welcome to crazyland
some days the news is more lunatic than others. when parents who pretended their child is being carried away in a balloon just so they can get their own TV show become the least crazy story, you know you’ve crossed over some kind of line from which you might not be able to return.
take this tidbit, thanks to Steve Benen, via my good friend DP. sen. tom coburn (R-OK) just wrote an opinion piece for The Advocate online.
yes, one of the most virulently anti-gay people in washington decided to join forces with–wait for it–christopher barron, chairman of GOProud (not a joke, really) to protest health care reform. because health care reform might be bad for gay people. (like coburn wouldn’t be thrilled at the idea of more queers dying. like he wouldn’t be taking a number to make that happen faster.)
there’s so many levels of crazy to this, it makes showing up at a rally for obama with a hunting rifle on your back look positively benign.
on days when i despair that the left is permanently twisted and the democrats have turned into pillars of salt, i check the republicans and am reminded that no matter how bad/insipid/useless/spineless the democrats get, the republicans will always be so much worse–so vile, so craven, so fill-in-the-adjective-that- implies-despicable. always.
we get it: the right doesn’t want health care reform and they will team up with anyone, even people they despise, to kill it.
and we get that a kiss-ass assimilationist ”homosexual” elite will do anything to get someone in washington to hold their hand in public.
i don’t know which is more despicable, coburn or The Advocate. anyone who doesn’t get that something called GOProud is oxymoronic–or maybe just moronic—doesn’t understand that the right hates queers. all queers. it doesn’t matter if you dress and sound like pat buchanan or glenn beck or andrew sullivan. queer is queer and first chance they get, they will tie you up like matthew shepard and bash your brains in and find an excuse for it that somehow has to do with jesus.
the only difference between the republican view of queers and say, the iranian view of queers (homosexuality being punishable by death in iran), is geography.
we toss around the word terrorism a lot in our culture. but facts are facts and the fact is, coburn is a terrorist. he wants all queers relegated to the ice floe. that The Advocate would give this queer-baiting, queer-hating republican space is repugnant. there is no such thing as bi-partisan in the culture wars. none. forget that at your own peril. —vab
