Progressives revel in their superior intellects, which they are assured are superior because within the eco-chamber of the left, everyone agrees with them. Global Warming is real. Republicans hate gays. Socialism works as long as European white people are in charge of it.

We have seen, by dint of the leftist commentators on this site, how this notion of left-wing intellectual superiority is laughable. Now, watch as Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist rips through the smug facade of leftist intellectual superiority like a starving jackal through a zebra carcass, including an entire section devoted to the unbelievably dim-witted Matt Yglesias, a man who has earned a good living parlaying his complete ignorance of every topic imaginable into a position as one of the left’s premier pundits and thought leaders.

Perhaps no living writer more fully embraces unabashed ignorance than Yglesias. I couldn’t begin to adequately catalogue the examples but interested readers might enjoy “Does Matthew Yglesias Ever Tire Of Being Embarrassingly Wrong About Everything?” and “Taming The Fury Of Rage: How Not To Write, Starring Slate’s Matt Yglesias.”

Identity politics can be fun when rival victim-privilege groups turn on each other.

A white professor is suing Alabama State University (ASU) over claims the historically black university discriminated against him and his partner based on their race and sexual orientation.

According to the lawsuit filed in federal court on June 11, Dr. John Garland is suing the ASU and eight current and former employees for racially discriminating against applicants for university positions and subsequently targeting him when he retaliated against those practices.

Garland, who is a member of the Choctaw Nation but is identified as white by colleagues, was hired by the university in August 2008 as an adjunct professor. In January 2009, Garland was rehired as an assistant professor for the Master of Rehabilitation Counseling Program in the Department of Rehabilitation Studies in the College of Health Sciences (COHS).

His white same-sex partner, Dr. Steven Chesbro, was hired at the university around that time. They legally married in Maryland in February 2013.

Hat Tip: Peter H

So, once again, the progressive left is pushing the idea of Reparations; the idea that people who never owned slaves should give large sums of money to people who never were slaves in order to compensate, allegedly, for injustices suffered by the ancestors of non-slaves that were committed by the ancestors of non-slaveowners. (And a great way for Democrats to tell low-information voters that there is a huge pile of money owed to them that greedy Republicans don’t want them to have.)

But if the point of this exercise is “justice,” shouldn’t the weight of justice fall more heavily on those with the closest ties and relationships to the perpetrators of injustice? Because there is clearly one group of people who are far more responsible for injustices committed against African-Americans than other groups of people.

Which of two political parties in the USA was founded for the explicit purpose of abolishing slavery; the Republican Party. Which party supported slavery and opposed the abolition thereof; the Democrat Party.

Which party was it that instituted the Jim Crow laws, and maintained the institution of Segregation well into the 20th Century; the Democrats. What was the party that forcibly integrated previously segregated schools in the South; the Republican Party.

A majority of which party supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act; the Republican Party. A majority of which party opposed it; the Democrat Party.

Clearly, Democrats are responsible for the vast majority of injustices committed against African-Americans. Pay up.

(more…)

Not exactly news, but whatever…

“I have always felt a strong and emotional connection to members of the LGBTQ community. It was actually a huge disappointment for me when I came of age and realized that I was sexually attracted to men. So when my sister came out, I thought, ‘Thank God, now someone in this family can truly represent my beliefs and passions.’”

[She's on an HBO program that unmarried left-wing women like.]

Let me ask you guys something. After the 2012 elections, did any of your left-wing friends offer any words of comfort or reconciliation? None of mine did, and a lot of them were spiking the ball and dancing in the Endzone. It would have been nice if even one liberal friend had said, “Hey, this must have been a tough loss for you guys, and your guy actually had some good points.”

It at least would have been something, a small act of reconciliation and understanding.

I was thinking about this in the context of Mozilla’s purge of Brendan Eich for being on the “wrong side” of the Gay Marriage war. After the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln tried to reconcile a country whose citizens had been literally killing each other over opposite opinions on a profound moral issue. Even after the end of Apartheid in South Africa, there were attempts made at “Truth and Reconciliation.” But instead of being content in their victory, and trying to reconcile with their opponents, the Gay Marriage Left seem determined to carry on the war, in a kind of ideological bloodlust.

But there seems to be no room for reconciliation on the Modern Left. Perhaps, this is a consequence of them painting their enemies as sub-human. They have convinced themselves that their opponents are racists, bigots, homophobes, anti-woman, anti-science… and that they owe those who don’t agree with them nothing. No dignity. No compassion.

