Scientarist: HBO’s The Newsroom- Rick Santorum on Gay Rights

Source: This piece was originally posted at The New Democrat Plus

Rick Santorum and the broader Neoconservative-Right and Christian-Right are exactly why Americans are seen as stupid. We get stereotyped as people who think like them, as people who not only have warped religious and moral beliefs, but people who want to not only enforce those warped values on the rest of the country and do it through law. Will McAvoy asked a rhetorical question with an obvious answer to it. “How does someone’s same-sex marriage a threat to someone else’s straight marriage or make it less valuable?” The obvious answer is that it doesn’t.

The Christian-Right at least some of their militant members who go out of their way to put down people who don’t live like them, are simply assholes. Now are simply stupid and ignorant and know any better, or are they just rude bastards? I’m not a mind-reader, so I can’t tell you, but they have a bad habit of saying things about people and different communities that are flat false and as a result have a bad habit of speaking out of their ass. The definition of an asshole, someone who speaks out of their ass. Speaks to things they aren’t knowledgeable about as if they know what they are talking about.

Christian-Conservatives have the absolute constitutional right to look down upon people who are not like them and do not look at the world like they do. Gays case in point, but they don’t have a right constitutional or otherwise to harass people they do not like or even hate. And certainly don’t have a right to force their beliefs on the rest of the country, by law or otherwise. We live in a liberal democracy, as much as the Far-Right hates that and is against that. We all have the right to live our own lives and believe what we believe. Not try to dictate how others should live and what they should believe.

Scienytarist : The Newsroom- Rick Santorum on Gay Rights

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Salon: Hamna Zubair: Jon Stewart Defends Duck Dynasty Star’s Right to Free Speech

Source:Salon Magazine– welcome to Redneckistan. Or the Texas portion of Redneckistan.

Source:The New Democrat

“Last night Jon Stewart couldn’t resist bringing up the racist and homophobic comments “Duck Dynasty’s” star Phil Robertson made in a recent interview – but he didn’t take Robertson down in typical Daily Show style. Robertson was removed from “Duck Dynasty” soon after his comments became public, a move Stewart clearly took issue with.

Stewart, who admitted he thought “Duck Dynasty” was “a show where ducks reenact the show ‘Dynasty,'” defended Robertson’s right to free speech:

“I think what the guy said is ignorant,” said Stewart, “but I also have an inclination to support a world where saying ignorant sh*t on television doesn’t get you kicked off that medium.”

Stewart went on to talk about how Fox News was also, unsurprisingly, defending Robertson’s right to free speech – except that this defense was cloaked in hypocrisy, given the channel’s campaign to draw attention to a perceived “War on Christmas.”

He said: “Their [Fox News] belief in free speech doesn’t extend to the holidays, when the word ‘Christmas’ is mandatory.”

From Salon Magazine

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CBS News: Mike Wallace- ‘The Homosexuals (1967)’

Source:CBS News– 1967 documentary about homosexuality.

Source:The Daily Journal  

“”It’s been nearly 50 years since CBS News first took on the subject of gay rights. It was in a documentary. You’ll recognize the host, Mike Wallace, but you won’t recognize your country.

“Most Americans are repelled by the mere notion of homosexuality,” reported Wallace in the documentary. “A CBS poll shows two out of three Americans look on homosexuality with disgust, discomfort, or fear.”

The year was 1967 and whoever named the program cut straight to the chase: “CBS Reports: The Homesexuals.”

From CBS News

“The Homosexuals” is a 1967 episode of the documentary television series CBS Reports. The hour-long broadcast featured a discussion of a number of topics related to homosexuality and homosexuals. Mike Wallace anchored the episode, which aired on March 7, 1967. Although this was the first network documentary dealing with the topic of homosexuality, it was not the first televised in the United States. That was The Rejected, produced and aired in 1961 on KQED, a public television station out of San Francisco.Three years in the making, “The Homosexuals” went through two producers and multiple revisions. The episode included interviews with several gay men, psychiatrists, legal experts and cultural critics, interspersed with footage of a gay bar and a police sex sting. “The Homosexuals” garnered mixed critical response.”

Source:Kim Smythe– 1967 documentary about CBS News.

From Kim Smythe 

“Veteran journalist Mike Wallace, who died Saturday at age 93, had many claims to fame and one credit that might be considered a claim to infamy — his participation in the sensationalistic 1960s documentary The Homosexuals.

Wallace would later express regret about the tone of the documentary, which aired only once, March 7, 1967, on CBS. Hosted and narrated by Wallace, it characterized gay men as promiscuous and lonely, given to fleeting, anonymous sexual encounters. It acknowledged the discrimination they faced, but with “no sense of righteous indignation” about that, the journal Film Threat once noted. The program largely ignored lesbians. Still, it marked a breakthrough in gay visibility on television.

“Years after the broadcast, Mike Wallace would admit regret that The Homosexuals was not more balanced and sympathetic in its focus,” according to the Film Threat article. “In 1995, Wallace made a surprise appearance at New York’s Lighthouse Cinema, which was showing The Homosexuals as part of a Gay Pride line-up. The audience treated Wallace with deep respect and the veteran newsman hosted an impromptu Q&A session after the film was screened.”

Source:The Advocate– from Mike Wallace’s 1967 CBS News documentary about homosexuality.

From The Advocate

If you look at this documentary especially by the standards and culture of today, Mike Wallace’s 1967 documentary about homosexuality looks very homophobic. It wouldn’t be made today at least the way it was written and the people that were interviewed, especially Christian-Right folks who think that homosexuality should be a crime and we should go back to Beaver Cleaver’s and Ozzie and Harriet’s 1950s America. And the Far-Left political correctness movement would be the hell out it talking about how bigoted the documentary is.

But to state the obvious: 1967 is not 2012. The view that homosexuality was a crime and a sin was actually mainstream even in the late 1960s. And if you had no issues with gays and homosexuality back then and believed gays should be treated equally as straights, you would be considered a radical back then.

In my personal opinion and I believe I’m part of a solid majority today in 2012, gays are entitled to the same legal and constitutional rights and responsibilities as straights, just as I believe that ethnic and racial minorities have the same rights and responsibilities as European-Americans and even Anglo-Saxons. But if I was around in 1967 with those same views, I would be the radical. And people who are considered Far-Rightists today, would be part of the mainstream when it comes to American public opinion and culture.

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