Some bloggers on the gay left are trying to make much of no more than three** audience members who booed a gay soldier asking a question in last night’s debate, with one blogger saying the Audience Boos Gay Army Soldier Asking Santorum About DADT. The audience didn’t boo him. At most, three disrespectful jerks did.
But, for some on the left if there is one nutbag in a conservative crowd, said nutbag defines the crowd.
Despite his unusual answer* last night, the inconsequential presidential candidate did the right thing today. The former Pennsylvania Senator condemned those who booed the soldier:
“Yeah, well, I condemn the people who booed that gay soldier,” said Santorum. “That soldier is serving our country, I thank him for his service to our country. I’m sure he’s doing an excellent job. I hope he is safe, and I hope he returns safely, and does his mission well.
FROM THE COMMENTS: V the K is “not sure that the soldier was being booed”: “The booing got an immediate and angry reaction from nearly everyone sitting around him, who hissed and shushed at him. Lots of loud gasps, “Shhhh!” “No!” “Shut up, you idiot!” etc.” Wonder which gay lefty bloggers reported that. He also reminds us:
. . . multiple incidents of union violence, the display of socialist icons at Democratic party events, a pattern of cronies and campaign donors getting huge Government “loans” and subsidies … are all supposed to be aberrations that don’t typify the left at all.
*Unusual in that he effectively made the case for allowing gay members to serve openly while saying at the same time they should not be allowed to serve openly. (Please let me know if you’d like me to elaborate.)
UPDATE: Here’s the clip of the interview:
**Note how moderator Megyn Kelly points out that she heard only a couple audience members booing (out of an audience of 5,000). First time I watched this I thought I heard just one boo, but on repeated viewings, it seemed there may have been one if not two others echoing that rude response.
UP-UPDATE: Jim Geraghty has a most excellent post on the booing. Just read the whole thing and you’ll understand why Jim’s is one of the blogs I read regularly.
ALSO FROM THE COMMENTS: T asks a great question:
How do we know that those few that booed were conservative Republicans? Could they have been Westboro Baptists? Could they have been liberal shills trying to make the conservtive audience look bad? Every news item simply ASSUMES that they were conservatives in the audience. I’ve seen absolutely nothing that even attempts identify the source(s).
First sentence of the post is not flowing well for me. sorry
rusty, thanks for alerting me to that. I think I fixed it. For some reason, words are not flowing easily for me today.
Let me know if it’s clear now.
In fairness, Santorum stumbled around a bit but did say that he would grandfather gays serving openly under the current policy. Just how you unscramble that egg, he did not say.
Over at The Blaze they have set-to between Bristol Palin and a gay heckler. There is a separate link to an explanation by the heckler. Apparently, he does permit the enemy to use the word “homosexual.”
And yet multiple incidents of union violence, the display of socialist icons at Democratic party events, a pattern of cronies and campaign donors getting huge Government “loans” and subsidies … are all supposed to be aberrations that don’t typify the left at all.
I am not sure that the soldier was being booed.
And yet, no one has ever been sent home from a left-wing rally for wearing Che shirt. And when a union president vows to “take those sons of bitches out,” he gets cheered.
Didn’t complete my thought, I’m not sure the soldier was getting booed, or the policy. But it seemed that most in attendance recognized the response as inappropriate.
@V the K,
Yes the soldier was getting booed, NOT the policy of DADT. Most Republicans love discriminating against gays. Well, unless you stay celibate or go to a “pray away the gay” clinic. Freedom & liberty for all, UNLESS if you’re gay. Then you’re a threat to “the American family”.
Just because some random attendee says that people around the man booing were telling him to “shut up”, doesn’t mean that it’s true. We have no way of verifying her account of the story. I have listened to the clip several times and all that is audible is the loud booing.
Furthermore, there is a loud applause when Santorum responds, saying he wants to reinstitute DADT, followed by a strange comment along the lines that “sexuality should not be a part of military service.”
