Laugh til you choke on Billy Graham

Wise spiritual counselor to presidents in both parties:

One of the odder phenomena surrounding the passage of Amendment One in North Carolina was the last-minute emergence of the Rev. Billy Graham, the retired, chronically-ill 93-year-old evangelist, as a supporter of the amendment. Graham’s family-run organization took out full-page ads in 14 NC newspapers last weekend endorsing the Amendment as a simple matter of following the scriptural definition of marriage.

Fuck you, you bigoted homophobe.

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Amendment One

The North Carolina constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage passed by a 61-39 margin last night. About half the number of voters (2.2 million) voted in this election than did in the 2008 presidential race (4.3 million). I’d suggest that something as weighty as a constitutional amendment should at least get a general election vote, but that would go against the wisdom of the founders.

North Carolina has a proud history of intolerance about marriage. The amendment banning marriage between races (via) stood for almost 100 years after its enactment in 1875.

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Open Thread: “We Know What A Trojan Horse Look Like”

(h/t commentor NancyDarling)

A last-minute reminder from the Rev. Doc. William J. Barber for Balloon Juice readers in North Carolina: Don’t forget to vote tomorrow!

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Mitt Romney’s Gay Problem

Mitt-3-PO seems not to understand that when you fail to stand behind a member of your team, especially when that team member belongs to a class of people you know is derided by the side your team represents, that team member is going to be pissed.

Those of us who are not emotionally vacuous are not surprised that Richard Grenell, who recently resigned his post at the Romney campaign, is pissed.

From The New York Times:

It was the biggest moment yet for Mitt Romney’s foreign policy team: a conference call last Thursday, dialed into by dozens of news outlets from around the globe, to dissect and denounce President’s Obama record on national security.

But Richard Grenell, the political strategist who helped organize the call and was specifically hired to oversee such communications, was conspicuously absent, or so everyone thought.

It turned out he was at home in Los Angeles, listening in, but stone silent and seething. A few minutes earlier, a senior Romney aide had delivered an unexpected directive, according to several people involved in the call.

“Ric,” said Alex Wong, a policy aide, “the campaign has requested that you not speak on this call.” Mr. Wong added, “It’s best to lay low for now.”

For Mr. Grenell, the message was clear: he had become radioactive.

The Romney campaign doesn’t get it:

The day after Mr. Grenell was hired, Bryan Fischer, a Romney critic with the American Family Association, told  nearly 1,400 followers on Twitter: “If personnel is policy, his message to the pro-family community: drop dead.” The next day, the conservative Daily Caller published an online column that summed up the anger of the Christian right, linking Mr. Grenell’s hiring to the appointment of gay judges to the New Jersey Supreme Court.

As the critiques from conservatives intensified, Mr. Grenell pressed senior aides to allow him to speak about national security issues, arguing that the best way to soothe the ire over his appointment would be to let him do his job: defend his boss and take swipes at President Obama.

But Mr. Romney’s advisers balked at the idea of his taking a public role, saying that the best way to get beyond the controversy was for Mr. Grenell to lower his profile until it blew over. A big worry: that reporters would ask Mr. Grenell about his Twitter feed or sexuality, turning him rather than Mr. Romney’s foreign policy into the story.

_snip

Romney advisers attribute at least some of Mr. Grenell’s frustration to the inevitable complications of starting a new job within a large, competitive and rigid organization filled with big egos.

But the final straw, for Mr. Grenell, was the conference call on April 26. After being told not to speak, he felt deeply undermined, worrying it would erode his credibility with journalists who had expected to hear from him, friends said.

_snip

Several of them said they were baffled. They felt the storm had largely passed.  “We were shocked,” one caller said. “We could not persuade him to stay.”

Several gay leaders said the campaign failed to grasp the message it had sent when it told him to lie low.  “Clearly, the Romney campaign thought if they could put him in a box for a while it would go away,” said Christopher Barron, a founder of GOProud, a gay Republican group in Washington. “It is an unforced error on their part.”

Really? The Romney campaign was baffled as to why the man they hired as their foreign policy spokesperson was told not to speak during a major conference call about foreign policy out of fealty to religious nutbags like Bryan J. Fischer? Baffled?!

