Same-sex marriage

CPAC, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference begins Feb. 18. Conservative leaders will rally the troops before the mid-term elections in November and discuss the future role of conservatives in politics.

One person who will not be in attendance is Meghan McCain, despite the year-long media attempt to make citizens believe she is somehow representative of conservatives. She tweeted on Feb. 11, "I have no idea where this weird rumor I am speaking at CPAC came from, it isn't true and I will not be attending or speaking."

McCain, the 25-year-old daughter of former Republican presidential nominee John McCain and a writer for The Daily Beast, has taken it upon herself to tell the GOP what needs to be fixed within the party. Because she calls herself a Republican, media outlets have perpetuated the notion that she is also conservative. By doing that, they've pushed a liberal social agenda that directly conflicts with conservative values.

Writer Kathleen Parker, herself no stranger to conservative bashing, praised McCain last spring as "one smart cookie" who "in a matter weeks ... has created a brand, presenting herself as a fresh face of her daddy's party and voice of young conservatives."

Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post and a contributor to MSNBC, suggested last summer that "maybe what the Republican Party is going to have to do is skip a generation and wait for the Meghan McCains to come of age so they can run for office and take over the mantle of the party."

On Valentine’s Day, Reverend Billy Talen sponsored an “unMarriage event,” where he invited all couples to “unmarry” until everyone has the opportunity to marry whomever they want. As if that wasn’t enough, Talen wrote a charming article entitled, “Meditations Before the ‘UnMarriage Until Gay Marriage’” that was featured February 16 on The Huffington Post. His meditations included dividing people into categories such as “fear people,” “hate people,” and “the killer people.”

Talen attempted to equate opposition to gay marriage with violent behavior. He stated that, “Making marriage a gated community, is tantamount to violence. Marriage as a private club for heterosexuals – this is a kind of extortion. We should have long ago recognized the pain and suffering that comes from this social concoction. Reserving state-sanctioned love for certain approved citizens? This is the essential structure for racism, earth-death and war.”

Rosie O'Donnell knows that cute kids can sell anything. When she hosted her afternoon talk show back in the late 1990s, she put out two books of children's jokes titled "Kids Are Punny." That same principle is at work in her new HBO documentary, titled "A Family Is A Family Is A Family: A Rosie O'Donnell Celebration."

But it's not a celebration. It's an indoctrination. O'Donnell and HBO are pushing gay "marriage equality." A young black girl offers the sales pitch in the show's opening minute: "It doesn't matter if you have one parent. It doesn't matter if you have two moms. It doesn't matter if you have two dads. Just stick with it. A family's a family."

As O'Donnell explained to a reporter during her promotional tour: "It's hard to argue with the voices of innocent children telling the truth about their life and love." She's daring her opponents to try.

Romantic comedies and candlelight dinners are two common activities that couples like to engage in on Valentine’s Day, but Bill Talen is offering a rather, uhh, unique suggestion on February 14: un-marry your spouse for gay rights. USA Today reported that Talen is inviting all couples to participate in the “unMarriage event,” taking place in New York City, which apparently isn’t anything new.

Talen, who is also known as Rev. Billy, invites all to join in on this event on his website and writes, “Join hundreds of couples at the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park this Valentine’s Day for a mass ritual in support of all the rights of ALL people to marry whomever they wish.”

He continues to write, “Brides and Grooms will suspend their vows in a ritual officiated by Reverend Billy. Tragic and hopeful love songs will be sung. Participants will be issued an official unmarried certificate suitable for framing.” How romantic.

The once-Disney princess Anne Hathaway recently announced to a cheering media that she was leaving the Catholic Church due to its "limited view" on her homosexual brother. Even though the media haven't stopped clapping, Michelangelo Signorile, a gay activist and talk radio host, warned on "The Joy Behar Show" that Hathaway may be temporarily sidelined by the conservative bigwigs in Hollywood.

"I think that it's the powers that be that has the problem," Signorile said to Behar on Feb. 9. "Hollywood, ya know, it's the money. The conservatives - the money is always conservative, and they're always afraid."

Apparently in Rosie O'Donnell's world, people who don't subscribe to her beliefs are less than human, and she surrounds herself with people of like mind.

The former "View" moderator took the opportunity during the Feb. 8 broadcast of her Sirius XM radio show, "Rosie Radio" to outline how she tried to "humanize" her former colleague, Elisabeth Hasselbeck. O'Donnell's comments stemmed from a discussion about the conservative backlash to her recent HBO documentary about families, "A Family is a Family is a Family."

