This is going to be a quickie, since it’s my husband’s birthday and we’re off to do some furniture shopping as well as celebrate. Also, I’m avoiding answering the phone since some of my family members escalated the grieving process to the crying and screaming at each other stage earlier than I expected. I had thought that wouldn’t happen until after the person who just entered hospice care had actually died. But the dying man is a lifelong abuser, so I should have realized he’d drive people to turn on each other at least one more time.
While we’re on the subject of evil, abusive men, let’s talk about one that didn’t raise me…
Betty Powers footnotes former House Majority Leader, Tom Delay’s, letter for us. (Click to embiggen)Hey, so a couple dozen of the people who wrote letters asking for leniency for admitted child molester and former Republican Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, agreed to allow their identities and the contents of the letters made public (which was the condition the judge insisted on before he would look at any of them). That’s a bit less than half the letters the lawyers originally tried to submit under seal: Tom Delay and ex-CIA director among those who ask judge to go easy on Dennis Hastert.
He’s not being charged with the molestation, which drove at least one of the boys to commit suicide, because conveniently there’s a statute of limitations on sexually molesting children: Dennis Hastert Case Renews Debate Over Sex Crime Statute of Limitations. I think Eileen McNamara, a journalism professor at Brandeis University, puts it best in a quote from that last article:
“Why should a rape victim’s access to the courthouse depend on when the crime was committed?” McNamara wrote then. “There is no statute of limitations on murder because no one thinks the passage of time should shield a killer from answering for his crime. Why should perpetrators of the soul-killing act of rape have such a legal escape hatch?”
Why, indeed, do these hypocrites who rail against other people’s sexuality, and use it to deprive queers, women, and others of civil rights, keep being given these escape hatches?
I’ve written a few times about the case of former Republican Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, who has pled guilty to charges of trying to illegally conceal large cash transfers he made to pay millions of dollars in hush money in order to prevent the public from learning that while he was a high school wrestling coach he molested at least four of the boys under his supervision. The sexual assaults occurred long enough ago that due to a statute of limitations on such crimes, Hastert can’t be charged with the molestation. (Which prompted the Daily Show to point out, “You’d think something as awful as molesting children would have no statute of limitations”, because things like parking tickets have no statute of limitations, for example.)
There was one interesting little twist this week as Hastert’s sentencing date approaches: The judge in Dennis Hastert’s hush-money case says that if the former House speaker wants letters of support considered during his sentencing, they must be made public. Hastert’s lawyers have drummed up 60 letters of support from various people asking the judge for leniency. However, those letters have been submitted under seal, keeping the identity of the letter writers and the contents of the letters private. Presumably because most of the people (if not all) who wrote the letters only agreed to do so on condition of anonymity. Because no one, particularly no elected official, wants to go on record supporting a child molester. The judge has rightfully pointed out that ordinarily such leniency pleas are part of the public record.
I’ve been harping on Hastert because he was an anti-gay politician when he was in Congress, going so far as to, after promising the parents of Matthew Shephard (who was murdered in a gruesome hate crime) to help pass a hate crime’s bill, actually did everything in his power to kill it (and succeeded). Some reporters have tried to claim that Hastert wasn’t that anti-gay, or at least not as anti-gay as some of his fellow Republicans. Michelangelo Signorile begs to differ: How Dennis Hastert Demonized Gays as Predators While He Was the True ‘Super-Predator’
The records show that Hastert’s office kept a legislative file titled “Homosexuals,” filled with policy statements from social conservative groups like the Traditional Values Coalition and the Family Research Council that criticized same-sex marriage and Clinton administration efforts to prevent discrimination against gays and lesbians. The file also includes a 1996 Weekly Standard article, “Pedophilia Chic” that warned that “revisionist suggestions about pedophilia” were being embraced by the left…
…What was curiously not in Hastert’s files, according to the Politico report, was anything about the scandal that enveloped former GOP congressman Mark Foley, who was exposed in 2007 for having sent sexually explicit messages to teenage boys in the House page program. Hastert in fact was accused of dragging his feet in dealing with Foley’s activities, his office having known about it for months but either covering it up or simply not acting with the speed expected from the office of a House member who was so concerned about child predators.
