The Bilerico Project

How Mitt Romney Learned to Rule the World

Alex Blaze — Fri, 11 May 2012 10:45:00 -0500

Bil posted yesterday about Mitt Romney's days as a violent bully back in the 60's. The Washington Post had five witnesses who independently verified the story, the Boston Globe has a sixth. The short version is that Romney led others in holding down a kid and cutting off his hair and would shout "atta-girl" at another student who was perceived as gay when he spoke in class, but both articles are worth reading for the whole story.

Romney has several excuses for the whole thing:

he does not remember the incident (even though six classmates, some of whom sound fairly Republican, all do),
even though he doesn't remember the incident, he's absolutely sure he didn't do it because the kids were gay since there were no gay kids in the 60's,
he's had a bunch of kids who also had a bunch of kids, which means that his past is erased or something,
why can't we talk about stuff that's relevant, like how he stole pensions from workers in Kansas City?
it's funny, something to laugh about with Brian Kilmeade, and
he's sorry for any incident that "may have gone too far."

A few years ago I worked at a summer camp for future Bain-esque boys whose b/millionaire parents sent them there to toughen them up. Unlike my fairly middle class upbringing, these kids weren't taught to meticulously follow the rules. Instead, they could do pretty much anything they wanted to do so long as they were tough little men about it, and that included bullying and fighting.

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French Elections: LGBT Rights Could Be Coming Soon to France

Alex Blaze — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:00:00 -0500

Socialist François Hollande has won the first round in the French presidential election. The second round will happen in a couple weeks with only the top two candidates - Hollande and current president Nicolas Sarkozy - and Hollande expected to win.

(Don't let the party name fool you - the French Socialist party is capitalist in ideology but has kept its old name even as it moved to the right. Consider them the French equivalent of honest American progressives, along the lines of the Congressional Progressive Caucus with a few mainstream Dems thrown in because leftwing parties can never maintain purity like rightwingers can.)

Paul Krugman is cheering on an Hollande presidency because he isn't a pro-austerity ideologue, instead a political marshmallow on questions of economics, Europe, and the Euro. My circle of friends here mostly voted for anti-liberal leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is an anti-austerity ideologue. But a mushy Euro social Democrat is still better than France's Berlusconi/Bush.

Economics questions aside, what this means is that same-sex marriage is probably coming to France this year. French pols are better than their American counterparts when it comes to at least trying to keep campaign promises, and Hollande has already promised same-sex marriage.

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Another Teacher Fired for Doing Porn

Alex Blaze — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 17:30:00 -0500

I know that we'll never accept the idea that people who come into contact with children also have sex sometimes when they're not around children, but maybe we can handle it like responsible human beings?

Halas allegedly was cast in the movie under the name Tiffany. Administrators tried to verify the students' claims but couldn't because filters on the school's computers prevent access to pornographic websites.

So administrators distributed a memo to school staff, acknowledging the students' claims but only as unverified rumor. Other teachers then came forward and showed administrators the video that started the rumor on an Internet-connected cellphone.

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Homophobic TV Station Doesn't Get Why Outing Is Wrong

Alex Blaze — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 17:00:00 -0500

Last week I wrote about CBS-LA posting an abundance of identifying information about men arrested in a gay cruising sting. Again, I'm not going to get into the nature of those stings, which law enforcement generally acknowledges do little to nothing to stop public sex (even in this case, lifeguards took the doors off stalls in that bathroom to stop cruising; even they knew the undercover sting wouldn't do anything but ruin people's lives).

To review what CBS-LA did:

They broadcasted names, birth dates, and mug shots of the men arrested on television

They embedded those mug shots in their online story on the sting operation

They created a separate, downloadable PDF with names, birth dates, and mug shots

Usually these stories don't get much attention - a few lefty queer bloggers and a local LGBT publication will pick up it and that's about it. But a mainstream nonprofit, the LA Gay and Lesbian Center, called out CBS and the station responded:

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Homophobia at CBS Los Angeles

Alex Blaze — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 11:00:00 -0500

The homophobic media practice of printing the pictures and names of people arrested in gay sex stings is best left in the 1950's. But it's 2012 and media organizations still think it's fine to out people who haven't been convicted of anything, putting them at risk of spiritual and physical violence to get a few cheap chuckles from readers.

