Quote of the Day 2014-04-08: Tam on the Mozilla CEO affair

Her original post is good, but she hits a home run in the comments:

Let’s say there was a company in Jackson, MS some time ago. This company was well-known for its lack of discrimination in its hiring process and corporate culture, and was recognized in the industry as someplace where the color of one’s skin was no bar to advancement.

Let’s say they hired me in as senior management and I wound up getting named CEO, the leader of the company… and then someone found out that some years back I’d been writing checks to the Decent Citizens’ Anti-Miscegenation League.

Would I then be able to continue as an effective leader in that company?

Bingo.

END OF LINE

Quote of the Day – 2012-03-16

From Gay Cynic, in response to a gay-bashing in Houston, TX.

When you fight back, you aren’t just saving yourself. When you fight back, win or lose, you shatter the meme that the LGBT community is composed solely of wild-eyed pacifists that are vulnerable and easy targets for every bully that comes along – hate-driven or not.

After all, when was the last time you heard of a group of 5 youths with baseball bats attacking a cop or a biker?

It isn’t just hate that’s our enemy. It’s also the idea that we’re a safe target.

I can’t say it better than that. Being gay means that there are people who don’t even know you who are willing – and even eager – to hurt or kill you. People like that don’t bother to think beyond stereotypes, so because you’re gay they believe that you won’t be willing or able to fight back effectively. Learn to protect yourself. Get the best tools to protect yourself.

Remember, self defense works.

END OF LINE

The Bradys want me dead

Why do I say that? Because their desire to restrict legal gun ownership and carry into oblivion would leave me without a viable method of self-defense right now. If I were to be targeted for, just as an example, a gay bashing, without a firearm my two options would be to fight bare-handed against what would most likely be two or more assailants, or to try to run away (“giving them what they want” would not be an option in such a case, because what they want is me severely injured, crippled, or dead – and they don’t have to want me dead for it to happen anyway).

Right now, if I tried to run away from a week-old kitten I couldn’t do it. I suspect I wouldn’t make it more than half a dozen steps before ending up on the ground curled up in a little whimpering ball of pain and suffering. Trying to fight would be almost as bad, since my mobility is severely compromised and if you can’t maneuver during a fight, you’re going to lose.

So, without a gun, against 1 or more healthy assailants I am seriously disadvantaged, and probably would not survive any serious attack. With a gun, my odds are significantly better, and against the average assailant are tipped back in my favour.

But the anti-Rights cult wants to take that advantage away from me. Because a dead fag is apparently better than having a gay-basher get shot.

END OF LINE

Interesting…

Gary Johnson, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination who was (rather egregiously, I think) excluded from several early debates, declared yesterday that he is withdrawing from the Republican race and will seek the Libertarian nomination.

Gary Johnson lost a lot of potential name-recognition and popularity with those early debate exclusions. To be perfectly honest, I don’t really know that much about him or his positions myself (a failure that I plan to remedy shortly). One theory, as headlined in the article I linked to above (and which is what drew my attention to it in the first place) is that he will pull a lot of LGBT voters from Obama. While I don’t know how much of a factor that will be*, I am sure he will pull a lot of the more (small “l”) libertarian-minded people who would normally vote Republican from whoever the R’s end up nominating.

I’m not entirely certain that that would be a bad thing. While many people look at the current Republican lineup and say “I would vote for a syphilitic camel over Obama,” Tam had it right when she said “Keep ordering syphilitic camel, and they’ll just stop putting anything else on the menu, as a quick look at the current GOP field will tellingly point out.”

In fact, you should go check out the comments to that post of Tam’s that I just linked to. There are a lot of good thoughts there. Just a couple of examples:

Mikael said…
PS: You know the media really hates a candidate when they don’t even drum up a hate campaign, just exclude him completely, as if he’s not there.
6:09 PM, November 20, 2011

And one that echoes what I’ve been saying myself for a while.

