Gay Alabama Lawmaker Threatens to Reveal GOP Colleagues' Affairs

Patricia Todd at right

If hate is one of the defining motivation behind Republican policies, another defining characteristic of today's GOP is hypocrisy.  It's no coincidence that it seems that 9 times out of 10 it is a "pro-family" Republican who is getting caught in a sex scandal.  These hypocrites embrace hatred and live in glass houses and truly deserve being called out on their hypocrisy - hence my role in "outing" former 2nd Congressional District Republican Ed Shrock.  In my view, if one is going to be singing the "family values" song, one had damn well be walking the walk.   Apparently, Alabama State Rep. Patricia Todd, D-Birmingham, feels the same way: she has threatened to disclose the affairs of the "godly, family values" members of the Alabama legislature.  Here are highlights from the Times Daily:

State Rep. Patricia Todd, D-Birmingham, had a warning for her Statehouse colleagues over the weekend.
“I will not stand by and allow legislators to talk about ‘family values’ when they have affairs, and I know of many who are and have,” Todd, the state’s only openly gay lawmaker, said on Facebook over the weekend. “I will call our elected officials who want to hide in the closet out.”

Todd was responding to comments from her fellow lawmakers after Friday’s decision by a federal judge to overturn the state’s ban on same-sex marriages.

“It is pretty well known that we have people in Montgomery who are or have had affairs …” Todd told the TimesDaily this morning. “I just want them to be careful what they’re saying, some of it might come back to stick on them.”

Todd said she was hurt and angered by some of the remarks and backlash she has heard since Friday.

“But I know I’m on the side that is going to win and I’m sorry they’re so ignorant,” she said.

Several high-profile GOP leaders have spoken out against the ruling, and Attorney General Luther Strange asked the judge to stay her order until the U.S Supreme Court considers gay marriage later this year.

Todd this morning said for Alabama to continue to fight gay marriage was a waste of limited state resources.

Todd will carry this year a bill that would protect gay and lesbian state employees and teachers from workplace discrimination. “I’ve probably burned any chance of getting it through,” she said this morning.

Kudos for Todd.  Personally, I hope she outs some of the hypocrites.   Likewise, I'd love to see some Virginia Republicans called out on their hypocrisy.

Abortion Bill Hurts Taliban Bob McDonnell’s V.P. Prospects

I've written a number of times that Bob "Taliban Bob" McDonnell, Virginia's current governor and V.P. nominee want to be, may have cut his own throat by slavishly supporting the extremist, theocracy supporting agenda of The Family Foundation and Virginia GOP lunatics like Del. Bob Marshall who seems to hate all gays and women with equal vigor. While the image immediately below comes from Oklahoma where GOP extremists are pushing measures akin to what the culture wars obsessed Virginia GOP has sought to inflict on all Virginians, it sums up what many women are feeling in Virginia and will hopefully remember when they are in voting booths in November, 2012, and November 2013:

A column in the Washington Post looks at Taliban Bob's self-inflicted damages and pretty much mirrors my analysis and that of my former undergraduate classmate, Larry Sabato, which I noted in a previous post. Here are some column highlights:

When Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) asked antiabortion zealots in the General Assembly last week to soften the controversial ultrasound bill, he faced a dilemma in explaining his move: Shall I appear ill-informed or weak-willed?

McDonnell chose the former. He says he just didn’t realize the measure he had been broadly supporting would require many women desiring to end a pregnancy to undergo a particularly invasive ultrasound in which a probe is inserted in the vagina.

Because of McDonnell’s intervention, the bill soon headed for his signature would require only an abdominal ultrasound, performed outside the belly. That’s still an outrageous violation of women’s rights, for abortion defenders (like me). But abortion opponents view it as a disappointing compromise.

I’m skeptical that the governor’s explanation is the whole story. I agree with the hard-core social conservatives who said he had “suddenly gone squishy,” as one blogger wrote, when faced with an outpouring of opposition. That included having the law (and by extension, the state) become a punch line for late-night comedians.

