How often do we hear gay activists — and their allies on the left — label those who oppose state recognition of same-sex marriage as “haters” or, more subtly, “h8ers”, even when such folks express their support of traditional marriage in the most civil of terms?  Recall, for example, how the Southern Povery Law Center, dubbed certain social conservative groups, “hate groups“.

Given the rhetoric of Dan Savage, will they know include him on a list of “haters”? He has, reports Ben Shapiro. . .

. . . has personally insulted virtually every Republican candidate for higher office. Last year, Savage said on Bill Maher’s show, “I wish the Republicans were all f***ing dead.”

But he saved some special vitriol for Herman Cain. When Cain stated that he thought that homosexual activity was a choice in October 2011, Savage responded by telling Cain to “show us how a man can choose to be gay. Suck my dick, Herman.”

Now, to be sure, we may disagree with those opposing state recognition of same-sex unions, but just because social conservatives have views different from our own doesn’t mean they hold their opinions out of animus for people like us.

That said, someone who wishes Republicans were dead does seem to harbors a good deal of hatred for Republicans.  Is he then a hater?

Wondering why Mr. Savage was “speaking at a conference on journalism in the first place“, Chris Barnhart reminds us that

By his own admission, Savage commits what the Left would call hate crimes. He willfully attempted to infect a politician with the flu, including licking doorknobs. On an episode of “Real Time With Bill Maher,” Savage voiced the wish that all Republicans should be dead. He also wished a Green Party candidate would be dragged behind a truck until there was nothing left but rope.

We ask again, why does this man hate so much?  And why do his ideological allies call those who disagree with them on gay issues hatred, yet refuse to condemn Mr. Savage’s speech?

Finding “a growing air of incompetence around Mr. Obama’s White House“, Athene took it to the incumbent again in his column on Friday.  Teasing out the essence of her column, Allahpundit offers:

As for her point that “a lot of what he says could have been said by a president 12 or 20 years ago,” that’s because he doesn’t want to engage with the major challenge of his day. He knows the numbers on spending and entitlements. He could lead the reform effort if he wanted to, but that would mean great electoral peril and ferocious pushback from the left.

Emphasis added.  He does seem a bit beholden to the left, far more so than the immediate past Democratic president with whom he has recently teamed up.  Perhaps, it’s because like the academic intellectual, he’s so beholden to this theories that he knows they must be true and experience at fault.

Mr. Clinton, however, deftly responded to the changing political landscape after his party suffered setbacks in the 1994 election and learned to work with the then-Republican Congress to address popular concerns about our bloated welfare system and increasing federal spending by supporting welfare reform and working to balance the federal budget.

Instead of addressing the problems of the day, Mr. Obama is standing fast to the big-government programs he has long supported even though they are losing favor with the public.

Oddly though, despite his commitment to his policies, he doesn’t seem very confident about their popularity nor about their success in the real world.  Instead of campaigning on those, he’s campaigning against his ideological adversaries, often creating issues of out of whole cloth–the better to demonize them.

NB: Tweaked the post since its initial publication.

Yesterday, thanks to a left-of-center Facebook friend, caught a Washington Post piece where two left-of-center political scientists blamed Republicans for Washington gridlock.

Unfortunately, they didn’t mention the failure of the Democratic Senate to pass a budget for the past three years.  Nor did they consider that Republicans in the current Congress thought that they owed it to those who elected them to hold the line on government spending as they face off against a Democratic president who believes more government spending (and greater regulation) is the only way to face pressing social and economic problems.

Messrs. Mann and Ornstein (said political scientists) lament, for example, that Republicans are committed to the small government principles of Ronald Reagan:

Republicans often dismiss nonpartisan analyses of the nature of problems and the impact of policies when those assessments don’t fit their ideology.[*] In the face of the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, the party’s leaders and their outside acolytes insisted on obeisance to a supply-side view of economic growth — thus fulfilling Norquist’s pledge — while ignoring contrary considerations.

