➤ “I think we expected that,” Mitt Romney claimed of the 18 seconds of sustained booing he received from the NAACP when he promised to repeal Obamacare. If that were true, why did Romney have to go off script” Why wasn’t a response written into his remarks? Poor planning or just lying?
➤ “The day after Regnerus’ study first appeared online, a conservative group called the American College of Pediatricians cited it in a ‘friend of the court’ brief in Golinski v. United States Office of Personnel Management, one of the ongoing federal lawsuits challenging DOMA. The ACP’s use of the study was first reported on The New Civil Rights Movement website.” Congratulations to our Scott Rose! And thanks, Sofia Resnick and The Advocate!
➤ “According to NWCN, the right wing group Preserve Marriage raised only $17,000 in the month of June,” Andrew Belonsky at Towleroad reports. “Washington United for Marriage, the group hoping to maintain the state’s marriage equality, raised a little over $900,000 during the same period, thanks in large part to Microsoft executives Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. WUM has raised a total over $2 million.” Oops. You can learn more about Washington United for Marriage and make a donation at their website.
➤ In 2010, “at the very moment anti-tax protesters were emerging as the most powerful force in American politics, handing Republicans landslide control of the U.S. House, the data show that people were sending the smallest portion of their income to the federal government since 1979,” the Washington Post reports. Yes, “Americans paid the lowest tax rates in 30 years to the federal government in 2009.” Now can we get the GOP and the Tea Party to focus on creating jobs?
➤ “Jennifer Roback Morse, head of the National organization For Marriage’s 501c3 arm (which works as the Ruth Institute)… uses her Catholic beliefs to tell a caller that gays are intrinsically disordered but font have to “act on” their “behavior”; that gays can live perfectly wonderful lives without intimate love or erotic companionship; and that gays have a choice about “how to behave,” just like young’uns of her generation has a choice about whether or not they wanted to shack up,” Jeremy Hooper reports at Good As You. (Buy his book, If It’s A Choice, My Zygote Chose Balls. My review coming soon!)
➤ “For the first time ever, a presiding Lutheran bishop spoke before a pro-LGBT faith group, which also serves a denominational advocacy organization. The historic first came on July 7, when Bishop Mark S. Hanson of the Evangelical Church In America (ELCA) delivered the keynote address at Luther Place Memorial Church in Washington, D.C..”
➤ “Nobody on the right, at least at the national level, seriously cares about proper national governance, even as conservatives would define that — all right-wingers do is devise and execute new ways of winning. They want to win the propaganda war; they want to win votes; they want to win the opportunity to improve the material comfort of those who are already extremely materially comfortable. They don’t want anything else. They don’t want to govern. They’re not patriots.” — No More Mr. Nice Blog writes, as he details the way a fake story about how “Eighty-three percent of American physicians have considered leaving their practices over President Barack Obama’s health care reform law.”
➤ “Mick Jagger’s affair with David Bowie revealed in new book: They ‘were really sexually obsessed with each other’.” Or, um, so?
➤ “It would be hard to overstate just how amazingly LGBT-friendly the US State Department has been under the leadership of Hillary Clinton even as she prepares to depart later this year,” writes friend of the blog Blabbeando in his exceptional, and exceptionally thorough, report on how “US Embassies in Latin America celebrate LGBT pride.” You want to read this.
➤ The documentary film, “Crossing Over,†in Spanish with English subtitles, tells the story of three transgender immigrants from Mexico who “are seeking political asylum in the United States due to emotional, physical and sexual abuses inflicted upon them in their home country.” Watch the trailer: