starts in the Boston's northern outer suburbs-- Lynn, Saugus, Wakefield, Burlington and Bedford and shoots north to Salem, Gloucester, Ipswich, Newbury and Merrimac. It's been John Tierney's district since 1997 but Moulton beat him in a primary on September 9. Although every poll showed Tierney winning, Moulton had closed to within 3 points the weekend before the election and then won 36,575 (50.8%) to 28,915 (40.1%). Last night he won 149,449 (54.65%) to 111,848 (40.90%), beating Tisei far more convincingly than Tierney had in 2012 (48-47% with less than 4,000 votes separating them).

On their October 15 FEC reports Moulton was seriously out of cash compared to Tisei-- $109,572 for the Democrat and $714,104 left for the Republican. The biggest outside expenditures on behalf of Tisei were $997,339 from a right-wing operation calling themselves the American Unity PAC; $700,212 from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; $256,237 from the National Association of Realtors; $494,832 from the NRCC's Congressional Leadership Fund; $151,158 from a shady Big Oil funded 501c called Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions. Meanwhile Moulton's biggest backers are the VoteVets PAC ($4,036,122), and the DCCC and their House Majority PAC (for a combined $782,570). VoteVets spent $3,001,776 last week.

The last 2 polls, one by Emerson College and one by Republican polling firm ;Øptimus, both last week, showed an extremely tight race with Tisei ahead but within the margin of error.

One of the oddities of this race is that the Republican, Richard Tisei came out of the closet and campaigned as openly gay. The rabidly homophobic National Organization for Marriage, a regular part of the Republican coalition, endorsed Moulton, not because they like him but to stop Tisei. NOM president Brian Brown told his members and supporters to vote for Moulton because it's better to have a Democrat-- even a pro-gay one with a gay brother-- than a gay Republican in Congress who opposes "the values of marriage, family, and life." Moulton told NOM to take their endorsement and shove it up their asses.

“Seth Moulton fundamentally disagrees with everything NOM stands for and has long said that equality is the civil rights fight of our generation,” said Carrie Rankin, Moulton’s communications director. “Fighting against groups, like NOM, that deny equality as a basic human right will be a priority of Seth’s in Congress.” Rankin noted that Moulton has a gay brother and Moulton has said, “It’s fundamentally wrong that he and I don’t share the same rights just because of who he is.”

The other openly gay Republican who ran-- Carl DeMaio in San Diego (in a D+2 district)-- ousted New Dem Scott Peters, 50.26- 49.74%, despite two gay sex scandals breaking about him within a month of each other and despite homophobic GOP congressmen urging Republicans to vote against him.

By the time Jamie Kilstein finishes with the Bible-thumpers, they ought to be looking for something else to thump

Jamie Kilstein delivers his inspired and inspiring rant on The Green Room with Paul Provenza. We've got a transcript below, and boy, is it worth reading! But believe me, it's worth experiencing both ways.

"I know that America thinks every time a gay couple adopts a child, it forces otherwise straight and homophobic pastor Ted Haggart to hire a gay male prostitute and engage in a weeklong meth-induced fuck spree. I know. He didn't want to do it, you guys, but then a gay couple adopted and it forced him to take an injection of another male prostitute cock. I know, I get it. . . .

"You give me one valid argument beside: 'But God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.' Really? Because by the looks of it, Adam and Eve fucked up big-time, and maybe Adam should have explored other options."

-- (straight) comic Jamie Kilstein, from his astounding rant

by Ken

This DailyKos post today by our colleague Clarknt67 falls in the "not to be missed" zone. In passing it along, Clark provided this interesting bit of background:

Sometimes you post something and the enthusiasm of response surprises you. Today, on a lark, I did a riff on Clint Eastwood's GQ quote on marriage equality and rounded it out with some of the better straight boys quotes of support. It kind of shocked me how much our mostly straight allies at Daily Kos like the post.