Um, guys, could it just be that they just don’t believe that increasing federal spending will lift us out of an economic downturn?  The authors do reference the Great Depression, but fail to point out that neither the big spending policies of then-President Herbert Hoover nor his successor, a Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt served to end said downturn.  They didn’t call the depression great because it ended in the early 1930s; they called it great because it lasted through the entire decade.

Does seem that Mann and Ornstein have ignored some contrary considerations about the success of Mr. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

The political scientists reveal their bias from the get-go, beginning their article by noting that “Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates” failed to condemn Congressman Allen West for alleging that roughly 80 of his Democratic colleagues were Communists.  They fail, writes Karl at HotAir to provide “links to all the op-eds they did about the extreme statements about Republicans being Un-American, comparing them to fascists, Nazis, racists and so on made by” leading Democrats. (more…)

I just noticed this quote from Savage’s wild-eyed bullying tirade…

“There is no effort to amend state constitutions to make it legal to stone women to death on their wedding nights if they’re not virgins — at least not yet,” Savage said. “We don’t know where the GOP is going these days.”

“People are dying because people can’t clear this one last hurdle,” he said. “They can’t get past this one last thing in the Bible — about homosexuality.

If I didn’t know better, I would think he was criticizing Islamic governments around the world that routinely stone women & hang gays NOW. I don’t recall an American government official doing anything of the sort in at least 50 years. And back then, it would have most likely been a Democrat.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Released in the last hour… GOPROUD condemns Dan Savage.

Jimmy LaSalvia, GOProud Executive Director – “Dan Savage’s outrageous anti-Christian tirade hurts – not helps – the fight for gay rights in this country.”

(Washington, D.C.) – Today, GOProud – a national organization of gay and straight Americans seeking to promote freedom by supporting free markets, limited government, and a respect for individual rights, condemned a speech given by left wing gay activist Dan Savage. “Dan Savage’s outrageous anti-Christian tirade hurts – not helps – the fight for gay rights in this country,” said Jimmy LaSalvia, GOProud Executive Director. “There is nothing incompatible between being a Christian and believing that all people should be treated equally, and Dan Savage’s attacks on Christianity only fuel those on the extremist fringe who oppose gay rights.”

“Dan Savage should apologize for his comments and should apologize to the high school students in attendance who he called ‘pansy-asses,’” continued LaSalvia. “It is ironic that someone whose claim to fame is fighting bullying would resort to bullying tactics in attacking high school students who were offended by his outrageous remarks.”

“GOProud works with people of faith every single day – gay and straight. We believe strongly that people of faith should be treated with respect,” concluded LaSalvia.

Bravo.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Anti-Bullying Speaker Curses Christian Teens:

As many as 100 high school students walked out of a national journalism conference after an anti-bullying speaker began cursing, attacked the Bible and reportedly called those who refused to listen to his rant “pansy asses.”

The speaker was Dan Savage, founder of the “It Gets Better” project, an anti-bullying campaign that has reached more than 40 million viewers with contributors ranging from President Obama to Hollywood stars. Savage also writes a sex advice column called “Savage Love.”

. . . .

Savage was supposed to be delivering a speech about anti-bullying at the National High School Journalism Conference sponsored by the Journalism Education Association and the National Scholastic Press Association. But it turned into an episode of Christian-bashing.

(Via Instapundit*)

Why does Dan Savage harbor so much hatred?  Gay organizations, especially GLAAD, should condemn Mr. Savage for his mean-spirited rhetoric and make clear that he does not speak for gay people. He certainly doesn’t speak for me — and I would dare say most of this blog’s readers, including some of our liberal ones.

We should expect gay speakers at such fora to show the same respect for Christianity as we would like Christians to show for gays.

More on this as time allows.  (Spending weekend with family as per this post.)

* (more…)

In the past year, we’ve heard Democrats, including the president himself, fault Republicans in the 112th Congress for, attempting with their budgets to starve the poor and deprive others of needed social services, as if they insist the less fortunate alone and isolated in a cruel world and oppose all notions of charity and compassion in general and government assistance in particular.

