More GOP "extremist" positions about republican Senator

[Gimpy]

Equal Rights is the Responsibility of Every American
By Governor Howard Dean
t r u t h o u t | Exclusive Editorial

Sunday 27 April 2003

George W. Bush ran for President on the promise that he would be ``a uniter, not a divider.'' Nothing could be further from the truth. Earlier this week, Senator Rick Santorum, the third highest ranking Republican in the Senate, compared homosexuality to bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery. On Friday, President Bush praised Santorum as ``an inclusive man.'' With his praise, this President has once again demonstrated his willingness to follow the extremist Republican tradition of dividing our country for political gain. The President knows that his defense of Santorum's inflammatory words deeply offends millions of gay and lesbian Americans, their family and friends; his praise also raises grave concerns about this Administration's commitment to civil rights and civil liberties.

Senator Santorum has called his repugnant remarks ``a legitimate public policy discussion.'' Senator Santorum is wrong. Equating the private, consensual activities of adults to the molestation of minors is not a policy discussion. It is gay-bashing, and it is immoral.

Senator Santorum asserted that the government has the right ``to limit individuals' wants and passions.'' While the government has the right to protect citizens from the harmful acts of others, as well as an obligation to promote the general welfare of all people, I do not believe that it is the proper role of government to step into the private bedrooms of consenting adults. The continuous assault by right-wing radicals on the privacy of ordinary Americans must stop.

Senator Santorum must step down from his leadership post. His failure to recognize that it is wrong to attack people because of which group they belong to makes him unfit to hold a leadership position in the United States Senate.

The issue at hand is about more than Senator Santorum's reprehensible statements, however, and the issue is also about more than the dignity and respect of gay and lesbian Americans.

The issue is whether we, as Americans, will continue to allow ourselves to be led down a path by this Administration to a country that is divided against itself by race, income, gender, sexual orientation and religion.

Senator Santorum's remarks do not exist in isolation. In January, President Bush went on national television to discuss the Supreme Court's hearing of the University of Michigan's affirmative action case. One of the most despicable moments of this President's Administration occurred when, on national prime time television, he used the word "quotas" repeatedly to describe the University of Michigan's admissions policy.

President Bush knows that the University of Michigan does not now have, and has never had, quotas. His use of the race-loaded word "quota" is intended to incite people's fears of losing their jobs, or their positions in America's leading universities, to minorities. Such rhetoric, which is designed to appease the extreme right-wing of the Republican Party and to appeal to Americans' worst instincts, betrays the guiding principle that America is a nation in which all people are created equal.

Achieving this equality requires moral leadership. It sometimes requires standing against your party's base. It is not moral leadership when the third highest ranking Republican in the Senate intimates that the sexual abuse of minors is no different than the consensual acts of adults, and the President's spokesperson responds by praising that man for ``doing a good job as Senator.''

Three years ago, I signed into law the civil unions bill, a law that guarantees same-sex couples in Vermont the same legal rights as married couples. The Vermont Supreme Court in December of 1999 held that gay and lesbian people were not being provided with equal rights in our state. An hour and a half after that court issued its decision, I told the press and the people of Vermont that I would support a bill making our state the first in the country to provide all Americans with equality under the law. At the time, approximately 35% of the people favored the bill, and 60% were opposed.

I signed the civil unions bill because it was the right thing to do. Those of us who came of age during the civil rights movement have long understood that the strength of America lies in our commitment to equal rights under the law for everyone. Civil unions provide equal inheritance rights, equal hospital visitation rights, and equal insurance rights. Every legal right that I have as a married person, anybody in Vermont can have, including gays and lesbians. Today, Vermont is the only place in America where equal rights under the law means equal rights under the law for every citizen, not just for the people we like or the people we're comfortable with or the people who look like us.

President Bush's and Senator Santorum's remarks remind us that while laws may guarantee equal rights, laws alone do not create equality. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 guarantees equal rights for minorities in this country, but the law did not end racism and prejudice. The civil unions law guarantees equal rights for same-sex couples in Vermont, but the law did not end discrimination toward gays and lesbians.

Creating equality for all requires the personal responsibility of everyone. As Americans, we can no longer tolerate politics of division and still hope to achieve the promise of equality envisioned by our Founding Fathers. The dream of equal rights for all Americans will only be realized when all of us-whether in the corridors of power or in the hallways of our schools and offices-come together to create a community in which bigotry and hatred is cast out from the forum of public discourse. I believe equal rights can be achieved, but it will only be achieved when we have leaders in the highest offices of the land who stop pandering to bigots in exchange for a handful of votes.

[phuloi]

My dear liberal friend:Please read the following for another point of view.It should come as no surprize to you that the majority of Americans subscribe to same.