Should men have sex in places where it's illegal to have sex? No. Is it the end of the world that they did? No.

Do we treat straight public sex differently than we do gay public sex? Of course. Straight people are so proud of their public sex that they named a cocktail after it. Straight celebs go on TV to brag about their public sexual exploits. Reality TV stars build careers and brands around how sexual they're willing to get in public. We laugh when straight teens get caught having sex in public (since they can't do it at home in front of their families, the rascals).

When it comes to gay sex, on the other hand, the public wants arrests and names added to sex offender registries. They want people fired and banished from civil society. They want people to suffer.

They want blood.

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The Price of Free Speech

Alex Blaze — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 15:00:00 -0500

I actually get where Maher, etc., are coming from when they say that going after their sponsors is an assault on their free speech rights.

No, they're not right on law, but what does it say about a society where the most valuable speech - speech that can reach millions of people - is pretty much controlled by private interests whose only concern is making money? It's our own little dystopia where the ability of a thought to make a rich person even richer is more important than that thought's ability to create change or shed some light on the truth.

This is because the listeners to Limbaugh's radio show or the TV audience of Maher's old ABC show aren't the customers. Maher and Limbaugh may have worked to build bigger audiences, but the product they're selling is the audience's attention, and their customers are the corporations buying ads.

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Luann: Having a Single Mother Makes You Gay

Alex Blaze — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 14:00:00 -0500

I love the newspaper comics and that was one of my beats way back in the day here at Bilerico. I stopped that because reading the comics I don't like but are widely distributed was taking up too much time. Now I just follow the ones I like.

Luann isn't one of them. I'm not the target audience, so no problem there. It's a strip about a teenage girl and her group of high school friends, which usually involve goofy hijinks and... thinly veiled, immature sexual references. Here's how America's foremost comic critic, Josh Fruhlinger, put it a few years ago:

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Newt Gingrich Doesn't Live Like a Porn Star

Alex Blaze — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:30:00 -0500

John Becker posted an ad his org (Truth Wins Out) is running in Roll Call yesterday, saying that Newt Gingrich "talks like a preacher, lives like a porn star."

I wouldn't be anywhere near the first one to point out how insulting the comparison is to porn stars, including the way the ad ejaculates "porn star" as if it were equivalent to "rapist," "heroin dealer," or "terrorist," so I'll just point out that doing porn does not involve divorcing people when they're sick.

What's intriguing is that there's a man who's had three sexual partners that we know about. He probably had more, but we only know about three. That's nowhere near "porn star."

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Another Way to Fight Anti-Gay Discrimination

Alex Blaze — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 13:00:00 -0500

The New York Times's obituary for the founder of Cracker Barrel brings up something that's still legal in most of the US:

His tone was considerably harsher when it came to defending a January 1991 directive to all the company's restaurants to fire employees "whose sexual preferences fail to demonstrate normal heterosexual values." Mr. Evins's explanation for the edict was that gay people made customers in rural areas uncomfortable. As many as 16 openly or suspected gay employees were promptly fired.

The policy was later overturned by the restaurant's shareholder board.

I visited the in-laws earlier this month. My father-in-law is straight, French, and a retired worker. He didn't go to high school, doesn't speak a word of English, and doesn't know any gay people apart from his son and people he met through him. So sometimes the cultural divide seems great.

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How Not to Prevent Child Molestation

Alex Blaze — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 12:00:00 -0500

Adam posted yesterday about how Fox News got a teacher suspended for doing gay porn in the past. It's hard to tell which is worse, that someone did porn and yet kept on living or that a teacher had sex at some point in the past. Either way, the solution is clearly to ensure that he can never get employment outside the porn industry.

One thing that I'd like to know is how Fox News found out about this. There wouldn't just have to be someone who watches a lot of gay porn at Fox News for them to have stumbled upon this internally; that same person would also have to know the teacher in question. That's a pretty big coincidence.

Most likely it was a parent who decided to call Fox News instead of the school directly, and it would have made for a more complete report to include that fact. But they actually investigated the past of a nobody who was doing nothing illegal and then tried to get him fired, so the rules of journalism don't apply because this simply isn't journalism.

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Radio Lab Investigates the Origin of HIV

Alex Blaze — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 12:00:00 -0500

I listened to an interesting episode of Radio Lab this week, a podcast out of NYC. It was about the concept of Patient Zero, or that there's really one place where a disease (or an idea) starts.