New York Daily News front page breaking the scandal (click to embiggen)Hastert, of course, isn’t the only Republican who demonized some people’s sexual lives while engaging is sexual misconduct himself: Cosponsor of Tenn. Transphobic Bill Accused of Sexual Harassment Not just accused—the accusations have been around for months—what has finally happened is the Attorney General’s office has found sufficient evidence against GOP Rep. Jeremy Durham that the rest of the legislature felt compelled to act, and has exiled him to an office in another building and essentially quarantined him from any contact with woman on any legislative staff position. I am very amused at Think Progress’s headline earlier this week about it: The Surprising Sexual Harassment Scandal Accompanying Tennessee’s Anti-Transgender Bill, because the only thing that any reasonable person should find surprising about this is that his fellow republicans have taken any action against their fellow family values champion at all.
And remember those statute of limitations laws in various states that shield child molesters, while letting other, far less severe crimes be punished many many years later. You want to know how those laws came to exist? Disgraced Former NY Assembly Speaker had affairs with at least two women — one a lobbyist, the other a former assemblywoman, court papers show According to records unsealed this week, former New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver had affairs with two women, one of whom is a former aide turned lobbyist who was hired by the Catholic Church to pressure legislators against a bill that would have extended the time period in which victims of molestation could sue their attackers. Sheldon dropped his support for the bill once his former aide/mistress began lobbying against it. So the sex criminals being shielded were pedophile priests whose victims didn’t speak up while they were still children. Again.
And I have to ask once again, why do any of us ever take any of these anti-sex, anti-gay politicians seriously? There is not one single case of someone using a trans rights law to try to sexually assault someone, but there are hundreds of cases of anti-gay, pro-family elected officials molesting children, sexually harassing or assaulting people, having extramarital affairs, taking their same sex “photographer” who also happens to live with them on taxpayer-funded junkets, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
When the former Republican Speaker of the House was a high school wrestling coach he sexually molested male students. (Click to embiggen)If you’re an adult queer person trying to live openly in this so-called land of the free, Republicans want to be able to discriminate against you with impunity, while telling you that your very existence is destroying America and that you are going to burn in hell. But, if you’re a retired Republican congressperson who used to molest high school boys (the youngest identified by prosecutors was 14 at the time of the abuse) back when you were a high school teacher (Hastert Molested at Least Four Boys, Prosecutors Say), well then, of course, they want people to forgive and forget: While former House Speaker Dennis Hastert asks for leniency, media recounts corruption allegations. His lawyers have gone so far as to contact the family of one of the boys he molested, and asked them to write a letter asking for leniency because of all the “help” Hastert gave to the man later?
I really don’t understand why anyone, particularly in the media, doesn’t immediately assume that a legislator or prosecutor or governor who pushes for anti-gay bills has a scandalous sexual secret. I mean, when someone can create an entire web site to chronicling the prominent anti-gay folks who are later caught in a gay sex scandal: GayHomophobe.com, it’s time to stop turning a blind eye to the issue!
I already ranted last night about it: Blood stains on their hands, but it is really difficult to let it go. People I knew and loved went to early graves as a direct result of the indifference, contempt, and utter lack of compassion of an entire administration. It wasn’t just them, I know. One of the examples I gave last night was a preacher who had nothing to do with either one of the Reagans. But they were in a position of leadership. They were there when one of the world’s leading experts on epidemics made the case for why government action was desperately needed, and they responded by saying that it wasn’t actually a health crisis. Never mind that it is a virus, never mind that it was killing hundreds, then thousands of people. They laughed. Go listen to that recording I linked to last night, and think about it for a minute: hundreds of young people dying in horrible pain, and they laughed.
It’s hard for one ugly episode to stand out among so many ugly aspects of the Reagan administration, but Nancy and Ronald’s deliberate silence on one of the defining public health crises of the era is surely near the top of any list. What Clinton is saying isn’t just untrue, but erases the deadly legacy of the Reagan era.
I agree with each word of the headline. Especially the inexplicable part. Why? When Bill Clinton was running against George H.W. Bush for President in 1992, Bill and Hillary both talked publicly about the inadequate attention that the Bush and Reagan administrations had given to AIDS/HIV research, and assistance to people both inside and outside the U.S. suffering and dying because of HIV. Queers came out in unprecedented numbers to support and donate to Clinton’s campaign, because they made us believe that they saw us as human, which is something we didn’t see from either Bush or the Reagans. She knew that the Reagan administration had not just ignored AIDS, but actively impeded medical research and aid programs.
