In a private e-mail to the Human Rights Campaign, a tired reporter in the Pine Tree State responded to their assertion that those who supported Question 1 on the state’s ballot month were haters, echoing something we have said on this blog.

“They said the Yes-on-1 people were haters. I’m a Christian. I take offense at that,” [Larry Grard, that aforementioned sleep-deprived journalist] said. “I e-mailed them back and said basically, ‘We’re not the ones doing the hating. You’re the ones doing the hating.’

He may have been weary, but he did have a point. A lot of the gay marriage activists have been doing a lot of hating.

Shortly after sending this e-mail, Grard, a “reporter for thirty-five years, the last eighteen of them at the Morning Sentinel in Waterville [Maine]” was summoned to the office of Bill Thompson, editor of the Sentinel:

He was told that Trevor Thomas, deputy communications director of the Human Rights Campaign, had Googled his name, discovered he was a reporter, and was demanding Grard be fired. According to Grard, Thompson said, “There’s no wiggle room.”

He was immediately dismissed.

Wow, just wow. HRC gets an intemperate e-mail and instead of asking for an apology demands the writer be fired. And heck, the reporter didn’t even cover “the marriage issue or other gay-rights controversies for the Sentinel.”  But, to HRC, if you don’t have the politically correct mind-set, well, then you shouldn’t have a job in journalism.  Maybe it’s because of tactics like theirs that mainstream reporters don’t cover the hateful rhetoric spewing from some segments the gay left.

Has any mainstream reporter ever covered the thuggish tactics of HRC? (more…)

Familiar solutions dominate Congressional jobs meeting

Seems that when it comes to policy ideas, this new kind of politics is nothing more than the same old big-spending liberalism.

(More on this as time allows.)

While I think some of the coverage on conservative blogs about the latest Kevin Jennings hullabaloo (James Taranto might call it a kerfuffle) a bit overheated, I have not yet found any cause to rescind my earlier call for his resignation.  Simply put, he is not the kind of man who should be supervising a program for elementary and secondary schools in the federal Department of Education.

That said, while I think it’s highly relevant to study the content of the books he recommended for middle and high school students, I don’t know how relevant it is to bring up the “youth conference” his organization GLSEN sponsored at Tuft’s University in March 2000 where facilitators* taught the finer points of “fisting” and asked rather inappropriate questions of young teens. It appears that GLSEN did a better job policing its workshops since then.***  More recent conferences apparently have not included such seminars.  (At least I have seen no evidence that they have.)

Let us hope that they fired the individuals responsible for said workshops and the person who, by including them in the conference, deemed them appropriate for adolescents.*** Anyone who thinks it appropriate to teach such things to teens shouldn’t be allowed to teach teens (or facilitate workshops for them).  Such seminars have nothing to do with teaching adolescents responsible sexual behavior nor do they help them develop an adult attitude toward sexuality.

But, the “curriculum” there does seem to be part of a pattern for Mr. Jennings, wishing to impart to adolescents an attitude toward sexuality where indulgence is the operative idea and intimacy and affection are reduced to occasional (and perhaps welcome) side effects.  And the rules of safe sex are the only limits.

As I’ve said previously and it bears repetition, we can’t make a final judgment on the nature of the books on the GLSEN list without putting the sexually explicit passages in context.  That said, books with such descriptions are not appropriate for young teens (up to age 15 or 16) and should only be recommended to older ones after first consulting their parents.

What I find troubling in this whole story is something I have encountered all too often in my own experience coming out and living as a gay man, that our (gay) culture reduces our sexuality to its mere sexual expression.  Not just that, those who put themselves in positions of guidance to gay adolescents very often just mimic the culture; they don’t try to improve it by encouraging their charges to tether sexual expression to emotional connection or even to make them aware of the importance of that connection.   (more…)

Massachusetts Congressman Ed Markey, chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, is using a slur some AGW zealots love to describe those critical or skeptical of their views. I heard him on TV today on the news calling them “anti-science.”

So, we’ve got a career politician (Markey was first elected to the Massachusetts House in 1972 when he was 26) telling scientists who have spent their lives studying the earth and its climate “anti-science.”  That’s rich.

If Markey calls opponents of cap and trade are anti-science, I wonder what he calls scientists who try to force data into a theory without accounting for how some data often undermine said theory. Or what does he call scientists who won’t release their data and disguise their methodology.  About scientists who “subvert peer review and prevent publication of papers that didn’t completely agree with the favored theory“.  About scientists who try to hide an inconvenient decline? (more…)

Just caught this while reading another post on the blog Conservatives4Palin; it speaks to do things our mainstream media has failed to explore (well, on the former, they are beginning to address said failure), Barack Obama’s rhetoric and Sarah Palin’s record.

Even now, after having presided over massive increases in the federal deficits, the Democrat still decries out-of-control federal spending.  During the campaign, he had promised us a “net spending cut”, matching an increase in one program with a cut in another.  Well, Mrs. Palin could teach him a thing or two about spending cuts.  Between 2007 (the last state budget signed by her predecessor Frank Murkowski) and 2010 ( the last budget she signed as Governor), she cut spending by  ”whopping 9.5% or $1,127,400,000”

Governor Murkowski’s last budget FY2007: $11,697,400,000

Governor Palin’s latest budget FY2010: $10,570,000,000

That is, she didn’t just cut spending in inflation-adjusted dollars, she cut it in real dollars.  With record deficits, we could use some fiscal discipline like that in our nation’s capital.