laissez fairy

Portland’s Heroic New Mayor!  Gay Establishment Wonder Boy!  America’s Gay Mayor!  The Gay Obamessiah! Had you picked up a copy of the Advocate way back on January 9th those are just some of the images that might have popped into your mind regarding Sam Adams, Portland’s newly sworn-in gay mayor.

“Portland, Ore.’s gay mayor Sam Adams was finally sworn in at 12:01 a.m. on New Year’s Day . . . about 40 people were there to witness the ceremony, including his partner, Peter Zuckerman.”

Finally. Then this moving tale:

“Though Adams’s sexuality never became a factor in the race, before it officially began, he was the subject of a smear campaign from a world-be rival, gay real estate developer Bob Ball.  Ball attempted to link Adams to an encounter with an underage intern - an attempt that failed.”

(Puzzle: Did the attempt fail or did it just take a while to kick in?)

Ah, the ol’ “smear campaign.” Ironically, the most common “smear campaign” in American politics, esp. at the local level, consists of falsely accusing your opponent of orchestrating a “smear campaign” against you.  That is, often times the accusation of smearing is itself the only smear in the picture.  I’m not saying that’s what transpired in the Portland mayoral election, but now that Adams has admitted that the smears were true, some Oregon liberals are now openly wondering who was smearing whom.  As a BlueOregon column noted last week:

“Earler, Adams had denied any sexual relationship with Breedlove, and the story transformed from one focused on Adams’ judgment and possible criminal wrongdoing into one focused on the motives of Adams’ accuser, Portland developer Bob Ball, and the tragedy of smear-filled politics. . . It turns out Ball was right.  Not only did Adams lie, but he convinced Breedlove to lie as well.  And he kept on lying right up until today when WW [The Willamette Week] was going to release an update on the subject parading forth a ton of evidence showing the truth.”

Oh well, that’s just politics, you say?  I guess.  Or perhaps that’s just politics in a one-party cesspool like Portland.  Mind you, this is a city where someone (like Adams) can go straight from undergrad into politics, never have a real job, never work in the private sector, and somehow sweet-talk (or worse?) his way up the local Democratic machine until he reaches the office of mayor.  Looking at the Gay Wonder Mayor’s resume, though, I wouldn’t trust this left-wing gaybot to manage a 7-11 for more than a few hours.

But he seems to have mastered the fine art of successfully managing a political sex scandal.  First, you adamantly deny any accusations and lash out at your opponents by smearing them with accusations of smearing you right up until election day (with intermittent photo shoots for national magazines like the Advocate).  Then once you’re safely across the election-day finish line - what do you do?  Well, ol’ boy, ya’ switch gears!  The voters don’t matter anymore (or at least not until a few months before the next election), so you quickly fess up to all the accusations and start shrieking “BUT I DIDN’T BREAK ANY LAWS!!!”  Because once you’re elected, it’s not the voters’ judgment that matters, but the prosecutors’.

It was the post-election phase that Mr. Gay Establishment’s Mayoral Wonder Boy went into last week.  Specifically: Adams and Breedlove both suddenly revealed that although they met when Breedlove was 17, there was no sex until Breedlove turned 18 - which, as a conspiracy theorist might latch onto, just happens to be the legal age of consent in Oregon.  (Say, what did they do to kill time until Breedlove turned 18?  Sit around playing two-person Scrabble?  Sweety, won‘t that be great next month when you turn 18?  Uh-oh, I think someone is stuck with the ‘Q’ and it‘s not me!)

For months Adams and Breedlove lied about how they met, about having a relationship at all, about whether or not Breedlove was an intern or an internet hookup.  In an attempt to cover up their relationship, lie to voters, deflect attention, and defame a decent man, they publicly and falsely accused Adams’ gay political rival, Bob Ball, of orchestrating a “smear campaign” against Adams for political gain, and now - safely after the vote was counted and Adams was sworn in - when the only issue is whether or not Adams broke any laws, they radically reworked their storyline into a version that concedes pretty much everything but minimally complies with the law?

How does Adams thinks that looks to prosecutors?  (Or does America’s Gay Mayor see this as a chicken game where he tries to spook the prosecutors into believing that he will survive this latest “smearing” and retaliate against them later when he’s, say, America‘s Gay Governor?)

