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What The Criticisms Of NYT Columnist Ross Douthat For Speaking To An Anti-Gay Group Are Missing

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The New York Times’ conservative columnist, Ross Douthat, spoke last week at a fundraiser for one of America’s most anti-gay groups. Many in the LGBT community are outraged — here’s what they’re missing.

Ross Douthat is the New York Times’ only conservative opinion writer. The Times always has one. His predecessor was the horrific neocon war hawk William Kristol.

Douthat is young (34), smart, and far more religious than the average American. 

And I can’t stand his work.

This week, some members of the LGBT blogosphere, from Dan Savage to Media Matters to Joe.My.God. to Towleroad, and others, went on the warpath, attacking Douthat for speaking at a fundraiser for the Alliance Defending Freedom. If you’re unsure exactly of what the ADF is, or their embarrassing portfolio of anti-gay legal work, read my recent piece, “Almost Everything You’ve Been Told About The Idaho Wedding Chapel Story Is A Lie.”

Here’s a screenshot of a recent ADF Facebook post that’s clearly not telling the truth:

adf.jpg

Bottom line, the ADF is the law firm currently pushing the lie about the “Hitching Post” ministers being “threatened” with jail, etc. They also unintentionally brought same-sex marriage to California and Virginia, having lost those cases. They support putting LGBT people in prison, have ties to international anti-gay groups and actions, and are pursuing a Biblical take on the Constitution. 

Evil, some might say, is an appropriate word for their work.

Ross Douthat claims he was unaware the event he attended was a fundraiser.

Big mistake.

He apologized, as Media Matters reports today:

“I was not aware in advance that this event was a fundraiser and had I known, I would not have agreed to participate,” he said in a statement issued to Media Matters through the Times Wednesday. “I was invited by an events organizing group, not by ADF directly. I understood this to be a public conversation about religious liberty. This is my fault for not doing my due diligence, and I will be declining the honorarium.”

Douthat is getting heat now for suggesting if it weren’t a fundraiser, he would have attended, revealing an appalling lack of investigation into the ADF — still — and an appalling lack of understanding of why so many are so upset.

Meanwhile, what everyone should be attacking Douthat for, actually, is not just that he showed up,  allowing his name to give creedence to the event, and thus, padding the ADF’s coffers, but that he didn’t chastise the ADF, its leaders, and its audience for being so off-the-wall filled with anti-gay hate once he got there.

Douthat had the opportunity to express just how offensive, dangerous, and anti-Christian the ADF actually is, but he didn’t.

“Hi, I’m Ross Douthat. Thanks for inviting me. I want you to know that I’m a devout Roman Catholic, a successful New York Times opinion writer, and I think what you’re doing, what your mission is, and how you treat God’s children who happen to be LGBT, is vile, disgusting, inhuman, and against God’s message of love. Shame on you all. No one respects you, you’re a laughing stock, you’ve lost nearly every important culture war case you’ve fought, and your ideas are dangerous to the younger generation — including my family.”

That’s not what Douthat told the audience at the ADF, but he should have.

Dan Savage exploded today, writing, “Douthat isn’t apologizing for crawling into bed with the ADF, an organization that wants to send Douthat’s colleagues Frank Bruni (gay), Josh Barro (gay), Charles Blow (bi), and Jennifer Boylan (a trans woman married to another woman) to prison. He’s not apologizing for speaking before the ADF. He’s only apologizing for appearing at a fundraiser for the ADF.”

“So,” Savage continues, “it’s fine for writers at the NYT to speak before hate groups—rabidly anti-gay orgs like the ADF, anti-Semitic groups, the reconstituted KKK, White Citizen Councils—so long as the event isn’t a fundraiser? So… it would’ve been fine for Douthat to have a ‘conversation’ with the organization that wants to send Frank Bruni and Josh Barro to prison but a line was crossed when Douthat helped raise money for the organization that wants to send Frank Bruni and Josh Barro to prison.”

He has several excellent points.

But no one is talking about what Douthat actually did say to the ADF.

Hugh Hewitt, a far-right wing pundit, introduced Douthat as the “special forces of conservative punditry,” someone who’s embedded “behind enemy lines” — meaning, the New York Times.

Douthat actually did a fairly decent job of presenting secular America’s position in opposing the radical religious right. Clearly, Hewitt and his audience were surprised, and Douthat likely didn’t make many friends, but he did plant important ideas in their minds, and there’s something to be said for that, too.

So, here’s the clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug1tz-ECKGA#t=11932

I agree, the LGBT community and our allies should be outraged at Douthat for “crawling into bed with the ADF,” but that’s not where our anger and upset should end.

 

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White House Responds to ‘Stone-Cold Loser’ Carville After Devastating Prediction

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In a rare move, the White House is pushing back against James Carville, after the longtime political consultant and prolific pundit predicted that Donald Trump’s presidency would end within the next year.

“I’m saying this right now,” Carville declared on his Politicon podcast. “You’re not going to be president a year from now. You’re too soft a man. You’re too weak. Your support is draining out.”

“People are going to be on to you. And when the Democrats get back in office in January, they’re going right after the corruption,” Carville added.

“We’re going to find out all the money that has gone the wrong way, and we’re going to have a legal proceeding, and we’re going to have what you call a clawback,” he said.

The White House, in a statement to Fox News, slammed Carville.