"I have that horrible, horrible, optimistic view that I could reach one of them. Remember, after Columbine, I used to write Wayne LaPierre letters, who was the head of the NRA at that time, saying, ‘Surely, sir, you can understand,' as if he's gonna [agree]," she explained. "It's sort of what I thought about Elisabeth Hasselbeck, too. I'm gonna love her, regardless of what she says, I'm gonna love her and the love, then, is going to win through in the end."

She continued, "I was positive of this, and we sort of got it a little bit. We started to sort of humanize her. Remember, after she came to my house, she actually said on television how she thought our family was so great? Can you imagine the amount of hate mail she got from her constituency?" [Audio available here.]

Harry Knox is not exactly a household name, and the media elite have no interest in making hime one. The media are in the controversy-making business, but not when Barack Obama picks "spiritual advisers" who think condoms are holier than the Pope.

Most media outlets have reported nothing on Knox, despite his view that Pope Benedict is "hurting people in the name of Jesus."

Some could say Bush's faith-based initiatives office didn't get much ink, either. But back in July 2001, the networks picked up and promoted gay-left groups like Knox's group (the Human Rights Campaign) in complaining about the Bush faith-based initiative. They made the Salvation Army a target of political criticism. (Here and here.)

If it isn't obvious already, Joy Behar doesn't know when to keep her mouth shut. On Jan. 26's "The View," a clueless Behar accidentally tipped the agenda of much of the gay and same-sex marriage movement.

"They," she said, referring to gays, "don't take monogamy and infidelity the same way that the straight community does."

Such things as fidelity, she added, don't have the "same weight" with gays as with straights, and - you might want to sit down for this - Behar was actually right for once.

With the latest battle over same-sex marriage brewing in a California federal court, gays are claiming that they simply want the right to participate in traditional marriage. But that couldn't be further from the truth. As a previous CMI article noted, many gays don't want to just participate in traditional marriage. They want to radically change it.

On Wednesday’s Countdown show, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann defended his recent attacks on Massachusetts Republican Senator-elect Scott Brown by insisting that some of the incorrect claims he made are true when, in fact, two are factually without merit while the third represents one of Olbermann’s typical episodes of distorting the words of a target. Among other complaints, Olbermann on Wednesday claimed that Scott "swore at" high school students at an assembly in 2007, that he has refused to renounce a vulgar threat made against Attorney General Martha Coakley by an audience member at a Sunday rally, and that he demonstrated racism in once suggesting that he wasn’t sure if Barack Obama’s parents were married at the time of his birth.

The Countdown host repeated a myth promoted by the liberal blog bluemassgroup.com that, in February 2007, then-State Senator Scott "swore at a hall full of high school students" as he appeared before a group at King Philip Regional High School in Wrentham, Massachusetts. In reality, Scott was not alleged to have "sworn at" the students, but rather, he angrily responded to and complained about vulgar comments that some students had written about him and one of his daughters – comments which had been posted on the Facebook page of a pro-gay rights teacher at the school – as Scott read the uncensored comments from the site, naming some of the students, in front of the assembly. His actions sparked criticism because he read aloud the profane words as they appeared on the Facebook page, but he was not alleged to have "sworn at" the students.

CNN legal analyst Lisa Bloom condemned the voter-approved Proposition 8 in California in an editorial on CNN.com on Tuesday, and labeled the Supreme Court’s Lawrence v. Texas decision in 2003 as “the gay community's Brown v. Board of Education.” Bloom would later imply that the supporters of Prop 8 were “lunatic-fringe bigots.”

The legal analyst began the January 12, 2010 editorial, titled “Prop 8 is simply unconstitutional,” by contrasting “reckless heterosexual nuptials,” such as the 23 marriages of a grandmother in Indiana, with her friends Wilbert and Carlos, “‘free men’ together 16 years and lovingly raising a son, [who] are shut out of the 1,100 federal and hundreds of state legal benefits that come with marriage.” She continued by dropping another personal anecdote, citing the “children in same-sex families: kids like my friends’ son Dorian, growing up with the sting of knowing that his parents are second-class citizens in their own country.”