But, as conservative bloggers and pundits (including yours truly) have noted, even the Ryan budget maintains federal domestic spending at or above (mostly above) levels experienced in the Clinton era.

John Hinderaker reminds us of the dishonest Democratic demagoguery in other arena, that of environmental protection, where some Democrats contend Republicans have become far more radical, departing from the traditions of past Republican presidents.  John reminds us that it’s not Republicans who have changed, but the Democrats who have become more radical than they once were:

But is it Republicans who have changed on the environment, or Democrats? What Republicans are advocating repeal of the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act? None. What Republicans do object to is the extremism embodied in Barack Obama’s EPA, a senior official of which says that the agency’s “general philosophy” is to “crucify” oil and gas companies.

It’s important to bear in mind that even as Republican candidates and elected officials today talk about scaling back federal regulations and cutting government spending, they’re only talking about repealing legislation passed in the Obama and George W. Bush eras and keeping in place (often to the chagrin of the libertarian-minded among us) legislation enacted before the end of the last century or reducing spending to levels seen under Clinton, Nixon or Reagan.

Sometimes, it seems conservatives pay more attention to the plight of gay people in Islamic lands than do the various heads of gay organizations.   Now, to be sure, there are some gay bloggers who do address their web-sites.  They often do the work that paid gay activists do not.

Yesterday, one of my favorite conservative blogresses reminded us that there’s no Arab Spring for women and gays.  Jennifer Rubin asks us to understand. . .

. . . that in most Muslim countries homosexuality is a sin and punished by severe and sometimes capital punishment. So it’s okey-dokey for a Muslim man to have sex with a dead woman but heaven help him if he chooses to have sex with a live man. (I await the 60 Minutes expose on the plight of Middle East gays — that there aren’t enough gays in the Knesset or something.)

Read the whole thing.  Yeah, and when we remind us how good it is for gays in Israel, some gay activists on the left accuse us of “pink washing” the Jewish State as if its treatment of gay people shouldn’t matter.

Well, it should matter to gay activists that some conservatives have shown concern for the plight of gays under Islamofascistic regimes.  Let’s hope they acknowledge Jennifer’s post.  As well as the work of David Horowitz’s Freedom Center.

RELATED:  Conservative Confronts Islamic Prejudices Against Gays

Nine months ago, when writing about “conversion therapy,” I expressed my doubts about the effectiveness of this treatment, designed to “cure” people like us of our longings for same-sex intimacy and affection.

Despite those doubts, I believe, as I then wrote that, in a free society, “Christian groups have every right to set up . . . companies [offering such therapy, provided they do not coerce anyone to enter treatment.”  Even though in a subsequent post, I expressed the intention to address the issue of “coercion“, I have yet to do so.  Given that  many of those “coerced” to enter such treatment are minors, the issue is not as simple as it might first appear; should the state intervene to prevent this coercion, it would then be acting in loco parentis.

As a reader said when we were discussing the issue on Facebook, “It does get hairy for minors.”  On the one hand, I very much want to prevent any teen from experiencing some of the extreme treatments in such programs.  On the other, I fear the slippery slope created by any legislation removing parents’ rights to raise their own children.  Will the state then try to prevent parents from home-schooling their children or learning to hunt?

At the LA Weekly, Patrick McDonald writes about a bill pending before the California legislature to allow teens to opt out of therapies their parents choose;

Written by California State Senator Ted Lieu and sponsored by the gay rights group Equality California, Senate Bill 1172 would force psychotherapists to tell gay patients about the mental and physical harms of undertaking any so-called “gay therapies.” Therapists would also need the consent of a patient before moving forward with their dangerous work.

Most importantly, the bill seeks to stop all gay therapies of minors, regardless of the wishes of his or her parents. So you have to be at least 18 years old and sign off on treatment before a whacked-out therapist can do anything to you.