The middle of the show is a segment about HIV that discussed quite a bit of the history that I didn't know. For example, apparently the first transmission of HIV from a chimpanzee to a human happened in 1908 in Cameroon, long before the virus was first isolated and Québécois flight attendants were being blamed for causing it.

The third segment starts with the story of the first out Major League Baseball player, who was drummed out of the league for being gay. He's one of the people ascribed to the position as inventor of the high-five. It probably isn't true, but wouldn't it be cool if a gay man co-invented the high-five? That's so us.

They take a detour in France, saying that it appears in À bout de souffle, a 1960 French film, although I haven't met a French person who knows what a high-five is (Wikipedia's page for the high-five doesn't even have a French translation).

Anyway, it's a great podcast that releases a new episode every couple of weeks. The gay-related content in this one makes it a great episode to start with.

Benetton Pretends to Care about Diversity, Fails Again

Alex Blaze — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 09:00:00 -0500

I don't know if it's just an Indiana thing, but I'd never heard of Benetton before I read Patricia Williams' Alchemy of Race and Rights, where she uses an instance of being refused entrance to a Benetton store for being black to illustrate pretty much every point in the book. The irony of Benetton refusing entrance to a black woman while running ads that glamorized the diverse, neoliberal world order wasn't lost on her readers.

Now Benetton has a new ad campaign that shows world leaders kissing. The one ad that shows the Pope kissing an Egyptian sheik (Mohammed Ahmed al-Tayeb) caused a stir in the Vatican and now Benetton promised to take it down. Isn't Benetton so edgy?

The video report at The Guardian also quotes a French Muslim who doesn't think that the ad is a very good depiction of Islam. If there were people who others should be told to "unhate," there's plenty of material to work with.

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Herman Cain: Real Men Eat Sausage

Alex Blaze — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 15:00:00 -0500

I don't know if it's officially a gaffe or if no one cares, but here's Herman Cain with GQ:

Chris Heath: What can you tell about a man by the type of pizza that he likes?

Herman Cain: [repeats the question aloud, then pauses for a long moment] The more toppings a man has on his pizza, I believe the more manly he is.

Chris Heath: Why is that?

Herman Cain: Because the more manly man is not afraid of abundance. [laughs]

Devin Gordon: Is that purely a meat question?

Herman Cain: A manly man don't want it piled high with vegetables! He would call that a sissy pizza.

There's nothing more manly than longing for a mouthful of nice, hard sausage.

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Sing if You're Glad to Be Gay

Alex Blaze — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 11:00:00 -0500

I found this video on YouTube yesterday for "Glad to Be Gay" by Tom Robinson Band. The song was written in 1978 in the hey-day of London's punk rock scene, not even a decade after homosexuality was legalized in the UK (and still more than two decades before homosexuality was legalized everywhere in the US).

The pub anthem sound of the chorus contrasts with angry verses, but it's not having fun-in-spite-of-being-attacked so much as it's camaraderie-through-shared-anger. Is it just me, or is even more anger heaped on closet cases than on homophobes in that last verse? Lyrics are after the jump.

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Obama Is Not a Radical Leftist

Alex Blaze — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 16:00:00 -0500

This political test has been around for years and digby recently linked it. She also has a discussion of how Obama was in the upper-right quadrant in 2008 based on his Senate record, which, in 2011, doesn't seem surprising at all. The only people who'd reject that assessment are those in the "Obama is a Socialist, Kenyan, Muslim America-hater" and "Obama is a savvy, 57-dimensional chess-playing radical doing the best he can" contingents. The fact that those people aren't just laughed out of our political discourse is a testament to how far to the right America has moved in the last forty years.

I took it again and found myself in the bottom-left corner, as I guessed I would be. I remember taking a similar little test on the Libertarian Party's website when I was 16 and being labeled a straight-up libertarian, which also makes sense since their test would naturally try to lead people to their ideology. That and libertarianism loses its appeal once people start working. (I found the test again but it isn't on the LP's website.)

It isn't serious but it's fun to see where people are on this. I suspect that the way we each define "agree" and "strongly agree" will account for a large part of the difference between where people end up on this thing. I used a lot of stronglies since I don't believe in doing anything halfway.

What about you all?

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