Oh, and then Breedlove had the gall to tell the New York Times, “I do not feel like I was ever a victim.”  No, heh.  We’re pretty sure you don’t feel like the victim.  In fact, at this point, we doubt anyone is seeing you as the victim.

So now the natural spin for Adams and his remaining Gay Establishment advocates will (we assume) proceed something like this: “Oh, well, it’s a private matter, my own personal life, and I didn’t break any laws.  The haters are going after me because I‘m gay.  Sure, I shouldn’t have lied.  But it‘s a sexual witch hunt, straight men aren’t held to the same standard, I didn‘t break any laws, privacy, privacy, blah, blah, blah.”  Wildly entertaining, we readily admit; nauseating nonetheless.

There is a real scandal here.  First, there’s the obvious question of whether or not Adams committed statutory rape and then conspired with Breedlove to cover it up.  Second, there’s this from Oregon’s largest newspaper:

In early 2008, Amy Ruiz was a reporter at the Portland Mercury news weekly when she confronted Sam Adams about his relationship with an 18-year-old man three years earlier.  By the end of the year, Ruiz had joined Adams’ staff as a planning and sustainability policy adviser.

The two events have opened Adams and his staff to questions about whether Adams hired Ruiz — who had no formal experience in planning, policy or as an analyst — to stop her from digging deeper into the story.

Bribing a young reporter threatening to investigate you with a government job is very likely illegal, depending on just how quid pro quo the job offer was.  And, for the record, it wouldn’t be the sex part that’s illegal - it would be handing out government jobs in an attempt to hide a sex scandal from the voters that would be illegal.

But at this point in the life of a political sex scandal, it’s time for Adams and his apologists to do two things, and so far they appear to be working at both:

1) Make it all about the sex.  So long as the general public and the media are focused on the sex scandal part, Adams can insinuate or outright assert that the government investigations are all about sex, just another homophobic witch hunt.  We’re all just obssessed over the sex because we’re dumb Americans.  Why can’t we be more laid back about sex, like the Europeans?  This line allows him to (yet again) pretend like he’s the victim.

2) Show up at city hall and show just how hard he’s working for the people of Portland - even in the midst of this distracting sex scandal.

Something like this:

Mayor Sam Adams\’ Apology

Yes, a disgusting display.

Most of the gay publications in Oregon have called for this megalomaniac to resign.  LF strongly concurs.

This guy is a slime ball.  He gives the rest of us a bad name.  He has mislead voters, unfairly smeared political rivals, potentially committed statury rape, potentially conspired to cover up his crime, refused to abdicate office in the midst of serious accusations, and reinforced for the general population some of the foulest stereotypes about gay men.

We can and will find better role models.

As a follow up to yesterday’s post  on the situation in the Netherlands, I thought I’d bring up Bruce Bawer’s blog, which I stumbled upon this morning.  In case you’re not familiar, Bawer is an American homo who ran off to Europe in the late 90’s, ostensibly to escape from the oh-so mean and oppressive American Taliban and their RethugliKKKan leaders.  But, as outlined in his book While Europe Slept, he quickly found that the Eurotopia of liberal dreams didn’t quite match reality: 

“As an American living in Europe since 1998, Bruce Bawer has seen this problem up close. Across the continent—in Amsterdam, Oslo, Copenhagen, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, and Stockholm—he encountered large, rapidly expanding Muslim enclaves in which women were oppressed and abused, homosexuals persecuted and killed, “infidels” threatened and vilified, Jews demonized and attacked, barbaric traditions (such as honor killing and forced marriage) widely practiced, and freedom of speech and religion firmly repudiated.

The European political and media establishment turned a blind eye to all this, selling out women, Jews, gays, and democratic principles generally—even criminalizing free speech—in order to pacify the radical Islamists and preserve the illusion of multicultural harmony. The few heroic figures who dared to criticize Muslim extremists and speak up for true liberal values were systematically slandered as fascist bigots. Witnessing the disgraceful reaction of Europe’s elites to 9/11, to the terrorist attacks on Madrid, Beslan, and London, and to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bawer concluded that Europe was heading inexorably down a path to cultural suicide.”

