HAPPY NEW YEAR and MAY 2012 BRING EVEN MORE VICTORIES FOR OUR LGBT LOVED ONES

Merry Christmas from Scottsdale, Arizona

Three things:

One:  I want to wish you and yours a very happy, healthy, and safe holiday season.

Two:   I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to show you just what we sane Arizonans have to put up with in this crazy state of gun nuts and right-wing crazies. 

And three:  Oh gawd no, the people below are NOT MY FAMILY and I haven't the foggiest idea who they are and I have zero desire to ever find out.

But this is supposedly an annual event offered by the Scottsdale Gun Club, a place not far from where I live. And what is really depressing is Scottsdale has generally had the reputation of being a city of well-educated, sane people who are fiscal conservatives, not gun nuts or religious crazies (and no Tucson, I'm not forgetting your suffering liberal masses down south, but I am limiting my disdain to greater Maricopa county - land of the three stooges: Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Jan Brewer, and Russell Pearce ).

The Gun-Bubba family

This is a parent with an attitude we all should emulate

Via the most wonderful Sage who is hat-tipping this blog:

Sage - you were right - this totally made my day!

A heartfelt letter of apology from the MN gay community to recently resigned Republican Senate Majority Leader, Amy Koch

Amy Koch, resigned MN Senate Majority
Leader and sanctimonious fraud

Quick back story:

MN Republican Senate Majority Leader and public champion of legislating everyone else's morals, Amy Koch, campaigns with fellow MN Republican legislators, including her (now former) staffer Michael Brodkorb, to put a state constitutional amendment on next year's ballot to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman, thus forbidding those evil gays from marrying the person they love and destroying good Christian one-man-one-woman marriages like Amy's.

And then lo and behold, little Miss Sanctimonious Fraud-ette gets caught defiling and de-sanctifying her own one-man-one-woman marriage and has to resign as Senate Majority Leader and vow not to run for Senate again.

Michael Brodkorb, former Koch staffer and
the alleged other half of Koch's "illicit affair"

So in response to this horrible tragedy that has befallen former Senate Majority Leader, Amy Koch, the gay community in Minnesota has issued a letter of apology:

Dear Ms. Koch,

On behalf of all gays and lesbians living in Minnesota, I would like to wholeheartedly apologize for our community's successful efforts to threaten your traditional marriage. We are ashamed of ourselves for causing you to have what the media refers to as an "illicit affair" with your staffer, and we also extend our deepest apologies to him and to his wife. These recent events have made it quite clear that our gay and lesbian tactics have gone too far, affecting even the most respectful of our society.

We apologize that our selfish requests to marry those we love has cheapened and degraded traditional marriage so much that we caused you to stray from your own holy union for something more cheap and tawdry. And we are doubly remorseful in knowing that many will see this as a form of sexual harassment of a subordinate.

It is now clear to us that if we were not so self-focused and myopic, we would have been able to see that the time you wasted diligently writing legislation that would forever seal the definition of marriage as being between one man and one woman, could have been more usefully spent reshaping the legal definition of "adultery."

Forgive us. As you know, we are not church-going people, so we are unable to fully appreciate that "gay marriage" is incompatible with Christian values, despite the fact that those values carry a biblical tradition of adultery such as yours. We applaud you for keeping that tradition going.

And finally, shame on us for thinking that marriage is a private affair, and that our marriage would have little impact on anyone's family. We now see that marriage is more than that. It is an agreement with society. We should listen to the Minnesota Family Council when it tells us that marriage is about being public, which explains why marriages are public ceremonies. Never did we realize that it is exactly because of this societal agreement that the entire world is looking at you in shame and disappointment instead of minding its own business.

From the bottom of our hearts, we ask that you please accept our apology.

Thank you.
John Medeiros
Minneapolis MN

And it is at times like this that I cannot help but think of parents like Jeff and Lori Wilfahrt who fought on behalf of their gay son and fallen soldier, Cpl. Andrew Wilfahrt to keep this odious amendment from going on the ballot in 2012. I just have to wonder if Amy Koch felt any guilt or shame when they testified in front of her and her fellow legislators in the halls of the Minnesota State Capitol. And the evil side of me also wonders how many other Republicans were also boinking someone other than their opposite-sex spouses while fighting to deny loving gay couples the right to marry the person they love.