He goes on to detail some of the treatments to which young people have been subject.  The text of the legislation is here.   (more…)

This week, Joshuapundit took home the laurel for his post, Yom Hashoah – Reflections On The Holocaust, “a look at how those people who came into contact with it tried to process it, what’s been remembered, why many people would like to forget all about it and what that all means in today’s context.”

The non-Council winner was Raymond Ibrahim’s How the Media Whitewashes Muslim Persecution of Christians.  The remaining Council winners include: (more…)

Yesterday, Ann Althouse, reminding us that his predecessor gave up golf when he was chief executive, wondered as the president’s latest effort to appear cool:

Does a slow jam with Jimmy Fallon send the wrong message? Or do we not think about the mom whose son may have recently died anymore? (Obama has no Cindy Sheehan dogging hounding him bothering him… at least not that we see in the news.)

Why is Obama immune from the criticism that normally befalls a President? Back in 2008, running for President, Obama pushed back the press one time with “Why is it that I can’t just enjoy my waffle?”

It’s like that was a really hard question — why is it that he can’t just enjoy his waffle… and his multiple vacations and his golf and his rock concerts in the White House and his slow jam with Jimmy Fallon?

The answer is: Because you have a job. You applied for it. We hired you. Make us believe you’re doing it.

Via Instapundit.  Seems he’s more interested in the perks of office than its responsibilities.

It’s not just that we’re still at war, it’s also that the nation has big problems, many exacerbated by the president’s policies in his first three years in office.  Our debt is skyrocketing, entitlements face insolvency and the president has neither pushed his fellow partisans in the Senate to vote on his budget nor put forward solutions to reform Social Security or Medicare.

Perhaps, his attempt to be “cool” is part of his campaign strategy.  In Commentary, Peter Wehner observed that:

Given his inability and unwillingness to run on his record, the Obama strategy appears to rest on achieving three things: (1) energizing the turnout of his base (minorities, young voters and liberals); (more…)

Maybe it’s that because at least starting in college, we have to confront the biases of our professors, listening to, engaging with and responding to their arguments that we develop the appreciation of opposing arguments.

Yesterday, Bruce alerted me to a poll (which I had also noticed) showing how (compared to Democrats) broad-minded Republicans are:

Yet another new survey shows that Republican supporters know more about politics and political history than Democrats.

On eight of 13 questions about politics, Republicans outscored Democrats by an average of 18 percentage points, according to a new Pew survey titled “Partisan Differences in Knowledge.”

The Pew survey adds to a wave of surveys and studies showing that GOP-sympathizers are better informed, more intellectually consistent, more open-minded, more empathetic and more receptive to criticism than their fellow Americans who support the Democratic Party.

. . . .

Pew’s new study echoes the results of many other reports and studies that show GOP supporters are better educated, more empathetic and more open to criticism than Democrats.

Emphasis added.  In addition, more than twice as many liberals as conservatives “deleted friends from their social networks after disagreeing with their politics.”

And yet the perception persists that conservatives are intolerant troglodytes, lacking the understanding of their arguments of their ideological adversaries or unwilling to associate with those holding views different from their own.  Wonder why that is.

On Sunday, I reported that a Democrat who currently serves in Congress — and seeks to represent my district in the next Congress — spoke to a town hall at my synagogue, yet acknowledged he had no plan to address the coming crisis of entitlements. Even though he failed to stand behind any plan to fix the problem, he did find the time to attack the Republican solution.

And this even as the “nation’s Social Security and Medicare programs are sliding closer to insolvency, the federal government warned in a new report underscoring the fiscal challenges facing the two mammoth retirement programs as baby boomers begin to retire.”  These reports, writes Philip Klein at the Washington Examiner, “underscore the dire need to reform the programs if the nation wants to avert a fiscal crisis.”

Democrats like Mr. Schiff and President Obama, however, seem either oblivious to the challenge sor lack the political will to face up to them.  Where Obama has failed, Mitt Romney has at least recognized the imperative to act, having already, as Jennifer Rubin notes,

. . . set out Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security reform. There is no guarantee that he will have the nerve or skill to push those through, but he’s already done more than Obama has in over three years in the White House.

