Saturday, July 30, 2005

Nothing but shattered lives, depression and suicide

A gay man and a straight preacher started Love in Action in California in 1973. The gay man left. He’s speaking out:

NEW YORK - Author Wayne Besen released an explosive letter today by Love In Action’s co-Founder and former ex-gay John Evans, which rebukes gay conversion groups saying that they “shattered lives”. The group he started has recently made headlines because it runs a boot camp for gay teens called “Refuge” that tries to turn adolescents heterosexual, often against their will.

“In the past 30 years since leaving the ‘ex-gay’ ministry I have seen nothing but shattered lives, depression and even suicide among those connected with the ‘ex-gay’ movement,” Evans writes in his letter to John Smid, Love In Action’s current director. “I challenge Christians to investigate all sides of the issue of being gay and Christian. The Church has been wrong in the past regarding moral issues and I’m sure there will be more before Christ returns.”

Via John at AMERICAblog: “This is a big deal...”

Very, very funny

So says my friend John about Joe Queenan’s review of “Edward Klein’s stupendously controversial book ‘The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She’ll Go to Become President:’”

Granted, it is a very bad book. Granted, it is a lazy, cut-and-paste recycling of other people’s work. Granted, it relies too much on nasty personal comments about Senator Clinton provided by anonymous sources. Granted, it sleazily intimates that Hillary Clinton is a lying, scheming, smelly, left-leaning lesbian and a non-maternal parent who consorts with lawyers who defend mobbed-up unions and bears a striking character resemblance to both Richard Nixon and Madonna, and who tacitly approved of her husband’s rape of a young woman at a time when Mrs. Clinton may or may not have been bathing, washing her hair or shaving her underarms, while hanging out with short-haired women from the sapphic charnel house Wellesley College. But to suggest, as the talented John Podhoretz did in The New York Post, that this is ‘’one of the most sordid volumes I have ever waded through’’ is to raise serious questions about Podhoretz’s sordid wading experiences.

Go read it. I laughed out loud.

Blogging at its best

Barbara O’Brien at The American Street on the Right’s excited allegations that Air America is stealing money from poor children and old sick people is an example of blogging at its very best.

In How To Fake News: A Primer she recounts the whole tale, tracks down all the links, and concludes:

But if you follow the links, what you find is that they’re all just linking to each others’ allegations, and the allegations are ultimately all based on the one, single, lamely substantiated source-Michael Horowitz of the Bronx News. [He got his information from “informed sources” of undetermined origin.]

The whole post is a must read. I hope the conservative bloggers are successful and they get the MSM to tune in.

She’s no left-winger

Much as I dislike Weisberg’s reasoning for why Hillary can’t win in ‘08, I do like his take on Hillary the left-winger:

One facile argument, often voiced by Hillary-loathers on the right, is that she’s too far to the left. The “real” Hillary is closer to Howard Dean than Bill Clinton, a recent piece in the National Review asserted. Wrong! An unhedged supporter of the war in Iraq, Sen. Clinton stands at the hawkish, interventionist extreme of her party on foreign policy. Despite her pandering vote against CAFTA [Jacob, that was a gratuitous swipe! her argument reads well to me], she’s a confirmed free-trader and deficit hawk. On the cultural issues that often undermine Democrats, she seeks common ground, sometimes with flat-earth conservatives like Rick Santorum, and has been nattering about the “tragedy” of abortion. Even Hillary’s notorious government takeover of health care was misconstrued as an ultra-lib stance. In opting for a mixed, private-public managed-competition plan, the then-first lady was repudiating the single-payer model long favored by paleo-liberals. Her plan was flawed in many ways, but it wasn’t what Ted Kennedy wanted.

In fact, Sen. Clinton’s political positioning couldn’t be better for 2008. Despite being a shrewdly triangulating centrist on the model of her husband, she remains wildly popular with the party’s liberal core: It seems to share the right’s erroneous view of her as a closet lefty and draws closer to her with every inane conservative attack. There’s no other possible candidate in either party so well poised to claim the center without losing the base.

My favoirte moderate(s) may well agree. Earlier in the week David Schraub pointed to this Debate Link post noting that “she should be applauded for some gutsy moves.” Later he wrote:

I think Clinton’s move is more one of perception than content--she’s now focusing on her more centrist positions (like a hawkish defense policy and social moderation) rather than the liberal ones. I’ve seen no evidence that she’s changed the material substance of these positions--much less that it was done for the sake of pure politics… nowhere in this is there any proof that Clinton is changing from any previously held position.

To be clear, I do think Hillary is a liberal. My kind of liberal. A winning liberal.

Rhymes with witch

Give me a break! Jacob Weisberg writing in Slate on Why Hillary Clinton Can’t Win the ‘08 nomination:

Plainly put, it’s her personality. In her four years in the Senate, Hillary has proven herself to be capable, diligent, formidable, effective, and shrewd. She can make Republican colleagues sound like star-struck teenagers. But she still lacks a key quality that a politician can’t achieve through hard work: likability. As hard as she tries, Hillary has little facility for connecting with ordinary folk, for making them feel that she understands, identifies, and is at some level one of them. You may admire and respect her. But it’s hard not to find Hillary a bit inhuman. Whatever she may be like in private, her public persona is calculating, clenched, relentless-and a little robotic.

That’s it. That’s his reason. He grants that she “isn’t as obnoxious as Gore or as off-putting as Kerry,” but I have to wonder has he fallen prey to the old “if it’s a man he’s ambitious, a woman she’s just pushy” dichotomy.

Weisberg offers no justification beyond what’s quoted here. That she’s unlikable is just a given. But the people of New York, no easy sell for a politician called a carpetbagger, apparently liked her. They still do. And I think America may one day too.