Perhaps I should not have offered that “personal note” I had offered yesterday.  With Bruce busy and me manning the fort, sometimes it seems I can’t meet the expectations of our readers for regular content on a variety of issues, particularly those of concern to our community.  Especially when I have other projects to complete and when there are others issues are on my mind.

When I posted the piece, I expected some understanding commentary — from our defenders and our critics, instead witnessed the return of a troll, arriving not to address the point of the post, but to attack me personally and gay conservatives in general, basing his bile not on anything I had said, but on aspects of my biography he assumed to be true, but none of which having in fact any basis in reality.

Indeed, some were in direct opposition to the facts of my life, some he might have discerned had he read my posts.  For the record, I have a very strong relationship with my father whom I see several times a year even though we live in different states.  He knows I’m gay and loves me for the man I am.

Our relationship has strengthened since I came out to him, perhaps because my coming out caused him to ask questions about an experience that was foreign to him — or perhaps because fathers and sons oftentimes become closer in adulthood.  (And that is all I will say — all, for the purposes of this blog, that needs be said.)

Why someone would want to make assumptions about my relationship to my family is beyond me.  This blog should be a forum for discussion, not insinuation.

I am grateful to ur reader Rattlesnake for not mincing words when he took our critic to task: (more…)

Religion of Peace Alert! (via @BillyHallowell)

A disturbing trial came to a close this week in London, England, after three men were convicted of distributing pamphlets that called for gays and lesbians to be murdered. The hateful fliers were disturbing at best. One of them, titled, “Death Penalty?,” showed a mannequin that was hanging from a noose and said that gays should be sent to hell.

“The death sentence is the only way this immoral crime can be erased from corrupting society and act as a deterrent for any other ill person who is remotely inclined in this bent way.”

The leaflet continues: “The only dispute amongst the classical authorities was the method employed in carrying out the penal code.”

It goes on to offer burning, being flung from a high point such as a mountain or building, or being stoned to death as suitable methods.

It’s okay, the real threat to gays (according to American gay leftist/progressive types) is Rick Santorum. 

Move along, nothing to see here.  Except the truth.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Let me get this out of the way first:  I am no fan of Rep. Bachmann.  I would not vote for her and I believe her social views are out of the mainstream of American conservatism, not to mention mainstream America.

HOWEVER…. she has been a steady voice of reason on the disaster of Obamacare and the perils of our national debt.  Topics that the presumptive nominee, Mr. Romney, seems to avoid at all costs.  So for her determination to engage in these topics, both in Congress and in the GOP nomination race, I congratulate her.

And finally the real reason I am writing this post….

I am disgusted at the way Rep. Bachmann was treated by the (mostly left-leaning) media and the political punditry class.  She was routinely derided for her faith and for being a female candidate.  This has become a sad routine in American politics:  Female candidates and Christian candidates are the targets in the last bastion of mainstream media bigotry.  One can only reflect on how Sarah Palin & Hillary Clinton were treated in 2008 to be as disgusted now with how Rep. Bachmann was treated.

For all of the self-congratulatory praise that American liberals in the media heap upon themselves… their attitude toward women and Christians during the past 20 years has degraded toward barbarism.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

UPDATE (from Dan):  Uncanny yet again how similar our thoughts are.  Visiting my hometown (Cincinnati) right now and was driving around with my brother when I heard the news.  I outlined a quick post on her withdrawal which I will post later today.  You’ll then seen how Bruce and I have different ways of expressing similar thoughts.

Well, there is at least one sad aspect of Barney Frank’s upcoming retirement.  We won’t have the unhappy Massachusetts Democrat to kick around any more.  This guy is so ripe for ridicule.  It has been a lot of fun mocking his various statements, not to mention his juvenile reaction to the type of questions Republican politicians face on a daily basis.

“From his relatively petty transgressions related to his personal life,” write the editors of the National Review,

to his more consequential role in enabling Fannie and Freddie, Representative Frank personifies a great deal of what is wrong with American public life. Though a highly intelligent man, he made the wrong decisions at every turn, and compounded his policy errors with the petty and vindictive style of his politics.

Barney is, in short, an embarrassment. Now, I’m sure that if I scanned the various gay blogs, I would read numerous encomia to this prominent politician. Indeed, I received one such e-mail yesterday from a gay organization.

Instead of celebrating his career and lamenting his retirement, gay people should be cheering his departure.  Simply put, Barney is not a good role model for our community.  We should not want such a mean-spirited, petty man, wrong about so much, unwilling to admit his mistakes, childish in victory as a face of gay America.  That he will no longer be the most prominent gay politician is a good thing for gay America, a very good thing indeed.