Related:
And there is no shortage of anti-gay hate going on in my beloved Minnesota either

"Andrew’s Round Table" aims to defeat MN marriage amendment

Minnesota DFL: In All Its Different Forms...Family Is About Love

Of loaves and fishes by Jeff Wilfahrt

Minnesota Poll: 55% oppose ban on gay marriage

MINNESOTA: Openly Gay State Sen. Scott Dibble: What problem are we trying to solve here?

Another Minnesota Politician and Hero

Dear Minnesota,

Thank you Jeff and Lori Wilfahrt, your son would be so proud

Revisiting my Minnesota days and hoping that Minnesota doesn't lose what sets it apart from states like Arizona

Dear Willard

How does it feel looking a veteran right in the eye and telling him that some people are more equal than others? I know, I know, you had NO IDEA this veteran was gay and that you were stepping in it big time - did ya? Well no matter bud, no one likes you anyway, so losing another huge swath of voters isn't really going to hurt you much. And what a cryin shame, you've twisted and turned yourself into such a laughable, pitiful, and embarrassing mess just to please a segment of your base (who's never gonna vote for ya anyway) and now you've gone and pissed off gay veterans and the people who love them. What a flippin fool you are Willard:

 

Hat tip to Jeff and Lori Wilfahrt - parents of a gay son who lost his life to an IED in Afghanistan last February so Willard could have the freedom to make a world-class jackass of himself.

UPDATE: Here is a follow-up interview with the gay veteran, Bob Garon, about his encounter with Willard:

The big dilemma the so-called "Christian" Right is going to have to pretend does not exist ...

Newt with 2nd mistress turned 3rd wife, Calista,
enjoying the sanctity of marriage until
a better model comes along.

It is no secret - Newt Gingrich is a nasty, adulterous, hypocritical liar and fraud. His track record in politics is very public and very ugly, and I would argue the antithesis of every value the Republican party "claims" to hold near and dear. So it is no surprise that Newt has enemies, many of them from his own party, many of them who served with him when he was Speaker of the House, providing them with a bird's-eye view of just how rotten to the core ole Newt is. And yet, astonishingly, Newt is the current front-runner for the 2012 Republican candidate for President of the United States. And this has prompted some within his party to speak out about the creepiest huckster in American politics:

Conservative Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma bluntly stated his concern about the twice-divorced, thrice-married Gingrich during a Friday town hall.

"He's the last person I'd vote for for president of the United States,” Coburn said, per the Tulsa World. “His life indicates he does not have a commitment to the character traits necessary to be a great president."

Coburn said that Gingrich’s personal history indicates that he “doesn't know anything about commitment to marriage.”

But far more interesting than the Republicans willing to break Ronald Reagan's Eleventh Commandment and speak ill of a fellow Republican is the huge dilemma that a possible President Newt would present to those within the Republican party who supposedly place "Family Values", "Christian Values", and the "Sanctity of Marriage" above all else. How can this group of "Christians", who proclaim their commitment to these values every damn chance they can, vote for a man who is the friggin poster boy for everything they proclaim to detest?

Well ...

It appears that many of them detest Barack Obama more:

There’s an e-mail war raging among some of the nation’s leading evangelicals over whether Newt Gingrich has repented enough for his sins to be president.

One recent skirmish was set off by an open letter urging Gingrich to give a major speech confronting his perceived moral stumbles, including an affair with his third wife, Callista, while married to No. 2.

“You need to make it as clear as you possibly can that you deeply regret your past actions and that you do understand the anguish and suffering they caused others, including your former spouses,” Richard Land, public policy chief for the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote.

[...]

Rather than galvanizing the faithful, however, Land’s letter provoked an outcry from a handful of evangelical leaders who argued Gingrich has repented enough and deserves forgiveness.

[...]

On the same e-mail chain, which CNN obtained from a conservative activist, prominent Atlanta preacher Richard Lee said the nation’s evangelicals needed to support Gingrich.

Lee called Gingrich “the only forceful Christian candidate who can at this point be elected and cleanse the White House next November.”