And it isn’t just on the fringe; or rather, the fringe is indistinguishable from the mainstream left. Gay leftists demand that those who don’t agree with them lose their jobs and livelihoods. Academics in institutions of higher learning demand that those who disagree with them be jailed for their difference of opinion. The President of the United States, instead of reaching out “with malice toward none,” hurls childish insults at people who disagree with him on matters fiscal.

It used to be a mark of a civilized man to be gracious in victory, and to behave with decency toward his defeated opponent. But those values are gone, perhaps because graciousness and courtesy are values now associated only with dead white slaveowners. Or, perhaps because the left is morally void, and its ideological bloodlust can never be satisfied no matter how many scalps they collect.

Kevin Williamson spells it out.

A useful definition is this: “Feminism is the words ‘I Want!’ in the mouths of three or more women, provided they’re the right kind of women.” Feminism must therefore accommodate wildly incompatible propositions — e.g., (1) Women unquestionably belong alongside men in Marine units fighting pitched battles in Tora Bora but (2) really should not be expected to be able to perform three chin-ups. Or: (1) Women at Columbia are empowered by pornography but (2) women at Wellesley are victimized by a statue of a man sleepwalking in his Shenanigans. And then there is Fluke’s Law: (1) Women are responsible moral agents with full sexual and economic autonomy who (2) must be given an allowance, like children, when it comes to contraceptives.

Ace takes note of a lefty setzpinkler who thinks he’s figured out why Conservatives have been making fun of Obamacare spokesmodel PajamaBoy. It’s because Conservatives hate gays.

I had no idea that left-wing pundits had Professor Charles Xavier-level telepathic abilities and were able to read the minds of all Conservatives everywhere all the time!

Also, GLAAD is throwing a hissy-fit because one of the stars of Duck Dynasty expressed an opinion about gay people that hurt their feelers.

GLAAD has condemned “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson in the wake of inflammatory remarks about gay people.

On one level, I don’t get the mindset that says you can’t be happy if someone, somewhere doesn’t approve of your lifestyle. What’s the Big Deal if a guy on a cable TV show doesn’t like you? Obsession that someone, somewhere might disapprove of you seems like a cripplingly neurotic way to go through life. (We’ll leave aside, for the moment, the obsession secular leftists have with judging what “true Christians” should and should not believe.)

On another level, I understand it completely. Faux outrage generates publicity. Publicity generates donations. Donations ensure that Wilson Cruz can keep his cushy job as an outraged spokesperson for GLAAD and not have to get a real job in the miserable Obamaconomy. Such generosity is what earned Alec Baldwin a pass from GLAAD for his repeated use of anti-gay slurs.

Update: A&E caves to intolerant bigots.

(more…)

Chris Cheng, Season 4 winner of the History Channel’s “Top Shot” competition, came out as “gay for guns.”

One reason why I chose to come out publicly is that I’m a gay guy in a gun world. Hunters, sport shooting enthusiasts, and collectors are too often stereotyped as part of efforts to politicize guns as we witnessed last week on the anniversary of the horrific Newtown tragedy. Take it from someone who in a single package is not only gay, but Chinese, Japanese, California-born, a college graduate, a tech geek who worked on cool Google projects, a gun enthusiast and a passionate 2nd Amendment advocate. Our community is as diverse as anyone’s.

It’s good to be armed. That way you can defend yourself when a deranged leftist like Karl Pierson, Floyd Corkins, or Amy Bishop starts shooting at you.

(more…)

Karl Pierson, who would have become the latest school mass murderer – except that a good guy with a gun (and not Colorado’s Draconian gun laws) stopped him – disappointed the media by being a socialist left-winger whose hatred of Republicans was almost at MSNBC levels and not, as they had fervently hoped, a pro-Second Amendment Tea Party supporter.

Gabe Malor at AoSHQ has dissected the media’s pattern of desperately hoping a new shooter is a right wing nut job, and then losing interest in a story when they find out he’s on their team. There is nothing for me to add, so thorough is his dissection.

So, one detail of the story piqued my interest. Karl Pierson showed his love for murderous progressive leftism partly by wearing Soviet themed T-shirts to school and proclaiming himself a communist. Communism is a murderous and opporessive ideology that butchered somewhere north of 100,000,000 people in the 20th Century. Do you think the school would have let him wear T-shirts emblazoned with Swastikas and proclaim himself a Nazi? Why is one murderous ideology okay and the other forbidden? Are some murderous ideologies just “more equal” than others?

(more…)

Matthew Shepard was a gay 21 year old college student, who was beaten to death in a terrible hate crime because… homophobia.

Status: False.

Stephen Jiminez – not a right-wing Christian apologist, but a gay investigative journalist who values the truth above ‘The Narrative’ – has published a book: The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard.

Shepard’s tragic and untimely demise may not have been fueled by his sexual orientation, but by drugs. For Shepard had likely agreed to trade methamphetamines for sex. And it killed him.

And for daring to undercut the narrative with inconvenient little things called “facts,” Jiminez has been vilified by those who profit from promoting a narrative of imaginary hate.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog recently accused Jimenez of serving as a lapdog of “right-wing pundits, radio hosts and bloggers.” In Washington, DC, gay activists pestered bookstores to cancel Jimenez’s appearances.

In a world with a properly functioning moral compass, Matt Shepard’s story would be a cautionary tale with the moral: “Don’t leave a bar with strangers to have sex and do drugs.”

But in the twisted world where only ‘The Narrative’ matters, Shepard was a complete innocent whose death is useful in villainizing people who had absolutely nothing to do with it.

If you know a lot of leftists, as I do, chances are you’ve encountered a link to this interview of Reza Aslan by Lauren Green at some point in the past two days or so.  They see the interview as an example of the evil of Fox News.  They claim it illustrates the bias of the network, and that it illustrates how “smart” the author is and how he “totally pwns the interviewer’s assumptions.”

I watched the interview, and I encourage you to do the same, but my main reaction to their claims about it is to think:  Excuse me?  Did we even watch the same interview?  I believe neither the interviewer nor the guest came off particularly well in this exchange.

Lauren Green comes across as someone who likely hasn’t read the book, but who has read many reviews of the book, and is trying to provoke a response from the author. Reza Aslan, though, comes across as the ultimate disingenuous academic who says, “I am just a historian, I have no agenda whatsoever.”  He keeps reiterating that he is an academic with a PhD, as though that is an adequate defense against bias.  Green could have done a more skillful job challenging his assumptions or his arguments; her questions only serve to make him defensive, and so the interview doesn’t appear to accomplish much for either party.

Nevertheless, I didn’t view the interview as a complete failure for Fox News.  Quite to the contrary, I thought it illustrated that there is more journalistic spirit alive at Fox News than at most of the mainstream press outlets who have interviewed the author or reported on the book.  Why do I say that?  Because, the other morning I had to endure this NPR interview with the same author of the same book, and I heard a lot of claims by Aslan about his book, and his beliefs, but no one challenged those claims or tried to interrogate Aslan’s motivations for writing the book that he wrote.  The NPR interview was so concerned with helping him make his points, that it could have just as easily come from the public relations office of his publisher.

Not surprisingly, the other day NPR’s website featured this story entitled “Reza Aslan Hearts NPR”: “Author and religious scholar Reza Aslan is one of those people who’s at NPR West so often that he blurs the line between guest and employee. We always joke with our regulars that they should have a punch card, and when it’s full, they get their own cubicle.”  Even less surprisingly, today NPR has this sympathetic story about the reaction on the left to the Fox News  interview.

When you compare NPR’s very sympathetic pieces helping Aslan promote both his book and his talking points, with Lauren Green’s somewhat awkward attempt to interrogate him, though, it’s pretty clear to me which “news” outlet is more interested in informing its viewers and letting them decide for themselves.   Green’s interview told us much more about Aslan than NPR’s pieces: it showed us something of his character, it introduced us to some of the controversies surrounding the book, and it raised the question of his worldview and its influence on his writing.

And as it turns out, there is a lot of reason for controversy, as Pamela Geller Robert Spencer points out in her his own detailed post about the controversy (hat tip: Pamela Geller).   Geller Spencer writes:

I don’t care about his scholarly credentials. Even if everything he had said about his degrees had been true, it would confer on his book no presumption of accuracy or truth. I am constantly assailed for lacking scholarly credentials, but as it happens, when it comes to writing about religion I have exactly the same credentials as Aslan, a B.A., Phi Beta Kappa, and an M.A. in Religious Studies. His other two degrees are in other fields.