Hours later, Clinton offered a tepid apology: Hillary Clinton apologizes for praising Nancy Reagan’s response to HIV/AIDS. She misspoke? If it had been a brief comment where she had merely mentioned AIDS alongside Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, which were illnesses Nancy Reagan spoke out on later in life, breaking with Republican rhetoric against stem-cell research at the time, I might be able to believe that she misspoke. But Hilary had a long lead up to that. She said how difficult it was for anyone to talk about HIV/AIDS during the 80s, and so on. That wasn’t just a poor choice of words or a matter of mentioning one disease along with others. That was a well-thought out, planned talking point. And it was more than just a minor factual error, it was a whole pile of lies!
I know that there are other big things going on in the world that we could be talking about. The Nazi-salute throwing lady at the Trump rally, or the insane attempt by the big bully himself and his supporters to claim that their decision to cancel an appearance rather than face protestors means that they are victims (when they’ve been the ones literally attacking, punching, and violently tackling people who they only suspect might be protestors). Or people dying in floods in Louisiana and Texas. There are refugee crises and consequences and many more things to worry about, yes.
“Black Sheep” was written by Karen Finley and intended as a public poem. It opens with:
After a funeral someone said to me –
You know I only see you at funerals
it’s been 3 since June –
been 5 since June for me –
He said I’ve made a vow –
I only go to death parties if I know someone before
they were sick –
Why?
cause – cause – cause I feel I feel so
sad cause I never knew their life –
and now I only know their death
And because we are members of the
Black Sheep family –
In the middle it observes:
We’re related to people we love who can’t say –
I love you Black Sheep daughter
I love you Black Sheep son –
I love you outcast, I love you outsider
But tonight we love each other –
That’s why we’re here –
to be around others like ourselves –
So it doesn’t hurt quite so much –
In our world, our temple of difference –
I am at my loneliest when I have
something to celebrate and try
to share it with those I love but
who don’t love me back.
There’s always silence at the end
of the phone –
There’s always silence at the end
of the phone –
The full text is available at the Creative Time archive here.
Silence = Death became a rallying cry that led to the formation of ACT-UP as the queer community declared, ‘silence about the oppression and annihilation of gay people must be broken as a matter of our survival.’ “I included three links in this morning’s link post that were less than complimentary of former First Lady Nancy Reagan. That was a limited list. A whole lot more went across my social streams this week. I tried to limit it only to criticisms of things she had been directly involved in. I wasn’t going to say anything more about her. I hoped to avoid any coverage of her funeral. I tried. Oh, I tried.
Every year on December 1st, because it is World AIDS Day, I post a list of names. They are the names of people I knew personally who died from complications of AIDS. Those names are: Frank, Mike, Tim, David, Todd, Chet, Jim, Steve, Brian, Rick, Stacy, Phil, Mark, Michael, Jerry, Walt, Charles, Thomas, Mike, Richard, Bob, Mikey, James, Lisa, Todd, Kerry, Glen, and Jack.
Let me be clear, that isn’t every single person I knew who died from the disease. Those are only the ones I knew well enough that I cry when I type their name. Yes, I’m crying now. I have been alternating between crying and shaking with rage since reading that Hilary Clinton said, “The Reagans, particularly Nancy, helped start ‘a national conversation’ about HIV and AIDS.” And then went on to describe her as an advocate for AIDS research!
I get it. Nancy Reagan just died, and Hilary’s a politician on a national stage and is expected only to say nice things about the recently deceased. Fine. Compliment Mrs Reagan on bucking the rest of the Republican establishment and coming out in favor of stem-cell research. Never mind that it was for selfish reasons, at least it was for a worthy goal. But the Reagans absolutely did not open a national conversation about HIV and AIDS. We in the queer community had been shouting, begging the powers that be to do something, anything about it for five years (while tens of thousands in the U.S. were infected, and thousands died) before President Reagan actually mentioned the name of the disease in public. It took another two years before he referred to it as a health crisis—and don’t forget that Reagan recommended a $10-million cut in AIDS research spending the same year that the U.S. death toll reached 5,500.
