Frank Rich: Give Aaron Schock A TV Show

"Back in the day, Groucho Marx used to ask if a vaudeville act “will play in Peoria?” — the theory being that Peoria was the ultimate barometer of mass Middle American taste. Schock, as it happens, represented Peoria, a bedrock conservative district, and there is little evidence to suggest that his hijinks, transgressions, and ambiguous sexuality offended his constituents whatsoever. In other words, he played big time in Peoria. So give this guy a show on Bravo right now. He has one of the most sizzling audition tapes reality television has seen in years. As his father said of his son in an interview this week, 'Two years from now he will be successful if he’s not in jail.' But first Aaron Schock must apologize to Julian Fellowes and the production team at Downton Abbey. That notorious Capitol Hill office — created by an Illinois decorating firm appropriately named Euro Trash — didn’t remotely evoke Edwardian England. With its blood-red walls and busts of Republican presidents, it was nothing if not a Warren Harding–era bordello out of Boardwalk Empire." - Frank Rich, writing for New York Magazine.

Frank Rich On LGBT History

"As we just learned, a man can still be murdered for being gay a few blocks away from the Stonewall Inn. But the rapidity of change has been stunning. The world only spins forward, as Tony Kushner wrote. And yet as we celebrate the forward velocity of gay rights, I think we must glance backward as well. History is being lost in this shuffle—that of those gay men and women who experienced little or none of today’s freedoms. Whatever the other distinctions between the struggles of black Americans and gay Americans for equality under the law—starting with the overarching horror of slavery—one difference is intrinsic. Black people couldn’t (for the most part) hide their identity in an America that treated them cruelly. Gay people could hide and, out of self-protection, often did. That’s why their stories were cloaked in silence and are at risk of being forgotten."- Frank Rich, opening his New York Magazine article on LGBT history and his surrogate gay father.

Read the full essay.

Tweet Of The Day - Frank Rich

Why Frank Rich Supports Gay Marriage

Speaking to a group at Harvard, New York Times columnist Frank Rich explained that he first came to support gay rights when at the height of the AIDS crisis, an editor asked him to write a lengthy essay on how straight people view gays.

Quote Of The Day - Frank Rich

"It still seems an unwritten rule in establishment Washington that homophobia is at most a misdemeanor. By this code, the Smithsonian’s surrender is no big deal; let the art world do its little protests. This attitude explains why the ever more absurd excuses concocted by John McCain for almost single-handedly thwarting the repeal of 'Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell' are rarely called out for what they are — 'bigotry disguised as prudence,' in the apt phrase of Slate’s military affairs columnist, Fred Kaplan.

"Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council has been granted serious and sometimes unchallenged credence as a moral arbiter not just by Rupert Murdoch’s outlets but by CNN, MSNBC and The Post’s 'On Faith' Web site even as he cites junk science to declare that homosexuality poses a risk to children' and that being gay leads to being a child molester. [snip]

"Has it gotten better since AIDS decimated a generation of gay men? In San Francisco, certainly. But when America’s signature cultural institution can be so easily bullied by bigots, it’s another indicator that the angels Keith Haring saw on his death bed have not landed in Washington just yet." - Frank Rich, writing for the New York Times.

Frank Rich On Palin 2012

"If logic applied to Palin’s career trajectory, this month might have been judged dreadful for her. In an otherwise great year for Republicans she endorsed a 'Star Wars' bar gaggle of anomalous and wacky losers — the former witch, Christine O’Donnell; the raging nativist, Tom Tancredo; and at least two candidates who called for armed insurrection against the government, Sharron Angle and a would-be Texas congressman, Stephen Broden, who lost by over 50 percentage points. Last week voters in Palin’s home state humiliatingly 'refudiated' her protégé, Joe Miller, overturning his victory in the G.O.P. Senate primary with a write-in campaign.

"But logic doesn’t apply to Palin. What might bring down other politicians only seems to make her stronger: the malapropisms and gaffes, the cut-and-run half-term governorship, family scandals, shameless lying and rapacious self-merchandising. In an angry time when America’s experts and elites all seem to have failed, her amateurism and liabilities are badges of honor. She has turned fallibility into a formula for success.

"Republican leaders who want to stop her, and they are legion, are utterly baffled about how to do so. Democrats, who gloat that she’s the Republicans’ problem, may be humoring themselves. When Palin told Barbara Walters last week that she believed she could beat Barack Obama in 2012, it wasn’t an idle boast. Should Michael Bloomberg decide to spend billions on a quixotic run as a third-party spoiler, all bets on Obama are off." - Frank Rich, writing for the New York Times.

Quote Of The Day - Frank Rich

"Thanks to Rekers’s clownish public exposure, we now know that his professional judgments are windows into his cracked psyche, not gay people’s. But there is nothing funny about the destruction his writings and public activities have sown. His fringe views have not remained on the fringe. His excursions into public policy have had real and damaging consequences on a large swath of Americans.

"The crusade he represents is, thankfully, on its last legs. American attitudes about homosexuality continue to change very fast. In the past month, as square a cultural venue as Archie comic books has announced the addition of a gay character, the country singer Chely Wright has come out as a lesbian, and Laura Bush has told Larry King that she endorses the 'same' rights for all committed couples and believes same-sex marriage “will come.” All of this news has been greeted by most Americans with shrugs, as it should be." - New York Times columnist Frank Rich, in a delicious evisceration of Dr. George Rekers.