But anyway, it doesn’t matter: there are plenty of fools with degrees, and plenty of geniuses without them. My work, and Aslan’s, stands or falls on its merits, not on the number of degrees we have. Aslan’s pulling rank on Lauren Green and starting to reel off (inaccurately) his degrees was a sign of insecurity: it implied that he didn’t think his book could stand on its merits, and had to be accepted because he had a lot of degrees. And indeed, his book doesn’t stand on its merits.

I encourage you to be sure to read Geller’s Spencer’s whole post.

To my mind, the reaction on the left tells us more about their fondness for credentials and their disdain for Fox News than anything else;  that the same people who view this interview as an instance of intolerable bias think nothing of the swill served up regularly by NPR and MSNBC should tell us all we need to know.

Recent-ish, and I found them worthwhile:

• Shelby Steele on The Decline of the Civil Rights Establishment. “The purpose of today’s civil-rights establishment is not to seek justice, but to seek power…based on the presumption that [blacks] are still…victimized…This idea of victimization is an example of what I call a ‘poetic truth.’ Like poetic license, it bends the actual truth…[listeners] say, ‘Yes, of course,’ lest we seem to be racist…this establishment is fighting to maintain its authority to wield poetic truth…One wants to scream at all those outraged at the Zimmerman verdict: Where is your outrage over the collapse of the black family?” – Read the whole thing.

• A good piece from Cathy Young reviewing the depth of the Established media’s malpractice in this case, and one from Bill Whittle expressing his outrage over that malpractice.

• Now old, but: Video of the jury reading the Not Guilty verdict. (Just to see the moment. And sorry, but there is no honest way to force Zimmerman into a ‘white’ identity; by conventional standards, he seems clearly a Latino / person of color.)

BONUS (from Kurt in the comments): Bryan Preston critiques how Obama has cast his lot with the race-baiters. “In Florida, blacks benefit from ‘stand your ground’ laws more often than whites do…[and] the president went on to acknowledge that…’stand your ground’ was not invoked in Zimmerman’s defense, [but said] we should re-examine such laws anyway. Logically, why?”

UPDATE: Zimmerman helps people, despite the nasty death threats that Trayvon Martin supporters have inflicted not only on him, but even on strangers who (say) happen to have a phone number similar to his.

Well, well, well.

Last night Trayvon Martin’s friend Rachel Jeantel gave CNN her first interview since testifying in the George Zimmerman murder trial.

Jeantel opened up and let loose on the murder case that gripped that nation.

She explained to CNN’s Piers Morgan how she warned her childhood friend that Zimmerman –  could be a gay rapist!

MORGAN: You felt that there was no doubt in your mind from what Trayvon was telling you on the phone about the creepy ass cracka and so on, that he absolutely believed that George Zimmerman, this man, you didn’t know who he was at the time, but this man, was pursuing him?

JEANTEL: Yes.

MORGAN: And he was freaked out by it?

JEANTEL: Yes. Definitely after I say may be a rapist, for every boy, for every man, every — who’s not that kind of way, seeing a grown man following them, would they be creep out?

So according to #RachelJeantel … #Trayvon attacked a guy HE had profiled as being gay. Isn’t that an interesting turn of events. #tcot

— Bruce Carroll (@GayPatriot) July 16, 2013

Ironically that makes much more sense. stoned out of his gourd, wanting to avoid being cruised he attacked. @AppFlyer @GayPatriot

— Kurtis Marsh (D) (@kurtismarsh) July 16, 2013

@GayPatriot .sounds like TM was afraid of gays… And that by definition is homophobia. TM throw 1st punch at "gay" Zimmerman. Hate crime?

— Kristin Byron (@ksbyron) July 16, 2013

-Bruce @GayPatriot

In the comments for my last post on Obamacare commenter Ignatius began his discussion of the legislation’s undesirable albeit unstated aims with the observation: “I believe that political discussions would be much easier if those on the right jettisoned this quaint idea that leftists have good intentions.”  I highlighted that sentence in a subsequent comment, and other commenters took up the theme, as well.

Commenter Eddie Swaim observed:

While reading the comments about “the left,” it suddenly occurred to me that after listening to Rush Limbaugh for 25 years, he has always been careful to separate “the left” politicians in D.C. from “the left” common everyday folk. I always agreed with him but now I’m not so sure. Most of the gay male liberals that I know fall right in line with the D.C. politicians. Anything and everything is o.k. if it hurts [conservatism] or wins them a battle against the right, whether or not their action is legal or ethical. The ends always justify the means.

