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| Bobby Jindal |
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| TX state rep. Molly White |
State Rep. Molly White (R-Belton) has proposed legislation that would allow businesses to refuse to serve customers on religious grounds. The first-year Republican lawmaker has also proposed legislation seeking to make the state’s ban on same-sex marriage immune from court rulings.
. . . But White’s staff has said trying to discuss the issues with her “would be a waste of time." The Temple Daily Telegram reported last week that White’s staff had initially greeted Frank Carlson of Equality Texas, before turning him away upon learning who he represented.
Her staff told Carlson, who works on behalf of the largest LGBT rights organization in Texas, to “drop off your literature and leave.” White’s staff informed Carlson that the lawmaker “is against anything LGBT.”
“I conveyed that the representative has stances on some issues and that she isn’t likely to change her mind on them,” White’s chief of staff Hannah Bell told the Temple Daily Telegram. “We try to be a transparent office and I told them that they needed to meet with individuals that shared their viewpoint.
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| Sen. Marco Rubio |
Where to begin with Steven Hotze? The Houstonian and head of Conservative Republicans of Texas last made headlines a few weeks ago when he brought Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore to the Texas Capitol for a rally in defense of this state’s ban on same-sex marriage.
Hotze was back in Austin on Wednesday to appear before the Texas House Committee on State Affairs to speak in support of House Bill 4105 by state Rep. Cecil Bell, R-Magnolia. HB 4105 would prohibit state or local funds from being used to issue a same-sex marriage license or acknowledge a same-sex marriage in any other way — regardless of whether the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the ban on those unions in Texas.
During his testimony, Hotze, one of the most vicious anti-gay activists in all of Texas, got into a lengthy exchange with state Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston. Just in the four-minute clip you can hear above, Hotze:
Portrays the freedom to marry for gay and lesbian couples as morally equivalent to the Nazi’s mass murder of Jews
Argues that Texans should actively subvert any U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down the state’s ban on same-sex marriage
And, for the extremist cherry on top, equates gay people to alcoholics, murderers, adulterers, perverts, pornographers, rapists and embezzlers. In that order.
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| Mike Huckabee has questions to answer about a 'support group.' |
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| James Dobson |
James Dobson, the founder of the Religious Right behemoth Focus on the Family, warned in a recent conference call with fellow anti-gay activists (Editor's note - according to Right Wing Watch, this call included Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel, Rick Scarborough of Vision America and Peter LaBarbera of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality) that a Supreme Court ruling in favor of marriage equality could lead to a full-blown civil war. After Janet Porter, the creator of a new “documentary” about how the gay rights movement will outlaw Christianity, discussed her “restraining order” campaign to convince Congress to strip the Supreme Court of its authority to rule on marriage cases, Dobson said that his fellow activists “need to be realistic about what we’re up against here.”
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| Dear Tony Perkins, a BAD liar is of use to no one. |
Michelangelo Signorile
"Victory blindness is something we all succumb to at times. It's a term I use to describe the phenomenon in which we focus on the wins, so starved for validation, that we allow them to blind us to the continued bigotry we face. We become enthralled, intoxicated -- spellbound by even a little bit. The effect is that it obscures our reality -- literally our vision -- and it makes us lose our gumption, not wanting to rock the boat, fearful that we'll lose what we've gained and not get what little bit we think we need, when in fact we need a lot and we should be strong and confident knowing our allies will stay with us. In that chapter I use a vivid example, in a section titled "A Story of Victory Blindness," in which too many activists, claiming that we'd gotten a lot and had a banner couple of years, asked us to accept a situation that validated bigotry and urged us to be "magnanimous," fearful that the right would portray us as going too far -- but in fact this only allowed the backlash to grow because we seemed disjointed and that made us seem weak. We were and are still hated and despised by many -- despite having so many allies now -- and we have no rights in most states nor federal protections. So this is victory blindness, and it can have the terrible effect of actually allowing the backlash to grow because it telegraphs that we will back down." - LGBT activist Michelangelo Signorile on why the lgbt community must not rest on our laurels if the Supreme Court rules in our favor on marriage equality later this year.
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| What the anti-gay industry wants America to see us as. |
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| All anti-gay lies come down to this. |
Lawmakers in both Indiana and Arkansas today passed fixes to their respective religious freedom bills. Indiana, of course, is the state where this entire controversy burst forth from, after celebrities and CEOs expressed their issues with the law over potential discrimination of gays and lesbians by business owners.
Today the Indiana legislature passed clarifying language that includes this new passage. Meanwhile, in Arkansas, they had passed their own religious freedom bill, but Governor Asa Hutchinson sent it back and said he wants to see changes to it that align more with federal law on the matter. The Arkansas legislature passed the qualifying language this afternoon, and as of this posting, Hutchinson has signed the bill into law.