Look, as I’ve said previously, Grenell is a misogynist dick, and I don’t feel sorry for the guy. Grenell is gay and still chose to align himself with a party filled with people who hate him for who he is, and who kiss the ring of the most right-wing homophobic assholes.

Still, Romney hired him and Romney should have stuck by him. Romney should have let Grenell do his job and he should have told the likes of Bryan Fischer to eat his magic underpants. Also, Romney should have known that not letting Grenell do his job in the hopes that the controversy would blow over was never a tactic that was going to work. The right-wing haters don’t forget, and they would never have been cool with A Gay in their midst. The controversy never would have blown over.

Romney blew it.
[read the rest at TRS-ABLC]

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Hush, Hush, Keep It Down Now

The Grenell story lives another day:

It was the biggest moment yet for Mitt Romney’s foreign policy team: a conference call last Thursday, dialed into by dozens of news outlets from around the globe, to dissect and denounce President’s Obama record on national security.

But Richard Grenell, the political strategist who helped organize the call and was specifically hired to oversee such communications, was conspicuously absent, or so everyone thought.

It turned out he was at home in Los Angeles, listening in, but stone silent and seething. A few minutes earlier, a senior Romney aide had delivered an unexpected directive, according to several people involved in the call.

“Ric,” said Alex Wong, a policy aide, “the campaign has requested that you not speak on this call.” Mr. Wong added, “It’s best to lay low for now.”

The whole thing is a portrait of a campaign that’s piss-pants scared of the right wing of their party. Santorum didn’t win the nomination, but he’s clearly in charge.

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It’s Only a War If The Bullets are Flying at You

Sullivan, 25 April:

I hate the term “war on women”. It’s so hackish and echoes with the kind of liberal screechiness that backfires with everyone else. But the fact that there is a wave of laws in GOP controlled states, making abortion harder and harder and more humiliating to obtain, and what can reasonably be described as a full-bore assault on Planned Parenthood, is simply undeniable.

To which I noted- “It really only is about things that affect him directly, isn’t it?”

Sullivan, today:

Sigh.

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Mr. Backlash

Just like Erik Erickson (find the link yourself), James Joyner (who’s now writing for The New Republic, whocoodanode), says:

I’m not sure I’m buying this narrative. Yes, Grenell is gay. Yes, some right wingers were angry that a gay man was named Romney’s foreign policy spokesman. On the other hand, this man was openly gay when he served as John Bolton’s spokesman. While I’m no fan of Bolton, he’s a veritable superhero on the right.

Joyner then quotes a Romney spokesman who trotted out the party line: Grenell wasn’t really on the payroll yet, he hadn’t appeared as a spokesman, and the Romney campaign asked him to stay.

That’s all probably true, but here’s what Grenell said in his resignation statement:

While I welcomed the challenge to confront President Obama’s foreign policy failures and weak leadership on the world stage, my ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyper-partisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign. I want to thank Governor Romney for his belief in me and my abilities and his clear message to me that being openly gay was a non-issue for him and his team.

And here’s a few more points from noted pinko Jennifer Rubin:

During the two weeks after Grenell’s hiring was announced the Romney campaign did not put Grenell out to comment on national security matters and did not use him on a press foreign policy conference call. Despite the controversy in new media and in conservative circles, there was no public statement of support for Grenell by the campaign and no supportive social conservatives were enlisted to calm the waters.

The thing that Joyner can’t seem to wrap his head around is that the Republican Party has gotten worse on gay rights in the last couple of years. And Joyner’s man Romney goes right along with that, because going along is what he does best.

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Cabin fever

There’s one key point that John missed…BOTH SIDES DO IT:

“It is unfortunate that while the Romney campaign made it clear that Grenell being an openly gay man was a non-issue for the governor and his team, the hyper-partisan discussion of issues unrelated to Ric’s national security qualifications threatened to compromise his effectiveness on the campaign trail,” Log Cabin Republicans Executive Director R. Clarke Cooper said in a statement. “Ric was essentially hounded by the far right and far left.”

Of course no one believes the “far left” had anything to do with this, except maybe Charles Lane and David Gergen, and when you’ve lost them, you’ve lost almost no one else.

This is at least a medium-sized fuck up by Team Mitt. It makes him look like a pansy ass who can’t stand up to the Lord’s Resistance Army.