READ MORE: Where Were Republicans as Trump Zigzagged on Iran War and Peace?

“James Carville is a stone-cold loser who suffers from a severe and incurable disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome, and it has rotted his peanut-sized brain,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle told Fox News Digital in a statement.

Carville had other strong words for the president.

“You’re so screwed,” he warned, before referring to a New York Times article.

“They’re leaking on you like crazy,” Carville said.  “You can’t trust anybody. Your staff is leaking on you. The Pentagon is leaking on you. The State Department is leaking out here. Everybody is dumping all over you, loser. And, you know, this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

He also warned the president about Vice President JD Vance’s loyalty, and later said, “you’re done, dude. You’re really done. No one fears you anymore. Your own staff doesn’t fear you.”

“But, dude, you and I know something,” Carville continued. “We got a little secret between me and you. You’re done. People hate you. Trust no one. Be as paranoid as you possibly be, because you can’t be paranoid enough.”

READ MORE: Will ‘Sputtering’ Trump Ever Learn His Lesson?: Columnist

 

Image via Reuters 

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Will ‘Sputtering’ Trump Ever Learn His Lesson?: Columnist

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As his tenuous ceasefire approaches the 48-hour mark, President Donald Trump remains a “foolhardy and unpredictable executive-in-training” who got “schooled” by Iran, writes Trump biographer and Bloomberg columnist Timothy L. O’Brien.

In addition to costing American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, Trump’s Iran war has cost the lives of American soldiers, and thousands of Iranians. The economic tab may soon approach $100 billion, says O’Brien. But there have also been enormous “reputational, civic and strategic costs” for America.

“In the run-up to a two-week ceasefire announced on Tuesday evening, the president took to social media and the airwaves to warn Iran and the world that ‘a whole civilization will die’ and he intended to bomb the country ‘back to the stone ages.’ He brushed off questions about whether he was willing to commit war crimes by noting that Iranians are ‘animals.'”

Trump’s “dangerous and reckless flexes” may have just been him “bluffing, but sophisticated dealmakers know that undeliverable threats backfire when your bluff is called” — and Iran “called Trump’s bluff.”

READ MORE: Where Were Republicans as Trump Zigzagged on Iran War and Peace?

Now, writes O’Brien, Trump is, “essentially, a downed power line. If he is left to his own devices, sputtering, further conflagrations could consume the Middle East.”

O’Brien reminds that once elected, presidents “should come to the job with tangible aptitudes for management, leadership, policy, rationality and decency,” and not need the White House to be their “finishing school.”

But “largely uneducable,” Trump faces an Iran ceasefire that “is a recess of sorts for the world’s most powerful and incendiary pupil, and he may return to class having failed to absorb his studies.”

Trump is a “blinkered, close-minded leader,” charges O’Brien, and “a serial bankruptcy artist” who, before entering the White House, “was never an adept dealmaker.”

A “serious student” would try to learn from the ceasefire. But a cornered Trump may become “even more dangerous and thuggish.”

Ultimately, Trump “will be measured by whether he defines his Iranian studies by weeks of failed exams — or commits himself to years of mindless and cataclysmic classwork.”

READ MORE: Trump Rages in Incoherent Truth Social Rant

 

Image via Reuters 

 

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Bill Kristol Diagnoses Trump’s ‘Conquistador’ Complex

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Conservative commentator Bill Kristol suggests President Donald Trump has a “conquistador” complex — which is a complete reversal from how he campaigned in 2024, on “no new wars.”

“If Kamala wins, only death and destruction await because she is the candidate of endless wars. I am the candidate of peace. I am peace,” Trump declared during his 2024 campaign.

“These war hawks, they want to draft your kids to die in wars, and they will never fight themselves,” Trump said, days before the 2024 election.

The night he won, Trump told supporters, “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”

Kristol writes at The Bulwark, “We haven’t heard much talk recently from the president about wars we’re not getting into.”

“Will one consequence of his humiliating failure in Iran be a return to such a stance? Perhaps the difficulties of the last two weeks have diminished Trump’s interest in foreign excursions?” he asks. “Appears not. A taste for foreign adventures seems to have lodged itself in Trump’s brain.”

READ MORE: Trump Rages in Incoherent Truth Social Rant

He points to Trump just weeks ago saying, “Cuba is ​next by the way.”

Just yesterday, Trump returned his focus to Greenland.

“NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN. REMEMBER GREENLAND, THAT BIG, POORLY RUN, PIECE OF ICE!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Thursday night, Trump appeared to threaten Iran again, declaring that all “U.S. Ships, Aircraft, and Military Personnel, with additional Ammunition, Weaponry, and anything else that is appropriate and necessary for the lethal prosecution and destruction of an already substantially degraded Enemy, will remain in place in, and around, Iran, until such time as the REAL AGREEMENT reached is fully complied with.”

He concluded: “In the meantime our great Military is Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest. AMERICA IS BACK!”

Kristol notes that it is unusual for an American president to “proclaim ‘Conquest’ as his goal. In his June 6, 1944 D-Day prayer, President Roosevelt said that American soldiers ‘fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate.'”

But for this president, “the dream of foreign conquest seems to have become a more central part of Trump’s personal sense of grandiosity, not to say megalomania, than it was earlier in his career.”

READ MORE: Trump Administration Wants Protected Health Records of Federal Workers

 

Image via Reuters 

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