A bit harsher on Republicans than Jennifer Rubin has been, the editors of the Washington Examiner also stress the importance of action:

Conservatives are well within bounds to apply appropriate blame to Obama for his cowardice in confronting the great challenge of the day — an unsustainable entitlement state created by previous generations’ overpromising. But they must not go easy on Republican politicians; if anything, they should push back even harder against Republican attempts to avoid the tough business of reform or to expand unsustainable entitlements for their own political benefit. If Mitt Romney becomes president and has a Republican Senate and House, conservatives will be the last line of defense against a repeat of the Bush disaster.

We need real reform. And the candidate of hope and change has chosen instead to attack Republicans rather than address the nation’s fiscal problems — which have only become worse under his watch.

RELATED: Path to the White House: Ready for entitlement reform?

As I was reading Timothy Carney’s critique of Newt Gingrich’s bid for the White House, caught something about the man who billed himself the “Last Conservative Standing” in the contest:

He was speaker of the House until he resigned from Congress, stayed inside the Beltway, and began working as a lobbyist and consultant for the most entrenched industries while living in McLean. Even so, he said he was running as the “conservative” against “the Beltway establishment.”

Rick Santorum, the other choice of Republicans eager to repudiate the establishment, also remained in the Washington, D.C. area after leaving Congress.

Not sure I agree with Carney’s conclusion about the damage Newt has done to GOP; it all depends on how he exits the race next week.

Last night, Piers Morgan led off his eponymous CNN show by asking his colleague Wolf Blitzer to offer his thoughts on Mitt Romney’s speech.  Blitzer agreed that “It was absolutely an excellent speech from — from his perspective because it looked — it looked like sort of an unofficial acceptance speech of the Republican presidential nomination.”

Morgan then turned to Obama campaign spokesman Ben Labolt for the president’s perspective.  And by the manner in which he deflected questions raised by the presumptive Republican nominee’s speech, the Democratic flack effectively made Mitt Romney’s point.

When CNN anchor asked Labolt for his ”reaction to Mitt Romney’s speech“, he cited “particularly” the Republican’s “claim that because the president has failed America, he [Obama] will run a campaign, and you are effectively running the press for that campaign, full of diversions, distractions, and distortions.”

Labolt focused on the choice offered by the coming election.  In a followup question, Morgan pressed the point, ”What happens if a large number of Americans come November conclude that actually most of the answers [about whether we're better off today than we were four years ago] to that are no?”

Instead of responding, Obama’s spokesman attacked Romney:

Well, the fact is a better title for Governor Romney’s speech tonight than “A Better America” should have been “Back to the Future.” Because he’s proposing the same economic policies that got us into the economic crisis in the first place. More tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, letting Wall Street write its own rules again.

You know we’ve tried those same policies before. We passed those tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. They were supposed to unleash growth. They were supposed to unleash job creation and they didn’t.

In office three years now, but still running against George W.

Yeah, Labolt did offer a few tidbits of good news in the current lackluster recovery, but his focus was on distorting Romney’s record, diverting attention away from “growth [which] surely feels like stagnation rather than a strong recovery” with personal income which is “flat to falling.”  Such attacks are nothing more than distractions from Obama’s real record.

ADDENDUM: (more…)

Earlier today, Jim Hoft linked this telling excerpt from the president’s recent Rolling Stone interview:

Frankly, I know that there are good, decent Republicans on Capitol Hill who, in a different environment, would welcome the capacity to work with me. But right now, in an atmosphere in which folks like Rush Limbaugh and Grover Norquist are defining what it means to be a true conservative, they are lying low. My hope is that after this next election, they’ll feel a little more liberated to go out and say, “Let’s redirect the Republican Party back to those traditions in which a Dwight Eisenhower can build an interstate highway system.”

Can you recall Mr. Obama’s immediate predecessor ever attacking his liberal critics by name, particularly, say, the folks at Moveon.org when they actively worked to frustrate and eventually succeeded at blocking the then-president’s efforts to reform Social Security?