Listen to this recording of a Whitehouse press briefing when a reporter asks about the Whitehouse’s reaction to a Center for Disease Control bulletin about A-I-D-S, “also called the gay cancer” officially labelling it an epidemic:
You almost can’t hear the reporter ask, “In other words, the White House looks on this as a great joke?” because everyone keeps laughing.
As I mentioned above, that list I post every year consists only of the people I knew well enough that I still cry thinking about them decades later. Through the early nineties, my late husband and I went to more funerals and memorial services than I can count. Many of them were people he had known before we met. Some of them were friends, lovers, or relatives of people one or the other of us knew, but we hadn’t been particularly close to the deceased ourselves. We went to the services to support the people who were mourning the death. We went to the services because sometimes the deceased’s own families wouldn’t attend. Sometimes we held services separate from the family’s because the partner/lover/life-long companion was barred from the official funeral by the family.
There was more than one time that we had to choose which memorial service to go to, because more than one was happening at the same time, and too far apart for us to attend a part of both. So many people were dying, we had to choose who not to comfort, because at the point when research and medical intervention could have limited the spread of the disease, people at the Whitehouse had been laughing at our suffering and dying.
And then to have Clinton, who has tried to portray herself as an ally of the queer community, praise Nancy for being an advocate for AIDS research? That’s when I lost it.
I was deeply closeted in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I had only a very small number of sexual encounters with other men during the time when so many were getting infected with the virus that no one knew existed. Even with that limited exposure, it is shear luck that I’m alive to bear witness to those years. Even though I wasn’t out, once the illness had been identified, I was keenly aware of how ordinary Americans perceived it. One of the most chilling moments for me came while sitting in a pew of a church in 1984. Our heads were all bowed in prayer, and the visiting pastor leading the prayer actually thanked god for the “plague of AIDS which you have sent to exterminate the homosexuals.”
Reading Clinton’s comments took me back to that moment. People like Nancy Reagan were not having a conversation about how to save people from AIDS, nor were they advocating for research for a cure. People like Nancy Reagan were thanking god for our suffering.
Never mind that Jesus commanded his followers to take care of the sick. He didn’t say to care for the sick that we deemed worthy. He didn’t say to care for the sick that lived a specific lifestyle. He specifically said to care for the sick, and people in prisons, and other outcasts of society. He said that the way you treated those outcasts was how you treated him. And he said that anyone who came to him on the day of judgment and had not cared for the sick, prisoners, outcasts, and the other “least of these” would be cast out of heaven and into the eternal fire; because they were not following his commandment.
But we’re not supposed to say anything like that about a famous person who has died. Even if she refused to raise a finger to help one dying friend get medical treatment. And apparently especially if she helped impede access to treatment for hundreds of thousands of people who were sick and dying. We’re apparently supposed to lie and say that she helped the very people whose blood is on her hands.
Make America Hate Again (Click to embiggen)Often my Saturday posts are about news stories I saw after posting my regular Friday Links that would have gone into the links if I had seen them earlier. Others are literal updates to a news story I had linked to on Friday which has had further developments. This is sort of the latter case, in that I had several links about this yesterday, but this isn’t really about new developments. Rather, I want to more explicitly gather my thoughts about the Frankenstein’s Monster that the Republican party has been creating for about fifty years.
Look back to the 1964 Presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater. As a Senator, Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, while claiming that he didn’t oppose civil rights for racial minorities. He just wanted civil rights to be handled at a state’s level (sound familiar?). A lot of his campaign rhetoric was about state’s rights and law and order. These were dog whistles for those white voters who felt their personal safety and economic security were threatened by non-whites.
Nixon carried on the tradition. Nixon is often credited with formally crafting the Republican’s Southern Strategy, which was to convince white working class “Dixiecrats” to abandon the Democrats and support Republicans by appealing to their racial anxieties. Nixon’s talk during the 1968 campaign of state’s rights, local control, and law and order in regards to civil rights questions and so forth seemed almost tame because George Wallace was mounting an openly segregationist campaign as the American Independent Party nominee. In private conversations with his campaign manager and supporters, Nixon worried that Wallace would capture too much of the anti-desegregation and anti-civil rights vote for the Republicans to win.