Unfortunately for McDonnell, the nuances of his position drowned quickly in the raging ideological whirlpool that is abortion politics, particularly at the national level. It doesn’t matter to the Democratic Party — much less MSNBC commentators or “Saturday Night Live” satirists — that McDonnell repeatedly urged GOP legislators not to “overreach” on social issues.

As a result of the uproar, he has probably sacrificed whatever chance he had of being picked as the GOP vice presidential nominee this year, said a wide range of political analysts, including Republicans sympathetic to the governor.

Assuming that the Republican presidential candidate is Mitt Romney, it would be much harder for him now to tap McDonnell as a running mate. The two of them would immediately have to devote time to defending the ultrasound bill, in addition to McDonnell’s controversial 1989 master’s thesis saying, among other things, that working mothers hurt families.

“I think the moment in the sun is over,” said a Republican source, who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak candidly about the governor’s prospects. The ultrasound controversy “was probably very unhelpful to the calculus that Romney will make at the convention. Together with the thesis, this creates a second object of ridicule,” the source said.

McDonnell didn’t help his own cause when he signed a bill to repeal a longtime law limiting firearms buyers to one handgun a month— which he supported when it originally passed.

If Democrats win Virginia in November as a result, with both the White House and U.S. Senate in play, the Republicans might wish they had better heeded McDonnell’s counsel.

As noted in prior posts, Bob McDonnell needs to talk to Virginians outside The Family Foundation/Christofascist bubble and if he refuses to do so, he does so at his own peril. And on a personal level, it's not the first time that McDonnell has refused my advice and learned the hard way that I may be gay, but I'm not stupid or lacking in political sense. What am I talking about? Several things, but the most memorable is when I told McDonnell - actually the entire Virginia GOP delegation to the Virginia General Assembly - that they had a problem in the form of former Congressman Ed Schrock and that if the Virginia GOP anti-gay agenda did not cease, Schrock was going down. Did Taliban Bob listen? Of course not, and ultimately Mike Rogers outed Schrock with some help from yours truly.

I don't wish McDonnell ill, but he has made a pact with the Christianist devils and needs to pay the price for his betrayal of concepts such as freedom of religion for all citizens. If McDonnell wants to repent, he can start by firing Victoria Cobb's husband from his cushy state government job, veto the anti-gay adoption bill, and start looking after the interest of Virginians who don't imbibe Christianist Kool-Aid by the gallon full. Will he do it? I doubt it and it could be why he may never get the VP nomination.

Is Illinois Rep. Mark Kirk Another Ed Schrock?

It seems that outwardly closeted, self-loathing Republicans just do not grasp the fact that if they keep voting anti-gay that sooner or later someone in gay community is going to reach such a level of anger and disgust that they will turn to the media and/or activists and "out" the politician equivalent of George Rekers. I know this for a fact - I'm the one that call Mike Rogers about former Congressman Ed Schrock who consistently voted against the interests of LGBT Americans even as he was cruising for gsy sex trysts. It seems that Illinois Congressman Make Kirk learned NOTHING from the Schrock debacle. Kirk is now the newest target of Mike Rogers - all set in motion by those who were simply fed up with Kirk's hypocrisy and disingenuousness.