Likewise, commenter Steve linked to this video of Ann Coulter discussing the tendency of liberals and the lamestream media to fall back on “racial demagoguery” to advance their agenda in cases like the Zimmerman trial.

I thought of all three comments when I came across another link to an article by John Hawkins dated March 27, 2012.  Hawkins’ article is entitled “5 Uncomfortable Truths About Liberals,” and I encourage everyone to read the whole thing.  For the moment, though, I’ve summarized his five points below.  Hawkins writes that:

1) Most liberals are hateful people.

2) Liberals do more than any other group to encourage race-based hatred.

3) Most liberals are less moral than other people.

4) Most liberals don’t care if the policies they advocate work or not.

5) Most liberals are extremely intolerant.

Now while the language in those observations is strong enough that Hawkins could be accused of engaging in hyperbole, I think a certain amount of strong language is necessary for describing leftist rhetoric and means of argumentation.  There’s no need to take my word for it, though, read the whole thing and decide for yourself.

I would say, though, that in both the Zimmerman case and in the debates (and protests) over late-term abortion restrictions in Texas, we’ve seen many of the traits Hawkins describes displayed quite openly by many leftists.

Likewise, consider this article in The Advocate which a Facebook acquaintance brought to my attention.  The article focuses on the “mighty change of heart” which many Mormons have undergone on the issues of gay rights and gay marriage.  True to what both Hawkins and our commenters noted, most gay leftists will have none of it, as is very evident from their comments on the Advocate article.  Rather than welcome the changes underway in the LDS church, they are expressing their hatred and intolerance for the Mormons in very hostile language.  Read the comments there and see for yourself.

Now while I know a number of our readers might believe that the Mormons brought the hatred on themselves through the church’s advocacy against Proposition 8 in California in 2008, I’d point out a few things that the left never will, namely: 1). Despite what the HRC and its allies would have us believe, opposition to gay marriage isn’t necessarily motivated by hate, however easy or convenient it may be to believe that, and 2). Individuals are and should be defined by more than their affiliation with some group or collective.  The gay left is always up in arms about what this group or that group said or did about some gay issue, but they never have qualms about denouncing or smearing or insulting members of that group in a similar manner.

Jeff’s post the other day about the questionable workshop at Brown University came to mind recently when I saw a very far-left Facebook friend link to this article by a professor named Warren Blumenfeld who had just retired from a position as a professor of education at Iowa State University.  The article contains the professor’s reflections and gives voice to both his lamentations and his indignity about those students who took his class who were not won over to his worldview and who had the temerity to announce that fact in their final papers.

The course was entitled “Multicultural Foundations in Schools and Society,” and Blumenfeld describes it in the following terms:

I base the course on a number of key concepts and assumptions, including how issues of power, privilege, and domination within the United States center on inequitable social divisions regarding race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, sex, gender identity, sexual identity, religion, nationality, linguistic background, physical and mental ability/disability, and age. I address how issues around social identities impact generally on life outcomes, and specifically on educational outcomes. Virtually all students registered for this course, which is mandatory for students registered in the Teacher Education program, are pre-service teachers.

In other words, this is a required course in “multicultural studies” indoctrination.  If the course were voluntary, it would be a slightly different situation, but as a required course, it amounts to an example of the sort of thing that conservatives can easily point to as illustrating the left-wing biases of academia.

Professor Blumenfeld is particularly alarmed by the case of two female students who tell him quite boldly that the course has not changed their socially conservative Christian worldview:

On a final course paper, one student wrote that, while she enjoyed the course, and she felt that both myself and my graduate assistant — who had come out to the class earlier as lesbian — were very knowledgeable and good professors with great senses of humor, nonetheless, she felt obliged to inform us that we are still going to Hell for being so-called “practicing homosexuals.” Another student two years later wrote on her course paper that homosexuality and transgenderism are sins in the same category as stealing and murder. This student not only reiterated that I will travel to Hell if I continued to act on my same-sex desires, but she went further in amplifying the first student’s proclamations by self-righteously insisting that I will not receive an invitation to enter Heaven if I do not accept Jesus as my personal savior since I am a Jew, regardless of my sexual behavior. Anyone who doubts this, she concluded, “Only death will tell!”