I guess he means that people who proclaim their heterosexuality by wearing wedding rings, going out on opposite-sex dates, or getting women pregnant should be discharged too. Wait. Oh, no, it’s only “shoving it in your face” if gays, particularly gay men, do it.
Don’t you guys get it? If you’re heterosexual & married (& preferably Christian), by all means hold hands with your spouse & be romantic in public, show pictures of your kids to everyone and talk about your spouse all the time. Take your young children everywhere, even if they’re screaming on the plane. You are “real” Americans.
If you’re openly gay & refuse to “repent”, then at least keep it in the bedroom! Republicans don’t want their kids to see openly gay people, and they certainly should be discriminated against. What if, as Dr. Keith Ablow says, your kids see gay people, and then they wonder if they too are homosexual? The horror!
As a whole, the Republican Party dislikes openly gay people (especially gay men) even more than you guys hate gay liberals.
Cue North Dallas Thirty to respond with a rabid post obsessed about his usual interests — pedophilia, BDSM, and sex toys. Wait a minute. NDT is from San Francisco, and isn’t this weekend the Folsom Street Fair?
Never ceases to amaze me, the left uses the military whenever its to their advantage. Now my generation of gay men, Vietnam vets, got booed and spat upon when we returned home, and it wasn’t by conservatives, it was by the left wing idiots who blamed the soldiers for the war. So it suited the left’s agenda in the 70’s to disrespect American servicemen, as it did when they opposed the war in Iraq (yes, I saw those wonderful demonstrators in San Francisco who celebrated North Korea and called for the death of American service men and women). Now it suits their agenda to smear all conservative with homophobia because of the actions of two or three idiots who were promptly shouted down, and rightfully so. So what is it lefties? Are you for or against American service men and women???? Or is does it depend on your agenda de jour?
How do we know that those few that booed were conservative Republicans? Could they have been Westboro Baptists? Could they have been liberal shills trying to make the conservtive audience look bad? Every news item simply ASSUMES that they were conservatives in the audience. I’ve seen absolutely nothing that even attempts identify the source(s).
Santorum does more for the LGBT movement than most activists and groups like the HRC. Incidents like this really makes folk sitting on the fence come closer to a decision. It is so amazing. . .but then GOPROUD even came out with their statement of disapproval.
BDB. . . .inconsequential presidential candidate
but also pondering this statement and looking at how so many have the similar reactions. . .
But, for some on the left(or right) if there is one nutbag in a conservative(liberal) crowd, said nutbag defines the crowd.
Well, if “Most Republicans love discriminating against gays” and are the boorish neanderthals you so desperately want to believe, I should think he/they would’ve booed as soon as he identified himself as gay instead of waiting until the end of his question.
It’s not the booing so much as the cowardice of the candidates, refusing at the TIME to call it out for fear of looking like they actually care about gay issues, which they are all terrified to do. And of course, the GOP policy, led by Santorum, of continuing to favor discrimination against gays. I was waiting for this post, and I predicted it perfectly. It is laughable. Whenever anyone on the right has an anti-gay policy, whenever people boo a gay soldier or attack gays, whenever the right fights to reinstitute descriminatory policies in the military, in health care, in any other arena, whenever the Bachmanns wage a conversion campaign, it’s not the people who hate gays or the candidates who are too cowardly to stand up for their rights who are to blame, no, it is the MEDIA who dares to actually, gasp, have the gall to record that discrimination and rebroadcast it. It’s to the point where a GOP candidate could say “we should deport all gays from this country” (heck, Bachamann and Santorum aren’t all that far from that view anyway), and this site would make the story about the media coverage of that remark, rather than remark itself. 100 percent guaranteed.
It’s perfectly fine to be gay and conservative. There is nothing remotely incompatible there. It’s an absolute joke, however, to predictably defend ANY anti-gay comment or policy or action by the right, and instead blame media coverage of that comment or policy or action, no matter what the circumstance. You just have no credibility whatsoever when you are such an apologist for discrimination, when your reaction is so laughably predictable. The mainstream media coverage of this was really scant, I barely saw a mention outside of left wing sites like HuffPost — you are as usual imagining this “liberal” media bogeyman that simply doesn’t exist, to fit your theories of what you’d like to think the media is.