RELATED: The Best Thing Barney Frank Could Do For Gay People . . .

UPDATE:  Indeed, even today, Barney demonstrates his juvenile inability to handle the type of questions Republicans face on a daily basis.   In the Washington Examiner, Charlie Spiering reports that the retiring Democrat “lashed out against the Today Show’s Savannah Guthrie this morning for asking ‘negative questions’ during an interview about his recent retirement announcement.”  (Read the whole thing — and watch the video.)

Interesting that Barney only gets tough questions from the MSM after he has announced his retirement.

This is the guy the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn once dubbed a “Minority Wit“?

Apologies for the slow blogging.  Am spending time with some good Mormon friends in Utah.  And, no, they’re not trying to “cure” me.  They know I’m gay and have made me very welcome in their home, even allowing me to adopt their children as my niece as nephews.  Indeed, they have made me feel far more welcome than have many gay liberals upon learning I’m a conservative.

Anyway, as you can probably guess, I have much to say on the retirement of the unhappy Barney Frank.  The long and the short of it is that it is a very good thing for gay Americans.  We will no longer have this mean-spirited embarrassment as the most prominent gay politician in the country.  If we had a less biased media, reporters would note how frequently the Massachusetts Democrats has been wrong and journalists would ask him tough questions.  He has shown an obliviousness to the reality of the marketplace and the record of the Reagan era.  And has demonstrated a refusal to admit wrong and an arrogance about his critics.

He doesn’t seem to realize that this nation enjoyed an economic boom in the 1990s in no small measure to Senate Republicans’ success in filibustering the Clinton “stimulus” in 1993 and Bill Clinton’s compromises with such congressional Republicans as Newt Gingrich in the mid-1990s.

That said, I post this piece having just chanced upon this post on Drudge:

“For those unfamiliar,” writes Noel Sheppard in posting this,

Blake writes for the Post’s The Fix political blog, hence the moniker “Fix Aaron.”

What would one expect from a newspaper that only five months ago called for readers to sift through former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s email messages?

It therefore isn’t at all surprising they’d be looking for dirt on the current Republican presidential frontrunner.

Wonder if Mr. Blake or any of his Washington Post colleagues went looking for dirt on the Democratic presidential frontrunner in the 2008 campaign.

SOMEWHAT RELATED:  Wonder if anybody at Mr. Blake’s paper is tweeting for help in sifting through the recent White House Visitor Log Document Dump.

Lately, we’ve experienced many examples of media bias, the discrepancy in the cover of #OWS and the Tea Parties, the focus on allegations against a Republican presidential candidate while downplaying scandalous activity of a Democratic president’s administration, an absence of scrutiny of Democrats’ conflicts of interest.

And here’s yet another example, a man known for his mean-spirited attacks on Republicans secures an invitation to a morning show on one of the “big three” networks.  Wonder if his one-time Democratic associates  helped persuade former Clinton advisor (now co-anchor for ABC’s Good Morning America) George Stephanopolous to include Mr. Maher in his program.

And that former funnyman damned Mitt Romney with faint praise by saying that in contrast to his fellow Republicans, the immediate past Massachusetts governor “is all that stands between us and the rise of the apes.”

Interesting the longtime Democratic operative did not follow up on Maher’s characterization of the GOP, never even challenging the guy on his critiques of Republicans.  It’s just a good-natured exchange with a man otherwise quite mean-spirited and most uncivil.  Why did they even invite him on to do political commentary?  Would Stephanopolous have shown similar deference to a conservative commentator who regularly hurled slurs at Democrats?

Given this exchange, it should come as no surprise that a Media Resarch Center study found the network morning shows shilling for the incumbent president (while trashing the opposition):

As might be expected, given the lack of a contest for the Democratic nomination, most of the segments were about the Republican nomination process. Yet of the approximately 60 percent of items that mainly focused on just one candidate, there were more than three times as many segments about President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign (129) than about any individual Republican candidates. (This tally only includes stories that discuss Obama as a candidate, excluding items that dealt with him strictly as President.) (more…)

It seems the president set the tone for the second half of his first term, his first experience as chief executive with a Republican House (but Democratic talking points notwithstanding, not a “Republican Congress” as his party still controls the Senate) on April 13 when he delivered a speech at George Washington University on the budget.

Supposedly he was going to unveil a new budget plan (he still hasn’t). The president invited House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan whose budget had won a lot of acclaim in conservative circles (and even some praise in liberal ones), but had largely been lambasted on the left.*  Instead of releasing his own plan, he spent the better part of his time attacking Republicans.

