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So, Is Kagan Gay?

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Andrew Sullivan, and a slew of gay activists and bloggers are all over the, “Is SCOTUS nominee Elena Kagan gay?” issue, and their point of view may surprise you.

You’d think those nasty rapscallions on the right would be going hard after the lesbian angle, but, with the possible exception of Maggie Gallagher and her NOM henchmen, claiming, (quite frankly, stupidly,) “A Vote for Kagan Is a Vote for Gay Marriage,” theirs has been a whisper campaign. (And you can just flat-out call B.S. on Maggie for saying HRC agrees with her. They do not. But Maggie never links to items that would prove she’s twisting truth. It’s just easier that way.)

From the gays in the blogosphere, however, well, there’s an entirely different story.

Andrew Sullivan (whom we can hardly call being on the right anymore, thank goodness,) demands to know. In, “So Is She Gay?” he posits,

It is no more of an empirical question than whether she is Jewish. We know she is Jewish, and it is a fact simply and rightly put in the public square. If she were to hide her Jewishness, it would seem rightly odd, bizarre, anachronistic, even arguably self-critical or self-loathing. And yet we have been told by many that she is gay … and no one will ask directly if this is true and no one in the administration will tell us definitively.

Hmmm… On the one hand, this makes me ponder.  Let’s continue.

In a word, this is preposterous – a function of liberal cowardice and conservative discomfort. It should mean nothing either way.

Darn right, it should mean nothing either way. And yet, how terribly presumptuous to assume that it does not. Kagan is 50. Sullivan is 46. Both come from a time when it was more “appropriate” to hide one’s homosexuality than to be open. Sullivan took one road, perhaps (I said, perhaps) Kagan took another.

Since the issue of this tiny minority – and the right of the huge majority to determine its rights and equality – is a live issue for the court in the next generation, and since it would be bizarre to argue that a Justice’s sexual orientation will not in some way affect his or her judgment of the issue, it is only logical that this question should be clarified.

Now hold on here.

This is the crux of the issue and the exact problem I have with all those on the right who were screaming when Judge Vaughn Walker’s homosexuality was “exposed.” (It was considered well-known before the Prop 8 trial.) The Maggie Gallagher brigade was clamoring that of course Walker would decide the federal Prop 8 trial, automatically, for “the gays.” As if Clarence Thomas would decide every case for “the blacks.” And as if one element of one’s identity is always the deciding factor in all they do. Why, look at right-wing zealot Michelle Malkin, whose entire existence seems poised to rebel against everything she is.

Ridiculous.

Sullivan continues:

It’s especially true with respect to Obama. He has, after all, told us that one of his criteria for a Supreme Court Justice is knowing what it feels like to be on the wrong side of legal discrimination. Well: does he view Kagan’s possible life-experience as a gay woman relevant to this? Did Obama even ask about it? Are we ever going to know one way or the other? Does she have a spouse? Is this spouse going to be forced into the background in a way no heterosexual spouse ever would be?

GayPatriot stoops so low as to ask, if Kagan is gay, “is she actually filling the homosexual Supreme Court seat left vacant since last year?

Oh come on, you never heard of the David Souter gay talk?  Where have you been?  In the same crowd of women that pine for Anderson Cooper…. or the Village People?  Sheesh.

Nice…

But he does ask, “why does Obama think that being a lesbian is such a bad thing?” A valid question, given the White House’s deplorable jump to uphold Kagan’s “straightness.”

At least Elijah Sweete puts it a little nicer. In, “Sex And The Supremes – Kagan Is Sixth “Maybe Gay” Nominee,” he includes “Frank Murphy, Benjamin Cardozo, James McReynolds and David Souter” as on-the-court and “suspected of being gay, or bisexual.”

Gay activist, writer, and Sirius radio host Michelangelo Signorile weighed in last night. We had, via Twitter, a robust conversation, prompted by his tweet:

The story has now become highly relevant: Kagan now needs to say if she is a lesbian or not. And the press must ask her point blank.

And later,

Was it “our business” if Souter was gay? If Scalia or Thomas is? Why is it “our business” that they’re straight? Or Catholic?

Hmmm… again. Good points.