(By the way, can you IMAGINE the uproar on Fox News and in the conservative blogosphere if even a few lefties booed a solider at a debate, it would be the lead story on Fox, Limbaugh, etc. for at LEAST three weeks. So don’t you dare blame the purportedly liberal media, which barely even covered this disgrace, and gave it 1/100th the coverage the conservative media would have, without a shred of doubt, had roles been reversed. If you actually believe this EXACT incident would have received LESS uproar, less attention, less hand-wringing from Drudge and FoxNews and so on had this happened at a Democratic event, then please, let me borrow a little bit of what you are smoking, because that must be a fun fantasy world to live in. Hell, the right doesn’t even need this type of action from an audience member or this type of commentary (or lack thereof) from candidates to claim that the entire left wing are populated by American-hating marxist socialist military-hating etc. etc.).
Heaven forbid if someone on the stage didn’t jump down and start pounding heads for that boo. Wouldn’t they say he didn’t hit him right, or something? No matter what the right does they will be called something bad, that’s what the left does. I want the best to be in the military, strait or gay. If they pass boot camp their in, enough with the social experiments. Wasn’t it Clinton the Democrat that started this crap in the first place? That doesn’t matter though, right?
Isn’t it funny to watch the desperate bigot gays ike James and Jeff change their stories and demands as each is successively disproved and called out?
Classic projection. Jeff and James hate Republicans and wish they were all dead, just like LGBT community leader Dan Savage wished that all Republicans, especially teenagers, were dead. As we’ve seen in Wisconsin, they support and endorse bombing and murdering Republicans. They wanted Republicans imprisoned, tortured, and executed for the Giffords shooting, not the actual shooter.
And John is spot on about how James and Jeff feel about the military. Obama and LGBT supporters like Jane Fonda actively called for the killing of US soldiers like the one at the debate. The Obama and the lgbt community have passed resolutions endorsed and supported calling soldiers like the one at the debate “uninvited and unwelcome intruders” in the US. The Obama Party and LGBT supported organization Code Pink has sent aid to terrorists to help them kill US soldiers.
And last, but certainly not least, there’s LGBT hero Bradley Manning — who gave away classified information to revenge himself for such slights as having to follow the orders of a superior officer with the intent of getting as many US soldiers killed as possible. For that, the LGBT community is praising him, calling him a model soldier, and insisting that his being imprisoned and tried is “homophobia”.
But that’s no surprise. The LGBT community calls you homophobic for objecting to gays and lesbians dressing children as sex slaves and taking them to sex fairs to “show off” in front of naked and masturbating adults.
It would have been better if the candidates had thanked the soldier for his service. That said, I can’t imagine any answer the candidates would have given that would have satisfied the bitter lefty Democrat shills walking through life with their nails in their anuses.
Jeff,
You make several very good points. I expect you will soon learn that is not accepted here and the wild pack of hyenas will soon accuse you of “murdering black babies” or making children your sex slaves (two of NDT’s favorite fantasies), soon followed by Heliotrop admitting that though “he willfully avoided educating” himself on the issue will blather on incoherently about your deconstructionist criticism and how Marcuse is all to blame.
I missed that NDT had already posted his child sex slave fantasy. How predictable? He probably has that comment as a macro file.
“As a whole, the Republican Party dislikes openly gay people (especially gay men) even more than you guys hate gay liberals.”
Hey dil-hole…I don’t enjoy being told by someone who has never met me who “I dislike” and “who I hate.” You don’t know me, nor would I venture to guess do you know very many Republicans at all.
If you have to base your argument on emotions and attitudes that you have to assign to the other side, then as the leet kidz say: “ur doing it rong!”
A candidate’s positions on economic recovery, deficit control, and national security really should trump his position on implementing the gay agenda. I really can’t identify with people who put those priorities lower on the list than receiving self-esteem from the state.
