Times Dispatch Runs Mealy Mouth Response to Publishing Hate Speech

Image from GayRVA.

Earlier in the week I wrote about the Richmond Times Dispatch's publish of an anti-LGBT advertisement place by the Virginia Christian Alliance ("VCA"), a certified hate group.  In response to the overwhelming negative action to the ad, the Times Dispatch issued basically a non-apology and gave a mealy mouthed response about "freedom of speech" although that does not guaranty one the right to have hate speech published.  I strongly suspect that had the ad been a rant against blacks, Jews or other minorities, it would not have been published. Especially if the Times Dispatch had bothered to check out the facts on the Virginia Christian Alliance the way the Southern Poverty Law Centered has done.  Once again, I suspect what was in play was undeserved deference to religion and those who bandy about the "Christian" label even though their behavior and beliefs are the antithesis to Christ's message.  A column in GayRVA looks at the disappointing response of the Times Dispatch and the ugliness of the Virginia Christian Alliance. Here are column excerpts (NOTE what Republicans are in bed with VCA):

[T]he Richmond Times-Dispatch ran an advertisement from the Virginia Christian Alliance in their Tuesday, April 10 edition. The ad was full of anti-LGBTQ hate . . . If you did miss our article about it, it seems you were in the minority; indeed, the RTD saw it themselves and issued a “response” — they didn’t call it an apology, because it wasn’t one.

In the brief response from Times-Dispatch Publisher Tom Silvestri, which you can read in full here, Silvestri said the Virginia Christian Alliance ad “does not represent the views of The Times-Dispatch” and that the decision to run it “was guided by First Amendment freedoms that allow for a divergence of viewpoints and opinion.” He then stated that response from staff and others “has prompted us to begin a review of our content guidelines for future paid advocacy advertising.”

As I wrote on Tuesday, the ad was “written in the kinds of hateful terms that any reputable publication should think twice about printing — even if they did get paid for it.”

Indeed, Times-Dispatch reporter Graham Moomaw seemed to agree with us, tweeting yesterday in response to the issue that “there is no First Amendment right to have your views printed in a privately owned newspaper. The First Amendment is what gives newspapers the right to reject submissions (paid or unpaid) that don’t meet their standards.”

Standards should particularly be brought to bear on any content submitted by Virginia Christian Alliance (VCA), the group who placed the ad. They were listed as a hate group earlier this year by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). At the time of this designation, VCA president Don Blake told the Baltimore Sun that VCA are “as opposite as you can get from a hate group,” and that “we’re pro-Christ and pro-Bible. We aren’t anti-anything.”

The Sun then pointed out that the group’s website linked to articles with headlines like “Fear Of Muslims Is Not A Phobia, But Rational,” and “Islam Is Satanic, Says Dallas Pastor Robert Jeffress.” To this list, we’d add our own discoveries: “The Top Ten Myths About Homosexuality,” and “Homosexual Behavior Is Inherently Destructive,” for starters.

Why is a group like this even getting the time of day from the Richmond Times-Dispatch?

Virginia politicians including Congressman Dave Brat and Delegate Nick Freitas (who is currently running for Tim Kaine’s Senate seat) have previously been awarded the VCA’s “Courageous Leadership Award.” Keep that in mind next time you go to the voting booth.

Most politicians are smart enough not to enthusiastically accept awards from groups that boldly touted white supremacist views. By the same token, it would be shocking for a newspaper to accept advertising from white nationalist groups, regardless of how overtly they pointed out that it was just an advertisement. Why should anti-LGBTQ hate be different?

Hateful views toward marginalized groups of any kind should never be tolerated as part of public discourse. This was the message we were sending with our first article. And we will continue to repeat it until the Richmond Times-Dispatch gets it.

 Kudos to GayRVA and shame on the Times Dispatch, Dave Brat and Nick Freitas.

The Hillary Clinton Paradox

Recently Ezra Klein conducted an lengthy interview with Hillary Clinton, a woman who has been subject to unrelenting attacks by right wing conservatives for decades even as she has often been among the most admired women in various surveys.  Klein suggests that issues about Clinton's "honesty" are less the results of her own actions that the right's constant attacks that depict her as someone other than who she is in reality.  The attacks have been akin to the Nazi tactic that believed that if one tells a lie often enough, in time the public will believe it to be true even if it is totally false.  The American right - and the Christofascists in particular - have also long used this approach against LGBT Americans (i.e., that we are predators and/or threaten society) and the black community.  Here are highlight from Vox.com that look at the interview:

This is an effort to answer a question I’ve been struggling with since at least 2008: Why is the Hillary Clinton described to me by her staff, her colleagues, and even her foes so different from the one I see on the campaign trail?