(To name but one effort when liberal group’s worked to block that Republican’s agenda, even before the election of  a Democratic Congress in 2006.)

* (more…)

Just caught Jennifer Rubin’s Sunday post, “Anti-gay voices should be rebutted“, which included this tidbit:

There plainly is a debate generationally, as I have reported, within the GOP on gay marriage. But while this goes on, there should, one would hope, be a consensus that animus toward gays and toward hiring gays to work in government (or anywhere else) is beyond the pale.

Seems to reflect an emerging consensus within the GOP. Read the whole thing.

Responding to the most important person in California’s request that I come over to play trucks with him, I’ll be heading up to the Bay Area this weekend to stay with my sister (said individual’s Mom).  Would like to organize a brunch for GayPatriot readers on Saturday or Sunday.  Please drop me a note if you would like to join us; would like to do this in East Bay if possible.

Also, please join our reader Leah and myself to hear a grown up from Washington, D.C. deliver a talk entitled, “A Rendezvous with Reagan’s Legacy: Lesson for 2012,” at the sacred shrine of freedom Reagan Library in Simi Valley on Tuesday, May 22. Click here to register. It’s only $65 and includes dinner in the Library’s AIr Force One Pavilion.

More information below the jump: (more…)

Council Submissions

• The Colossus of Rhodey – “Progressive” liar set to return to comics
• Joshuapundit-Yom Hashoah – Reflections On The Holocaust
• The Political Commentator – Wall Street 101 For Progressives, Academics and Career Politicians!
• The Noisy Room – Iran + UN: The Incorrectly Included Datum
• The Independent Sentinel – Obama About to Cede Sovereignty of Our Oceans to Marxist UN
• The Mellow Jihadi – The Military Draft
• Simply Jews – There Are Judges In Jerusalem
• GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD – PACRIM Airwar
• The Right Planet – Bloody Revolution and Cultural Suicide
• VA Right! - Hollywood Balks at Obama’s Financial Genocide!
• Rhymes With Right – Bishop Takes On Faux Catholic Politicians
• Bookworm Room – The California Open Primary has the practical effect of stifling Republican political speech in November, when it matters most
• The Razor – No One Wins In the Zimmerman Trial
• The Glittering Eye -The Amazing Even Alarming Ease
• Gay Patriot – What gay Republicans (should) expect from the state

Honorable Mentions (more…)

Like John Hinderaker, I too was impressed with Mitt Romney’s speech last night.  And like him, I too noticed the former governor’s wife.  John took note of his poise and speculates about how she might contribute “in a subtle way, to the overall image of the ticket.”  I noticed how devoted he seems to her.  He looks at her, as if he just can’t believe that, out of all the men in the world, she picked him.

It wasn’t just the way he looked at his wife that struck me, but also the content of his speech.  Now, given that I watched while doing cardio, I did not catch the tone of his voice, only saw how he energized he looked as I read the text of his remarks through the miracle of closed-captioning.  He hit all the right notes and made clear he was taking the fight to Obama, hitting the Democrat for his policy failures and for the sour state of the national economy.

The Republican was upbeat, optimistic, Reaganesque in rhetoric if not in tone.

And he used Obama’s words against him:

Those who promise to spread the wealth around only ever succeed in spreading poverty.  Other nations have chosen that path. It leads to chronic high unemployment, crushing debt, and stagnant wages.

He also turned a familiar Clinton campaign expression on its head.  Warning us that the Democrats remain determined to “run a campaign of diversions, distractions, and distortions”, Romney reminds us that “It’s still about the economy …and we’re not stupid.” The UK’s Toby Harnden reminds us of a bit of American history:

Just as the Clinton campaign (whose manager James Carville famously coined the phrase ‘it’s the economy, stupid’) resisted President George H.W. Bush’s attempts to make the 1992 election about the then Arkansas governor’s character, Team Romney will try keep the focus on Obama and his record. (more…)