And, lastly,

Why do let right dictate terms: They say it’s bad to be gay, so we so okay, keep it a secret, don’t dare ask. Very weak.

Signorile and Sullivan are taking this issue on to highlight the “tyranny of the closet,” and rightly so. But at what point do we cross the line in using an individual’s privacy to further our own causes? I’m certainly not saying they are, I’m just asking.

In, “Elena Kagan Is Not Gay,” The Nation’s Richard Kim, looking back on a Sullivan-Signorile event a decade ago, calls this “the high-tech lynching of an uppity ambiguous Harvard dean.” Kim then calls Sullivan’s reasoning “naive,” and wonders if Sullivan is, “exorcising some old demons.”

Earlier in the day, Sullivan wrote:

The NYT’s bizarre profile of Kagan, which plumbs every minute aspect of her most intimate and private life while saying nothing whatever about her emotional relationships, home, dating, or indeed anything that might even touch upon her sexual orientation, gay or straight, is so contrived in its avoidance of the obvious it is almost comic. To put it bluntly: the NYT can produce 4,500 words on a person and barely address the three most common Google searches on her name. There is some kind of disconnect here, no?

So I stick to my guns. If Obama had not publicly declared someone’s life experiences to be essential to his pick of a Supreme Court Justice, it would be one thing.

If Kagan is gay, or not, it’s between her and whomever she chooses, unless she is but denies it to the public. In other words, unless she flat out lies. Personally, I would rather have an “out” judge than a closeted one. A closeted judge in this day and age is not a tribute to our community. It’s one thing to point to someone from the 1940s and say, “And did you know they were gay?” It’s another to point to someone prominent in today’s society who is, but isn’t out.

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Trump Declares War on ‘Woke Leftist Ideologues’ as He Moves to Reshape Entire US Military

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President Donald Trump has made clear he intends to remake the culture of the entire U.S. Military, starting at the very beginning.

“Our Service Academies have been infiltrated by Woke Leftist Ideologues over the last four years. I have ordered the immediate dismissal of the Board of Visitors for the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard,” the Commander-in-Chief announced Monday afternoon.  The Boards ensure accountability and civilian oversight at institutions like West Point. “We will have the strongest Military in History, and that begins by appointing new individuals to these Boards. We must make the Military Academies GREAT AGAIN!”

“Trump campaigned on a promise to purge the U.S. military of officers he deemed ‘woke’ and has used the start of his second term to try and rid the Pentagon of diversity initiatives by executive order,” Politico reported. “The purge has begun to extend to the nation’s service academies, where Republican lawmakers have long complained that so-called ‘woke’ literature is seeping into the curriculum. The Washington Post reported on Friday that the U.S. Defense Department had begun restricting access to some books in its school systems. The service academies themselves had already begun disbanding student clubs focused on diversity in response to Trump’s executive orders, with West Point getting rid of a dozen such organizations last week, including the Asian-Pacific Forum Club and the National Society of Black Engineers Club.”

It is unclear if the President can fire members of the Boards of Visitors, who are appointed by the President to serve a term of three years.

READ MORE: The 27 Words the NSA Is Scrubbing From Its Websites: Report

As President Trump’s newly sworn-in national security cabinet members get to work in their new roles, they are making clear their priorities will be his: getting rid of “woke.”

Trump’s announcement on the firings came just one day after U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared he had “met with the leadership” of each service academy last week.

“My message was simple: stick to leadership, standards, excellence, war fighting, and readiness. These are MILITARY ACADEMIES, not civilian universities. I was impressed by the changes already underway and look forward to visiting each institution. Social Justice and DEI are OUT; History, Engineering, and War Studies are IN. We must restore the warrior ethos to the @deptofdefense — and it starts with our future leaders.”

Secretary Hegseth, who officially took office on January 25, was criticized for his remarks after the mid-air collision between a commercial airplane and an Army helicopter that took place near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and claimed all 67 lives.

The next day, Secretary Hegseth tried to blame “DEI” — diversity, equity, and inclusion — for the crash, following President Trump’s lead.

Now, Hegseth is again engaging in “culture war” attacks, this time attacking transgender service members, another attempt to purge “woke” from the Trump administration.