Associated (with liberals) press
Brent Bozell (archive)


April 30, 2003 | Print | Send


It was a perfectly absurd moment. Patrick Guerriero, the new head of the gay-left Log Cabin Republicans, sat on a sedate, Saturday morning C-SPAN set and declared it was a shame that Sen. Rick Santorum distracted us all from the Iraq war with his hurtful comments on homosexuality.

This was not just absurd because the Log Cabin Republicans did everything but throw balloons of blood at Santorum to get the story humming -- in alliance with the Human Rights Campaign and other gay-left intimidators. It was absurd because the biggest promoter of the Santorum story was the socially liberal Associated Press (AP).

AP spent a week promoting this fraction of Santorum's interview: "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery." AP hyped this comparison by adding the word "gay" between "consensual" and "sex."

Santorum's point was philosophical and legal: Do we want an absolutely unlimited right to privacy? That's where we could be headed with the Texas sodomy case now before the Court.

The absurdity began as the interview was twisted beyond recognition. What better outlet for that than AP? Remember their track record. In the fall of 1998, AP made an obscure murder victim in Laramie, Wyo., a household name, turning the brutal killing of homosexual Matthew Shepard into grist for a countless series of editorials, books, plays and TV "docudramas." A year later, AP shamelessly avoided national coverage of the murder of a 13-year-old Arkansas boy, Jesse Dirkhising. He died from suffocation after being bound, gagged with underwear in his mouth, blindfolded, taped to the bed and sodomized by one gay man while another gay man watched. AP inspired no books, no plays, no movies on this largely anonymous young victim.

Now Santorum has run into the AP's anti-"homophobe" buzzsaw. Supporters pointed out that the reporter who plucked the "intolerant" remarks out of an hour-long interview was Lara Jakes Jordan, the wife of Jim Jordan, who recently headed the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), and now runs John Kerry's presidential campaign. Isn't that noteworthy? Journalists whined this was "blaming the messenger," and lamented cries of bias based on the mere whisper of marital associations.

But look at the story, and how this allegedly objective wire service promoted it like they were selling sunscreen at spring break. You could call the week of April 20 Santorum Resignation Week at AP.

1. The first story was "Family Values Drive Santorum's Politics," a chance for Mrs. Jordan to explain how the senator's beliefs are at odds with the Constitution. She summarized his view: "Homosexuality, feminism, liberalism all undermine the family. Even parts of the Constitution can harm the family." Note the utterly untrue liberal assumption that the Constitution presently insures the right to sodomy.

2. Unsurprisingly, the next day's campaign led with "Gay Groups Urge GOP To Remove Santorum." Mrs. Jordan began by explaining the gay lobby was "fuming over Sen. Rick Santorum's comparison of homosexuality to bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery."

3. On the third day, AP really pressed the accelerator on the story. "Santorum Seeks to Clarify Remarks on Gays," read the inaccurate headline. Santorum did not seek to clarify, saying: "I can't deny that's how I feel."

4. AP also reported "Dems Call for Santorum to Resign Post." This story didn't have Mrs. Jordan's byline -- or anyone else's -- but it did have suspicious fingerprints, because the DSCC, Mr. Jordan's old office, was leading the resignation parade. Several paragraphs later, Mr. Jordan's new office kicked in. "Separately ... John Kerry issued a statement."

5. AP also released a transcript of the gay-related section of the interview, so all of Washington could pick up on the story and presumably be horrified at Santorum's traditionalism.

6. It got increasingly desperate on Day Four: "Dean Calls for Santorum to Resign Post." Far-left presidential candidate Howard Dean, Vermont's guru of gay marriage, objected? How newsworthy.

7. Day Five was pure giggles: "Utah Sect Leader Criticizes Santorum." An 89-year-old polygamist from Utah was Pundit For A Day to keep the story going. This was news?

8. In case Howard Dean wasn't earth-shattering enough, AP added "Chafee Chides Santorum for Gay Remarks." Liberal Lincoln, a Log Cabin Republican supporter, criticizing Santorum? Shocking.

9. Finally, on Day Six, one pro-Santorum headline: "Bush Praises Santorum As 'Inclusive Man.'" Note this was the AP campaign's first use of quotation marks in a headline.

10. On the seventh day, the story expired, with "Sen. Santorum Seen Likely Surviving Flap." That's clearly not the outcome the AP's Washington flap manufacturers wanted. But it died because no one outside AP and the radical left wanted to see Santorum get sacked.

[Andy]

Like you, I?d hate to have "The Office of Bedroom Police" but as has been pointed out, Santorum was basically repeating a Supreme Court decision that has been the law of the land for years.

Vt. has legalized gay marriage and their high court has oked it. However they still have a law that prohibits ?unnatural acts?, that would include sodomy. Also the VT. high court does not trump the Federal supreme Court.