 Indeed.

Bawer’s latest blog entries discuss a number of misleading media headlines summarizing obviously fudged government “studies” that purport to show that it’s not Muslim immigrants who keep attacking gay men on the streets of Amsterdam:

“Bosma notes that this other report, which was issued by the Ministry of the Interior, inspired a slew of mainstream-media headlines, such as the one at DutchNews.nl, claiming that most antigay attackers were ethnic Dutch. But the headlines misrepresented what was actually in the report: as the DutchNews.nl article itself noted, 16% of the perpetrators were identified as “non-white,” while 84% of assaults were “committed by native Dutch men or no attacker was listed [my emphasis].” In other other words, it’s absolutely false to say that a majority of antigay attackers were ethnic Dutchmen or that only 16% were members of immigrant groups; even if one takes these figures seriously, they by no means rule out the possibility that the overwhelming majority of the perpetrators were indeed Muslims. The headlines that suggested otherwise seriously misrepresented the report’s contents, and did so in an apparent effort to shift blame for gay-bashing away from Muslims.”

 

 

Misleading news stories on misleading government “studies” always amuse me.  You find it all the time in US newspapers.  Typically, it’s some 24-year-old AP writer with nothing but a B.A. in journalism (which isn’t even a real degree) trying to summarize some alleged “study” on, say, healthcare or global warming. 

For the most part, these so-called “studies” are attempts to get us to believe the opposite of what our experience and commonsense tell us:

“It’s well known among Dutch gays that young immigrant-group men are disproportionately responsible for these attacks (the great majority of which go unreported). There’s no need for any study to prove this: the anecdotal evidence is immense. In the last couple of years, there have been several high-profile – and increasingly audacious – assaults on gay people, and routinely the perpetrators have been young Muslim men. It’s obviously no coincidence that the perceived climb in gay-bashings over the last decade has seemed to track the increase in Amsterdam’s Muslim population during the same period. (Meanwhile, the proportion of ethnic Dutch Amsterdammers has declined steadily.)”

Self-proclaimed “independent gay blog,” Citizen Crain, is touting “federal civil unions.”  That alone almost made us fall out of our chair laughing.  But then Mr. Gay Independent started off with:

“More properly, the title of this post should have been ‘Federal recognition of our relationships as civil unions: so simple.’”

Oh no, he just replaced the phrase “civil union” with “recognition of our relationships as civil unions.”  That’s right: we’re the bitter ol’ queens in the third row weeping - literally weeping… with laughter at this nonsense.  Honestly, is this politics or a Lifetime movie?

Oh, but ol’ CC almost tops himself (if that’s possible) in the next paragraph:

“Of all President Barack Obama’s proposals for the LGBT community on the official White House webpage , I believe this one is the best and most powerful. It will achieve more rights and benefits for gay people than all the others combined.”

“Most powerful”?  Oh dear lord. Weeping again.

Let’s look at just a few of the reasons why “federal civil unions” ain’t gonna happen this side of the looking glass:

• Entitlement programs.  As it is, Social Security and Medicare are fiscal time bombs.  Add even a few million gay civil union couples who will receive Social Security or Medicare benefits via their civil union spouses, and the already bleak numbers fall off the charts.  Add five to ten million non-gay civil union couples (since, presumably, civil unions would not be limited to same-sex couples or, for that matter, couples in love), and you’re in fiscal la-la land.
• Taxes.  The Federal Gov’t makes alot of money off single individuals.  Singles, esp. singles without children, pay more taxes than the rest.  If the Federal Gov’t creates civil unions - which, presumably, would include long-term roommates or elderly siblings living together - there will be a huge decrease in revenue, which would entail tax hikes, etc.  The decades of transactional costs  involved with the IRS and the courts trying to determine what can and can’t count as a “civil union” for federal tax purposes are astronomical.  And inasmuch as a great deal of state tax law “piggybacks” (heh, no pun intended) on federal tax law, the state courts would spend years and who knows how much money sorting out what living arrangements can or cannot count as civil unions for state tax purposes.
• Family law.  Tons of family law at the state level - and under the Fed Constitution - is based on the current definition of marriage.  Federal recognition of “civil unions” (for gay and straight couples) would result in the re-litigation of literally hundreds of thousands of court adjudicated custody and family law decisions over the last decade and a half.  It would potentially mean rethinking decades of Supreme Court 14th-Amendment law related to family.  It would also result in absolute chaos for decisions related to wills, trusts, and estates.

