July 20, 2016

Will You Stop Being Mean to Log Cabin Republicans? (Spoiler: No, I Will Not.)

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As for the rank and file of the LGBT community, Paul, we're mad at LCR and our anger is not misplaced.

This is the worst GOP platform ever. That’s all LCR has to show for nearly forty years of what exactly? Forty years of trying to change the GOP from within? No. Forty years of lying to the LGBT community about the Republican Party and forty years of complicity in Republican attacks on the LGBT community.

I'm not just talking about LCR's long and ignominious history of endorsing anti-LGBT politicians. It's worse than that. LCR isn't just guilty of endorsing shitty anti-gay bigots — George W. Bush over Al Gore 2000; John McCain (and Sarah Palin!) over Barack Obama in 2008; Mitt Romney over Barack Obama in 2012 (despite Romney's support for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, his opposition to gays and lesbians serving openly in the military, and his support for discrimination against LGBT people in employment and housing) — LCR is also guilty of providing cover for anti-LGBT Republicans. While anti-LGBT bigotry still plays well with the "rank and file" of the GOP base, it doesn't play well with moderate and independent voters. Log Cabin Republicans and other gay Republicans are used — they allow themselves to be used — the same way Ben Carson and Herman Cane allow themselves to be used and Colin Powell once allowed himself to be used. ("Our policies can't be racist! We aren't the party of white grievance, deafening dog whistles, Lee Atwater, Willie Hortan, "welfare queens," Donald Trump, and the Southern Strategy. Look! Over there! It's Ben Carson!&quot

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Read the whole thing! (ETA: Guess it would help if I added a link!)

July 3, 2016

Anti-Semitism Is Back. Will You Stand By Or Stand up?

THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP!

Erin Schrode, a promising 25-year-old Jewish woman, announces her candidacy for U.S. Congress. In response, she is bombarded by hundreds of anti-Semitic messages: “Fire up the oven.” “Kike.” “Get out of my country, kike. Get to Israel where you belong. That or the oven. Take your pick.” This did not happen in the 1930s. It happened last month in California.

An Oberlin College professor, Joy Karega, posted a photo of Jacob Rothschild, a member of a well-known Jewish banking family, which read: “We own nearly every central bank in the world. We financed both sides of every war since Napoleon. We own your news, the media, your oil and your government.” This was not published in Gleichschaltung, a Nazi newspaper. This was on her Facebook page.

Students at UC Berkley woke up one morning this past year to the words, “Zionists should be sent to the gas chamber” painted on a building.

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Suddenly, mainstream culture is finding cover for the age-old hatred of Jews. They’ve figured it out. So long as the attack is lightly-battered and flash fried in a light coat of anti-Israel sentiment, and as long as you pretend you are fighting for “human rights,” the rise of anti-Semitism is socially acceptable. It shouldn’t be. It’s can’t be. Not again.

more...

July 3, 2016

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference." Elie Wiesel

The secure world of Wiesel's childhood ended abruptly with the arrival of the Nazis in Sighet in 1944. The Jewish inhabitants of the village were deported en masse to concentration camps in Poland. The 15-year-old boy was separated from his mother and sister immediately on arrival in Auschwitz. He never saw them again. He managed to remain with his father for the next year as they were worked almost to death, starved, beaten, and shuttled from camp to camp on foot, or in open cattle cars, in driving snow, without food, proper shoes, or clothing. In the last months of the war, Wiesel's father succumbed to dysentery, starvation, exhaustion and exposure. source