Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Yes Mr. Huckabee, there are some haters on your side

Former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee appeared on the Daily Show publicizing his book, Do The Right Thing. In this appearance he yet again tried to make his opposition of marriage equality sound reasonable.

Host Jon Stewart skewered Huckabee and I rather liked that. But Huckabee did something that annoyed the hell out of me.

He made another reference to us gays supposedly "unfairly" calling people on his side of this so-called cultural war "haters."

It amazes me how the religious right and their cohorts like to flip the script. They are adept in trying to play the victim by whining how the “other side” (and that would include me) are so quick to call them “bigots” and “haters” when supposedly all they want to do is “protect traditional marriage.”

And I'm frankly tired of it.

Most of all, I don't like Mike Huckabee carousing the talk show circuit channeling Maria Von Trapp and taking advantage of the fact that he has a platform that lgbts don't have in order to distort the reasons behind our anger.

What he needs to do is check the backgrounds of some of his supporters.

Such as Jane Porter (nee Folger).

According to People For the American Way's Right Wing Watch:

Mike Huckabee willingly associates himself with Porter, praising her in his new book as "one of the main catalysts" for his success in the Republican primary and haling her as among a "new wave of leaders" who will remake the Republican Party in their own image.

Oh really?

This is the same woman who, according to Wayne Besen (in his excellent book Anything But Straight), falsely accused the gay organization ACT-UP of being partially responsible for pressuring the American Psychiatric Assocation of removing homosexuality from its lists of disorders in 1973. The only problem with that is ACT-UP did not exist until the 80s. The organization was formed to fight ignorance about the AIDS virus.

This is the same woman who, on a July 30, 1998 episode of the ABC news program Nightline, said she agreed with the sodomy laws that at the time could jail lgbts for private sexual behavior.

And this is the same woman who wrote a mind boggling, idiotic column in which she forecasted a future where Hilary Clinton was elected as president.

Apparently according to Porter, Christians will be placed in prisons for re-education and labor camps thanks in part to us lgbts:

When the "Employment Non-Discrimination Act" ("Thought Crimes" for the Workplace) became law, businesses and ministries were targeted by homosexual activists and were forced to close when they wouldn't comply with a law forcing them to hire those opposed to their beliefs on moral issues.

When they canceled my program, banned my book and targeted my ministry, I knew it was only a matter of time before I'd be forced into "prison ministry" against my will. Unfortunately for our nation, that ministry is growing fast. A homeschooling mom was assigned the cell next to me. I try to comfort her, but she cries constantly at the thought of her kids being raised in government foster care.

The forced labor here makes me think that I should have done more for our brothers and sisters in China sent to labor camps for the crime of hosting a home church, or those imprisoned in every Muslim country for choosing Christ over Allah. We should have seen the writing on the wall when Yahoo turned over confidential searches to the Chinese government, sending people to prison, and when Google barred American Christian sites from its search engines as "haters." Finding allied ministries is now almost impossible.


And don't think Porter likes Obama either. Again according to Right Wing Watch, since his election, she has written six columns pushing the lie that Obama should not be president because he is not a natural born U.S. citizen.

If Huckabee wants to do the right thing, he needs to stop playing the martyr and look at the behavior and words of some of his supporters.

He would see that us lgbts do have a point when we refer to them as haters.