Oh, I hadn’t noticed you highlighted my comment. Thanks, Dan. (I also got a comment highlighted at AoSHQ yesterday. Yea, me!)
Booing? I didn’t hear any booing.
V the K at #19, EXCELLENT point!
Jeff, trying to figure out your point. I called the individual(s) who booed the soldier “nutbags.”
I also noted how Santorum later defended his service because in the context of this story, it is newsworthy. I still think he’s an inconsequential candidate. And then I linked jim Geraghty’s post where that blogger/pundit called out all the candidates for failing to do so (commend the gay soldier’s service) during the debate.
Did you predict all that perfectly?
No, the point of this post was not to defend Santorum (whom I believe should exit the presidential race immediately), but to point out the prejudice of the gay media/bloggers. They want to smear Republicans for booing a gay soldier, yet ignore Santorum’s (belated) defense of just such a man.
Let me just add one thing. I didn’t defend Santorum’s comment, indeed, called it “unusual” in this post. And had I been better able to focus yesterday, I would have done a post criticizing Santorum for making a self-contradictory statement, at once saying that sex shouldn’t be part of the military, then demanding that a policy which discriminates based on sexual orientation be reinstated. Did you predict that? (May get to that today as time allows.)
And since you believe I was defending Santorum, please point to the words in this post where I defend the response he offered to the gay soldier’s question.
Seane Anna. . .try to take a gander outside of that hovel of yours and check out the video from FOX around the 22 second mark. . .
Santorum even noted that the booing and hissing was real.
So whats the big deal? That’s the way NDT operates. Get over it.
Me neither.
OR they learned, as I did, that in public speaking, you ignore distractions if possible and stay on topic, especially since they have time constraints. One guy apparently booed for whatever reason, he was shushed and move on. Guess you missed the part, too, where Santorum said that sexuality shouldn’t matter. Or is that the knot in your panties?
Remind me again who’s banning asthma inhalers in favor of more expensive ones? And remind me who decided that women get too many mammograms? I can go on about liberal discrimination, ass clown. Suffice it to say that the party of slavery, segregation and the Klan OWNS discrimination. You fucktards are the ones who bit on a pillow for DADT in the first place and you slobbered about ObaMarx’s “evolving position” even while he fought hard to keep DADT in place.
Long story short, f**k you and your whiney bitching about discrimination.
I think NDT’s broader point is when gay couples dress their toddlers in S&M gear and take them to FSF, nobody says, “Dudes! Get. Those. Kids. The. F. Out. Of. Here. And. Into. Child-Appropriate. Clothing.” Whereas quite a few people told the guy who booed at the debate to STFU.
That’s not the point, NDT (like mos rightt wing extremists) want one set of rules for them and another for their adversaries, he is no different from gay liberals, hence why I laugh at most of his posts, I can easily substitute some few of his words and post them on liberal sites posing as one of them.
Actually, it is the point.
And once again we see: JS criticizes, not the people who dressed the toddlers as sex slaves and took them to a sex fair to “show off” in front of naked and masturbating adults….but the person who dared to point it out.
Actually, it is exactly the point. The question is whether the offensive behavior of a small number of people can be imputed to the larger group they belong to.
Situation A: Person behaves offensively in the presence of conservatives, and is rebuked for his behavior by his peers. Conclusion: The group disapproves of his behavior.
Situation B: Person behaves offensively at gay culture festival, and is not rebuked for his behavior by his peers. Conclusion: The group tolerates his behavior.
Explain the flaw in my reasoning, if you can.
No it isn’t. The only reason why you point that scenario out is the same reason why liberals point out the booing: SUITS YOUR POLITICAL IDEOLOGY.
Sine you are both trenched with an ideology, your main focus is to ridicule the other side rather than be consistent.
You excuse the booing much like how “gay sex liberals” excused the sexual depravity of a child.
There is no exact difference between both sides, in the end you help prove MY point and assumptions about gay conservatives. They are just as slippery as they gay liberals they hate on a daily basis.
And we all know the right wing is innocent of violent rhetoric as well, oh geez.