Divemedic said…

I am about to say something that many of you will not like:
If Romney wins the primary, I am voting for Obama. If I have to choose between two big government liberals, I want to choose the one that this Republican congress will oppose, rather than the one they will support.

If Romney is elected, congress will fall all over themselves to support the president with the R behind his name.
7:00 PM, November 20, 2011

The only difference between what I said and what Divemedic said is that I haven’t restricted it to just Romney – a Republican controlled Congress will reflexively support any president with an R behind his name. At the very least, they will reflexively not oppose him. Whereas a Republican Congress will reflexively oppose, or at a minimum refuse to support, anything Obama tries to push through.

This holds especially true with Supreme Court nominations.

Think about that. In recent years, it’s been the Republican party that has been the most vocal about claims that the Senate should be a rubber stamp for defer to the President on SCOTUS nominations. Even when it’s a Democrat doing the nominating, they haven’t really put forward any truly strong opposition, but even token resistance is better than none, and it’s certainly better than the active support that any Republican president would most likely receive.

It is for that reason that I have been increasingly leaning towards voting for Obama in the 2012 election. Not because I support him or most of his policies in any way, shape, or form, but because I haven’t seen any significant difference between him and the most likely Republican nominees, and I want someone as President that won’t have a Congress willing to back him regardless of how good or bad his ideas are simply because of some concept of “party solidarity.”

Based on the little I know so far, Gary Johnson would be a candidate that I could vote for, rather than having to vote against someone. I don’t think I’ve ever had that, before. Hopefully, further investigation won’t change my initial assessment.

END OF LINE

[Source: The Daily Caller article on Yahoo! News, retrieved 12/29/11]

Armed Gays don’t get bashed

Sometimes, they don’t even have to be armed.

Friday evening I was on my way home from the GOProud office on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., when I came upon a group of young black men. There were roughly eight of them.

It was such a nice day that I had ridden my bicycle to work, so I was on my bike when I approached them. I was on the street but kept to the right side of the lane so that cars could easily pass on my left. This put me within a couple of feet of the sidewalk, where the group was walking toward me.

Just as I got up to them, the assailant lunged off the sidewalk toward me and delivered a punch across my chest. The momentum of my bicycling drove me into his fist and arm, causing a shocking pain like I’ve never felt before. Just as I began to realize what was happening, I heard it. The words are still ringing in my ears as I write this — “Fucking faggot!” […] [emphasis mine]

The situation could have gone either way: I could end up beaten or dead, or we could all go our separate ways.

All I could think to do was to get to my backpack and find my phone. As I fumbled for the phone, I heard one of them say, “Does he have a gun?”

So I kept my hand in my backpack, allowing them to wonder whether I was reaching for a gun. Then a couple of them started to run away, and the others soon followed. I got back on my bike and pedaled as fast as I could out of there.

This was GOProud’s executive director, Jimmy LaSalvia, a pro-gun, gay rights activist.  Since this occurred in DC, he was forcibly unarmed at the time, but his attackers either didn’t know or thought he might be armed anyway. Considering it was 8-on-1, and the fact that gay-bashings like that can quickly and easily turn deadly even if that’s not the attackers’ original intent, that fear very probably saved his life.

And he knows it.

But I’ve thought a lot about the turning point of the situation — the fact that one of them thought that I might have a gun. None of them said, “There’s a law against antigay hate crimes!” That wasn’t the deterrent. It was the possibility that I might have had a gun that saved my life Friday night.

[…]

Although concealed carry is, unfortunately, not legal in the District of Columbia, I do intend to buy a handgun to keep in my house. Even though I didn’t actually have a gun, I now know the power of lawful gun ownership to save lives. [emphasis mine]

This is the kind of incident that the anti-rights crowd really doesn’t want you to hear about – a defensive gun use (DGU) that had no shots fired, because it didn’t even involve an actual gun. Tragedy was averted because a group of thugs thought their intended victim might have a gun.

Self-defense works. Concealed carry works. Armed gays don’t get bashed.

As Tam frequently says: Carry your gun. It’s a lighter burden than regret.