Now while we might question the wisdom of both students in advertising the heresy represented by their beliefs so boldly in a graded assignment,  I think we might also be heartened by their courage in being true to their faith, even if we do not agree with all of the particulars of their worldview.

The professor, however, is shocked and appalled, and the rest of the essay is his attempt to reconcile–through reference to one leftist theory and tract after another–what he calls “our campus environment, one that emboldens some students to notify their professor and graduate assistant that their final destination will be the depths of Hell.”  Notice his word choice, there.  The problem is with the “campus environment” which “emboldens some students.”  It seems like a foreign idea to this professor to think that a university could be a place for the free and open exchange of ideas, especially those ideas that are unpopular.  I trust we will not find him quoting Voltaire or Jefferson anytime soon.

No, instead what we get is a description of and a reflection on a course that sounds like it could have been lifted straight from  the pages of Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, albeit with a more contemporary reading list.  While the professor uses the (more…)

So, if a man working in the “news” industry (who happens to be gay) concedes a conservative’s point about the president’s whining he is betraying gay people?

Earlier today, Bruce e-mailed me, alerting me to Ed Morrisey’s post where that one-time CPAC blogger of the year reports:

On Sunday evening, CNN’s Don Lemon told viewers that “people like Sarah Palin have a point” when they say that Barack Obama needs to stop blaming everyone else for the shortcomings in his own performance, including the economy.

Read the whole thing.  Note that the telegenic CNN anchor was not conceding a conservative’s point on a gay-specific issue. Still, as Morrissey reports, several bloggers to reference his sexuality in attacking him for his concession:

@donlemoncnn If you think the Right will make you their Pet Gay, they won’t. Obama is standing up 4 U & don’t forget who you are.—
Kees Valderol (@keesvalderol) April 24, 2012

@theosmelek @Lezlie61 @DonLemonCNN He’s a black gay man and a RW tool for a buck. His boyfriend is a CNN higher up too.—
Annie Lawton (@CurlynDoris) April 23, 2012

@donlemoncnn Little Gay kids are committing suicide because of the Right Wing. You could make an impact. You’re a wimp.—
Fritz Alverez (@FritzAlverez) April 24, 2012

Guess to these folks when you acknowledge a conservative critique of Obama you are somehow betraying gay people.  We gay conservatives have heard such notions before.  Seems that’s what happens when you have so politicized your sexuality — that any departure from left-wing ideology must needs make a gay man a “tool.”

“Occasionally,” writes Tina Korbe, a woman who feels Howard Dean’s party patronizes those of her sex

. . . Democrats give me the distinct impression that their positions on, say, gay marriage or immigration are based more on the desire to win votes than cohesive principles. It’s suspicious, for example, that the president’s official position is against gay marriage but “evolving.” It’s almost as though he’s just waiting for an overwhelming majority of Americans to be in favor of gay marriage before he switches his position. Reducing gays, Muslims, Latinos, immigrants and women to their concerns over gay-specific, Muslim-specific, Latino-specific, immigrant-specific and women-specific positions reduces them to something less than a whole, entire, complex person. But no person is reducible to the tiniest sliver of himself — his sexuality, his religion, his ethnicity, his immigrant status, his gender. We all care — broadly — about human flourishing. That’s what Republicans want — a prosperous, flourishing, fully human society.

She says this in response to former chair of the Democratic National Committee Howard Dean who, in his latest rant, accused the GOP of engaging in “Gay-bashing, Muslim-bashing, Latino-bashing, immigrant-bashing, women-bashing every day”. Sounds like he got his information from the left-wing blogs which supported his 2004 bid for the White Rather rather than from actual interaction with actual Republicans.

Korbe acknowledges she “cannot speak for gays, Muslims, Latinos or immigrants”, but she contends that as a woman, she has

. . . found the Democratic Party’s approach to my vote far less loving and far more insulting than the Republican Party’s approach to that vote. While Democrats reduce me to nothing more than my sexuality and assume that I cannot even pay for my own birth control, Republicans appeal to me as a whole person, to my ability to take personal responsibility for myself, to work hard, to reap the benefits of my labors and to voluntarily share those benefits with whose who truly aren’t able to be responsible for themselves.

Well, Tina, you speak for me.  And, I would dare say, for a good number of our blog readers.   (more…)

The media narrative notwithstanding, many conservatives would be willing to support a gay or lesbian candidate for public office if he or she advocated sensible policies.  Note for example the California Republican Party’s recent endorsement of Brad Torgan.  You can join me in supporting his bid to represent the citizens of California’s 50th Assembly district by donating to his campaign.