The House would pass Ryan’s budget two days later. The Democratic Senate hasn’t passed a budget in 913 days.

In his speech, the president would fault policies of the his predecessor for creating the federal spending problem, telling his audience that “we lost our way in the decade that followed” the 1990s.  But, after crediting Republicans for presenting and championing one vision, he went on to excoriate the plan:

But the way this plan achieves those goals would lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we’ve known certainly in my lifetime.  In fact, I think it would be fundamentally different than what we’ve known throughout our history.

I believe it paints a vision of our future that is deeply pessimistic.  It’s a vision that says if our roads crumble and our bridges collapse, we can’t afford to fix them. . . .

It’s a vision that says America can’t afford to keep the promise we’ve made to care for our seniors. . . .

This vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America.

Even the Washington Post reported that the budget speech had a “partisan tone.”  Finding that the president “spent much of the afternoon speech at George Washington University criticizing [Ryan's] deficit-reduction plan, called ‘Path to Prosperity,’” the analysts at the Annenberg Center found that the Democrat’s “critique strayed at times from the facts.”

Seems the imperative was not telling the truth, but instead savaging the opposition.  On his various job tours in swing states, the president has attacked Republicans, mixed his partisan rhetoric with backward-looking class-warfare rhetoric (last link via Instapundit).

Which brings me to the title question:  Can the president make the case of his economic policies without demonizing the opposition and raising the specter of class warfare?

* (more…)

It’s not just Barack Obama.  The Democrats of the 21st century will use whatever means necessary, even ones which transgress the norms of political discourse.  In his memoir, the most pro-gay Vice President in U.S. history, reminds us how his 2004 rival attempted to use that good man’s daughter as a wedge issue in their debate:

There was one subject on which he [John Edwards] had done some planning.  A little over halfway through the debate, moderate Gwen Ifill asked us about the the president’s proposal for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriages.  Edwards opened his answer this way:  ”Let me say first that I think the vice president and his wife love their daughter.  I think they love her very much.  And you can’t have anything but respect for the fact that they’re willing to talk about the fact that they have a gay daughter, the fact that they embrace her.  It’s a wonderful thing.  And there are millions of parents like that who love their children.”  I was furious with that response.  What gave him the right to make pronouncements about my family?  But you never want to let the other guy get under your skin, so I kept my anger in check.  When Ifill asked me if I’d like to respond, I said, “Well, GEn, let me simply thank the senator for the kind words he said about my family and our daughter.  I appreciate it very much.”  ”That’s it?” Gwen said.  ”That’s it,” I said.

When Edwards’s running mate brought up Mary Cheney’s sexuality in the presidential debate a week later, her father concluded that

. . . it was obvious that there was a concerted effort by the Kerry-Edwards campaign to remind viewers that my daughter Mary was gay, to bring her into the debate and into the campaign.  I don’t recall another instance of a candidate for the presidency attempting to use the child of an opponent for political gain.   (more…)

Last year, during “the healthcare debate’s final hours”, U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) insisted that “his GOP colleagues need to do more to ‘differentiate themselves’ from the hateful speech spewed” by a handful of Tea Party protesters.

Now, instead of a few fringe members of the Tea Party making untoward comments about their ideological adversaries, we have members of the leadership of Mr. Frank’s party engaging in mean-spirited name-calling. According to Politico,

Vice President Joe Biden joined House Democrats in lashing tea party Republicans Monday, accusing them of having “acted like terrorists” in the fight over raising the nation’s debt limit, according to several sources in the room.

And he wasn’t alone.  Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi “pulled out a Star Wars reference on the House floor, saying that Speaker John Boehner chose to go to the dark side’ and court the most conservative members of his conference, rather than work on a bipartisan compromise.”   The New York Times called the better part of the debt deal “a nearly complete capitulation to the hostage-taking demands of Republican extremists.”

Sources in the paragraph above via James Taranto who reports today that the vice president’s office claims the Delaware Democrat did not use the term, but that members of Mr. Frank’s caucus did.  He also provides numerous examples of some very uncivil discourse on the left.  And over at the Sundries Shack, Jimmie offers a snapshot of some of the civil Democratic discourse during the debt debate. (Via Instapundit.)

Do hope Mr. Frank and his Democratic colleagues do more to ‘differentiate themselves’ from mean-spirited discourse.

Perhaps the most depressing thing about the debate on gay marriage is the dedication of gay marriage advocates to demonizing those who oppose state-recognition of same-sex marriages.  With their childish “No H8″ campaign, they contend that people oppose their view because they hate gay people.