I’ve come to call it “the Gap.” There is the Hillary Clinton I watch on the nightly news and that I read described in the press. She is careful, calculated, cautious. Her speeches can sound like executive summaries from a committee report, the product of too many authors, too many voices, and too much fear of offense.

Polls show most Americans doubt her basic honesty. Pundits write columns with headlines like “Why Is Clinton Disliked?”

And then there is the Hillary Clinton described to me by people who have worked with her, people I admire, people who understand Washington in ways I never will. Their Hillary Clinton is spoken of in superlatives: brilliant, funny, thoughtful, effective. She inspires a rare loyalty in ex-staff, and an unusual protectiveness even among former foes.

This is the Gap I set out to understand. While reporting this story, I spoke to dozens of people who have worked with Clinton in every stage of her career, going back to her time in the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion. Every single one acknowledged its existence. Many were frustrated and confused by it.

So, too, is Clinton herself. We spoke for 40 minutes on a hot day in Raleigh, North Carolina, and it was clearly on her mind as she looks at the daily polls.  As you watch this clip, remember this is a real human being — a human being who really believes she’s dedicated her adult life to helping others — trying to understand why most Americans say they don’t like her: “It’s always amusing to me that when I have a job, I have really high approval ratings,” Clinton said. “When I’m actually doing the work, I get reelected with 67 percent of the vote running for reelection in the Senate. When I’m secretary of state, I have a 66 percent approval rating.”

Her explanation for the Gap is simple enough. “There’s a lot of behavioral science that if you attack someone endlessly — even if none of what you say is true — the very fact of attacking that person raises doubts and creates a negative perspective,” she says.

There is something about her persona that seems uniquely vulnerable to campaigning; something is getting lost in the Gap. So as I interviewed Clinton's staffers, colleagues, friends, and foes, I began every discussion with some form of the same question: What is true about the Hillary Clinton you’ve worked with that doesn’t come through on the campaign trail? The answers startled me in their consistency. Every single person brought up, in some way or another, the exact same quality they feel leads Clinton to excel in governance and struggle in campaigns. . . . Hillary Clinton, they said over and over again, listens.

Modern presidential campaigns are built to reward people who are really, really good at talking. So imagine what a campaign feels like if you’re not entirely natural in front of big crowds. Imagine that you are constantly compared to your husband, one of the greatest campaign orators of all time; that you’ve been burned again and again after saying the wrong thing in public; that you’ve been told, for decades, that you come across as calculated and inauthentic on the stump. What would you do?

When Hillary Clinton ran for the Senate in 2000, she tried to do something very strange: She tried to campaign by listening. It was called her “listening tour,” and the press did not like it. . . . . By the time she finished those listening sessions around New York, she really knew more about New York, about the issues there, about what was on people’s minds.”

Let’s stop and state the obvious: There are gender dynamics at play here. . . . “Listening is something women value almost above everything else in relationships,” says Deborah Tannen, a Georgetown linguist who studies differences in how men and women communicate. “The biggest complaint women make in relationships is, ‘He doesn’t listen to me.’”

Talking is a way of changing your status: If you make a great point, or set the terms of the discussion, you win the conversation. Listening, on the other hand, is a way of establishing rapport, of bringing people closer together; showing you’ve heard what’s been said so far may not win you the conversation, but it does win you allies. And winning allies is how Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination.

One way of reading the Democratic primary is that it pitted an unusually pure male leadership style against an unusually pure female leadership style. Sanders is a great talker and a poor relationship builder. Clinton is a great relationship builder and a poor talker. In this case — the first time at the presidential level — the female leadership style won.

[T]here’s one group Clinton absolutely can’t stand hearing from: the press. She believes the media offers wall-to-wall coverage of trumped-up non-scandals that ultimately prove hollow. She resents the fact that when the stories finally fall apart, the press just moves on, but the damage lingers in the public’s view of her. And, well, she’s right. Whitewater, Travelgate, Benghazi — there’s no politician who has been at the center of so many scandals that have turned out to be worth so little.

Her answer is that the media abdicated its role as gatekeeper of a civil, substantive discourse. “I do think — and I keep saying this, because I believe it — I think the media environment where people are rewarded for being outrageous, for yelling at each other, for saying things that are untrue without being held accountable for it has contributed to this attitude of divisiveness and separation,” she said.

 She sees the loss of public trust in her as caused by the same force that has led to the loss of public trust in everything else: a press corps obsessed with controversy, uninterested in substance, and incapable of or uninterested in policing the boundaries of decency and truthfulness.

I have to say that I largely agree with Clinton's assessment of the press.  Nowadays, it's all about sensation and scandal and much needed policy discussions and planning get thrown down the toilet.  The press has helped turn politics into a form of ugly reality TV and the nation has been the loser for it. 

