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Maggie Gallagher Tells Supreme Court Justice Christians Are The New Gays

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The co-founder and former chair of the National Organization For Marriage pens an open letter to presumed swing vote Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, lamenting the persecution of Christians over same-sex marriage.

Since the dawn of time, and practically from birth, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people have been stigmatized, ridiculed, treated as second-class citizens, verbally and physically attacked, stoned to death or otherwise murdered in the name of religion, forced to hide their true selves, forced to marry a person of the opposite sex to hide their sexuality and to advance their careers, and so much more.

In America today, Christians make up about 80 percent of the U.S. population. And some of them are LGBT.

Today, National Organization For Marriage co-founder and former chairman Maggie Gallagher chose to all but ignore the centuries of hate and harm bestowed upon gay people, in an open letter she wrote to Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is presumed to be the swing vote in the same-sex marriage case heard this week.

Gallagher identifies Christians as the “newly stigmatized,” in her farcical rewriting of history.

“The forces for gay marriage are powerful,” she begins. “You have been their hero in the past, when gay people were not so powerful. The tables are turned now, as I think is clear to everyone. The LGBT community has built a powerful cultural, legal, and political movement. They are not helpless or friendless. They do not need you to distort the Constitution to win the right to live as they choose. We who believe in the traditional understanding of marriage do need your help. We live at a time when our livelihoods are under new attack, when our standing as equal citizens is under attack, when the system of ideas and the deep human realities that gave rise to marriage for millennia are now being dismissed as mere bigotry, as irrational, incomprehensible hatred.”

Of course, with the exception of less than two dozen nondiscrimination cases across the country against business owners like cake bakers and florists who refuse to follow the same laws their friends and neighbors are obliged to, the idea that “our livelihoods are under new attack” is preposterous. Meanwhile, despite gains on the marriage front, LGBT people can be and are fired from their jobs in the majority of states across the nation, yet Gallagher has never once denounced that, nor supported a nondiscrimination law for LGBT people.

That “millennia” claim, as the world knows all too well, is also false. Marriage for centuries was about property rights, and in many biblical cases, the more property, the merrier.

The one thing I have always marveled about Maggie Gallagher is her unyielding habit of saying what she thinks and believes, despite how it sounds. In a way that’s brave, given how ugly and privileged what she thinks and believes truly is.

For instance, despite how ugly this sounds, Gallagher has no compunction about posting it:

“It is not true that same-sex and opposite-sex couples are equal. Not all sexual relationships are equal, even if they are loving and committed. Same-sex couples have to deal with the preference that the majority has for opposite-sex relationships, ranging from mama’s slight mourning for the family her son will likely never have to Westboro Baptist’s awful, crude, ugly, and unchristian hatred. Opposite-sex couples have the task of managing the reality that from the about age 14 until the woman ages out around 45, every single act of sex could make new life. Nothing the Supreme Court says or does about marriage will change these realities, but importing gay marriage into our Constitution will unleash a cavalcade of consequences for traditional believers.”

Gallagher goes on to claim that equality “will require continual policing, because it is based on an untruth about human nature.” 

In reality, much of society today exists as “an untruth about human nature.” If it didn’t, murder would be legal, so would robbery, rape, etc. Human nature is both beautiful and beastly, and that’s a very basic truth.

And she continues her impassioned insanity, claiming “sustaining marriage privately, without public or governmental approval, will become immeasurably harder, as the portions of society most committed to marriage, classically understood, become consumed with the task of figuring out how they survive the hatred and dhimmitude directed their way.” 

No, allowing gay people the rights and responsibilities of marriage will not make non-gay people less likely to marry. If any straight person refuses to marry because gay people are marrying, they need a psychiatric exam, not a law banning the civil rights of those they oppose.

“Government cannot confer dignity on our relationships,” Gallagher, wrongly concludes. “My best friends, my adult children, my godchildren, my brothers and sisters, every single intimate relationship that I have and that gives meaning to my life, government has no role there. To imagine that a government stamp of approval is what creates value in human relationships, or gives dignity to our sexual lives, is to accord to government a power it does not have: a power to impose an idea of equality that is not true, and to remove from the American people the hard work — of negotiating, compromise, and dealing with one another — that belongs to the democratic process, not the Constitution.”

Almost two years ago I experienced one of the greatest moments of joy in my life, the moment I married my partner. I know other gay men who tell me, as I felt, that it was a life-changing moment, that they felt, as did I, transformed. I don’t know, but I have a suspicion, that many gay people have felt that when they married. Perhaps because a decade ago we barely dreamed we ever could marry, but claiming that legal civil marriage does not “confer dignity on our relationships” is a falsehood of huge proportions. 

Update:

Jeremy Hooper at Good As You adds his usual brilliant insight:

The reason Maggie has to claim that people like me cannot exist without reducing our oppositional voices as being driven by “bigotry, as irrational, incomprehensible hatred” is because she cannot admit that her movement’s ideas—ideas she very much helped develop, let’s always remember—have simply lost out in the public square. Increasingly, people like Maggie like to pretend that this has been something other than a robust debate and that activists like her have had less of a chance to engage. Bull.Crap.

 

This article has been updated and edited. 

Image by WisPolitics.com via Flickr and a CC license
Hat tip: Daily Kos

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Platner Scorched Over ‘Taking Time’ Video After New Accusation

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Maine Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Graham Platner is under fire after releasing a video declaring that new allegations against him are false, yet he is “taking time to reflect” on a path forward.

Politico on Monday afternoon reported that a woman who dated Platner, Jenny Racicot, “says he forced her to have sex with him nearly five years ago despite her repeated objections, an allegation Platner denies.”

