Connect with us

CPAC: Gay GOP Group GOProud Booted, So Breitbart And Buddies Boycott

Published

on

It should come as no surprise that the rabidly-right-wing wingnuts at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, which hosts an annual conference with a strange consortium that is part Ron Paul Libertarians, part American Family Association hate groups, part Ann Coulter/Andrew Breitbart media whores, part Joe and Jane Average older Republican, part Tea Party patriot extremists, and part news media, (not to mention almost entirely white,) doesn’t particularly like homosexuals. In fact, I think they hate homosexuals.

So, it should also come as no surprise that CPAC’s new board has booted the gay Tea Party group GOProud from being able to co-sponsor the conference, which they have the past two years. Of course, GOProud is welcome to attend, like everyone else, but they cannot be officially affiliated with CPAC or the American Conservative Union, which exists primarily to manage the annual CPAC event.

Media mogul Andrew Breitbart, who sits on GOProud’s board, has decided he will not attend next year’s CPAC in response to the booting, as it were, and now his followers are, well, following.

“The decision means GOProud won’t be able to pay to have a booth at the exhibition hall, nor will the organization have its name appear on promotional materials for CPAC 2012,” writes Chris Johnson at The Washington Blade.

“Kristy Campbell, spokesperson for the American Conservative Union, said ACU Chair Al Cardenas took the issue of GOProud’s participation — as well as other groups — to the board ‘given controversies surrounding a few CPAC 2011 co-sponsors’ and ‘concerns raised by a number of our board members’.”

“GOProud’s participation at CPAC had incurred the wrath of social conservative groups that pledged to boycott sponsorship of the event over the gay conservative group’s involvement. These groups include Family Research Council, Concerned Women For America, Liberty Counsel and Liberty University. In 2011, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), a social conservative and Tea Party favorite, also declined to participate at CPAC.

“Also last year, GOProud board chair Chris Barron took heat from conservatives after he described Cleta Mitchell, chair of the ACU Foundation, as “a nasty bigot” in an interview. Barron apologized, but ACU chair Cardenas told FrumForum that “it’s going to be difficult to continue the relationship” with GOProud and expressed disappointment in the group’s reaction to the furor over its participation at the event.”

Roger Simon of Pajamas Media is boycotting, as is someone named Ted Frank.

World Net Daily (yes, I know,) also mentions, “a campaign assembled by Americans for Truth’s Peter LaBarbera and Liberty Counsel’s Matt Barber to object to GOProud’s participation.

“Barber had objected to GOProud’s endorsement of ‘gay marriage’ as well as its demand that homosexuality be promoted in the U.S. military through the repeal of the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ practice’.

GOProud has to take part of the blame for getting the boot. After all, when someone like Chris Barron, GOProud’s co-founder, calls important people nasty names, they’re not too excited about jumping up and supporting the nascent organization.

(Note to GOProud’s Barron and LaSalvia: you actually do catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Not that you really care. If those two spent as much time working for equality as they do bashing “the gay left” as they call us, no doubt we’d all be farther along.)

Interestingly, CPAC also barred the notorious John Birch Society from co-sponsoring CPAC — but no one’s boycotting CPAC for that reason. It’s nice to know that some of the right-wing extremists out there like “the gays” more than “the crazies.”

So now, GOProud is doing what it does best: playing the victim and trying really, really hard to get lots of attention. And when you have a media whore and man who will say or do just about anything, someone like Andrew Breitbart, on your board of directors, how hard could that be? Breitbart is boycotting CPAC, and all the media whorettes who want to get in Breitbart’s good graces are joining in.

Fred Karger, the openly gay Republican presidential candidate, in The Guardian, writes, “If conservative political conference CPAC persists in its anti-gay policy, all Republican presidential candidates should boycott it,” and adds this little dash of insight into the party of supposed free markets and free ideas (sorry, Reason,)

“Alberto “Al” Cardenas, the new head of the American Conservative Union (ACU), has taken bigotry and hypocrisy to new heights. I believe I was a victim of his organisation’s prejudice earlier this year when I wanted to purchase a booth at their annual CPAC gathering in Washington, DC. My credit card information was taken last December, and I was told that I was in. Then, mysteriously, three weeks later, I was told by phone that they had “sold out”. Funny, others were purchasing booths right up until the conference began in mid February.”

Karger, so innocently, adds,

“How can anyone running for president attend, let alone speak at CPAC’s September Florida event or the February conference next year? It is tantamount to endorsing discrimination against an entire class of Americans.”

