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More On Coulter's QuislingCon Speech

Talking Points Memo reporter Megan Carpentier, whose live tweets from Homocon 2010 I followed last night, has posted her story. According to Carpentier, headliner Ann Coulter's offensive remarks went far beyond telling the crowd that they didn't deserve civil rights.

First, she ran down the stereotypical stand-up comedian's list of reasons, including that lacking the legal right to marriage allows the less-committed partner to weasel out of it. But in a more serious note, she parroted the losing arguments of the lawyers supporting California's Prop 8 and told the crowd that the reason she opposes (and they should oppose) same sex marriage is that it is strictly for procreation. In one of a series of racially insensitive remarks that pervaded her speech, Coulter added, "Marriage is not a civil right. You're not black." It was part of a larger argument on which she later elaborated, telling the crowd that the 14th Amendment only applies to African-Americans and that it does not, in fact, apply to women, LGBT people or other minorities. [Snip]

Coulter also made a forceful case against sex education in schools, accusing liberals of attempting to teach kindergartners about "fisting" (which garnered her a heckler, who shouted out "What's wrong with fisting?") and told the crowd that most parents didn't want their children learning about the "homosexual lifestyle" instead of reading and writing. Several attendees, who requested anonymity, were also startled by her racially-tinged humor: in addition to her comments about civil rights, she also accused single parents of breeding muggers and blamed the decline in marriage in the African-American community on welfare, "the subsidization of single parenting" and overly liberal child support laws.

Carpentier notes that many of last night's Homocon attendees were very unhappy with Coulter's speech. Funny, that's not what we're getting from all those celebratory tweets issued by GOProud afterwards.

Read Megan Carpentier's entire report.

Dan Choi On The Harry Reid Moment

NEVADA: Teabagger Senate Candidate Sharron Angle Linked To Anti-Gay Group

Talking Points Memo has uncovered an anti-gay newspaper insert published in 1994 by the wingnut party that GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle belonged to at the time.

The far-right third party that Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle called home in the 1990s supported abolishing "the debt money system" and ran a vitriolic anti-gay insert in state newspapers that portrays LGBT people -- or, as Angle's party called them, "sodomites" -- as child-molesting, HIV-carrying, Hell-bound freaks, according to documents obtained by TPM. As we reported earlier this month, Angle was a member of Nevada's Independent American Party, a Christian conservative-cum-libertarian third party, for at least six years while she was getting her feet wet in politics in the 1990s. Independent American Party members told us that Angle switched to be a Republican in 1997 out of political expediency as she was preparing to make a run for state-level office.[snip]

In 1994, the party attracted considerable controversy by placing a 16-page advertising insert in Nevada newspapers promoting an amendment to the state constitution that would explicitly permit discrimination against LGBT people by businesses and government. Janine Hansen, the current executive director of the party and the editor of the '94 insert, told TPM earlier this month that "in general [Angle] agreed with our position on the issues." The ad insert, which approvingly cites an 1814 legal treatise titled "Consequences of Sodomy: Ruin of a Nation," is a digest of articles that refer to LGBT people alternately as "homosexuals," "sodomites," and "brazen perverts." The insert includes virtually every homophobic myth ever conceived. Sample headlines include: "Homosexual Curriculum In The First Grade" ... "Flawed Science Nurtures Genetic Origin For Homosexuality" ... "No Constitutional Right To Be A Sodomite."

The insert cited lies from discredited anti-gay "researcher" Dr. Paul Cameron and made the claim that HIV can survive in water.

Talking Points Memo: Yes On 8 Ads Are Ok On Our Site

Progressive blog Talking Points Memo had all of its ad space taken over by Yes On 8 ads yesterday via Google Ad Sense. Despite a massive outcry from readers and despite opposing Prop 8 in their editorials, TPM took no action. Josh Marshall's reasoning:

When we started accepting paid advertisements in 2003, I instituted a clear policy that we would never accept or reject ads on the basis of political content. We reserve the right to reject ads on the basis of 'taste' or 'appropriateness', which we do every so often. We also will not run ads containing hate speech or appeals to violence. But outside those two categories, which we interpret very narrowly, we run ads irrespective of, indeed, with an intentional indifference to their message.

Hmm. Some would say that the Yes On 8 ads DO qualify as hate speech. Other sites have blocked the ads, including the gay car enthusiasts site, Gay Wheels.

(Tipped by JMG reader Joseph)