The headline should suffice: “Pat Robertson: God Can ‘Straighten Out’ Your Gay Daughter At Summer Camp”.
Allister Fiend comes to mind.
Be strong.
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Tashman, Brian. “Pat Robertson: God Can ‘Straighten Out’ Your Gay Daughter At Summer Camp”. Right Wing Watch. 27 February 2015.
Do you ever have those moments when you just wonder?
Is this real? Are people actually like this? It is one thing to say these people and ideas exist, but, really, is this real?
Lila Shapiro tries―and valiantly, at that―to explain for Huffington Post:
When asked why they’d come to the National Mall on a recent overcast Saturday, four days before the Supreme Court would hold its latest hearing on same-sex marriage, nearly all of the dozens of people I talked to opened with the same statement, pretty much word for word: “I believe that God’s marriage is between a man and a woman.”
Several added, as an afterthought, “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” — looking at me frankly, as if that settled everything.
This is my third year reporting on the National Organization for Marriage’s annual “March for Marriage.” The past three years have not been kind to opponents of gay marriage in America, who have, with only minor exceptions, lost every significant legal, political and cultural battle they’ve fought. This year’s march was billed by NOM President Brian Brown as “our last, best opportunity to reach the U.S. Supreme Court before they decide whether marriage as it has existed throughout our history is unconstitutional.” But nearly everyone I talked to said they felt that moment had already passed.
“Honestly, I think it might be over,” said Mary, a 27-year-old woman from Virginia who declined to give her last name.
Nearby, two women in long dresses and sun hats were talking about the end of days. “It’s like my daddy always says, we’re going to hell in a handbasket,” said Jaime Smathers, 37, who’d come with her church from Virginia. She didn’t smile as she said it. There is very little joking at the March for Marriage.
Yes.
This is real.
This is happening.
This is what it looks like.
This is what it sounds like.
Naturally, the line seems overused: It all goes downhill from there.
This is what it is.
This is who they are.
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Image note: A Salute to Virtue: Participants in the March For Marriage pray outside the U.S. Supreme Court on April 25, 2015, in Washington, D.C. The Supreme Court meets on April 28 to hear arguments on whether same-sex couples have a constitutional right to wed in the United States, with a final decision expected in June. (PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images)
Shapiro, Lila. “Meet The People Trying To Seize The ‘Last, Best Opportunity’ To Stop Gay Marriage”. The Huffington Post. 27 April 2015.
“Of course, in the American tradition, the idea of elected American officials trying to sabotage American foreign policy, on purpose, brazenly undermining our nation’s attempts at international leadership, seems plainly ridiculous. But in 2015, it’s become an increasingly common Republican tactic.”
This is not a good sign:
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), one of the nation’s most aggressive climate deniers and the man Senate Republicans chose to lead the Senate committee on environmental policy, wasn’t subtle when describing his sabotage ambitions.
“The Tom Cotton letter was an educational effort,” Senator Snowball told the WSJ.
It is impossible to state with appropriate gravity the strangeness of the #GOP47; this really was, once upon a time, out of bounds. And it is, at the very least, foolhardy, if not downright dangerous. The difference between the two is up to voters; if this is the what they expect of governance, the marketplace will respond, and this will be how foreign policy goes. To the other, if this really is as worrisome to Americans as many seem to think it should be―and, yes, that includes the triune staff of This Is (Me, Myself, and I, as the old Gilligan’s Island joke goes)―what will Americans say when a Republican is in office and Democrats are trying to stymie some foreign policy initiative? Is this the way it will go, or will Democrats be expected to play by obsolete rules that will cost them at the ballot box and, as a result, cost everyone else in terms of policy resolution?
If it was good enough for Bush when he negotiated our exit from Iraq, then it is good enough for Obama trying to negotiate against a future nuclear war, or simply haggle over clean air. When Republicans appeal to some version of common sense―should the Senate have a say in this or that?―remember the standard they are appealing against. There is an unfortunate appearance in American politics and governance that we only get around to certain assertions of the right thing when there are other complicating issues. There are plenty who rightly wonder if the president’s skin color is what inspires Republican hatred. Others might suggest that the GOP has simply run out of tricks in opposition to a Democratic president at a time that interrupts their effort to build a warring New American Century. Regardless, however, of what leads to such conservative lunacy, Republicans need to knock it the fuck off.
And, quite frankly, American voters need to make that point. Out in Washington state, Democrats held a supermajority for years, and generally refused to use it; this conforms to an older political model by which such strongarming is considered unseemly. In the face of conservative bullying, however, it has long been a question whether or not this is an appropriate resolution for the question. As Republicans grow their game, perhaps we might look upon Democratic incompetence as a series of opportunities lost for the sake of some dignity that voters don’t give a damn about anymore. In the end, two state Senate Democrats rolled, handing the chamber to Republicans, and once again our sense of obligation―say, funding the schools to meet constitutional requirements―is brought into question as an issue of whether or not it is worth fulfilling those commitments. That is to say, given a chamber to control in our state government, Republicans returned the discussion to whether or not it is financially worth obeying the law.
Perhaps state Democrats should have used their supermajority.
Nonetheless, what will the American people say if Democrats, under a Republican presidential administration, return the favor?
Don’t want them to do that? Then don’t ask them to.
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Benen, Steve. “GOP sees Cotton sabotage strategy as ‘an educational effort'”. msnbc. 27 April 2015.
Well, yeah, that’s embarrassing. Somehow I looked at the calendar wrongly, thought today was the twenty-eighth, and never got my head straight. It is not exactly useful to point out that nobody corrected me; I did this to myself.
That said, oral arguments for marriage equality are tomorrow, which offers one last opportunity to wrap our heads around what is about to happen; I might recommend Lyle Denniston’s overview for SCOTUSblog.
(sigh)
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Denniston, Lyle. “Same-sex marriage: The decisive questions”. SCOTUSblog. 26 April 2015.
This Is 