Episode 20 - GLBT News transcript
GLBT News transcript
Host: phaballa
"[Homosexuality] is [a sin]....You should try to show them a way to deal with that problem, just like alcohol...or sex addiction...or kleptomaniacs."
"One might have that lifestyle, but if one promotes it as acceptable behavior… I don’t think they should be a representative of this country."
"These people are intellectually dishonest in just about everything they do or say… They start by pretending that it is just another form of love. It's sickening."
" 'Hitler and his supporters were Satanists and homosexuals. That's just a true statement. The notion that is involved in homosexuality, the unbridled sort of satisfaction of human passions' leads to 'totalitarianism,' 'Nazism,' and 'communism.' "
These are all statements made by Republican congressmen in the past ten years, the first of which by Trent Lott, who was the Senate majority leader at the time he made the statement. This is the atmosphere that Republican congressmen face on a day-to-day basis. In any other job in, well, okay, about half of the United States, these statements would be regarded as hate speech. They would be harassment.
The summer after my second year of college, I went back to my hometown of Toledo, Ohio, and got a job at the only place that was hiring and didn't involve food service: the Meijer Store. Meijer, for those of you who aren't from the Midwestern United States, is sort of like if you combined a WalMart with a Target and added in a grocery store. I was delighted, mainly because all I had to do was reboot cash registers, but also because instead of the ugly turquoise polo shirts everyone else in my training class had to wear, I got a pretty grey smock, with pockets, and my own cell phone so cashiers could call me when their registers broke.
We went through a week of training as new hires, three days of which was spent on workplace harassment. There were videos and computer games to teach us in a fun yet educational manner how to deal with harassment situations and what the consequences of harassing others might be. So I can tell you that those statements made by those congressmen? Well at the Meijer Store, those guys would be fired. Do not pass go, and please turn in your 12% Employee Discount card to be shredded. Because those sorts of statements are what we in the working world would call "creating a hostile work environment." They call it their platform.
In the past YEAR, the Republicans have had five major gay sex scandals. FIVE! The Democrats? ZERO. And you know why this is? It's because the Republican party's culture doesn't allow for people to be gay. It encourages hatred and homophobia not just in thought, but in practice as well, and so you end up with these men who are self-haters; these gay men who have been taught for decades and decades that something intrinsic and fundamental about themselves is wrong and un-Christian and dirty and evil. Is it any surprise that they try to repress? That they lead secret double lives and end up getting caught?
I'm talking, of course, about Senator Larry Craig of Idaho, who has been charged with soliciting sex from another man in airport bathroom and has been forced by his own party to step down from all his leadership positions and committee chairs and may be forced to resign in the end. Putting aside the idea that soliciting sex in a restroom is still illegal (seriously? So all those times I've walked in on people at bars going at it in the bathrooms, I should've been reporting it to the cops?), this whole scandal seems to me like a simple inevitability, just based on the Republican party's attitudes and statements alone. And you know, I don't like Craig and his voting record makes me want to vomit, but I do feel some sympathy for him over this matter. The hypocrisy of prominent republicans (McCain, Huckabee) trying to force Craig to step down because of a situation they helped create via the culture of hatred and homophobia they perpetuated within their own party disgusts me FAR more than Craig trying to get a blowjob in an airport bathroom.
Democrats don't have this problem because our gay congressmen aren't forced to hide their sexuality. They don't need to become self-haters because (most of) the party respects the LGBT community and it's getting better and better within the party every day. It's things like this that will rip the Republicans apart.
And hey, maybe that's the secret gay agenda all along. If so, we are much sneakier and awesome than I previously suspected.
The saddest thing to me about all of this is that these closeted, self-hating republicans like Mark Foley, Larry Craig, and Ted Haggerty are doing so much more damage to the LGBT community than they are to the Republican party, which seems further fueled and motivated toward hatred by each new scandal. The national chairman of the young republicans, Glenn Murphy, Jr., gets a fellow young republican drunk only for the guy to wake up in the midst of Murphy's attempt at a mouth-to-penis resuscitation, and instead of attempting to help Murphy through what must've been a troubling (and desperate, to attempt blowjobbery on a sleeping colleague) time, they left him high and dry to resign the offices he was elected to by the young republicans, who have subsequently removed all traces of him from their website.
Leading Republicans have said that homosexuality is a disease, a choice, and an anti-American, anti-Christian agenda. The republican party used to be about government-it used to be about the size of government, federalism, and keeping the government out of social issues. But that's no longer the case. Now, it's about one view of morality that some of them, including our President, would like to force on all Americans. A classic tyranny of the minority, as much as I hate to admit that de Tocqueville may have had a valid point. I would say that this tyranny extends itself over the Republican party itself, to such a point that gay Republicans and old school Republicans who believe in Republican economic values but not necessarily the new so-called compassionate conservatism that Bush espouses are being oppressed even more than democrats. When your own team doesn't want you and forces you to hide and hate your true self, what are you supposed to do? Apparently, if you're a United States Senator-soliciting gay sex in public restrooms is the answer.
In my mind, this form of conservatism is the opposite of compassionate, and furthermore, it makes me angry. Angry that because these sorts of Republicans are so full of ignorance and hate, I have to be compassionate for them. Especially when all they really wanted was a little mouth-to-penis resuscitation.