In a memo on Monday titled, “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” (the exact same title as a Trump executive order,) the Defense Secretary announced a “pause” for all medical treatments of transgender service members, and a pause on accepting any new transgender service members into the U.S. Military.

Also on Monday, U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins posted a statement in line with Republicans’ recent attacks on the news site Politico.

“Ran across a $178,000 contract VA had with Politico and we promptly canceled it. That money can be better spent on Veterans health care!” Secretary Collins wrote.

READ MORE: ‘Stomach Turning’: Trump Defends His J6 Pardons as ‘Great for Humanity’

Longtime veterans’ activist and political commentator Paul Rieckhoff blasted Collins, and issued a warning.

“This is the first action item he [Collins] posts about as VA Sec. The very first. Not suicide, not healthcare improvements, not even bureaucratic changes. He’s taking action against Politico. The Trump administration messaging machine is synched up. And growing this week to include [the] VA. Look for attacks on DEI, trans people and the press any minute now. The culture war at VA under Collins will run in direct parallel with Hegseth at DoD. And it’s all just getting started.”

Rieckhoff has been sounding the alarm bells about Trump’s apparent takeover of the military.

“He’s daring the world to stop him, just like he has his entire life, and they’re not stopping him,” Rieckhoff said Friday night about Trump in a panel discussion on MSNBC.

He also talked about Trump’s “radical extreme agenda of taking over the government and snatching the levers of power,” and warned: “we should be really watching when he says, ‘I’m going for the military.'”

“He went with Hegseth first, he’s going for the Pentagon first because when you break into a house and take it over, you go for the gun closet first,” Rieckhoff remarked. “He knows the military is the most powerful, he knows it’s the most influential. It’s the biggest biggest employer. It’s got the biggest budget, and it’s got the guns, so that’s where he’s going first and he’s leading his entire strategy with and at the Pentagon.”

Before the 2024 election, the liberal political action committee VoteVets, posted video (below) showing how Trump, using the Project 2025 playbook, could take over the U.S. Military and turn it “into his own MAGA military.”

Almost all the suggestions have begun to be implemented.

Watch that video below or at this link.

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Image via Reuters

 

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The 27 Words the NSA Is Scrubbing From Its Websites: Report

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The National Security Agency (NSA), a largely clandestine global intelligence-gathering and counterintelligence organization that “prevents and eradicates threats to U.S. national security systems,” is reportedly undergoing a massive “purge” on its public and private websites and internal network, eliminating any site that contains any of a list of 27 words — despite possibly including mission-related work. The operation is an effort to comply with President Donald Trump’s order to eliminate any so-called “DEI” programs or language.

Trump has called DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion — “illegal,” and in his January 21 executive order alleged that DEI “policies not only violate the text and spirit of our longstanding Federal civil-rights laws, they also undermine our national unity, as they deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system. Hardworking Americans who deserve a shot at the American Dream should not be stigmatized, demeaned, or shut out of opportunities because of their race or sex.”

According to Popular Information, on Monday the NSA, which is under the U.S. Department of Defense, “is planning a ‘Big Delete’ of websites and internal network content that contain any of 27 banned words, including ‘privilege,’ ‘bias,’ and ‘inclusion.’ The ‘Big Delete,’ according to an NSA source and internal correspondence reviewed by Popular Information, is creating unintended consequences.

READ MORE: ‘Stomach Turning’: Trump Defends His J6 Pardons as ‘Great for Humanity’

Popular Information’s Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby report that “the dragnet is taking down ‘mission-related’ work. According to the NSA source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media, the process is ‘very chaotic,’ but is plowing ahead anyway.”

A memo announcing the 27 banned words “acknowledges that the list includes many terms that are used by the NSA in contexts that have nothing to do with DEI. For example, the term ‘privilege is used by the NSA in the context of ‘privilege escalation.’ In the intelligence world, privilege escalation refers to ‘techniques that adversaries use to gain higher-level permissions on a system or network.'”

Efforts to comply with Trump’s anti-DEI orders are not limited to the NSA.