END OF LINE

[Source: Advocate.com Op-Ed, retrieved 7/20/11]

(h/t Sharp as a Marble)

Some gays are starting to get it.

“It” being the fact that the Democrats talk big about gay issues at election time, but consistently fail to make any serious effort to deliver once they’re in office.

“Once they’re elected, they’re not fighting for things like civil unions or same-sex marriage or ending ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ because they’re hot-button issues,” said Wyatt, who usually supports Democrats. “We’re just used as a piggyback for them to get into office. It’s absurd.”

That last line is the clearest statement of the general attitude of the Democrat Party. “Use gays to get into office, but don’t actually follow through on any talk about equal rights, because it’s too controversial.”

The Republican Party is all but openly hostile to gays, using opposition to “the Gay Agenda” as a rallying cry anytime they think they can get away with it, while Democrats claim to support gays. This leads many gays to believe they have to vote for Democrats simply to oppose Republicans on gay issues. It’s the old “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” fallacy, and it gets us nowhere.

Remember Rule 29: The enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy. No more, no less.

The Democrats are not fighting for gay rights, they’re fighting for gay votes. They have their own objectives, and don’t care about us except for how we can help them meet their objectives. As long as they can keep getting gays to vote for them just by promising to help without actually having to give us results, they will.

[Source: AP article on Yahoo! news, retrieved 10/24/10]

So how’s the view from under that bus?

DADT is back in force again. I didn’t think that would last. It’s temporary right now – the 3-judge panel for the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a temporary stay of the injunction and told both sides to file arguments by Monday, then they will decide to extend the stay or allow the injunction to remain in place while the appeal goes forward.

I’ll say it again – Obama doesn’t care about gays, he cares about votes. As long as he can convince people he’s more likely to get a repeal of DADT than a Republican, he’ll keep almost getting it done so he can get those votes.

Get used to looking at that undercarriage. He’ll keep throwing us under that bus for as long as he thinks he can get away with it.

Gee, I never saw THIS coming

US seeks delay in ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ ruling

The Justice Department asked a federal judge Thursday to allow the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy to continue while it appeals her order to end the ban on gays serving openly.

Obama really wants to end DADT. Really, he does. He’ll get to it any day now, for sure.

There’s always room for more under the bus.

[Source: AP story on Yahoo! News, retrieved 10/14/10]

“Don’t Ask, Dont’ Tell” suspended – for now.

Update: SayUncle has linked to a story indicating that we are getting thrown under the bus.

So much for being a fierce advocate. President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice has announced that they will be filing an appeal in the case of Gill v. Office of Personnel Management.

Gill v. Office of Personnel Management is actually a separate case that was decided back in July. The injunction entered yesterday that ends enforcement of DADT was in the case of Log Cabin Republicans v. United States of America and Robert Gates. Still, it’s a good indication that Obama’s administration will appeal the latest case, too.

Still, how many gays will continue to vote Democrat even after this?

———-

Judge orders ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ injunction

A federal judge issued a worldwide injunction Tuesday immediately stopping enforcement of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, suspending the 17-year-old ban on openly gay U.S. troops.

U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips’ landmark ruling also ordered the government to suspend and discontinue all pending discharge proceedings and investigations under the policy.

U.S. Department of Justice attorneys have 60 days to appeal.

The question is, will Obama tell the Justice Department not to appeal?

Legal experts say the Obama administration is under no legal obligation to appeal and could let Phillips’ ruling stand.

[…]

Gay rights groups warned gay troops not to make their sexual orientation public just yet. Aaron Tax, the legal director for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, said he expects the Justice Department to appeal. If that happens, the case would be brought to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, where the decision could be reversed.

[…]

The case put the Obama administration in the awkward position of defending a policy it wants Congress to repeal.

It’s even more awkward politically, because he promised during his campaign to repeal it, but we’ve see very little actual movement to do so, and what we have seen has been slow, noncommittal, and half-hearted. “But what about the bill the Republicans killed?” I can hear people asking. Well, remember, that by itself wouldn’t have ended DADT.