If you're educated, you'll vote for gay politicians. That was the underlying message of the Time's article "Europe's Gay Leaders: Out at the Top" by William Lee Adams. Adams based his premise on the worn out stereotype that conservatives lack forward-thinking skills - or perhaps any thinking skills whatsoever - and need to be educated by progressive liberals such as himself. (And since we're dwelling on stereotypes, note that the first sentence above used only eight words to summarize what Adams, like a typical pontificating liberal, took 1,867 words to say.)

Adams argued in his article that Iceland, which elected Johanna Sigurdardottir last year - the world's first gay leader, was an "extremely homophobic" country until its citizens were given an "education."

Back in 2006, Brad Pitt announced during an interview with Esquire magazine that he will only tie the knot with his (perhaps, still) girlfriend Angelina Jolie when "everyone else in the country who wants to be married is legally able." (It's assumed he was talking about gays and not, say, first cousins or fathers and daughters - although he did leave it rather open-ended.)

Well, best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert isn't that dedicated, because she just got married to her boyfriend of many years (after swearing "never, ever, under any circumstances" to marry again after her first, bitter divorce), but she did throw out her two-cents during an interview with Time magazine on Nov. 4.

"A lot of heterosexual couples are reluctant to get married," asserted the woman who penned "Eat, Pray, Love" and the new "Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage."  "There's a sense of, Why should I have access to this when my friends who have been together just as long as me don't?"

To parents working to raise their children and teens in a world inundated with so much media - from video games to movies to music to the thousands of youth-oriented books published each year - a little help from experts is welcome.

So news that the American Library Association will announce its 2010 Youth Media Awards in just a couple of weeks should be good news for those who want to enrich their kids' cultural and intellectual lives, right? Just read what the ALA Web site has to say about the awards:

Recognized worldwide for the high quality they represent, the ALA Youth Media Awards guide parents, educators, librarians and others in selecting the best materials for youth. Selected by committees composed of librarians and other literature and media experts, the awards encourage original and creative work in the field of children's and young adult literature and media.

But in the case of the Youth Media Awards, the ALA's "librarians and other literature and media experts" have a very different conception of the "best materials for youth" than most parents. The ALA has a public social and political agenda that endorses same-sex marriage, and who's agenda is glaringly reflected in the books it chooses to award and those it chooses to ignore, or even - yes - ban.

MSNBC, "the place for politics" strikes again, this time with character assassination in the name of same-sex marriage.

On the Dec. 29 broadcast of "The Rachel Maddow Show," Maddow took aim at former Bush administration Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, now a Fox News contributor. She noted his prior opposition to same-sex marriage, which according to Maddow's citation of The Atlantic magazine, was done only to win elections.

"In the Karl Rove political playbook, more than one chapter covers the tactic of gay-baiting, which Mr. Rove has used to notorious electoral effect," Maddow said. "To quote a 2004 profile of Mr. Rove in The Atlantic magazine, quote, ‘One constant throughout his career is the prevalence of whisper campaigns against opponents. Often, a Rove campaign questions an opponent's sexual orientation.'"

UPDATE: Sources tell NewsBusters Limbaugh-Rogers wedding slated for June 2010, which was reported as July 4, 2010 by Behar.

It's probably no surprise, but conservative talker Rush Limbaugh isn't going to get a break from the liberal cheap shot artists on cable television in the wake of the news he will be getting married to Kathryn Rogers on July 4, 2010.

On HLN's Dec. 17 broadcast of "The Joy Behar Show," a panel including host Joy Behar, comedian Marina Franklin and satirist Harry Shearer took on one of the most important issues of the day - Limbaugh's marriage.

"All right - let's move on to Rush Limbaugh, ok," Behar said. "Reportedly he set the date for his fourth wedding, July 4th - how patriotic of him. Isn't he patriotic? And the lucky lady is named Kate Rogers. Isn't that - so are you happy for him? I guess anyone can find love, right?"

Apparently the Catholic Church is welcome when it promotes causes near and dear to liberal hearts, but it's shown the door as soon as it takes a hard line against controversial issues like homosexuality and abortion.

Robert McCartney of the Washington Post admitted as much in his Dec. 10 column about the effect legalized same-sex "marriage" could have on the charitable activities of the Catholic Church in Washington, D.C.

"I view the church as a tremendous force for good in the world in many ways, especially in its advocacy for the poor and against violence. The U.S. church supports more ambitious healthcare reform than Barack Obama, does, for instance," he wrote. 

"But I part with the church - as many of its members do - on many of positions on sexual issues. Regrettably, those are the ones that religious leaders often seem to care the most about."