They should have either known the God Squad was going to kick teh gay to teh curb or had a strategy to deal with teh kicking. They sure as shit can’t have it both ways, take a brave principled stand against discrimination, while allowing the gay to be prayed away.

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Yet The Log Cabin Republicans Continue On

Not surprising:

Richard Grenell, the openly gay spokesman recently hired to sharpen the foreign policy message of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, has resigned in the wake of a full-court press by anti-gay conservatives.

In a statement obtained by Right Turn, Grenell says:

I have decided to resign from the Romney campaign as the Foreign Policy and National Security Spokesman. While I welcomed the challenge to confront President Obama’s foreign policy failures and weak leadership on the world stage, my ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyper-partisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign. I want to thank Governor Romney for his belief in me and my abilities and his clear message to me that being openly gay was a non-issue for him and his team.

According to sources familiar with the situation, Grenell decided to resign after being kept under wraps during a time when national security issues, including the president’s ad concerning Osama bin Laden, had emerged front and center in the campaign.

Why any gay man would be a member of the GOP is just beyond me.

(via)

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Just a little savage

I don’t think this is offensive at all. There’s lots of crazy stuff in the bible that everyone ignores. Why NOT ignore the anti-gay stuff too? Dan Savage:

People often point out that they can’t help it, they can’t help with the anti-gay bullying, because it says right there in Leviticus, it says right there in Timothy, it says right there in Romans that being gay is wrong. We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people.

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Hate the Sinner But Love the Sin

Dan Savage causes a walkout at an anti-bullying talk at a high school journalism conference when he points out that we’ll make some progress on bullying when Christians treat the parts of the Bible that mention homosexuality the same way that they treat the parts that mention slavery. (via)

The low-hanging, kumbaya fruit has been picked on bullying. This is the next step, and it’s going to be uncomfortable for evangelical Christians who think that they can preach Leviticus on Sunday and advocate against bullying gay teens on the other days of the week.

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Romney Forgot that God Hates Gay People

Aside from the fact that he is a misogynist who likes to tweet his disgust for women, Romney’s new foreign affairs spokesman has another tiny little problem:

Gov. Mitt Romney stepped on a landmine by appointing Richard Grenell, an out, loud and proud homosexual, to be his spokesman on national security and foreign policy issues. Grenell has for years been an outspoken advocate for homosexual marriage. In fact, word is that he left the Bush administration because President Bush would not formally acknowledge his homosexual partner.

Since, as the saying goes in D.C., personnel is policy, this means Gov. Romney has some ‘splaining to do. This clearly is a deliberate and intentional act on his part, since he was well aware of Mr. Grenell’s sexual proclivities and knew it would be problematic for social conservatives. It’s certainly not possible that there are no other potential spokesmen available, men who are experts in foreign policy and who at the same time honor the institution of natural marriage in their personal lives.

So this has all the appearances of a deliberate poke in the eye to the pro-family community, and a clumsy one at that, coming right on the heels of endorsements from Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Dallas and the National Organization for Marriage, and right after the governor accepted an invitation to deliver the commencement address at Liberty University.

Fischer lets on more than he intends to, here, and lets his bigotry freak flag fly loud and proud. Normally, these guys spew some nonsense about “hating the sin and loving the sinner” and at least try to pretend it’s about policy issues. But here, we’ve got a gay man who will not be addressing same sex marriage or gay issues whatsoever, but working on foreign affairs issues, and for Bryan Fischer and company, the simple fact that he is gay disqualifies him for service.

The difference between these “respectable” bigots and Fred Phelps is that at least Fred Phelps has the balls to carry signs saying what he really thinks:

The rest of the evangelical community that Fischer represents doesn’t have that kind of courage.

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Always Blame the Gays

Tony Perkins:

Perkins: Yeah, you know that’s a great point. Just for a moment step back and look at the implications of this, over the weekend we saw the news of the President’s Secret Service detail in Colombia and the issue of them hiring prostitutes and now the White House is outraged about that. Actually in a meeting this morning my staff asked, ‘why should the President be upset’? It was actually legal; it was legal there to do that, so why should we be upset? Well, the fact is we intuitively know it’s wrong, there’s a moral law against that.