No, there are, I grant, some folks who oppose state recognition of same-sex marriages because of their animus against homosexuals, but they do not represent all such opponents.  Many oppose such recognition because they believe marriage should be reserved for different-sex couples.  Indeed, a good number of these folks (but, alas not all) support state recognition of civil unions, similar benefits, different name.

Should we call the legislators in Rhode Island and Illinois “haters” because they moved forward to recognize civil unions for same-sex couples without calling them marriage?

In fact, some who oppose same-sex marriage treat gay people with dignity.  Such individuals have, for exampl,e hosted me in their homes, listened to my arguments, stood with me in hours of difficulty and even let me play (unsupervised) with their kids.  They know gay people aren’t demons; they don’t disapprove of us, it’s just that their understanding of marriage differs from that of gay activists.

Which brings me to the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing earlier this week on the Respect for Marriage Act, a bill (that I support) which repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

While I believe Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) is wrong to oppose the Act pending before the current Congress, he’s spot on when he takes issue with another supporter of the measure:

One of the witnesses before us today says that DOMA was passed for only one reason: “to express disapproval of gay and lesbian people.”  I know this to be false.  (more…)

HRC is not the only gay organization to beclown itself this week.  GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) which bills itself as an organization that holds “the media accountable for the words and images they present,” has just honored someone who uses the harshest of words to defame a group of his fellow gays, those who do not share his left-of-center worldview.

It awarded, Caroline May reports in the Daily Caller, the best blog distinction to a website run by Joe Jarvis, a blogger who . . .

. . . often refers to gay conservatives in language unfitting of GLAAD’s catch phrase, “Words and Images Matter” — frequently using misogynistic language and comparing conservatives to Nazi collaborators.

“One thing about the kapo bootlickers at GOProud, we alway$ know where their prioritie$ lie,” Jarvis wrote in December about the conservative gay group GOProud’s support of tax cuts.

He has also used scatological term to attack conservative bloggers personally. By designating him as the best blogger, GLAAD has honored an individual who regularly defames approximately one-third of all gay people.  Please join me in contacting GLAAD and asking them why they choose to single out someone who regularly demeans gay conservatives.

Gay conservatives who support GLAAD would be wise to ask for their money back and direct it to more responsible organizations.

Since Barack Obama has taken office, the SEIU-backed rallies against responsible Republican reforms in Wisconsin have been the closest thing on the left to the Tea Party rallies against big government on the right.  Like most rallies, theirs have attracted a number of extremists shouting angry slogans and hosting mean-spirited posters.

Last March, when a handful of Tea Party members protesting the president’s health care overhaul called “Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) . . . a ‘Homo Communist’“, that unhappy Massachusetts Democrat said his GOP colleagues needed “to do more to ‘differentiate themselves’ from the hateful speech spewed in the healthcare debate’s final hours.”

Now, Zombie alerts us not to conservatives using “Communist” as a slur, but to actual participants in an rally “co-sponsored by the SEIU” proudly proclaiming themselves as Communists:  ”Not only did the SEIU help to organize the rally in conjunction with communists, they marched side-by-side with communists, while union members carried communist flags, communists carried union signs, and altogether there was no real way to tell the two apart.”

Just wondering, if Barney doesn’t do more to “differentiate himself” from these Commies, does that mean they are representative of Democrats, given Communist participation in a rally of one of that party’s key allies?

Is anyone really surprised?  I mean, REALLY? (h/t - Instapundit)

Glenn Reynolds linked something this morning, to which some of our blog readers had also alerted me, but something struck me today when I actually watched the transcript.  Take a gander at who laughs when Bill Maher makes a statement which would have earned him opprobrium if he were conservative:

The Blogprof who posted the video quips, Maher “will not get called out on his anti-Semitism“.  I mean, well, a Muslim Congressman didn’t castigate him when the one-time funny man called the lawmaker’s sacred text a “hate-filled holy book.“

If the unhappy Barney Frank were a Republican, the media would have a field day with some of his silly statements.  I mean, all they need do is hold Barney to the standards he sets for his partisan adversaries.  Remember just over a year ago in the health care debate when he insisted “his GOP colleagues need to do more to ‘differentiate themselves’ from the hateful speech spewed in the healthcare debate’s final hours.”

Well, last night, Glenn Reynolds reported on some rather angry things said to one of the Massachusetts’s Democrat’s Republican colleagues:

REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMAN PETER KING gets death threat and bloody pig’s foot. “A frozen pig’s foot and a note laced with anti-Semitic rants were sent to Rep. Peter King’s Capitol Hill office, a congressional source familiar with the situation confirmed to CNN Monday.”