Scanning the blogs before bed last night, I chanced upon Seth Mandel’s piece in Commentary Contentions about the upcoming (next year) contest for Mayor of New York.  He reported that frontrunner City Council Speaker Christine Quinn whom he described as “openly gay, and planning to marry her partner this year” supports a police policy (controversial in some liberal circles) that has helped reduce crime in the Big Apple.

With identity politics often placing “New York’s Finest, the NYPD, at the center of attention”. Mandel writes, the “police department’s stop-and-frisk policy has come under fire from minority advocates claiming racial profiling”.  As other candidates favor firing the popular police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, Quinn offers a different approach:

While [former city comptroller Bill] Thompson [also running for Mayor] responded to the stop-and-frisk policy by threatening to fire Kelly, and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who is also likely running for the Democratic nomination, lashed out at both the possible profiling element and the efficacy of the policy, Quinn took a more thoughtful tack. She suggested some changes to the policy in a letter to Kelly, but did not advocate scrapping it. She also included some praise for the policy: “We understand the vast majority of the lives saved were men of color and that part of the NYPD’s policing strategy that led to this decline is based on stop, question and frisk.”

Mandel believes that Quinn’s respect for the city’s police force has put her at the “front of the pack” in the race for Rudy Giuiliani’s old job.  Sounds like the kind of gal around whom his supporters could rally.

Now nearly fifty years ago, in one of the greatest speeches any American has ever delivered, Martin Luther King, Jr. expressed his vision of how to treat people who differ from ourselves, “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

It’s not the color of their skin which defines them, but the quality of their character.  So too should it be with sexual orientation.

It seems, alas, that we’ve gone for the vision of a society where we evaluate each individual according to his qualities of character to one where his difference becomes paramount.  Two weeks ago, I blogged about a proposal being floated in the University of California system to ask “incoming freshmen to identify their sexual orientation, a move that might cement such declarations as an emerging topic in the college admissions process.”

That story is getting more legs, with an LA Times report yesterday on the matter:

California’s state colleges and universities are laying plans to ask students about their sexual orientation next year on application or enrollment forms, becoming the largest group of schools in the country to do so. The move has raised the hopes of gay activists for recognition but the concerns of others about privacy.

“The negatives of this,” writes, Tina Korbe,

. . . vastly outweigh the potential benefits. Not only could the information be improperly used — say to either discriminate against or give preference to LGBT students — but it also suggests sexual orientation is somehow relevant to education. The college admissions process should aim to determine what students would be able to meet the rigorous academic requirements of a university experience.

Read the whole thing.  Knowledge of an individual’s sexual orientation won’t help determine whether or not he has that ability.   (more…)

Many of us, including yours truly, often challenge our liberal friends’ comments and links on Facebook, generally engaging in intelligent exchanges, but sometimes in exchanges of insults.  In a handful of cases, we suddenly find a partisan adversary has silently “de-friended” us, other times we finds ourselves subject to a barrage of insults accusing us of narrow-mindedness, self-hatred or even racism.

The other day, a gay conservative lamented on Facebook that it had . . .

Been a rough year with politics! Lost friends of 20 years and more because of Obama. Went from everybody liked being around me to the outcast with very few gay friends. Attacks have been very personal. Kinda blue here.

And he’s not the only one — as indicated by the comment thread. One man reported that a friend had told him he “deserved [his] heart attack for opposing Obamacare.” Another wrote that at a gay and lesbian film festival (not in LA), he and his partner sponsor:

People will be openly hostile to me and my partner (we’re both conservative). Very few are what I would even call tolerant. I continue to be a sponsor of the film festival because it is my last remaining tie to the gay commnunity. Without it, I have ZERO contact with the gay “community” – and my circle of gay friends is only a few. When I was a lib I had literally dozens of gay friends and was quite known in the gay community at the time.

Interesting that with a few notable exceptions, I have had almost the exact opposite experience at Outfest, the gay and lesbian film festival here in LA.  Most folk there continue to treat me with respect even after learning of my political leanings.

Another participant in the thread had not been so fortunate.  Three “so-called good friends” of another gay man told him “they could not be friends [because of his] dislike of B.O.”  From their attitude, he gleaned “they were not true friends, because all of my true friends, while we do not agree politically, we accept it, and move on” — which is what most of us experience. (more…)