I've avoided mentioning the title of the post, which is "Clint Eastwood Doesn’t Give A F*ck About Gay Marriage," because Clint is only one of the "straight boys" quoted. Now this is not at all to minimize the potency, pithiness, or pertinence of his quote, which Clark points out "went viral after Chicago Sun-Times film critic Richard Roeper tweeted it," thusly:


Here's the post's rendering of the Clint quote, from a GQ interview (you can click to enlarge):


Great stuff, no question. Still, Clint is, again, only one of five straight guys represented here. As Clark explains in the post:

There is something truly beautiful about how straight guys approach the topic of marriage equality. See, they aren't dealing with a lifetime of feeling shameful and unworthy. And they aren't fetishizing the tactic of presenting their views in nice, inoffensive ways that don't scare the straight people. They haven't sent their talking points through the Gay, Inc. car wash for a nice polish and buff sure to better appeal to America's soccer moms, NASCAR dads, and their deeply felt religious convictions.

And it got me thinking, so I compiled some of the more awesome, matter of fact things our straight male allies have said on the topic of gays and marriage equality. [Emphasis added.]

This puzzled me at first, until I realized that when Clark says, "There is something truly beautiful about how straight guys approach the topic of marriage equality," he surely means some straight guys.

The "top five list" he wound up with, in addition to Clint Eastwood and Jamie Kilstein, consists of Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, NYS Sen. Roy McDonald (who "found himself in the glare of a media spotlight when he famously flopped from voting no on New York's marriage equality bill in 2009 to saying yes to equality in 2011"), and retired NBA great Charles Barkley. Maybe we'll come back to those at some point, but for now you can read them in the actual post. I need to get back to Jamie Kilstein.

Before I watched the video version atop this post, I had read Clark's transcript. I think it deserves to be experienced both ways, in the same way that so many of the great Lee Camp's rants do. I had also read some of Lee's stuff before I saw him perform any of it, and reading it I was thrilled by the cool, unassailable logic of the arguments made with such deliciously blunt force. In the same way, as I read the transcript of Jamie's rant, I was overwhelmed with the feeling that it's the definitive answer to NOM and all the Bible-thumping ignoramuses who spew all their hate-filled ignorance and filth. By rights, if they possessed even the tiniest hint of decency and actual brain function, they would promptly take a vow to shut their delusional pieholes for eternity.

Anyway, here's Jamie's rant in transcript form:

To every heterosexual, mentally abusive, closet-racist, fast-food-feeding, let-your-kid-run-around-the-mall-like-a-psycho parent: Why do you have, like, nine fucking kids, yet you say that gay folks can't adopt because it might screw the kid up? And I know that America thinks every time a gay couple adopts a child, it forces otherwise straight and homophobic pastor Ted Haggart to hire a gay male prostitute and engage in a weeklong meth-induced fuck spree. I know. He didn't want to do it, you guys, but then a gay couple adopted and it forced him to take an injection of another male prostitute cock. I know, I get it.

But I say, just because your man-bits fit into some girl-bits doesn't mean you should have kids. Do you know how many straight people shouldn't have children? Go to a movie theater or an IHOP on a Sunday.

And don't tell us that two men or two women in the bedroom may cause a child to question his sexuality. Any kid basing his sex life on the sounds coming from his parents' bedroom is already fucked beyond repair. If God designed marriage for a man and women, then statistics say that God is failing. That is below failing. Just look at straight and homophobic pastor Ted Haggart, who's married with children but hired a gay male prostitute to shame-fist him into a meth coma.

But you say that being gay is being immoral? Really? More immoral than shame-fisting? Because I would rather have my kids raised by the flaming queer couple down the street than have them spend another night at the church with Father Diddlyhands. Is that why you want adoption restricted, Church? You keeping all the young ones for yourself? Church, if you really think that a child should only be raised by a married couple, then I have an idea. Let the gays marry, assholes! These are people who will raise a child for a better reason than "the condom broke."

You give me one valid argument beside: "But God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve." Really? Because by the looks of it, Adam and Eve fucked up big-time, and maybe Adam should have explored other options.

