When you receive successive e-mails from readers forwarding the same e-mail, it’s usually something worth blogging about. A lesbian called into Glenn Beck’s show to share her experiences coming out of the closet. Her story will seem mighty familiar to many of those who read this blog:

since I came out of my conservative closet, I’ve lost a lot of my friends.

. . . .

And in listening to you, in saying what you mean and being true to yourself and true to your country, especially with this last election, a lot of my friends realized when they said are you voting for Obama or Hillary and I said, neither, they think I’m crazy. One of them actually said I’m like a Jew supporting Hitler.

Because she voted for McCain. They compared her to a Jew supporting Hitler?  Hmm . . . .  Wow, seems the gay left across the land has the same insults for people like us, you know those free-thinking gay iconoclasts who don’t subscribe to the party, er, homosexual orthodoxy.

It sounds like some of her friends comment on this blog:

I feel so alone some days, and I’m lucky enough that, you know, through listening to you and getting back to what really matters in my eyes, being gay’s a very small part of who I am, and nothing of what I am that I lost my friends because they don’t want to talk to me, because they try to get me –

Emphasis added.  I guess that’s because, as she puts it, they claim it’s “the gay handbook” that you have to be a Democrat if you’re gay.

And I think she’ll find that if she tries to join a conservative organization, a Republican one, if her experiences are anything like mine, she’ll find a welcome, her worries notwithstanding.

Read the whole thing (or listen)!

(H/t Glenn.)

As I tossed and turned each night this week, a thought kept coming back.  What, exactly, constitutes a “right”?

We have passed legislation, called the “Voting Rights Act” which protects Americans’ right to vote from discrimination. 

But is gay marriage a “RIGHT”?  Is marriage a “RIGHT” at all?  And who is to decide?  What gay marriage activists always ignore is that “traditional marriage” is, in fact, a covenant between man, woman & God.  So are gay activists saying only the Government has the power to provide, and therefore takeaway, “RIGHTS”?

The Founding Fathers would strongly disagree:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

What about healthcare?   Do I have a “RIGHT” to smoke?  Do I have a “RIGHT” to eat bad food?  If, for example, healthcare is a “RIGHT” — then on the face of it, it cannot exist in the free market because “rights” have to be regulated/protected by the Government.

Too many people these days throw around the word “RIGHT” — and have absolutely no clue what they are talking about.  In addition, “RIGHTS” are not free — they come with “RESPONSIBILITY”.   Again, not something the gay marriage activists wish to talk about.

There.  Now you know what rolls around in my brain as the Ambien tries to win each night.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

UPDATE (from Dan): Great minds think alike, but often with different styles.

I just caught this post (via Glenn) and intended to use it as a starting point from a piece on rights. Basically Professor Bainbridge notes how many of the things which contemporary liberals define as “rights” (he calls them “positive rights”) “cannot be achieved without limiting the liberty of individuals.”

In last fall’s campaign, particularly those parts which drew the most public attention, the presidential debates, then-candidate Obama often sounded like Ronald Reagan, promising to cut the waste out of the federal government.  In the third presidential debate, he said, “what I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut.”

Just after his victory, he repeated that commitment, promising to “scour the federal budget, line by line, and make meaningful cuts.”

Not only has he given us the opposite since his election, but he’s done so on steroids.

Now, Jen O’Malley Dillon, the new Executive Director of the Democratic National Committee takes issue with Rush Limbaugh for taking Obama, pointing out that “Americans voted in November for the very kind of change the President is bringing to Washington.“  So, I’m wondering, isn’t Rush, in challenging the president on government spending, doing a better job of promoting the kind of change the American people voted for in electing Obama, given that Democrat’s rhetoric on spending?

Even our critics want to end the debate on the president’s policy proposals, contending “Engage in a debate over which policies will lead us? Didn’t we just do that? I think it was called an election.”  But, given the president’s campaign rhetoric, it seems the president has changed the terms of that debate.

He seems to think that his victory in the fall gave him a mandate to do whatever he wants now that he’s in the White House.  Kind of sounds like how George H.W. Bush treated his campaign rhetoric on not raising taxes and staying the Reaganite course.  And look where that got him.

“Seventeen top slots in Treasury have not been filled . . . .”