Sounds like hateful speech to me.  Now, under normal circumstances, we wouldn’t hold Democrats responsible for the angry rhetoric of their ideological confreres. But, well, since Barney asked his Republican colleagues to “differentiate themselves” from the angry rhetoric of their ideological confreres, shouldn’t we be asking him to do the same?

I’m not holding my breath.

Will the civility police denounce Democrats for “prying into his family’s private health insurance record“:

U.S. Sen. Scott Brown — an upstart Blue State Republican in the cross hairs of national Democrats — is lashing out at the party’s opposition researchers, accusing them of prying into his family’s private health insurance records, and demanding that they stop fighting dirty.

“It seems in bad form. Obviously, when it comes to information about my wife and daughters, it crosses the line. I find it offensive and so do they,” Brown told the Herald yesterday.

Now, to be sure, from time to time, Republican do play dirty tricks, but more often than not, it is Democrats — and their allies among liberal interest groups– who engage in the “politics of personal destruction.”

It seems that the guiding principle of today’s Democratic Party is retaining power at all costs — and to destroy any Republican who threatens that power.

(H/t:  Instapundit.)

Will ANSWER be in front of the White House tomorrow yelling “No Blood For Oil!” ????

Yeah, I didn’t think so.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

. . . can we claim a right to his?

I mean, this guy who acts as if he is today, something he never was, a member of the working class, shocks the audience on Rachel Maddow’s show “by telling the rich and bankers that ‘we have a right to your money!’”  And well, with the success of his movies, the guy can really count himself among the rich.

Noting that Michael Moore had declared in the same clip that “This is War”, Glenn Reynolds quips,

I guess the “new civility bullshit” is officially over. Bear that in mind as you contemplate a response. I don’t think these people realize that they are setting precedents that they may come to regret. They are as feckless in this behavior as they are in their fiscal approach. The consequences are likely to be insalubrious.

As I was reading about the Wisconsin Senate’s vote to curtail the privileges the state had granted pubilc employee unions, I was watching Media Malpractice: How Obama Got Elected and Palin Was Targeted which provided footage of various MSM reporters concerned about allegedly violent rhetoric at McCain-Palin rallies and asking Republicans to denounce it.  Interesting how concerned they were about violent rhetoric when they had no actual evidence of such rhetoric.

I wonder how many reporters will call on Wisconsin Democrats — or any Democrats for that matter — to distance themselves from Mr. Moore’s incitement to violence.

UPDATE:  Yes, the media who seem obsessed with imaginary conservative violence seem oblivious to actual liberal antics as per Bryan Preston’s observation: (more…)

Something to bear in mind next time you hear some from the left complain about the declining civility in our political discourse and the supposedly increasing number of right-wingers, particularly Tea Partiers, comparing the president to Hitler:

The head of one of the nation’s most powerful labor unions did not condemn the violent rhetoric in placards and signs held by union supporters demonstrating in Wisconsin despite two direct attempts Sunday to get him on the record declaring them inappropriate.

On several occasions over the past two weeks of demonstrations in the Wisconsin capital of Madison news media have zeroed in on signs that liken Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and recently ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Appearing Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka was twice asked whether he found the tone at the nearly two-week long demonstrations “wrong” or “inappropriate.”

Trumka did not answer, instead saying, “We should be sitting down trying to create jobs. … “

H/t Instapundit.

If it’s wrong to compare the president of the United States to the late German Führer (and it is), then it’s wrong to compare the governor of Wisconsin to the same bloodthirsty fascist.

Even though our reader and occasional blogger Sonicfrog doesn’t like former U.S Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa), considering him “an example of an anti-gay Republican“, he wonders at the lengths some of our fellow gays go to smear the man whose political career ended over four years ago.  (If Santorum runs for president, his polling may break into the single digits.)

Put the shoe on the other foot. Would you be cheering if someone associated your name with something you considered vile and extremely improper? I don’t think so. The guy is lame on his own.

When he took one of his “very liberal Facebook friends” to task for “gleefully” posting a link to the story documenting the smear, said liberal responded:

bull***t. santorum deserves much worse than this. a disgusting smug self-righteous religious blowhard like him should never be allowed to achieve any significance in our government and anything done to ‘smear’ his name is acceptable.

Anything done to ‘smear’ his name is acceptable?  And this fellow allies himself politically with the folks decrying the harsher tone of our discourse.

“And you wonder,” Sonic concludes, “why I don’t associate myself with the liberal pro-gay anti-Republican establishment that I’m supposed to belong to simply because I’m gay.”

Methinks some of our readers might share his sentiments.  Read the whole thing.