Frank Rich: Why Is Obama Waiting?

New York Times columnist Frank Rich goes after the Obama administration again today in an essay about the march towards full LGBT rights.

Obama has long been, as he says, a fierce advocate for gay equality. The Windy City Times has reported that he initially endorsed legalizing same-sex marriage when running for the Illinois State Senate in 1996. The most common rationale for his current passivity is that his plate is too full. But the president has so far shown an impressive inclination both to multitask and to argue passionately for bedrock American principles when he wants to. Relegating fundamental constitutional rights to the bottom of the pile until some to-be-determined future seems like a shell game. As [Evan] Wolfson reminds us in his book “Why Marriage Matters,” Dr. King addressed such dawdling in 1963. “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait,’ ” King wrote. “It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ ” The gay civil rights movement has fewer obstacles in its path than did Dr. King’s Herculean mission to overthrow the singular legacy of slavery. That makes it all the more shameful that it has fewer courageous allies in Washington than King did. If “American Idol” can sing out for change on Fox in prime time, it ill becomes Obama, of all presidents, to remain mute in the White House.

Rich opens his essay with a contemplation of the recent American Idol final, where, he contends, the nation would have easily accepted an openly gay winner in Adam Lambert. Lambert's success, he says, is yet another signal of the sea change in the way American youth see gay people and is a warning to the GOP that the continued fight against LGBT equality is already lost.

Justice Is Gathering

You've got to read Frank Rich's column in the NYT today in which he eviscerates NOM and the anti-marriage equality movement and says that they've lost the fight. A delicious snippet:

Far from terrifying anyone, “Gathering Storm” has become, unsurprisingly, an Internet camp classic. On YouTube the original video must compete with countless homemade parodies it has inspired since first turning up some 10 days ago. None may top Stephen Colbert’s on Thursday night, in which lightning from “the homo storm” strikes an Arkansas teacher, turning him gay. A “New Jersey pastor” whose church has been “turned into an Abercrombie & Fitch” declares that he likes gay people, “but only as hilarious best friends in TV and movies.”

Yet easy to mock as “Gathering Storm” may be, it nonetheless bookmarks a historic turning point in the demise of America’s anti-gay movement.

What gives the ad its symbolic significance is not just that it’s idiotic but that its release was the only loud protest anywhere in America to the news that same-sex marriage had been legalized in Iowa and Vermont. If it advances any message, it’s mainly that homophobic activism is ever more depopulated and isolated as well as brain-dead.

Rich closes with this: "It is justice, not a storm, that is gathering. Only those who have spread the poisons of bigotry and fear have any reason to be afraid." Read the entire essay.

The Unaffordable Culture Wars

The reliable Frank Rich writes in today's NYT:

The family-values dinosaurs that once stalked the earth — Falwell, Robertson, Dobson and Reed — are now either dead, retired or disgraced. Their less-famous successors pumped out their pro forma e-mail blasts, but to little avail. The Republican National Committee said nothing whatsoever about Obama’s reversal of Bush stem-cell policy. That’s quite a contrast to 2006, when the party’s wild and crazy (and perhaps transitory) new chairman, Michael Steele, likened embryonic stem-cell research to Nazi medical experiments during his failed Senate campaign. What has happened between 2001 and 2009 to so radically change the cultural climate? Here, at last, is one piece of good news in our global economic meltdown: Americans have less and less patience for the intrusive and divisive moral scolds who thrived in the bubbles of the Clinton and Bush years. Culture wars are a luxury the country — the G.O.P. included — can no longer afford.

Have things really gotten better, hate-wise, since Jerry Falwell was found face down in a pool of his own gravy?

Frank Rich On Rick Warren

NY Times columnist Frank Rich thinks its time to let the Rick Warren thing go and prepare to judge Barack Obama by his deeds.

By the historical standards of presidential hubris, Obama’s disingenuous defense of his tone-deaf invitation to Warren is nonetheless a relatively tiny infraction. It’s no Bay of Pigs. But it does add an asterisk to the joyous inaugural of our first black president. It’s bizarre that Obama, of all people, would allow himself to be on the wrong side of this history.

Since he’s not about to rescind the invitation, what happens next? For perspective, I asked Timothy McCarthy, a historian who teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and an unabashed Obama enthusiast who served on his campaign’s National Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Leadership Council. He responded via e-mail on Christmas Eve. After noting that Warren’s role at the inauguration is, in the end, symbolic, McCarthy concluded that “it’s now time to move from symbol to substance.” This means Warren should “recant his previous statements about gays and lesbians, and start acting like a Christian.”

McCarthy added that it’s also time “for President-elect Obama to start acting on the promises he made to the LGBT community during his campaign so that he doesn’t go down in history as another Bill Clinton, a sweet-talking swindler who would throw us under the bus for the sake of political expediency.” And “for LGBT folks to choose their battles wisely, to judge Obama on the content of his policy-making, not on the character of his ministers.” Amen. Here’s to humility and equanimity everywhere in America, starting at the top, as we negotiate the fierce rapids of change awaiting us in the New Year.

Read the entire essay.