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While some in the gay community argue that no one should out someone else, in cases like Schrock and Kirk I beg to differ. They have deliberately made the decision to vote in ways that harm others in the LGBT community and, therefore, deserve to be exposed for liars and hypocrites. Also, from working with Mike Rogers on the Ed Schrock story, I can personally vouch that he does NOT go off half cocked. If he says he has the goods on someone, believe me, he does. Check out the posts at BlogActive.com where Mike Rogers goes after Kirk. Even better, here are highlights from Huffington Post which will hopefully take the story national:
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Illinois Rep. Mark Kirk has had a dramatic few days, and now a popular gay blogger known for outing politicians claims to have sources confirming that Kirk is a closeted gay man.
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Before the February Illinois primary, Kirk, a Republican vying for President Obama's former senate seat, faced attacks from birther Andy Martin claiming that Kirk was gay. Kirk denied the claims, but now faces an attempted outing from the other side--the gay community.
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Activist blogger Mike Rogers tends to target politicians with antigay voting records, and "outed" Sen. Larry Craig and Rep. Mark Foley. He was also featured in the film "Outrage" where he discussed closeted politicians who work against the gay community. In a Tuesday post on Rogers' BlogActive, he explained why he decided to bring up Kirk's sexuality now:
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Until now, Mark Kirk elected not to play the typical Washington game. Instead of supporting his party's dismal record on gay rights, Kirk received Human Rights Campaign ratings of 67% in 2002, 88% in 2004, 76% in 2006 and 85% in 2008. That's more impressive than a lot of Democrats. I even let Kirk slide by when he didn't co-sponsor earlier legislation relating to the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. My thoughts then were that he wasn't THAT bad on gay stuff and that the bill was going nowhere anyway.
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Though the HRC has supported Kirk in the past, the group pledged their support to Democrat Alexi Giannoulias last week after Kirk voted against the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" repeal.
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Rogers cited several sources who contacted him following Kirk's DADT vote. Two men, whose names were not given, claimed to have had sexual relations with Kirk while he was in college.
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Frank Sennett, editor-in-chief of Time Out Chicago, interviewed Rogers about his Larry Craig outing in 2007, where the blogger explained who he chooses to out and when:

"Rogers acknowledged gay legislators don't have to support gay marriage. However, he added, 'You have to be honest with the American people that you're voting against a group you're a part of. If politicians want to say they're straight and then have sex in bathrooms [referring to Larry Craig] after voting against gay rights, that doesn't work.'
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The Kirk campaign has yet to respond to Rogers' claims.

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Kudos, Mike. Let's hope the closeted members of the GOP will get the message and stop voting against normal, out gays.

My Standards on "Outing"

The Gay Species has taken me to task for having double standards and not endorsing the outing of two gay students at Hollis F. Price Middle College High in Memphis, Tennessee, by the school principal. His charge is based on my support of the efforts of Mike Rogers at Blog Active in exposing closeted Republicans with anti-gay voting records and closeted clergy who preach against gays and engender anti-gay hate and discrimination.. For the record, I want to make it clear why I believe there ARE two (2) different standards depending upon the circumstances/actions of the person(s) being outed and why this view is not "hypocritical:"

The first standard - which might be called the private individual standard - applies to closeted gays who mind their own business and take no public stands and take no actions that support or further an anti-gay agenda. Individuals in this category have every right to keep their personal life private. At this point in my life, I now favor as many people as possible being "out" and living their lives openly. However, since it took me 37 years in the closet and 5 years of therapy to recover from my childhood religious indoctrination to get to this point, I cannot demand that individuals who are doing no harm to the LGBT community be outed against their will. This is the standard that I believe applies to the two high school boys at Hollis F. Price Middle College High.

The second standard applies to closeted individuals consisting of (1) elected officials and their staffers who actively support and work for the passage of anti-gay legislation that harms or reduces the legal rights of other LGBT indviduals and/or (2) clergy who preach anti-gay rhetoric and engender animosity aginst LGBT individuals. In my view, these individuals - who are meddling in and interferring with the personal lives of other gays - have forfeited the right claim that their personal lives are off limits. If they want to intrude into my life and impair my legal rights, then they need to be exposed for the hypocrite phonies that they are. By their own anti-gay jihad they have given up the right to keep their own gay sexual conduct private.

A case in point is former Congressman Ed Schrock of Virginia's 2nd District who had one of the most anti-gay voting records in Congress yet who was soliciting gay sex via Mega Phone in the greater Norfolk area. I knew Ed Schrock personally and even warned him - and later the entire Virginia Beach delegation to the Virginia General Assembly - that the GOP war on gays would result in someone outing Schrock. The warning fell on deaf ears and someone whose identity I have never learned subsequently furnished the audiotapes to Mike Rogers that ended Schrock's career.