None of that is a big issue and that?s not what I wanted to talk about. You said that Santorum?s comment were bad (in part) because it was in contradiction to our founding fathers views of equality. (Sorry that?s just a paraphrase but I think that?s the point you were making.) Lets not talk about slaves, lets stick to the issue of sex. Yes Jefferson had a long term relationship with his sister-in-law and slave Sally, but that was not unusual in the South, at that point in history. Do you think that Adams or Madison would have been elected president if it was discovered that they had engaged in homosexual acts? Do you think Washington could have been elected if it was know that he was openly gay?

In the late 1700s there were VERY few political leaders anywhere in the US who were not Christian and in those days the church took a very dim view on homosexuality. During those years all 13 states re-wrote their law codes. ALL states made, re-made, laws that specifically made homosexuality a very serious felony, in some cases punished by death. I can?t believe that our founding fathers actually for saw a land where Gay Pride marches would take place in most major cities of the country each year.

Times have changed and we are a more tolerant nation. There is a lesbian couple who lives next door to me and they are great neighbors. However the idea that Santorum would have been bad mouthed by our founding fathers seems like quite a stretch.
If the people who signed the Constitution could come back to life for a day and saw how Santorum is getting beat up by the press over his comments, I'd guess they would comment, "What the hell are you people thinking?"

Stay healthy,
Andy

[Jerry D]

Good Points Andy

[Gimpy]

You keep refering to what "I said"---this is a statement issused by Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont---not ME! Even though I must say I agree with most of his statement. And you're right about ONE thing---the "comment" you made was DEFINATELY a "paraphrase"---cause it ain't even CLOSE to what Dean REALLY said---"we can no longer tolerate politics of division and still hope to achieve the promise of equality envisioned by our Founding Fathers. The dream of equal rights for all Americans will only be realized when all of us-whether in the corridors of power or in the hallways of our schools and offices-come together to create a community in which bigotry and hatred is cast out from the forum of public discourse. I believe equal rights can be achieved, but it will only be achieved when we have leaders in the highest offices of the land who stop pandering to bigots in exchange for a handful of votes."--end quote---THAT'S what he said---AND I agree with him. You're right about something else also, "times HAVE changed"----and I'm SURE if the "founding fathers" were around today they would include these folks as part of their vision for equality and NOT the stupid loud-mouthed politicians who degrade them with statements like Santorums'.

[Andy]

Sorry Gimp, it was Dean?s statement not yours. However I have a lot more respect for your opinion than Dean. (Gov. Dean is considered too far to the left by Ted Kennedy. Of course that might have something to do with Dean and John Kerry of Ma. both running for president.)
I don?t consider gays in the same basket with acts such as incest. However being homosexual is a deviation from the norm. What is bigamy or polygamy? I can?t recall anyone getting arrested in the last 30 years, in this area, for those ?crimes? however there have been a few law suits filed by an angry woman or two. I get really upset when someone files a discrimination law suit saying they didn?t get the job or were fired because they are gay. That is where all this is going, in our area where it's already gone.
See, I like the idea that you do whatever you want to in your bedroom, I?ll do whatever I want to and neither of us should make our preferences public or political. When people do make their bedroom decisions public and political, that?s when there is division.
(Adultery was also thrown into the mix. I?d think gays would like that. How many people have committed adultery in their lives? How many political types engaged in that activity? Adultery really puts gays in the mainstream.)
This Sunday there will be a Gay Pride Parade in Northampton, the town next door. What?s the point? Gay?s can already put their partner on their life insurance, if they work for the state or a town and die the partner can already get survivors benefits, a pension, etc.
I?ve always thought a bigot was a person who hated people because of their race or religion, I?m not a bigot. Disliking people who want to scream in my face telling me what they do in their bedrooms is just obnoxious. As I said before, there is a gay couple who live next door to us. Both are successful, neither cry about being discriminated against. They don?t have any issues with the government. Also, they don?t hold it against my wife and me because we are breeders.
I know it?s different in other parts of the country but some gays around here are a distinct minority group because they Want to be. It gives them special status and it?s more difficult to fire or not hire a person with ?special status?. I do believe in equal rights, everyone should be equal, it's the "special status" Nazis that bother me.

Stay healthy,
Andy

[bbeil]

Well here we go: There is no law that will change any homosexuals point of view nor any heterosexuals for that matter.
Does anyone know of any person changing their sexual preference because of a law being put on the books?
It's a mute point and personal preference when it comes to sex drive in the human anatomy.( However if you bother kids with your warped sex drive, thats another story!)

[Gimpy]

I can't find a lot to disagree with you about regarding your statement. I feel we are pretty close on most of the "subject matter". However, Andy---Websters New Collegiate dictionary 'defines' bigot the following way:----------------- bigot /big-et/n [MF, hypocrite, bigot]; one obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his/or her own opinions and prejudices--

However---I don't particularly like someone "screaming" in my face either about their "bedroom" preferences.

Nuff said.

bbeil---I am in TOTAL agreement with your statement