Reagan capitalized on the racial dog whistles even more, giving his strongest pro-state’s rights speech on the 1980 campaign trail in the very county in Mississippi where three civil rights activist had been murdered in 1964 for protesting the state right to segregate the races. By dog-whistle I mean political messaging using coded language which appears to mean one thing to the general population but has a different and more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup.
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*gger, n*gger, n*gger.” By 1968, you can’t say “n*gger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. …I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N*gger, n*gger.”
— Lee Atwater, Republican Party strategist in an anonymous interview in 1981
I could go on and on about how the Republicans have played a wink and nod game of saying things that didn’t sound racist in a way that clearly communicated to the racists that they were welcome in the party. Which brings us to this: Polite Hypocrite Angry that Rude Hypocrite Might Become His Party’s Nominee .
Mitt Romney lecturing Trump for being racist! Mitt Romney, who used the phrase “self-deportation” to politely say that he thought all those darn Mexican workers who are here doing jobs American citizens actually won’t take (at least that the pay that the American employers want to pay) that they aren’t welcome. Mitt Romney, who said that Obama only beat him by promising poor and black voters “free stuff.”
Here’s the thing: at no point in the campaign before the recent kerfuffles did any of the other Republican nominees differ with Trump on the notion of opposing any pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Heck, earlier in the campaign they were all fighting to show which of them was willing to be tougher about things like “anchor babies” and securing the border. At no point did any of the nominees differ with Trump on the notion that the Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality was wrong. At no point did any of the nominees differ with Trump on the notion of using enhanced interrogation techniques.
They’re been upset that he’s been blatant about it.
But every one of them is just as racist, just as misogynist, just as homophobic, just as eager to bomb entire countries out of existence, just as eager to torture people, and so on.
They aren’t upset about his beliefs. They’re upset that he isn’t talking in their polite code phrases. They’re upset that instead of using dog whistles, he’s using a bullhorn.
10 year old hero Kiera Larsen died pushing 2 toddlers out the way of a car.So, a 10-year-old girl knew what to do when there was danger: Girl, 10, Fatally Struck While Pushing Toddlers Out of Runaway Vehicle’s Way in San Diego County. She’s a hero who didn’t even have time to think about what she was doing. It’s a story that should bring at least a tear to your eye. Hit the link. There’s a GoFundMe page to help her parents with funeral and medical expenses.
And there’s an investigation. Of course there is. A parked car rolled out and someone died. I don’t expect that the investigation will lead to anything particularly revelatory. Parking brake failure, maybe. I suspect I’m going to find myself being even more anal than usual about double-checking the parking brake on my car for a while after reading this.
And please, don’t tell me that there’s nothing we could do to reduce these. After a 35 people were killed in a single incident in Port Arthur, Australia, that country decided to do something about it: How Australia Eliminated Mass Shootings. It wouldn’t be as easy in the U.S., because the shear number of guns per capita here is much, much worse. That article includes some of the arguments about why the specific measures Australia took won’t work here. But like most other articles and arguments about this, it focuses on only part of the solution. The real solution was that a majority of Australians refused to accept that there was nothing which could be done, and agreed that it was time to do something.
Our refusal to even contemplate that we could change our attitudes is the only thing that’s stopping us from reducing the number of needless deaths.
I knew both authors for one beloved book each. For Harper Lee it was because she never wrote another book after To Kill a Mockingbird. For Umberto Eco I don’t have that excuse. I loved The Name of the Rose, and usually when I love a book, I actively seek out others by the author. I distinctly remember reading the back cover synopsis of Foucault’s Pendulum in a bookstore once and not being terribly interested. I have no idea why I never looked for anything else he wrote.
It’s very sad to lose them both.
If you’ve never read either To Kill a Mockingbird or The Name of the Rose, there’s no better time than now!
Speaking of beloved books: How One Mashup Artist Got Legal Permission to Pair Calvin & Hobbes with Dune. It’s pretty awesome. With the permission of Bill Watterson, the artist takes Calvin & Hobbes comic strips and replaces the dialog with extensive quotes from various Dune books creating some really interesting results.