You really have to smile when you see the gay Right realize what the gay Left has seen all along. What? Discrimination against an entire class of Americans? You mean, like DOMA, And DADT, and no ENDA, and…

Politico’s Ben Smith says GOProud’s “exclusion has become the kind of cause celebre to the libertarian right that its inclusion was to social conservatives,” and adds,

“Cardenas met today, I’m told, with the executive director of the gay conservative group GOProud, Jimmy LaSalvia. It was, a person briefed on the event said, “not a good meeting.” The representatives of GOProud were furious to learn from WorldNetDaily and the Daily Caller that they’d been dropped from the organization, and were also none-too-thrilled about Cardenas’s wife’s recent comments on the subject.”

Comments?

Oh, yes:

“Unfortunately, the biggest victory of the gay movement has been to shift the debate from a ‘behavior’ to identity, whereby those that oppose homosexuality are considered bigoted or hateful. They have equated it to the Civil Rights Movement, seeking to obtain the rights granted under the constitution to all races or religions. Sexual behavior does not fall into either category!!!!It is not about homosexuals wanting to enter into a ‘marriage’ so much as it is about them wanting to gain acceptance into mainstream society by redefining the traditional definition of the institution.”

That was just a small portion.

Meanwhile, in an amusing piece, Alana Goodman writes, “If CPAC caves to outside controversy and blocks one contentious group from participating, then it sets a precedent that could lead to other organizations getting blackballed in the future.”

Funny how “the gays” are always the ones who get blackballed.

 

There's a reason 10,000 people subscribe to NCRM. You can get the news before it breaks just by subscribing, plus you can learn something new every day.
Continue Reading
Click to comment
 
 

Enjoy this piece?

… then let us make a small request. The New Civil Rights Movement depends on readers like you to meet our ongoing expenses and continue producing quality progressive journalism. Three Silicon Valley giants consume 70 percent of all online advertising dollars, so we need your help to continue doing what we do.

NCRM is independent. You won’t find mainstream media bias here. From unflinching coverage of religious extremism, to spotlighting efforts to roll back our rights, NCRM continues to speak truth to power. America needs independent voices like NCRM to be sure no one is forgotten.

Every reader contribution, whatever the amount, makes a tremendous difference. Help ensure NCRM remains independent long into the future. Support progressive journalism with a one-time contribution to NCRM, or click here to become a subscriber. Thank you. Click here to donate by check.

News

National Conversation Needed on Law-Abiding Tax-Paying Undocumented Immigrants: Gingrich

Published

on

As President Donald Trump’s immigration polling numbers deteriorate and criticism of federal agents grows — and following the killings of two U.S. citizens by federal agents in Minnesota — Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is calling for a national conversation about undocumented immigrants who pay taxes, have lived in the United States for years, and are good neighbors.

Gingrich called on President Donald Trump to “open up a national dialogue,” as he told Fox Business, saying that “this is about dignity,” a quote he took from U.S. Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-FL).

“Americans don’t want to see the police behaving like a mob, Americans don’t want to see people killed in the streets, and Americans don’t want to see the kind of hunting down people in a way that really demeans the process,” he insisted.

“We need a national conversation about what we’re going to do, about people who’ve come here, some of them 20 years ago, who’ve been obeying the law, paying taxes, good neighbors, have kids, go to PTA,” Gingrich said. “Very few Americans want to see the police walk in and pick them up and deport them.”

READ MORE: Right-Wing Groups Launch Coordinated Push to Overturn Same-Sex Marriage

“On the other hand, people do not want to give them citizenship,” he claimed. “So there should be some middle ground here on long-term goals.”

Federal agents, he said, “may well need more training and maybe more restraint.”

But Gingrich also claimed that anyone trying to stop them from carrying out the law is “engaged in insurrection.”

According to The Hill, “a growing number of Republicans and conservative commentators are urging the White House to shift course and scale back its aggressive immigration enforcement, especially for law-abiding immigrants with roots in their communities.”

MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough, The Hill added, suggested that “if you’ve been in America for a long time, if you’ve been law-abiding, if you’re an asylum-seeker, certainly if you’ve had children that have served in the military, you’re at the front of the line” to return to the U.S. if you’ve been deported.

READ MORE: ‘All Tools Necessary’: GOP Hardliners Press Trump on Insurrection Act

Continue Reading

News

Right-Wing Groups Launch Coordinated Push to Overturn Same-Sex Marriage

Published

on

Forty-seven right-wing organizations have joined together to try to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell ruling that found same-sex couples have the same rights and responsibilities to marriage as different-sex couples. The coalition’s focus is to change national public opinion on same-sex marriage by declaring that children are “Greater Than” equality.

“We’re all going to speak with one voice, and it is ‘don’t touch the kids,’” the group’s founder, right-wing activist Katy Faust, told American Family Radio, as People for the American Way reported.

“Faust made it clear that the campaign will continue a long and dishonorable legacy of anti-LGBTQ forces smearing gay people and couples as threats to children,” PFAW added. “She called parenting by same-sex couples a ‘destructive state-sanctioned gaslighting experiment on children.'”