President Obama agreed to the Pentagon study but also worked with Democrats to write a bill that would have lifted the ban, pending completion of the Defense Department review and certification from the military that troop morale wouldn’t suffer. [emphasis mine]

That legislation passed the House but was blocked in the Senate by Republicans.

See? That bill effectively left it up to the Pentagon and the Defense Department – it depended on the military agreeing to lift DADT. Does anyone really think that would have actually happened?

They also conveniently leave out the fact that the bill was actually a rider on a spending bill. Oh, and they again failed to mention the fact that DADT wasn’t the only controversial social legislation attached to that bill – there was a measure on public funding for abortions, and one on immigration policy. Any one of those, including the DADT repeal, might have killed the bill, but putting all three together certainly did. Just don’t expect the MSM to tell you that.

I’d like to think that if Obama’s administration appeals this decision that it would finally make the majority of the LGBT community realize that the Democrats are not their friends, but I don’t hold out much hope for that. Too many have been driven to the Dems because of the Republican party’s near-official antagonism toward anything non-hetero – Republicans who are LGBT friendly are seen as rare and unusual, and as bucking the party line. Too many have bought into the myth that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

To that, I can only quote Rule 29: “The enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy. No more. No less.”

At best, the Democrat party is indifferent to us -neither hostile nor friendly – but sees us as useful enough to feign friendship. At worst, they are hostile to us but see us as useful enough in light of the Republicans’ open hostility to hide their own while they use us for their own gain. They’ve thrown us under the bus too many times for me to believe anything else.

Now we wait to see if Obama will do it again, knowing that so many gays will still vote for Democrat candidates whatever he chooses. After all, repealing DADT is a major political carrot he will be able to dangle in front of us for as long as it’s in effect – letting it get killed at the wrong time takes away a prime piece of bait for attracting gay voters.

What will it be Mr. President? Will you keep your promise, or will you throw us under the bus secure in the knowledge that most gays will get right back on when you tell them to?

[Source: AP Story at Yahoo! News, retrieved 10/12/10]
[Update Source: LezgetReal article, retrieved 10/13/10]

Why would a college student need a gun? – Part Deux

UVA officials alert students after 3 assaults.

Dean of Students Allen Groves said in a memo on U.Va.’s website that two female students were assaulted in incidents on Sept. 17 and Sept. 19 in neighborhoods near the university. He said police have reason to believe that the male perpetrator apparently “blends in well with the student community” and may have been observing the women and waiting for the opportunity to attack.

So, you have a serial attacker stalking women and waiting for an opportunity to attack them without being seen or interrupted. Right now it’s only assaults. How long until he eventually escalate to rape or murder?

Then there’s the third attack:

Groves said the third incident involved a man jumping out of a vehicle and punching a male victim on Sept. 18. Authorities believe the attack was motivated by the victim’s sexual orientation.

In other words, they think it was a gay bashing. How many of those turn deadly, even when that wasn’t the attacker’s original intent? “Armed gays don’t get bashed,” but if they do, they are in a better position to survive it than if they’re not armed.

University of Virginia officials are urging students to protect themselves and their friends after a string of recent assaults.

There’s a problem with that statement. UVA is a gun free victim disarmament zone (but only for students, faculty, and staff), so students, faculty, and staff are banned from carrying the most effective tool for self defense. From the linked Attorney General’s opinion:

It is my opinion that the governing boards of Virginia’s public colleges and universities may not impose a general prohibition on the carrying of concealed weapons by permitted individuals. Pursuant to specific grants of statutory authority, however, it is my opinion that colleges and universities may regulate the conduct of students and employees to prohibit them from carrying concealed weapons on campus.

[Atty. Gen. Op. No. 05-078, January 4, 2006]

This is the same legal reasoning that allows Virginia Tech’s disarmament policy. We all know how well that worked.

Perhaps we should start by reconsidering the bans on CHP holders carrying on college campuses?

[Source: WDBJ7 News website, retrieved 9/29/10]