So stop fucking telling us that the Bible says that being gay is unnatural, because I've read the Bible and there is a lot of unnatural shit that happens in that book. I would say that a dude dying and rising from the dead in a zombie-esque fashion is far less natural than me sucking a cock. Because at least cocksucking you can prove.

I am notoriously grumpy about standing ovations for performers, which nowadays seem to be "earned" by simply getting through whatever shtick they set out to. For this I'd like to think I'd be the first one in the audience on my feet. Bravo, Jamie!

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Merely "moderately" crazy right-wing crazies may be more afraid of the ultra-crazies than we are

Hateful and loony as right-wing zealots like NOM's appalling Maggie Gallagher may be, they can still recognize that their side includes people just too crazy for public consumption.

When I was a child, my mother taught me that if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. The first time I encountered the gay-bashing members of Westboro Baptist Church was in 1998, when they picketed the funeral of my close friend Matthew Shepard, who was beaten and left to die tied to a fence in rural Wyoming.

What most shocked me was that, even as I attended the funeral of someone who had been murdered in a hate crime, I hadn't realized how deeply some people hate.

It wasn't until I saw those neon-colored signs with their ugly words against the snowy Wyoming landscape that I understood what my community was up against. . . .

-- Romaine Patterson, the start of a Washington Post
op-ed piece today, "Let Westboro Baptist have
their hate speech. We'll smother it with peace"

by Ken

It pays to know smart people. Since I wrote last night about Justice Sammy "The Hammer" Alito's perhaps-surprising lone-dissenting stand against the First Amendment right of the Westboro Baptist-Scum Church's right to torment funeral mourners with their psychotic homophobia, a legal-eagle online pal has suggested a very different dynamic to the High Court's ruling in Snyder vs. Phelps.

Most of us, I suspect, at least those of us who take the First Amendment seriously, gnashed our teeth and agreed with the eight justices in the majority: that there's pretty much no other constitutional conclusion to be reached. No matter how hateful the speech of the Irreverend Fred and his stooge-thugs, it has to be considered protected. After all, the purpose of the First Amendment isn't to protect popular speech. Popular speech doesn't need protecting. Where we test the free-speech guarantees limits is pretty much by definition going to be with awful speech. And so, the way I was thinking about it, the Phelpsians once again get away with their awfulness, now under the protection of the Constitution.

As my online wise man points out, though, we're hearing voice from the Right, including some of the most tireless and unrelenting homophobes, likee the founder of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), Maggie Gallagher, who are quite unhappy with the ruling, and wish Justice Sammy's viewpoint had found wider support on the Court. Of course it's easier for these people, since they're not great believers in free speech themselves, except for themselves. It takes a moment, though, to realize that slapping down Fred Phelps can be an approved extreme-righ position. (Justice Sammy must be breathing a sigh of relief.)

What my friend argues is that for the organized, merely crazed zealots of homophobia, off-the-chart fruitcakes like the Irreverend Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist-Scum Church loonies are something close to their worst nightmare if the country comes to see them as the public face of homo-hating. It's practically a gift for those of us who believe in basic equal rights for all citizens. This is just a reminder that everything in the universe is relative, and yes indeed, it's possible for people as far gone as Maggie G, people who have learned to camouflage their bigotry and hatred in ways that are not only acceptable but often attractive or even compelling to ordinary folks to look at the Phelpsians and see that they're just plain nuts, and all too plainly so.

There's more to be said on the subject, in particular considering how the implications might be extended to the whole range of insanities now being shoved through the House of Representatives and state legislatures all over the country, but for now I want to -pick up with Romaine Patterson's WaPo op-ed piece at the point where we left off above.

When the Rev. Fred Phelps and his parishioners came back to Laramie the next year to protest at the trials of the men who murdered Matthew, they were in for a bit of a surprise. Several friends and I led a counter-protest, dressed as angels, silently encircling them, our huge outstretched wings blocking their vicious signs from view.