“Since Trump took office, thousands of web pages across various federal agencies have been altered or removed entirely. Federal agencies have taken down or edited resources about HIV, contraceptives, LGBTQ+ health, abortion, and climate change. Some web pages have later come back online ‘without clarity on what had been changed or removed.” Popular Information also reported.

“An analysis by the Washington Post of 8,000 federal web pages ‘found 662 examples of deletions and additions’ since Trump took office. The analysis found that words like diversity, equity, and inclusion were removed at least 231 times from the websites of federal agencies, including the Department of Labor, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Transportation.”

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A quick search of the NSA’s public website for the word “transgender” came up with only one hit, a page titled, “50 Years of Pride: Celebrating NSA’s Committment {sic] to Promoting Respect, Individuality, Diversity, and Equality.” That link led to an error page that stated: “The page you are looking for might have been moved, renamed, or may be temporarily unavailable.”

But a search for pages with the words “Diversity,” “Privilege,” and “Pronouns” resulted in numerous positive hits.

Legum posted the list of 27 banned words to social media. They include, Anti-Racism, Racism, Allyship, Bias, DEI, Diversity, Confirmation Bias, Equity, Feminism, Gender, Gender Identity Inclusion, Inclusive, and All-Inclusive, among others.

READ MORE: ‘Bring Him Back’: JD Vance Wants Musk to Rehire 25 Year Old DOGE ‘Kid’ After Racist Posts

Image via Reuters

 

 

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‘Stomach Turning’: Trump Defends His J6 Pardons as ‘Great for Humanity’

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President Donald Trump aboard Air Force One on Sunday announced that the nearly 1600 people he pardoned after they had been convicted of January 6-related crimes did not assault anyone but had been assaulted by the U.S. government, and his granting those pardons on his first day back in office was “a great thing for humanity.”

Trump was sitting next to a large map of what he announced is now the “Gulf of America,” and had signed an executive order requiring that new designation as the plane flew over what has, for hundreds of years, been called the Gulf of Mexico. Some observers have noted that Trump is also attempting to reshape the narrative of the January 6 insurrection and attack on the U.S. Capitol by claiming that those convicted of crimes were actually victims.

Reminded by a reporter that he had planned to honor first responders at the Super Bowl, President Trump was asked why he would pardon people who had assaulted first responders.

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“I pardoned people that were assaulted themselves. They were assaulted by our government,” Trump insisted, despite countless hours of footage of people he pardoned attacking the U.S. Capitol, and some of them attacking law enforcement officers.

“I pardoned J6 people who were assaulted by our government. That’s who assaulted — and they were treated unfairly, there’s never been a group of people in this country outside of maybe one instance that I can think of, but I won’t get into it, that were treated more horribly than the people of J6,” Trump insisted.

“I didn’t assault, they didn’t assault. They were assaulted, and what I did was a great thing for humanity.”

Just days after Trump handed down the pardons, The New York Times reported that even some of his close allies “opposed granting clemency to those rioters found guilty of violent crimes, especially the more than 600 who were convicted of assaulting or resisting police officers. Of those defendants, nearly 175 used a dangerous or deadly weapon, prosecutors say.”

On January 20, via a presidential proclamation, Trump announced he was commuting the sentences of 14 of some of the worst January 6 offenders, and granting “a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”

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Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, called the pardons “an attempt to rewrite history and erase an attack on the Constitution and the country.”

Critics are blasting President Trump’s remarks on Sunday, including his claim the people he pardoned had been assaulted by “our government.”

“This administration & the GOP are completely rewriting the events of January 6. The president is doing it here. They pretend all the evidence, footage, confessions, & documents just don’t exist, that we didn’t see it happen. It’s an authoritarian move, & it should terrify us all,” observed T. Kenny Fountain, an associate professor whose bio says he researches extremism, conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and disinformation.

Noted political scientist and professor of politics Larry Sabato called Trump’s remarks “Absolutely stomach-turning.”

Journalist Jim Acosta wrote simply, “Disgraceful.”

Award-winning investigative reporter Phil Williams posted video from January 6 and wrote, “These people were all pardoned.”

Watch the video above or at this link.

READ MORE: Trump Inherits Biden’s ‘Astonishing’ Jobs Legacy, But Prices Are Now Climbing on His Watch

 

Image via Reuters

 

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