“The very idea of the power and right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey established government.” George Washington, Farewell Address, September 17, 1796I had several links queued up related to the final holdouts of the Oregon Militia for yesterday’s Friday links, since the last militia members were finally arrested this week, but none of them conveyed anything useful except the fact that they were arrested. And I decided that wasn’t enough of interest to include with all the other links. Then Friday afternoon I saw this article: Dear Oregon Militia, Here’s why no one feels sorry for you and rejects your mission built on conservative Christian rage. Take it away:
The more the occupiers talked, the more obvious it became that they were not fierce warriors ready to die for a noble cause, but a bunch of fantasists who, bitter because white Christian conservatives don’t get the social deference they believe they deserve, have turned to conspiracy theories and other right wing argle-bargle in order to justify their sense that not being catered to is the same thing as being oppressed.
And:
…Slate’s Jacob Brogan live-tweeted the stream, and what struck him right away was “the combination of ideological incoherence and aggressive uncertainty.” They refused to recognize the authority of federal agents on federal land, as if wishing hard enough would make it go away. Their chatter suggested they “are intellectually and ideologically incommensurable even to one another”.
“All they seem to share are abstract reference points: guns, liberty, tyranny. No collective notion of how those things connect,” Brogan added. No big surprise, really. It seems at least a couple of them, possibly all, are deeply troubled people, drawn to this out of a sense of drama and not because they have a coherent or principled belief system to stand up for.
We’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, no matter how hateful, odious, or bigoted they were. As one person pointed out on twitter, I’m sure when Emperor Palpatine died at the end of Return of the Jedi there was an army of white dudes at the celebrations like, “A man is dead. Show some respect.”
Maybe I should show some respect. But it’s hard to respect someone who argued so vehemently in favor of torture, and not just argued, but legally enabled it. A man who compared homosexuality to murder, polygamy, and cruelty to animals and used those arguments and his vote on the Supreme Court to thwart the rights of gay people for many years doesn’t deserve any respect. A man who said (less than three months ago) that granting civil rights to gay people made as little sense as doing so to child molesters does not deserve any respect.
I prefer the advice of Charles Finch, “If you want to feel sad, go ahead and think about all the gay people who died alone because their spouses didn’t have visitation rights.”
If you want to feel sad, go ahead and think about all the gay people who died alone because their spouses didn't have visitation rights.
Can’t you just feel the Christian love oozing from the sign?I’ve been talking about it and linking to the stories about it all week. The infamous Harlem church with its even more infamous hate-spewing church sign has been ordered into a foreclosure auction due to over a million dollars in unpaid utility bills, plus ten of thousands in unpaid building permit-related fines, and hundreds of thousands in tax-related liens. And the Ali Forney Center, a charity that provides support, shelter, and nourishment to homeless youth and a safe place for LGBTQ youth, is trying to raise the money to make a bid on the building and turn it into a shelter and a retail operation to raise funds and provide job training to homeless queer kids: So close: Ali Forney Center has already raised $186,073 towards buying antigay ‘Harlem hate church’ I just checked this morning, and they’re over $190,000!
I really like this story about it: GAY GROUPS SEEK TO BUY NYC CHURCH KNOWN FOR HATEFUL MESSAGES because of the quotes from the neighbors of the church, including the lady who lives across the street who started fundraising for the Ali Forney’s bid as soon as she heard about it.
Meanwhile, just a few days after Donald Trump had vowed yet again to overturn the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling if elected, he’s suddenly claiming that he would be a champion of gay rights. Seriously. Not surprising, since New Hampshire republicans actually boo-ed Republican candidates at debates as far back as 2008 when they started making anti-gay statements. New Hampshire only had civil unions back then, but those had passed with overwhelming Republican and Democratic voter support. New Hampshire Republican voters have been far less anti-gay than Republicans elsewhere for a long time.
I don’t know if he thinks the pro gay voters in New Hampshire are stupid enough to fall for it, not to mention how his current supporters will react to this sudden flip-flop. Maybe he just assumes that the majority of his angry hateful supporters won’t care? I don’t know.
I had an old friend from High School scold me this week for posting a link to a story critical of Trump. Not that he’s not critical of Trump; he was angry about the characterization that Trump is a Republican front-runner, because he believes that real Republicans aren’t fooled by Trump’s hatred.
The bottom line, for me, is that it doesn’t matter which clown gets the Republican nomination: they’re all anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-poor… it will be a disaster if any of them when the White House.
Font Folly 