Having been face to face with the Phelps gang, my heart goes out to all the families, who, in their most vulnerable hour, have had to deal with this small band of cruel ranters.

After Laramie, it all changed. Westboro Baptist Church members realized that the more high-profile their protests, the bigger the response, so they started picketing at the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. This past week, the Supreme Court upheld their right to do so. But where they go, angels have appeared as well, to form a living shield.

When Westboro announced that it would come to Tucson to parade around the funeral of 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green, gunned down in January in the attack against Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona Legislature hurriedly passed a law setting limits on how close protesters could be to mourners. What filled me with pride, though, was seeing another community take inspiration from our own Angel Action protest more than a decade ago, depicted in the play "The Laramie Project."

As others have across the country, people in Tucson hunted up the PVC pipe and sheets and online pattern to make the costumes, and spread their wings.

To me, the lasting legacy of our counter-protest so many years ago is the enduring power of drowning out noise with silence, of smothering hate with peace.

I understand why the father of a soldier killed in Iraq sued Westboro Baptist after members jeered at his son's funeral. It is natural to want to banish such an abhorrent spectacle so that no one else will have to endure what you did. But I agree with Wednesday's ruling by the Supreme Court, because I support free speech. I know that there were many who stood by when Phelps yelled "God hates fags" at the funerals of gays or those who died of AIDS, but who mobilized in outrage when his vitriol was spewed in the direction of our brave men and women in arms, who died protecting his freedom and ours.

Patterson has a lot more to say, and I hope you'll read the whole piece, but she's making the same basic point that my e-friend did. The whole deal about free speech is that we're supposed to counter the worst speech with better speech.

And what people like that ghastly hate-monger Maggie Gallagher grasp is that the very awfulness of the Westboro gang's speech makes the job a whole lot easier. Naturally I don't say that this was what Justice Sammy had in mind in dishing out a rare rebuke to right-wingers. But sometimes these things just work out.

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Re. the marriage equality battle: Do we understand what it means when we say we know it's going to be a tough battle?

"I don't think there is any evidence of a national backlash against gay marriage. It should be borne in mind that gay marriage is still opposed by a small majority or large plurality of Americans. But there's not really any evidence that the numbers are getting worse; instead, they appear to be v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y getting better."

-- Nate Silver, in a fivethirtyeight.com post yesterday, "Maine Revisited: Is There a Backlash Against Same-Sex Marriage?"

by Ken

It hasn't been a happy time of late in the struggle for marriage equality, with this series of electoral defeats seemingly capped by this week's comedy of errors in the New York State Senate. At the same time, I think it's important to remember:

(a) Just how far we've come. Go back just a few years, and who would have imagined that the issue would even be on the table, let alone drawing something like half the vote in places where it's been put to a vote?

(b) And that we've always known that the die-hard opponents of basic rights for LGBT folk, seeing that history is squarely against them as more and more Americans sensibly cease caring about their fellow Americans' sexual orientation, and feeling themselves under siege, fighting as if for their lives for their deeply cherished bigotry, would throw every resource they could muster at the fight.

I can't believe there's anyone involved in the struggle who has been factually unaware of this, or that the homophobe community has incredibly supporters at its disposal. Which makes me wonder, what the heck did people think teh pushback was going to look like?

We might not, perhaps, have expected that, the Catholic and Mormon churches, normally such bitter enemies, would jointly inject themselves so blatantly and unapologetically in the political process. But did anyone really expect them to sit idly by on the sidelines? Surely nothing could have been more predictable than the rise of an aggressively funded outfit like the so-called National Organization for Marriage. They're doing what they feel they have to do. We have to continue doing what we know we have to.

Let me make clear that I'm not advocating any particular position or strategy for the fight ahead. I'm just pointing out that what NOM and its funders and allies have accomplished isn't unexpected and shouldn't be taken as more than a stage in the fight. We have to study what they're doing, and figure out how to combat it, but again, the point -- in the grand scheme -- isn't that they're winning, it's that they know they're losing, and unless they can make so much noise as to trample the growing sense of Americans of good will, they're going to lose. Not without a great fight on our part, of course.