According to The Daily Signal, which was launched by The Heritage Foundation, Faust also said that since the Obergefell ruling, children have been “deprived of the unique love and guidance only a mother and father can provide.”

Contributors to the project are promoting old claims that studies have disproven.

READ MORE: ‘Crime Might Be in Progress’: Ex-DHS Official Warns After Trump FBI Raids Election Office

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Al Mohler said in the group’s launch video that same-sex marriage “harms children in virtually every way imaginable.”

Colson Center CEO John Stonestreet claimed that social science data reveals that kids “do best when they are raised in a home with married, biological mom and dad.”

Numerous studies have shown that children raised by same-sex parents fare at least as well as children raised by different-sex parents.

A large 2014 study found that children raised by same-sex couples were happier and healthier than their peers raised by different-sex couples.

In 2023, The Guardian reported on a study that also found that “children of same-sex couples fare just as well, if not better, than those of heterosexual couples.”

“The findings chime with several other studies, including three decades of research from Australia that revealed children raised by same-sex parents do as well emotionally, socially and educationally as their peers in heterosexual families.”

Hemant Mehta at The Friendly Atheist wrote that the “Greater Than” campaign “claims loving gay parents are the real threat to kids.”

“While the video has received the bulk of the attention so far, it’s the campaign’s website that actually deserves a closer look. Because surely there’s evidence that children with gay parents suffer, right?” Mehta said. “Nope. There are no studies cited on the website. There’s no proof of any sort offered anywhere.”

He charged: “This is nothing more than repackaged bigotry and finding new ways to express anti-gay hate because the old ways no longer work.”

READ MORE: ‘All Tools Necessary’: GOP Hardliners Press Trump on Insurrection Act

 

Image via Shutterstock

Continue Reading

News

‘Crime Might Be in Progress’: Ex-DHS Official Warns After Trump FBI Raids Election Office

Published

on

Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security during President Donald Trump’s first term, is sounding the alarm after the FBI raided the Fulton County, Georgia election office and removed ballots and related voting materials from the 2020 election, in what is being called an “apparently unprecedented action.”

Taylor is also warning that Trump Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was “caught on camera” at the raid — a highly unusual move for the nation’s intel chief, a role that is supposed to be nonpartisan.

“This is bad. Very bad. But we don’t need to speculate wildly about why this is happening,” Taylor writes. “In an interview earlier this month, Trump openly said he wished he’d ‘seized’ ballots in the 2020 election, and he suggested he had the authority to do so. That should have rung alarm bells across the country.”

“When he laments he didn’t ‘seize’ ballot boxes after losing the 2020 election, he’s referring to a specific executive order that he thinks would justify such an act.”

“But guess what?” Taylor also wrote. “I co-wrote the order he’s talking about. He’s lying. And a crime might be in progress.”

READ MORE: Trump ‘Hellbent’ on Punishing Americans He Still Claims ‘Stole’ the Election: Columnist

“Trump and his lawyers, Taylor says, “have suggested that Executive Order 13848, signed in 2018, gives the president the power to intervene in elections, even to the point of seizing voting machines or ballots.”

But he insists that it does not — and warns that those involved in drafting that executive order are willing to testify that it does not.

He says the executive order was designed to make it easier to impose consequences on foreign actors who interfered in U.S. elections — but “NOT to revisit vote counts. NOT to rummage through ballot boxes. And certainly NOT to allow a president to deploy the military against local election infrastructure because he didn’t like the outcome.”

Taylor also charges that Trump is now “reinterpreting the order as some all-powerful election snooping tool.”

Trump stating that he should have seized ballots, according to Taylor, is “an admission he wanted to take an illegal act and then pretend the law would have somehow allowed it.”

He also takes aim at DNI Gabbard.

“I can’t emphasize how big of a break in custom this is (at best) and how deeply corrupt it might be (at worst),” that she was at the FBI raid on Wednesday — saying that it “stinks to high hell.”

Commenters weighed in.

The Lincoln Project’s Jeff Timmer, a political strategist, wrote: “This is a big f — — deal, and all y’all need to act like it. ”

“When Trump’s storm troopers show up at the Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Fulton County, Maricopa County, etc clerks’ offices and seize absentee ballots before they can be opened and counted, it will be too late,” he warned.

“People,” warned veteran journalist Michael Burgi, “this FBI raid on an Atlanta voting center is really dangerous. Especially when Tulsi Gabbard is lingering in the background.”

READ MORE: ‘All Tools Necessary’: GOP Hardliners Press Trump on Insurrection Act

Image via Reuters

 

Continue Reading

Trending

Copyright © 2020 AlterNet Media.