Daily Press Slams Randy Forbes; Forbes to Disingenuously Rent Apartment in Virginia Beach

4th District Congressman Randy Forbes who seeks to be a carpetbagger in Virginia Beach

My former law school classmate Randy Forbes continues to show the extent to which some elected officials will go to put their personal interests ahead the interests and well being of their constituents. Two stories looks at Forbes' self-centered agenda.  First, WAVY- looks at Forbes' plan to rent an apartment  in Virginia Beach in lieu of purchasing a home in the 2nd Congressional District (can we say cheap?) so that he can claim with at least a somewhat straight face that he lives in the District even though 100% of his past ties are in Chesapeake/.the 4th District.   The second piece is an editorial from the Daily Press which basically rips Forbes a new one.  Here are highlights from the WAVY TV piece:

10 On Your Side has confirmed Congressman Randy Forbes (R) 4th District is now in the process of renting an apartment in Virginia Beach.

His Campaign office told WAVY Forbes and his wife “have put down a security deposit and look forward to spending a great deal of time there.”

Forbes’ Communiction Director Hailey Sadler did not say where the apartment is.  Three sources confirm Forbes is getting an apartment at the Mayflower Apartments on 34th Street. Mayflower would neither confirm nor deny the Forbes application to rent an apartment.

Hailey Sadler also says, “Randy and Shirley intend to retain their generational home nine miles outside of Virginia Beach.”

That house is located in Chesapeake in Forbes current district.

Congressman Forbes is switching districts from the 4th where he lives in his Chesapeake home to the 2nd which represents mostly Virginia Beach.

He is running against Delegate Scott Taylor/(R) 85th. Taylor responded to our story “His first political plan of abandoning his people for a better district while living in Chesapeake has failed. Now he wants to try to deceive everyone by renting an apartment? Everyone knows Randy Forbes lives in a big house in Chesapeake, not a small apartment in Virginia Beach.”

It is unsure whether Forbes can and will move his voting precinct to Virginia Beach.

Del. Taylor has repeatedly said, “How can you vote for Randy Forbes who can’t even vote for himself?”

While I generally shun Republicans, it should be noted that Forbes's opponent for the GOP nomination, Del. Scott Taylor, is one of the few Republicans in the Virginia General Assembly who is NOT a homophobe.  Meanwhile. an editorial in the Daily Press slammed Forbes for his shameless opportunism and desire to stay in offence at the cost of the best interests of his constituents.  Here are excerpts:

Instead of a district that resembles a squashed salamander and purports to say bits and pieces of Newport News, Norfolk and Richmond connected by strips of mud along the James River shore make up a community, we will get something different from redistricting.

It's a basic question when lawyers look into something: Who gains?

Lawyers, being lawyers, have to ask it in Latin — they say "Cui bono" — but the point can't be obscured by a dead language. And the point was clear as Fourth grade English when the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments about the court-ordered redrawing of the 3rd Congressional District last week.

Who benefits if the Supreme Court eventually throws out the redistricting?

Members of Congress. The one name that kept coming up in last week's arguments before the Supreme Court was Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Chesapeake.

The lawyer for the Virginia members of Congress who challenged the lower court's redistricting argued several times that redrawing the map injured Rep. Forbes.

"Every time your district is changed and you believe it hurts you, you have a right to go to court and say what?" Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked at one point.

"He suffered injury-in-fact to what?" asked Justice Anthony Kennedy, referring to Rep. Forbes.

"To his ability to be re-elected," the delegation's lawyer said.  Huh?

So members of Congress are special. Their rights to that $174,000-a-year gig, and to districts carefully crafted to ensure re-election, are different than yours. Your right, that is, to a vote that matters to our Capitol Hill solons, most of whom romped home to re-election in 2014 with a 20-percentage-point margin from their carefully gerrymandered districts.

Here's the dirty little secret about congressional redistricting in Virginia: The General Assembly enacts it, but it does so with the wishes of members of Congress uppermost in its mind.

And now there's this: Risking an election loss is an injury — an injury! — to our professional politicians.  Nonsense.

The real injury lies in an environment where politicians don't risk losing elections.  The injured parties here are Virginia voters. We're injured when elected officials no longer have to listen to us because they are so secure in their seats.

Ouch!  But the truth is that the editorial is 100% on point.  Forbes has no right to be assured of re-election.  For years he has had a handcrafted safe seat which has allowed him to be re-elected while doing little or nothing for his constituents and pandering to the most lunatic fringes of the Christofascists in the GOP base.  It is far past time that Forbes be forced to participate in a competitive nomination and election process.  If the voters don't want the theocratic crap that he is peddling, then he deserves to be defeated and forced from office.