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The Christian Civic League of Maine's Mike Hein calls Pam's House Blend:
"a leading source of radical homosexual propaganda, anti-Christian bigotry, and radical transgender advocacy."
He is "praying that Pam Spaulding will "turn away from her wicked and sinful promotion of homosexual behavior."
(CCLM's web site, 10/15/07)
Ex-gay "Christian" activist James Hartline on Pam:
"I have been mocked over and over again by ungodly and unprincipled anti-christian lesbians."
(from "Six Years In Sodom: From The Journal Of James Hartline," 9/4/2006, written from the "homosexual stronghold" of Hillcrest in San Diego)."Pam is a 'twisted lesbian sister' and an 'embittered lesbian' of the 'self-imposed gutteral experiences of the gay ghetto.'" -- 9/5/2008
Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth Against Homosexuality heartily endorses the Blend, calling Pam:
A "vicious anti-Christian lesbian activist."
(Concerned Women for America's radio show [9:15], 1/25/07)
"A nutty lesbian blogger."
(MassResistance radio show [16:25], 2/3/07)
Pam's House Blend always seems to find these sick f*cks. The area of the country she is in? The home state of her wife? I know, they are everywhere. Pam just does such a great job of bringing them out into the light.
--Impeach Bush
who monitors yours Bevis ?? Just thought I would drop you a line,so the rest of your life is not wasted.
--"Joe"
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An Online Magazine in the Reality-Based Community.
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Wed Mar 12, 2008 at 23:00:00 PM EDT
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Thank you Keith. He used his Special Comment tonight to address this comment by 1984 VP nominee and former Clinton 2008 finance committee member Geraldine Ferraro:If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.
I discussed at length why I thought the Clinton campaign's seeming death wish for their candidate and the party here. That campaign is so off the rails, so off message, awash in campaign tactics of yesteryear, the good-old-boy strategies that push buttons that make people jerk to toward that third rail of race -- a place of extreme discomfort for most Americans of any color.
For more background if you haven't watched the whole video, Ferraro went on a barnstorming media tour to defend her remarks, which only resulted in the emergence of past instances of saying much the same thing before (so it wasn't off the cuff), something Keith addresses in full. MSNBC:
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| Pam Spaulding :: Keith Olbermann hits hard on the Ferraro debacle |
After that didn't seem to quell the press attention on the matter, she threw in the towel.Geraldine Ferraro has stepped down from her role as a member of Hillary Clinton's finance committee.
In a letter to Clinton obtained by CNN's Suzanne Malveaux - who spoke with the former vice presidential candidate shortly after she sent it to Clinton - Ferraro said she is stepping down so, "I can speak for myself and you can continue to speak for yourself about what is at stake in this campaign."
...When asked if she had any regrets about what she said, Ferraro replied, "absolutely not." Clinton's response:I said yesterday that I rejected what she said, and I certainly do repudiate it, and regret deeply that it was said. Obviously she doesn't speak from the campaign, she doesn't speak for any of my positions, and she has resigned from being a member of my very large finance committee. Interestingly, though a lot of this race has been dancing around race card issues, primarily through surrogates, Obama himself hasn't discussed his race much at all -- it seems everyone else is more than willing to use a tattered political playbook that always worked in the past, but seems more divisive and, quite frankly increasingly embarrassing now. He commented on Ferraro's statement:He said Ferraro's remarks had been "ridiculous" and "divisive," but he also described his own wariness about allegations. (Obama aides said yesterday that Axelrod hadn't meant to refer to a pattern of racially-charged remarks, but just of negative attacks, though many of his examples have been seen as having a racial edge.)
"I don't like to throw out words like 'racist,'" Obama said. "I would defy anybody to look though the rhetoric for the last year-and-a-half or the last year and a couple months to find one instance in which I have said some criticism of me was racially based."
He did, however, accuse the Clinton campaign of slicing up the electorate along racial lines. He noted that Clinton's aides -- notably Mark Penn -- have told reporters on conference calls that part of her strength lies in her ability to win traditional swing-voting groups, working class whites and Hispanics.
Clinton's aides, Obama said, say "there are a set of voters that Obama might not get." He said "that seems to track in a certain racial demographic."
He also joked, as he has before, that he's been challenged as both too black and as not black enough.
"I don't know what exactly [is] the margin of black vote that is the optimal -- not too black, but black enough," he said. All that said, the reason a lot of this is making people uncomfortable -- and this is particularly hard for progressives to accept -- is that the third rail of race has everyone all tied up in knots and tense. It's complicated by the competing issue of gender bias and outright misogyny rolling off the tongues of talking heads.
Heaven help those of us who are women and of color -- I guess we are expected to pick and choose how to affiliate politically based on putting our fingers in the air).
We are so in need of candid discussion about fear-based campaigning based on the inherent biases we all have about race (and gender). We are manipulated by it, even as we reject the morality of using such tactics openly. We are ashamed that it works, but it is employed because it does.
What makes it difficult is that many white progressives as well as Republicans (for very different reasons) wanted to believe that we are in a "post-racial" society because it is easier to say it and hope we all nod our heads in agreement, a tacit agreement not to discuss what we all know to be an persistent and difficult arena fraught with conflict and discord.
Sadly, it's obvious that we are only playing whack-a-mole.
***
UPDATE: I crossposted this at Pandagon (edited to include Kathy's question and my response), and received some comments there that I'm adding to this post for discussion.
From two Pandagon exchanges: You'll find no denial of the continuing, but often hidden, racism of the US public from me. I'm a white man but have seen enough to convince me that that racism is all over the place. I'd like to think that what Ferraro said would hurt the Clinton campaign but I am not sure it will- lots of people I talk to seem to agree with her. It may have even been an effective tactic. I guess we will have to wait and see.
My reply:
[F]or those who agree with Ferraro (about an advantage for Obama being black), do you ever think they would consider what I said in my earlier post -
* If Clinton were a black man, Hillary would have been told to drop out of the race after losing 11 contests in a row, after all, John Edwards had to get out after losing only 3.
* If Obama were white, he'd already be the nominee, because it's pretty clear that while there are blacks voting for him because of his race, there are certain demographic groups who didn't vote for him because he's black, and those are the Reagan Democrats that Hillary is chasing.
The real loser here is truth-telling - the inability of Americans to find some way to sanely discuss race when it's not a pot boiling over on the stove.
***
The poll on CNN has had Ferraro questions for the last two days. 55% of respondents agree with her and don't think she should apologize. That tells you all you need to know about why this was done and why this isn't going away.
My reply:
Yep. And that's the third rail no one wants to touch - that there are many out there who do agree, and that Clinton strategists know full well how to use the inherent biases out there that can be leveraged. These folks have been weaned on race-based campaigning because it works.
When the issue of the use of these tactics is questioned, it then raises the spectre of what "racist" is or isn't. Because something works, certainly doesn't make it right, but these are people who make a living based on trying to make their candidate the victor. You know, it's just politics.
The question our society should ask, particularly Democrats who desperately don't want to believe or discuss that their party is capable of such things, is at what cost do we enable this to continue by not examining the root problem of all of this because it makes people queasy.
It's hard to sell the idea of the emergence a "post-racial" era when this stuff crops up, particularly for progressives who think this is only the kind of thing the GOP does.
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