The same is true for what the President has done to the military enforcing open homosexuality in our military. You can change the law but you can’t change the moral law that’s behind it. You can change the positive law, the law that is created by man, but you can’t change the moral law, it’s wrong. So what you have is you have a total breakdown and you can’t pick and choose. Morality is not a smorgasbord; you can’t pick what you want. I think you’re absolutely right, this is a fundamental issue going forward because if we say ‘let them do what we want,’ what’s next? You cannot maintain moral order if you are willing to allow a few things to slide.

Because gays can openly serve in the military, our morals are now so bad that we are even engaging in prostitution! No one please tell the poor dear that prostitution is “the oldest profession.”

I expect for these religious nutters like Perkins, everything they dislike for the next decade will be alternately blamed on gays in the military or Obama or both.

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Game Of Chik’n

For some reason, this story really annoyed the hell out of me this morning.

Whenever a new Chick-fil-A opens, hundreds of its devoted fans walk in after spending days, sometimes weeks, outside the front door. Some devotees will wait in line at multiple restaurant openings, just to say they were among the first to eat at that Chick-fil-A. They must really love the chicken sandwiches there, right?

They do, but there’s another reason why they do this. At each grand opening, Chick-fil-A hands out coupons for one free Chick-fil-A Meal per week for a year (52 meals) to the first 100 people in line. For the most devoted Chick-fil-A fans who attend multiple openings, that means having free lunch and dinner for weeks, months or even years.

This leads us to Christina Heise and Matthew Robinson. They are regulars at Chick-fil-A openings, showing up to more than 70 combined. Eventually, they met and started talking. One chicken sandwich led to another, and now they’re engaged to be married.

Oh yes, NOW I remember why this story pisses me off.

As Equality Matters has reported, Chick-fil-A’s WinShape foundation has given millions of dollars to organizations that oppose marriage equality (Marriage and Family Legacy Fund, Family Research Council), bully gay students (Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Focus on the Family), and promote harmful ex-gay therapy (Exodus International). In addition, the company has a score of 0 on HRC’s corporate equality index, offering absolutely no protections to LGBT staff and even firing employees who engage in “sinful” behavior. Compare that to how many Fortune 100 companies offer non-discrimination protections based on sexual orientation (94 percent) and gender identity (69 percent).

Free waffle fries, free bigotry.  Yeah, that pretty much sums up America The Beautiful.  I wonder if they’d honor the coupons for Christina and Matthew here if they were Christina and Madison, or Christopher and Matthew, engaged to be married.  I’m thinking no.  But then again, I’m thinking they wouldn’t be in line anyway…then again, taking 52 free meals from these guys on the company’s dime seems like a pretty good entry into the sweet revenge column to me.

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Law And Dissed Orders

I can’t say that I think Greg Sargent is totally wrong about the President’s decision to sandbag on an executive order on preventing federal contractors from discriminating against people based on gender or sexual orientation.  He’s right when he says the White House is being too cute by half here.

There’s no denying that Obama and his advisers have a very good overall record on gay rights. But on this issue, and on gay marriage — two hugely important topics to the gay community — there’s too little clarity and too much of a whiff of excuse-making and political calculation.

Obama is trapped in a difficult dynamic that is in some ways the product of having done the right thing in other areas involving gay rights. Because of his real accomplishments in those areas, gay advocates are fully convinced he really believes in full equality for gay and lesbian Americans — and only grow angrier and more impatient when he hedges or equivocates on key issues. I can see why White House advisers would find this dynamic frustrating, but the simple truth is that it isn’t going away until he stops doing it.

The problem is the President’s slow and cautious (if not downright pragmatic) approach is A) it’s slow and frustrating, B) it works in the end.  People recognize A and forget B completely, it seems.  To his credit, Sargent does admit the whole B thing does exist.  But that’s the way it has to go with the political dynamic, and it’s not like the LGBT community in Washington hasn’t played politics to its own advantage, either.

There’s also the very real problem with executive orders: they can get rescinded by future presidents.  The next time a Teapublican gets into power, a lot of stuff is going away.  This close to an election, that’s a factor.  I don’t like it.  I admit it exists.  Going bugnuts over it won’t change much, either.  President Obama will get attacked by the right on LGBT stuff regardless of what he does.  He’ll also get attacked by a certain section of the left for the same reason.  That’s politics.

The long arc does bend but it’s a pain in the ass to move some times.

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