McCartney, argued that the diocese is allowing a "dispute over employment benefits," which he claimed "would have little practical effect," to force it to "give up doing valuable, publicly funded work helping the homeless and sick" because the Church does not "want to miss the opportunity, however small, to oppose homosexuals' right to wed."

[Update: HRC statement added below.] 

The censorious intolerance of the gay left is on display again – a reporter was fired in Waterville, Maine. His offense? Sending an angry private e-mail to the Human Rights Campaign in Washington. The HRC wanted the reporter dismissed – and bang, he was terminated.

Via the Romenesko media news site, I found Al Diamon of Downeast.com reported that Larry Grard was fired after 17 years at the Waterville Sentinel and 35 years in journalism:

Grard was fired by Bill Thompson, editor of the Sentinel and its sister paper the Kennebec Journal in Augusta, shortly after the Nov. 3 election in which Maine voters repealed a same-sex marriage law approved by the Legislature. Grard said he arrived at work the morning after the vote to find an e-mailed press release from the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, D.C., that blamed the outcome of the balloting on hatred of gays.

On Friday’s The O’Reilly Factor on FNC, during the regular "Dumbest Things of the Week" segment, host Bill O’Reilly and guest Greg Gutfeld of FNC’s Red Eye, possibly picking up on an item posted the day before on Newsbusters, highlighted ABC’s The View co-host Joy Behar’s recent defense of Tiger Woods as she opined that at least the golf star is not being a "hypocrite" like "one of these pro-marriage, right-wing kind of guys who is anti-gay."

After playing a clip from The View, Gutfeld responded: "I just can't believe she's still single. What a catch. ... This angers me, one, that she says that if you're a conservative you're anti-gay, which is bigotry, her own form of bigotry. Number two, she insults the left. She's saying that the left, because they have no standards, cannot be hypocrites. Therefore, they can get away with things."

Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the segment from the Friday, December 4, The O’Reilly Factor on FNC:

On Dec. 4, the Australian actress Portia de Rossi, wife of Ellen DeGeneres, appeared on both ABC's "Good Morning America" and "The View" to promote her ABC sitcom ‘Better off Ted" ... well, supposedly. In reality, ABC simply offered de Rossi a soapbox to rant about gay rights.

During his interview with de Rossi, GMA correspondent Bill Weir called DeGeneres and de Rossi a "beautiful couple" and gushed, "Every time we see you two together the affection is still so obvious."

Weir then asked de Rossi a long-winded question about legalizing gay marriage, which included a prophecy of his own.

"And you're a testament for this sort of thing," Weir began, "and - I don't want to get too political on you but there probably will be a day when this is not a novelty - but when you see sort of the votes that happen - some setbacks politically - how do you think about that in your house?"

CNN.com's coverage of the failed gay marriage bill in the state of New York was predictably slated against conservatives on the issue.

The article cited liberals against conservatives 4-to-1 and included an unchallenged quote that most states banning gay marriage "at one time or another sold blacks into slavery."

The piece came on the heels of a vote in the New York Senate Wednesday over a bill that would have granted marriages to gay couples. Eight Democrats defected from their liberal peers to kill the bill, 38-24.

CNN spent the first four paragraphs of the article commiserating with a disappointed Governor Paterson and offering reassurance to gay activists that the bill was not really dead:

On the Thursday, December 3, The View, on ABC, co-host Joy Behar found Tiger Woods worthy of being partially defended over his adultery saga – according to her, at least he’s not a "hypocrite" like "these pro-marriage, right-wing, kind of guys who is anti-gay," like former Republican Senator Larry Craig. As the group discussed the latest news of women who have alleged having affairs with the golf star, Behar offer up her defense of Woods, with conservative co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck struggling to rebut her while Behar sang, "La, la, la, la," as Hasselbeck spoke:

Voters in state after state have said no to gay marriage. So what's the lesson Newsweek's Sarah Kliff draws?

Well, maybe it's time for the gay marriage lobby to go over the heads of the people and push Congress to act.

Reacting to yesterday's 38-24 vote by the Democratic-majority New York State Senate to kill a gay marriage bill, Kliff suggested in a December 2 The Gaggle blog post:

Rather than pursuing piecemeal, state-level initiatives, which do not have a great track record, perhaps the movement, en masse, ought to focus on pressuring Congress and President Obama to take more decisive action.