I never excused the booing. At worst, I questioned what exactly what was being booed, a legitimate question. And I stated that the behavior was offensive, and that it was wrong for the candidates not to thank the soldier for his service.
There is an exact difference between the sides. One side punishes bad behavior, the other rewards it. (Note how the jerk who harassed Bristol Palin in a bar is getting the hero treatment from the MFM.)
I sense you are getting a bit desperate at this point to defend your very weak position, and making dishonest attacks against the people who have ably refutedare refuting your argument is, sadly, par for the course.
And then there’s Bill Maher, who called Sarah Palin a “dumb tw-t” and was promptly fired by HBO for his rude and obnoxious behavior.
Nah, just kidding. He’s more popular among libs than ever, and offers guest commentary on “serious” news programs like ABC News’s “This Week.”
(Don’t give me this crap that both sides are the same. One side rewards offensive behavior, the other side refudiates it.)
And of course, the entertaining thing is watching the Alinskyite JS attack both myself and V the K for being just like the gay leftists and Obama supporters he isn’t attacking.
Why it’s like he holds conservatives to different standards. Or, more precisely, he acknowledges that leftists and Obama supporters are completely amoral and will justify anything.
JS is a typical Alinsky coward, V the K. They try to shut up conservatives by appealing to the fact that we have behavioral standards while spinning themselves into a frenzy to excuse the behavior of liberals.
Since JS refuses to hold liberals accountable for their behavior, it’s clear that he is not acting out of standards or principles, but out of bigotry and hatred for conservatives.
Abd can you imagine, V the K, if a Republican or straight person had said on national TV that he wanted all Democrats dead? JS, rusty, Janes, and Jeff would have demanded his head and would have forced his charity out of business for hypocrisy. Furthermore, they would not have accepted any apology and claimed that the mere fact they said it proved their deepest feelings.
But for Dan Savage and the LGBT community he represents? Praise and support for wanting all Republicans dead.
But for Dan Savage?
NDT, I am just gratified that JS is incapable of refuting the logic of my argument. Were he able to, he would not have to resort to attacks and dishonesty. He reminds me much of the man who attacked Bristol Palin, a man who could explain that he felt compelled to attack her in public, that she did not deserve to be treated with decency but could not articulate his reasons for hating and despising Sarah Palin, other than to repeatedly call her trash.
Are you absolutely sure? What, exactly, was that “violent rhetoric”?
It is a shame that ****s like James, Brendan, JS and the like have to resort to the defense of ‘I didn’t plant those bombs’ while crowing they have to plant more bombs? If fact, let’s imprison them for those acts of terror they committed.
(What? IF they want to say the jerks booing are the Republican Party, then thety should be fine being judged by the actions of Obama friend Bill Ayers.)
Thing is, students and teachers are being purged from schools and others have been purged from their jobs for, effectively, booing gays. What’s next, gulags for the PC violators and thought criminals?
Why not?
People like you need people like me to drag you kicking and screaming into the future.
Why should I do that here? This is THE gay conservative blog, its not joemygod, or andy towle’s hideous site.
All you are is the other side of the political coin. Your arguments are not that convincing since they are easily transferable from one side to the other.
You and V the K represent the typical lefty vs righty paradigm of mindless droning, and shilling for the same people who control both parties.
Once Dan decides to make Gay Patriot into THE gay liberal site I will scrutinize the right wing as much as I can. But since you do not care for dissent you are merely interested in defaming the other side (no better than liberals) so I will put conservative teabaggers under the same microscope, and throw back the same stupid tactics that you employ, its only fair.
Oh please. I’m not convinced. That’s all. I don’t agree with you. What’s with your panties in a knot?
*here goes the world’s smallest violin*
Yes, I am.
Ok so we are in a defamation war. This comment will be reported.
Not at all, JS.
So see, using your own logic, clearly you support killing police officers.
Go ahead, report me, I hate to generalize, but that’s what leftists do. (Attaaaaakkkkkkkk waaaaaaaaaatch!)