MAYBE NOW SENATOR DUANE WILL BE WILLING TO
NAME THE SENATE CONFIDANTS WHO BETRAYED HIM?

I know the marriage-equality forces are reeling from this week's 38-24 vote in the New York State Senate against the proposed marriage-equality bill. Goodness knows, NOM is having a field day celebrating the victory. And even now it doesn't seems as if anyone, possibly including the bill's chief Senate sponsor and manager, Manhattan Sen. Thomas Duane, knows how we got from his pre-vote confidence that he had "yes" commitements from enough senators, both Democrats and Republicans, to pass the bill, to the actual tally.

In reality the defeat wasn't nearly as bad as the the 38-24 vote suggests. It's quite understandable that any Republicans who were prepared to vote yes went scurrying for cover when the roll call revealed how many of the officially undeclared Democrats were voting no. Given the present suicidally extreme climate in their party, and the all too vivid recent example made of their Assembly colleague Dede Scozzafava in her bid for the NY-23 congressional seat, and with NOM and all the other loons poised to fund primary challengers, they would have been nuts to stick with the sunk ship.

But the fact that eight Democratic senators voted no was appalling. At the same time, this was less about support for LGBT civil rights than the sorry state of the NYS Senate, which we've talked about all too frequently. The so-called Democratic "majority" isn't much of one, having no experience of running the Senate. Remember, most of these people were elected when Senate Democrats appeared to be a permanent minority, and had basically no role in its operation except to show up in order to keep their modest perks flowing. The Senate "majority" is also essentially leaderless. Of course there are some perfectly honorable, competent people among the 32 Senate Democrats, but an awful lot of them see themselves as basically "independent contractors," open for business on a wide range of issues. It's sort of a political swap shop.

Before the vote, and even in the immediate aftermath, Senator Duane was refusing to reveal the names of the senators who had made private commitments to him to vote yes. He explained that these were given "in confidence." Now that a whole bunch of senators have apparently betrayed those confidences, I'm wondering whether the senator might feel ethically free to name at least the Democats who, in his telling, lied to him.

THE ARGUMENT SPLITTING THE LGBT COMMUNITY

Certainly a factor that has to be considered is the basic-rights needs of people who live in what we might call blood-red states, where average voters haven't yet grasped that their opinion really has no legitimate bearing on which citizens are entitled to the fundamental rights that are supposed to belong to everyone in this country.

There is a rising tide of sentiment in the LGBT community that the marriage battle has been a diversion from, and even a cause of active harm, in their struggle for basic legal rights like freedom from employment and housing discrimination, medical-visitation and other next-of-king rights, inheritance and other legal rights, and so on. People who can be denied or thrown out of their homes, or be denied or fired from jobs, for being LGBT, have more urgent priorities than marriage equality, and in those blood-red states have actually suffered additional discrimination as fear of "the gays" has prompted legislators and law-enforcement officials to buttress the hostility of the forces of law to their basic rights.

I do believe it's true, as many engaged in the marriage-equality struggle argue, that to a significant extent the visibility of that struggle has assumed and promoted a wider acceptance of rights universality. That said, it certainly seems that there are states in which there is little hope of wining those basic rights on the political level, and the most realistic hope is federal civil rights action, the obvious starting point being ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, now struggling for a foothold in both houses of Congress.

People are arguing whether it's realistically possible to continue to fight on both fronts, and noting that the ENDA fight, for one, doesn't seem to be getting an awful lot of push, so easily is it wiped out of consciousness by each marriage-equality setback. Again, I'm not saying I have the answers, but I do know that those concerns can't be relaxed.

Considering all the progress that's been made in the public understanding that LGBT people aren't intrinsically better or worse than any other people, isn't it appalling that in the year 2009 so many people are forced to live in terror of losing their jobs or their homes if they lose control of their dark "secret"? Is this situation really acceptable to most Americans? There's a job to be done there.

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