Got that?

Andrew Sullivan sure did:

Don't you love that word "cleanse"? The current president is a devoted family man, devoid of any personal scandal, and a committed Christian, as his speeches and books testify to. And this must be "cleansed"? The reason is that Obama represents a more liberal and live-and-let-live version of Christianity, and believes in the separation of church and state. That's what needs to be cleansed (assuming we are not talking bald-faced racism here).

What Newt represents is the tip of the spear of the Christianist attempt to wipe separation of church and state out of the constitution. And in this struggle, the denominational differences do not count as much as the secular enemy. Gingrich is also not an old-style Catholic - in the Kennedy or Cuomo or Biden manner. He is an ideological Benedict XVI Catholic, bent on public and political Christianity as a means of saving what's left of civilization after the great Electro-Magnetic Pulse.

But wait! I am not done with the breathtaking hypocrisy of the Religious Right just yet. There are rumors that NOM (National Organization For Marriage), an organization whose very raison d'être is to "protect" marriage, might endorse old Newtie the adulterer for President of this God-fearin "Christian" nation. Now how's that for a cherry on top of a big pile of dung? 

NOM has got to be one of the nastiest, most hateful and homophobic organizations out there. They spend millions of dollars, much of it secretly funneled from the Mormon and Catholic Churches, to supposedly protect the "sanctity" of marriage, which when translated from their lingo to reality simply means: keep those evil homos from ever having the right to marry the person they love. And yet, there's this pervasive rumor out there that they might support a candidate who is a serial adulterer,  and on his third marriage? Now that would give us a crystal clear view of what their mission is really all about - wouldn't it?

Rick Perry is an Ass

I know I am really late to this game (lots and lots of company), but the honest truth is, Rick Perry so repulses me I've decided to ignore him as much as possible. But because there have been so many great rebuttal video clips to the latest ridiculous ad put out by the "good" Christian Texas dim-bulb, I'm making an exception today. But first let's watch the idiotic ad that has racked up 568,476 (and counting) "dislikes" on the You Tube page (because someone was too stupid to turn that feature off) to a meager 16,634 "likes" and prompted TIME to write:

It (the ad) was clearly intended to elicit a strong reaction, and don’t think that that jaw-dropping comparison went unnoticed. In just a few days, the video garnered scores of negative reactions on YouTube and, at the time of writing, 399,152 dislikes. Just to put that into perspective, that’s more dislikes than viral star Rebecca Black’s video for “Friday” has received, and that song was the butt of endless jokes for months on end. Her official video is currently at 255,704 dislikes. She’s practically adored compared to Perry! (Though, to be fair, the Huffington Post points out that Justin Bieber’s “Baby” is the most hated clip by far, with more than 2 million dislikes.)

So if you haven't seen this ad yet, here it is:




And because there are too many really good rebuttal ads, some funny, some serious, some downright crude, to post here, I've decided to share one that I found especially powerful and sincere. I saw it over at TPC and I liked it so much I decided to share it over at my place as well. This clip should be a wake-up call to the GOP (but it won't be). These young ladies perfectly represent the next generation coming of age to vote and they don't look kindly on hijacking the Christian Faith for political purposes or demeaning and dehumanizing minorities for political gain:



And then there are the crude responses to Perry's dufus ad and because I have some of my kids home for the holidays and more on the way, I am feeling especially sophomoric and silly and goofy today, so I am posting one that definitely could be classified as potty humor on the back page. So you'll have to decide whether to click over and watch it or not. But honestly, it depicts exactly what I was seeing in my own mind (cellulite and dimples and all) as I watched this world class idiot preen in front of the camera, bragging about what a great Christian he is while acting like a world class hateful dumb-ass.

A Tennessee mom's thoughts on the impending "Don't Say Gay" bill before the state legislature

Posted without commentary. This mom says it all without saying a word.



Via Jeff Wilfahrt

Related:  Dear Tennessee, your lawmakers are homophobic fools ...

This breaks my heart

This is a video clip made and posted by a bullied 7th grader last August. Apparently it is just now going viral. So I want to do my part to keep it going.



Via: JMG