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Bristol Palin The Victim? I’m Not Buying It

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It wasn’t hard to tell what direction things would take after Bristol Palin‘s recent statements about President Obama and his newfound support for gay marriage. Where the Palins are involved, the sequence of events is firmly established and completely predictable: one of them will say something ridiculous, everyone else will react, and the Palins will proceed to make the entire episode about themselves and how victimized they are.

Bristol Palin’s latest post is a textbook example of this. After being widely criticized for falsely suggesting that Obama only supports gay marriage because of his daughters, and claiming without evidence that “kids do better growing up in a mother/father home,” she now says that the response to her remarks has been “a lot of hate and a lot of bullying.”

Ironically, she accuses everyone of failing to make any arguments, and then proceeds to spend several paragraphs talking about how mean people have been. Maybe she would have received more serious responses if she had actually presented any arguments of her own in the first place, rather than misrepresenting what Obama said and disparaging families with gay parents for no justifiable reason.

If she’s looking for a real debate on the issues, she has a strange way of showing it. Instead of providing any explanation of her earlier statements, she claims that a generic monolith named “Hollywood” is uniformly intolerant of any dissent on the issues of gay marriage or abortion, and “anyone who disagrees is stupid, hypocritical, hateful, or bigoted.”

Not once did she consider that it might actually be hateful to assume that same-sex couples must be inferior parents when all studies indicate otherwise. And she doesn’t seem to think there could be anything bigoted about expecting people to teach their children that same-sex parents don’t deserve to be married. That’s because not being hateful and bigoted just isn’t her concern here — this is all about people calling her names and making her feel bad.

In that vein, she presents a selection of comments from people wishing for her death and generally being rude. While this is obviously unacceptable, it’s definitely not a unique occurrence. We could just as well gather up all of the violent and hateful comments made about Obama and his family, same-sex parents, and the LGBT community as a whole. But it would be incredibly dishonest to focus the entire discussion on hostility, incivility and tone in order to ignore any substantial criticism of what we’ve actually said.

This is what Palin has done here, and it’s practically guaranteed that we’ll soon see a torrent of op-eds using the latest incident to make sweeping statements about how hostility and threats are never an acceptable mode of discourse, no matter the target. But this, too, only serves to make the entire event about Bristol Palin the Victim, rather than what she actually said about our relationships and our families.

Palin may or may not be aware of this, but when you try to make yourself the center of attention here, you’re just running away from your own remarks. If she’d prefer to back away from her arguments — insofar as she has any — then she should issue a retraction and apologize to President Obama and the countless same-sex couples whose parenting skills she insulted.

Until then, we’re not going to forget this quite so easily. Sure, Palin can talk the talk about “hate” and “bullying” — she just won’t admit who the bullies actually are. But it really is bullying to use your platform as a national celebrity to deny the equality of our love. It’s bullying to dismiss our rights simply by uttering the word “tradition.” It’s bullying to assume that excluding us from marriage demands no more justification than merely vomiting out your opinion. And pretending to be the victim after you’ve attacked our families is unquestionably the act of a bully. Is this who you want to be, Bristol Palin?

Image, top, via Facebook

Zinnia Jones is an atheist activist, writer, and video blogger focusing on LGBTQ rights and religious belief. Originally from Chicago, she’s currently living in Florida with her partner Heather and their two children.

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Tennessee Governor Slammed After ‘Praying’ for Nashville School Community Without Mentioning Mass Shooting

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March 27, 2023

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Governor Bill Lee quickly drew tremendous outrage in the wake of a school mass shooting where six people including three young children were shot to death. Social media users criticized the Tennessee Republican, who had signed a permit-less gun carry law, for declaring he was “praying for the school, congregation & Nashville community,” without posting any mention of the mass shooting.

Tweeting he was “closely monitoring the tragic situation at Covenant,” Gov. Lee said, “As we continue to respond, please join us in praying for the school, congregation & Nashville community.”

There was no mention of any loss of life, and, as Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts passionately noted, the “situation” was a mass shooting.

“If thoughts and prayers alone worked to stop gun violence, there wouldn’t have been a shooting at a Christian elementary school. It’s your actions – including weakening the state’s gun laws – that’s killing kids in Tennessee,” Watts also tweeted. “SHAME ON YOU.”