I'm not the first to make this suggestion. The issue came to a head in October, when gay-rights activists organized—and argued over—their first large march in Washington since 2000.

Of course, as a journalist, it should not be Kliff's place to pen the game plan for a movement's political agenda. Hers should be to call the game, not the plays, yet the Newsweek writer continued by describing her shift in sideline strategy (emphasis mine):

Meredith Baxter, known for her role as the liberal matriarch Elyse Keaton in "Family Ties," came out as a lesbian this morning on NBC's "Today."

Baxter told host Matt Lauer that she's a "very private person" and "not a very political person," but that she understands coming out "is a political act."

"My understanding is that so much research has been done that says that if anybody knows someone who is gay or lesbian, then when they are addressing gay or lesbian issues, political issues that affect their rights, they're less likely to vote against them, to take away their rights," Baxter explained.

"If you knew me before, and you cared about me before, I'm the same woman," Baxter continued. "I'm the same mother to all these children. And if I can be that lesbian you now know, okay, well if I vote this way, than, than that actually might affect this person I know, that Meredith."

UPDATE: The New York Times confirmed the rumors:  CBS's Early Show has picked Adam Lambert up for tomorrow.

Was "American Idol" runner-up Adam Lambert's disgraceful performance at the American Music Awards Sunday a career ender?

Such thinking might be a tad premature.

However, TVNewser's Chris Ariens has learned that ABC has cancelled his scheduled concert on Wednesday's "Good Morning America":

Blogger Amanda Hess of the Washington City Paper suggests a new story for The Washington Post on the gay left waging war on the Catholic Church over the city council's imposition of "gay marriage" rules without a referendum:

A new Web site hopes to use the oldest trick in the book to combat the Catholic Church’s opposition to same-sex marriage: A good, old-fashioned forced outing!

At ChurchOuting.org, you’re invited to scroll through a list of every Achbishop, Bishop, and Reverend in the Archdiocese of Washington, zero in on one you know is gay, and then submit your “detailed account of how you know the priest in question is being hypocritical through his silence.”

On today's CNN Newsroom, anchor Kyra Phillips went after the kids who supposedly bully a 10-year-old boy who refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance because homosexual marriage isn't widely accepted.  Some of his classmates allegedly call him names.  Phillips's weapon of choice was name calling:

And a message to you boys who are bullying Will, shame on you. It's obvious you are jealous that Will is smarter and more well spoken than you are. Hopefully one day you will grow up and realize that you were being the wads, dork wads.

Phillips didn't say how she knows that Will is smarter and more well spoken than his purported tormentors.  On Monday, she reported that Will is "a terrific kid."  So what makes him so smart and terrific?

Headline wording choice can set the tone for liberal bias, and a November 18 Washington Post Style front-pager is a classic example.

Profiling Pentecostal preacher Bishop Harry Jackson, the Post titled staffer Wil Haygood's story "Seeking to put asunder," an obvious allusion to Jesus's declaration about the holy nature of matrimony (Matthew 19:4-6 KJV):

And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made [them] at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.

Of course, that scriptural passage succinctly illustrates Jackson's point: Christian doctrine regarding marriage is that "from the beginning" God's design was one man and one woman in a "one flesh" union, but the effect of the headline's allusion is the same. The paper is portraying Jackson as a man who aims to "put asunder" loving, committed gay couples who are "married."

CNN on Monday featured a fifth grade student who is refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance in his classroom until gays and lesbians have equal rights.

Not surprisingly, he was treated with far greater respect by the cable news network than Tea Party and town hall meeting protesters were earlier in the year.

The boy and his father appeared on CNN's "American Morning," and John Roberts began the segment:

A 10-year-old boy from Arkansas is taking a stand by sitting down. Will Philips is refusing to pledge allegiance to the flag in his fifth grade classroom until there really is, as the pledge says, liberty and justice for all. He says until gays and lesbians have equal rights. 

During the interview, the boy's father accurately noted, "Well, actually before we heard from anybody, my first thought was oh, my God, this is the type of thing you see on CNN" (video embedded below the fold with transcript, h/t NBer SkipperMLM):

Here's a sub-headline you probably never imagined seeing in a liberal magazine:

Gays on TV once helped promote tolerance. Now they may be hurting it.

Shocking, yes?

Even more so was the point of Newsweek's "Kings of Queens" -- the overly-sexual, "flaming" characterization of gays on television is actually increasing a negative stereotype (h/t Big Hollywood):