Host: phaballa
"[Homosexuality] is [a sin]....You should try to show them a way to deal with that problem, just like alcohol...or sex addiction...or kleptomaniacs."
"One might have that lifestyle, but if one promotes it as acceptable behavior… I don’t think they should be a representative of this country."
"These people are intellectually dishonest in just about everything they do or say… They start by pretending that it is just another form of love. It's sickening."
" 'Hitler and his supporters were Satanists and homosexuals. That's just a true statement. The notion that is involved in homosexuality, the unbridled sort of satisfaction of human passions' leads to 'totalitarianism,' 'Nazism,' and 'communism.' "
These are all statements made by Republican congressmen in the past ten years, the first of which by Trent Lott, who was the Senate majority leader at the time he made the statement. This is the atmosphere that Republican congressmen face on a day-to-day basis. In any other job in, well, okay, about half of the United States, these statements would be regarded as hate speech. They would be harassment.
The summer after my second year of college, I went back to my hometown of Toledo, Ohio, and got a job at the only place that was hiring and didn't involve food service: the Meijer Store. Meijer, for those of you who aren't from the Midwestern United States, is sort of like if you combined a WalMart with a Target and added in a grocery store. I was delighted, mainly because all I had to do was reboot cash registers, but also because instead of the ugly turquoise polo shirts everyone else in my training class had to wear, I got a pretty grey smock, with pockets, and my own cell phone so cashiers could call me when their registers broke.
We went through a week of training as new hires, three days of which was spent on workplace harassment. There were videos and computer games to teach us in a fun yet educational manner how to deal with harassment situations and what the consequences of harassing others might be. So I can tell you that those statements made by those congressmen? Well at the Meijer Store, those guys would be fired. Do not pass go, and please turn in your 12% Employee Discount card to be shredded. Because those sorts of statements are what we in the working world would call "creating a hostile work environment." They call it their platform.
In the past YEAR, the Republicans have had five major gay sex scandals. FIVE! The Democrats? ZERO. And you know why this is? It's because the Republican party's culture doesn't allow for people to be gay. It encourages hatred and homophobia not just in thought, but in practice as well, and so you end up with these men who are self-haters; these gay men who have been taught for decades and decades that something intrinsic and fundamental about themselves is wrong and un-Christian and dirty and evil. Is it any surprise that they try to repress? That they lead secret double lives and end up getting caught?
I'm talking, of course, about Senator Larry Craig of Idaho, who has been charged with soliciting sex from another man in airport bathroom and has been forced by his own party to step down from all his leadership positions and committee chairs and may be forced to resign in the end. Putting aside the idea that soliciting sex in a restroom is still illegal (seriously? So all those times I've walked in on people at bars going at it in the bathrooms, I should've been reporting it to the cops?), this whole scandal seems to me like a simple inevitability, just based on the Republican party's attitudes and statements alone. And you know, I don't like Craig and his voting record makes me want to vomit, but I do feel some sympathy for him over this matter. The hypocrisy of prominent republicans (McCain, Huckabee) trying to force Craig to step down because of a situation they helped create via the culture of hatred and homophobia they perpetuated within their own party disgusts me FAR more than Craig trying to get a blowjob in an airport bathroom.
Democrats don't have this problem because our gay congressmen aren't forced to hide their sexuality. They don't need to become self-haters because (most of) the party respects the LGBT community and it's getting better and better within the party every day. It's things like this that will rip the Republicans apart.
And hey, maybe that's the secret gay agenda all along. If so, we are much sneakier and awesome than I previously suspected.
The saddest thing to me about all of this is that these closeted, self-hating republicans like Mark Foley, Larry Craig, and Ted Haggerty are doing so much more damage to the LGBT community than they are to the Republican party, which seems further fueled and motivated toward hatred by each new scandal. The national chairman of the young republicans, Glenn Murphy, Jr., gets a fellow young republican drunk only for the guy to wake up in the midst of Murphy's attempt at a mouth-to-penis resuscitation, and instead of attempting to help Murphy through what must've been a troubling (and desperate, to attempt blowjobbery on a sleeping colleague) time, they left him high and dry to resign the offices he was elected to by the young republicans, who have subsequently removed all traces of him from their website.
Leading Republicans have said that homosexuality is a disease, a choice, and an anti-American, anti-Christian agenda. The republican party used to be about government-it used to be about the size of government, federalism, and keeping the government out of social issues. But that's no longer the case. Now, it's about one view of morality that some of them, including our President, would like to force on all Americans. A classic tyranny of the minority, as much as I hate to admit that de Tocqueville may have had a valid point. I would say that this tyranny extends itself over the Republican party itself, to such a point that gay Republicans and old school Republicans who believe in Republican economic values but not necessarily the new so-called compassionate conservatism that Bush espouses are being oppressed even more than democrats. When your own team doesn't want you and forces you to hide and hate your true self, what are you supposed to do? Apparently, if you're a United States Senator-soliciting gay sex in public restrooms is the answer.
In my mind, this form of conservatism is the opposite of compassionate, and furthermore, it makes me angry. Angry that because these sorts of Republicans are so full of ignorance and hate, I have to be compassionate for them. Especially when all they really wanted was a little mouth-to-penis resuscitation.