Those are just a few reasons why “federal civil unions” are not so simple.  As ol’ Donald Rumsfield might put it, there are too many “known unknowns.” Even a heavily Democratic Congress would balk nonsense like this.

I’m not saying that impracticality makes it okay to deny people rights.  But I am saying that “federal civil unions” simply are not going to happen any time soon.  That someone would cite the fact that it’s a policy proposal on the White House website is truly laughable.  Candidates and politicians put all sorts of silly policy proposals on their websites, most of which have little or no chance of ever being enacted into law. Policy proposals found on politicians’ websites are just marketing and (for herd gays) FUNDRAISING tools.  That’s right, Citizen Crain, keep trying to justify why the herd gays keep shoveling all that money into Democratic Party coffers.

Heck, way before “federal civil unions,” maybe the Dem’s could manage to pass a federal workplace non-discrimination law for gays and lesbians?  That’s actually easy to do and has broad public support.  Let’s see how long that takes!

And then to top it all off - and just to let us all know that Citizen Crain has some bigshot inside connections:

I wish I could say my thinking is original on this, but it is based on my discussions with a prominent LGBT Obama campaign official and a prominent ACLU attorney neither of whom wishes to go on record at this time.

Meanwhile, dear gay readers, please send more $.$$ to the Democrats.

Those three or four decades of freedom were fun, but Europe seems determined to get back to its authoritarian roots.   This from the Low Countries last week:

“A member of parliament in the Netherlands who has been charged with ‘insulting’ Muslims says he fears he will be found guilty and sent to prison in only a few months.”

Oh dear.

If the Dutch are going to criminalize inadvertent “insults,” they should at least consider some sort of exception for insulting Muslims.  Because let’s face it, these folks are rather easily offended.  And even if they’re not actually offended, they will feign offense to see just how much they can get away with.  Back to the MP:

“Wilders, who produced a controversial [TO WHOM???] film that was highly critical of the Koran last year, says he faces a maximum of two years in prison if convicted. He said he had expected to be charged, and he has retained legal assistance from a U.S.-based nonprofit to help him defend himself.

Prosecutors initially declined last year to charge the right wing politician after he issued his short film, ‘Fitna,’ which juxtaposes Koranic verses over footage of violence committed by Islamic terrorists.

But, the Netherlands allows private citizens to petition the courts to compel prosecution. In Wilders’ case, eight parties, including a politician from an opposing party, asked the courts to force prosecutors to bring criminal charges.”

I say Mr. Wilders needs to pack it up and leave immediately. Follow in the footsteps of Euro refugees Oriana Fallaci and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, take up residence in the U.S., and then he can say whatever he pleases about the Muslim takeover of his home country.

Whether he’s thrown in prison or not, if he stays in Holland, Mr. Wilders is going to be the next Theo van Gogh, the Dutchman who in 2004 was decapitated on a public street after releasing a film about the oppression of women in Muslim culture.  And if militant Muslims don’t get him,  the Dutch media establishment will continue to demonize him as a racist fascist until some deranged do-gooder liberal guns him down - as happened a few years back to the utterly fabulous Dutch gaycon Pim Fortuyn.

Also, it’s worth noting that the Muslims and the Dutch establishment are very likely trying to make an example out of Mr. Wilders.  This is a high-profile prosecution meant to scare average Dutchmen into silence.  After all, if a powerful politician like Mr. Wilders is forced to rely on a foreign human rights organization for his legal defense, what chance would your average joe on the street have?

A decade or so ago, the Netherlands was one of the most open and tolerant jurisdictions on the planet (esp for gays).  Today, that open, tolerant, pot-smoking Netherlands persists only in the imagination of American liberals, who fancy themselves hip and worldly because back in college they spent a night or two in a Amsterdam hostel on their way to Paris.  In reality, the Netherlands is rapidly disappearing under the rising tide of Islam, and any Dutchman who stands up for traditional Dutch values is either imprisoned or killed.