Gov. Lee signed a permit-less carry bill into law in 2021, at a Beretta gun manufacturing plant.

According to the CDC, as of 2020 – one year before the permit-less carry bill was signed into law – Tennessee ranked tenth in the nation in per-capita firearm mortality.

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Meanwhile, others took notice of the gun culture Gov. Lee has fostered in “The Volunteer State.”

MSNBC analyst and Bulwark writer Tim Miller commented, “Tennessee governor Bill Lee issued a statement recently about how the drag ban in Tennessee ‘protects children.’ If only he would have instead focused on laws that might have prevented the mass murder of children in his state today.”

Historian Kevin Kruse pointed to an article from last year, after the Uvalde, Texas school shooting, titled: “Rep. Clemmons Seeks Renewed Gun Laws, Gov. Lee Requests Prayer.”

“You chose prayer over gun reforms last year after the Uvalde massacre,” Kruse wrote. “And now here we are.”

The progressive website Tennessee Holler pointed out that Gov. Lee, along with GOP lawmakers, “just appointed Jordan Mollenhour to the [state] board of education— whose company was sued for selling ammo to an underage mass killer (SANTA FE) and sold ammo to at least one more (AURORA) He has ZERO education experience.”

Let’s Give a Damn founder Nick Laparra tweeted, “We are 86 days into 2023. So far, 9859 people have died by gun violence and there have been 128 mass shootings. Meanwhile, @GovBillLee spends his days being outraged over drag queens and CRT and book bans. This is Bill Lee’s and the GOP’s fault.”

See the tweets and video above or at this link.

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Mystery Grand Jury Witness in Trump Hush Money Probe Is Former ‘Enquirer’ Publisher and Trump Ally

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March 27, 2023

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Avid followers of the Manhattan District Attorney’s moves noted the grand jury had been called into service for Monday, and soon news leaked that yet another witness would be testifying in the probe into Donald Trump’s alleged hush money payment to Stormy Daniels.

Monday afternoon, NBC News’ Garrett Haake reported live on MSNBC that the mystery witness was David Pecker, the former tabloid publisher of the “National Enquirer,” who reportedly had been looking for stories in 2016 to protect Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Haake notes Monday was Pecker’s second appearance before the grand jury in the hush money case.

The New York Times also reported David Pecker as the grand jury witness, calling Pecker “a key player in the hush-money matter. He and the tabloid’s top editor helped broker the deal between the porn star, Stormy Daniels, and Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s fixer at the time.”

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“While the focus of Mr. Pecker’s testimony is unclear, he could provide valuable information for prosecutors. A longtime ally of Mr. Trump, he agreed to keep an eye out for potentially damaging stories about Mr. Trump during the 2016 campaign,” The Times reports. “For a brief time in October 2016, Ms. Daniels appeared to have just that kind of story. Her agent and lawyer discussed the possibility of selling exclusive rights to her story of a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump to The National Enquirer, which would then promise to never publish it, a practice known as ‘catch and kill.'”

Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Harry Litman weighed in, noting, “nothing about that decision [to have Pecker testify] suggests any change of heart on Bragg’s part to indict Trump.”

Former Dept. of Defense Special Counsel Ryan Goodman, an NYU professor of law, notes that Pecker’s “testimony can show the [hush money] scheme was designed to affect outcome of election.”

“He reportedly communicated directly with Trump on payment,” Goodman adds.

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‘Our Children Deserve Better’: First Lady Jill Biden Speaks Out After Six Die in Nashville School Mass Shooting

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15 hours ago

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March 27, 2023

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First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, speaking Monday afternoon at a National League of Cities conference, told attendees, “Our children deserve better,” as she broke the news of the Nashville school mass shooting at Covenant Presbyterian School where three children and three adults were shot dead.

“You know,” Dr. Biden, herself an educator and clearly pained by the news, began her remarks by saying, “I hate to say what I’m gonna say next because you know you’re so enthusiastic and with so much energy and hope and I feel it.”

“But while you’ve been in this room, I don’t know whether you’ve been on your phones but we just learned about another shooting in Tennessee, a school shooting and I am truly without words and our children deserve better, and we stand – all of us – we stand with Nashville in prayer.”

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The First Lady, a former public high school English teacher and currently a professor of English at a community college, was speaking at the organization’s Congressional City Conference.

Watch Dr. Biden below or at this link.

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