In Schrock's case, I feel sorry for his family, particularly his wife who is a gracious woman, but as to Ed personally, he brought the disaster on himself due to his hypocrisy. He knew the risks, actively sought out gay trysts, and did not care, all the while voting for legislation that harmed members of the LGBT community or which denigrated their legal rights as citizens. Former pastor Ted Haggart is another example of someone who preached an anti-gay message, yet sought out gay sex on the sly. The situation of these two men is nothing analogous to the boys outed by their school principal

Mandatory Vaccine for Deadly Bacterial Meningitis Sparks Debate

MSNBC has an online column (See: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20519953/) about the debate over requiring entering college students to have the vaccine against believe parents should be able to choose which vaccinations they — or their children — receive. . Opponents of mandating the vaccine believe parents should be able to choose which vaccinations they — or their children — receive. Having nearly lost my oldest daughter to meningococcal meningitis in 1999, my personal view is that only a fool would not have their child receive the vaccine. I would urge any readers who are the parents of high school or college students or college age themselves to get the vaccine. While rare, the devastation that this disease can do even if not fatal is horrific, and the financial costs of treatment can be likewise devastating even if one comes through with a full recovery. Without a doubt, the experience with my daughter's experience with meningitis was probably the worse experience in my life to date. Here are some highlights from the MSNBC column:

Meningococcal meningitis strikes fewer than 3,000 people in the United States each year, many of them college students or children under age 1. But while the bacterial infection is relatively rare, it’s also deadly, killing 10 to 12 percent of those it infects, sometimes within hours. The disease attacks and shuts down major organs and prevents blood from circulating to limbs, causing tissue to die. Among survivors, 20 percent suffer brain damage, kidney disease, loss of hearing or sight, limb amputations or other severe complications.

A growing grassroots movement is pushing for more states to require the shot. Currently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends Menactra for kids ages 11 to 18, but only 12 percent of teenagers got the vaccine in 2006.

But the disease can be horrific when it does strike. It happens so quickly’The disease’s hard-to-spot symptoms and rapid progression make meningococcal meningitis a “great fear” for doctors, says Dr. Tom Clark, a medical epidemiologist for the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. The symptoms are devastatingly easy to overlook, to dismiss as something minor.

When Lynn Bozof’s son Evan was a teenager, there was a meningitis outbreak in a neighboring county. Evan was worried, and he asked his mom if he should get the vaccination. “‘Mom, how do I know if I’ve got meningitis?’” Bozof recalls her son asking. And she remembers her reply: “Oh Evan, you don’t need to worry about meningitis!” But five years later, as a junior at Georgia Southwestern University in 1998, Evan called his mom complaining of a migraine. It got so bad that he went to the emergency room, where he was diagnosed with meningitis and placed in intensive care. His kidneys shut down. His liver stopped functioning. Both arms and legs had to be amputated. After a 26-day fight against the disease, Evan died. Bozof says, “Just because this disease is rare doesn’t mean it’s not going to affect you or someone you know.”

Many of those advocating for mandatory vaccinations are parents, including Frankie Milley, who have lost children to meningitis. Nine years ago, her 18-year-old son, Ryan, died of the disease, and since then, she has worked in her home state of Texas to make meningitis education available to all families. She also supported a bill currently being considered by the Texas Legislature that would require college students to get the vaccine.

Dr. Jim Turner, the executive director for the department of student health at the University of Virginia, was skeptical in 2001 when Virginia passed a law mandating that all students attending four-year universities must get the vaccination or sign a waiver. He thought most students would just choose to sign the waiver. But it seems that education about the disease has motivated many to get the vaccine. He’s seen the numbers climb from 55 percent of students getting vaccinated to 95 percent.

“It’s a safe vaccination, it’s an effective vaccination, and it’s one of those terrible, terrible risks — albeit extremely rare — that you can really minimize by spending money on the vaccine,” says Turner, who is also the chair of the Vaccines Preventable Diseases Committee for the American College Health Association. The vaccine is generally covered by insurance and costs around $120 on most college campuses.

In fairness, I have to comment that one of those who helped push the 2001 Virginia law requiring the vaccine was then state Senator Ed Schrock with whom I had discussed the need for the legislation.