“Racicot said she had an on-and-off relationship with Platner,” Politico reported, “for more than two years before he entered her rural Maine home uninvited one night in late 2021, deeply intoxicated, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop. She said she cut off contact with him after telling him the encounter was not consensual.”

In a video posted to social media eleven minutes after the Politico story dropped, Platner says, “I wanted to directly address the troubling, serious, and false allegations against me. Any accusation of nonconsensual behavior is categorically false.”

He said he and his supporters “were united in a love of Maine, a belief that our politics must change, in a focus on defeating Susan Collins.”

“So, regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful the political reality will inflict, we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward for the state that I love, the people that I love, the movement I belong to, and the goal of defeating Susan Collins.”

“Those were the goals when we launched this campaign. And they remain my goals today.”

“Throughout it all, you never turned your back on me. And I will not turn my back on you now. Every one of you deserves to see that vision come to fruition and see Susan Collins defeated. And we will use every tool at our disposal to do so.”

The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, a political commentator who served as the communications director for the Jeb Bush 2016 presidential campaign, blasted Platner.

“I’m sorry but ‘we are taking time to reflect on the best path forward’ is not an option on the table,” Miller wrote. “Either it’s false and you campaign with vigor or it’s true and you get out / apologize to everyone you let down.”

Journalist Ryan Grim, commenting on Platner’s video, noted that Platner “strongly suggests he is considering dropping out. Already Troy Jackson and Chellie Pingree, both gubernatorial candidates, are being kicked around in Maine circles as potential replacements.”

Several others, including Puck News’ Peter Hamby, predicted Platner will be dropping out.

Platner had postponed several campaign events before the Politico story was published.

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Trump Sparks Fury Online After Posting Unblurred Video of Muslim Kindergartners in Hijabs

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President Donald Trump is facing backlash after posting a video of children — including showing their unblurred faces — graduating from kindergarten, with some of the girls purportedly wearing hijabs.

“President Trump posted a captionless video of graduating kindergarteners on Truth Social on Monday, goading his supporters into verbally attacking little children simply for being Muslim,” The New Republic reported. “The clip is from Gateway STEM Academy, a majority-Black K-8 public charter school in St. Paul, Minnesota. It shows about 21 children in caps and gowns on stage singing a song together. Most of the girls are wearing hijabs.”

The original post of the video which Trump reposted reads: “Public school in St. Paul, Minnesota. Every girl is in a hijab … in kindergarten.”

Trump did not add any comments. TNR called the post “Islamophobic, weird, and creepy,” while noting that the comments section of Trump’s post was filled with calls “by racist, xenophobic MAGA supporters” to “deport the children and ban hijabs.”

TNR also noted that it “should come as no surprise that Trump isn’t above attacking children who just learned how to read, but this post is still particularly discomforting—and will certainly contribute to the already potent level of anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. and in Minnesota.”

Critics blasted Trump.

“There is something deeply unsettling about the president of the United States—the most powerful person in the world—going after kindergarten schoolchildren in Minnesota because they wore hijabs, as Trump has done this morning on his website,” The Bulwark’s Sam Stein wrote.

One social media commentator wrote, “Trump posted an unblurred video of more than a dozen Muslim kindergartners to Truth Social, exposing the children’s faces while targeting them for their religion.”

Another added, “Trump is a bigot. The president took to Truth Social to attack kindergarteners in hijabs. These are little kids. The president isn’t just a bigot, he’s also a coward.”

The original video was posted to the X social media platform in June.

U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) at the time commented, “If you are in a public school in America, you should be speaking english.”

 

Image via Reuters 

 

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One Legal Maneuver Threatens to Undo Everything E. Jean Carroll Won

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President Donald Trump’s apparent efforts to delay releasing the $5.8 million civil judgment to E. Jean Carroll are being met with a warning by the journalist’s legal team, who suggest there could be a legal maneuver for Trump to employ to forgo paying the judgment in either of the two cases he lost.

According to The Guardian, on July 4, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered Trump to release the $5.8 million judgment, which is in escrow, to Carroll by this coming Tuesday — or explain why he would not do so.

Carroll’s attorneys think Trump may be trying to buy time to mount another legal strategy, telling the judge that Trump’s request for an extension “appears to be little more than yet another play for time.”

“The case is separate from Trump’s appeal of a Manhattan civil jury’s 2024 award of $83.3m to Carroll for defamation,” The Guardian explains. “But her lawyers have suggested a legal scenario in which the president might seek to conjoin the cases and further delay payment of both.”

Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan (no relation to the judge) wrote, “We can only assume that defendant is seeking … to buy time so he can try to concoct some new basis to put off paying plaintiff presumably in connection with his forthcoming petition and motion for a rehearing.”

Trump’s former attorney, Justin Smith, in one of his final acts, wrote to the Supreme Court suggesting that his client would be appealing the $83.3 million civil judgment.

Smith argued that the Supreme Court “may wish to consider the petitions together,” given they involve the same parties.

The larger judgment case involves possible questions of presidential immunity, and that has Carroll’s attorneys concerned.

“A conjoined case, Carroll’s lawyers fear, could result in both judgments being wiped out,” The Guardian reports.

The president has also made clear he is no fan of Judge Kaplan, after the jurist made several rulings that “angered” Trump.

“What else can you expect from a Trump Hating, Clinton appointed judge, who went out of his way to make sure that the result was as negative as it could possible be,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in 2023, “speaking to, and in control of, a jury from an anti-Trump area which is probably the worst place in the US for me to get a fair ‘trial’.”

 

Image via Reuters

 

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