How obnoxious can U.S. Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) be? In a guest opinion published today in Bay Windows, a Massachusetts LGBT newspaper, Brown tells us that:
I don’t come before you with a checklist of items promising that I will be an advocate for you on each and every one of them. My opponent has already started down that road, promising to support everyone’s pet project. That’s not the way I have ever operated. …
I believe all people should be treated with dignity and respect. I recognize the liberty of every citizen to live as they choose, and it is from this diversity that we derive our strength as a nation. We are Americans first and must work together to fix our country’s real economic problems.
So apparently working to pass ENDA (Employment Non-Discrimination Act) to ensure the basic civil right to not be fired from your job because you are or are perceived to be trans or gay is just someone’s “pet project”. It’s not a “real economic problem”. Getting the federal government to repeal the so-called Defense of Marriage Act and finally recognize same-sex civil marriages just like it recognizes every other civil marriage legally enacted under state law is a “pet project”.
Does he really think that dumping this insulting garbage in an LGBT newspaper will win him votes? You have got to be kidding me.
Cross-posted at Pam’s House Blend.
Brown has had a horrid record on LGBT issues, from going after his lesbian opponent for being a mom, to opposing civil unions, gay marriage, gay adoption, and state level anti-discrimination and hate laws in the State Senate. He has toed a similar line in the US Senate. While I’ve mentioned elsewhere that running front and center on LGBT makes little sense in this economic climate, this race is definitely about what a solid progressive like Warren can do that a faux moderate will never do.
Happy days.
What about the beginning of the day? Mid-morning? Late afternoon? Why did it take Senator Brown until the end of the day to figure out that competence, honor, and dignity are what are important for soldiers — including himself, I might add? It couldn’t be because he was waiting to see if he’d have cover in breaking with Republican ranks? It couldn’t be because he was waiting to see exactly where the winds were blowing? Nah. He was studying the issue.
Riiiiiiiiiiggggghhhhhttttt.
There’s a pretty strong tendency among well-off straight white men (even if they aren’t conservatives) to think of anything of disproportionate interest to anyone other than themselves as a “special interest.” It’s a belief reinforced not only by right-wing talk radio but by movies and TV shows and advertising catered to them. They’re not the only target market out there of course, but other groups seem to be more aware of the fact that some piece of marketing is aimed at them specifically.
I think that’s what we are seeing with Brown and his language.
that just being willing to be seen talking to the gays is somehow edgy. Very 1980s of the senator, aye?
Don’t underestimate Brown. This wasn’t about getting gays to vote for him outside of a small subset who are “I don’t need civil rights because I’m rich.” It’s about trying to get vaguely supportive straight people who don’t want to vote for an explicitly anti-gay Senator.
read Bay Windows.
I am an explicitly for Elizabeth Warren straight person and I’ve never read Bay Windows until today.
It’s not that “vaguely supportive straight people” (VSSP) are reading Bay Windows, but that they can now feel comfortable voting for Brown because this interview has inoculated him (amongst a certain set of the VSSP crowd) against the charges that he’s ignoring the LGBT community.
“John, Sue, I know you; how could you possibly vote for Scott Brown? He’s totally ignoring the LGBT community!”
“That’s not true. He voted for the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and he even sat down for an interview with Bay Windows. He wouldn’t have done that if he was ignoring the LGBT community.”
I’m not saying that I buy this argument, but some people will. And in a tight race, every vote matters.
so he’d sure be getting a lot of mileage from a poorly re-worked stump speech if you’re right! I can believe that he relies on low-information voters, so perhaps you’re right after all.
Good thing this wasn’t part of the SAT’s reading comprehension section … not sure how I missed “guest opinion” .. it’s not like it was in bold or anything. 🙂
I wonder if Mr. Brown is trying to steal a page from Rick Santorum’s playbook — I’m reminded of Mr. Santorum’s appearance where he compared gay marriage to polygamy (Full disclosure: my son is good friends with the courageous high-school student who confronted Mr. Santorum). Perhaps Mr. Brown is using Bay Windows to reassure his supporters that his vote to repeal DADT was meaningless. What he did NOT say (“I oppose discrimination based on gender preference”) speaks far more than the pap he offered. I doubt that many prospective Scott Brown voters read Bay Windows — his “guest opinion” certainly does not read like an effort to attract support from that audiance. I’m guessing Mr. Brown is primarily seeking media coverage of his “tolerance”. Glaringly absent is ANY condemnation of the flagrant and pervasive anti-gay agenda of his party and its right-wing supporters.
It seems to me that both Mr. Brown and Mr. Santorum have so little respect for the LGBT community that they’re perfectly happy to cynically use it as a pawn in order to advance their own self-serving right-wing agenda.
Notice the identical IP addresses, lol.
Interestingly enough, that IP address reverses to a Comcast business account:
# dig -x 173.162.235.46
; <> DiG 9.3.6-P1-RedHat-9.3.6-4.P1.el5_4.2 <> -x 173.162.235.46
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 54198
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;46.235.162.173.in-addr.arpa. IN PTR
;; ANSWER SECTION:
46.235.162.173.in-addr.arpa. 3548 IN PTR 173-162-235-46-NewEngland.hfc.comcastbusiness.net.
;; Query time: 0 msec
;; SERVER: 172.16.0.23#53(172.16.0.23)
;; WHEN: Thu Apr 5 19:16:30 2012
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 108
If that was the address of an ISP offering shared hosting, I would expect to see several hits on the reverse lookup — and the name of the ISP in the PTR record that “dig -x” returns. This all seems to be from a business subscriber of comcast.
I spent most of 2011 trying to get Scott Brown and his Boston and Washington staff people to answer this one question about the impacts of DOMA (Defense-of-Marriage Act) upon his constituents:
He always chose option B. He and his staff confirmed that he wants to ensure that other states and the federal government can continue discriminating against all same-gender couples in 9 states today (CT, DC, IA, MA, MD, NH, NY, VT, WA) and in all future same-gender marriage states.
The only time that Scott Brown votes for an LGBT-positive measure is when his own vote makes no difference at all, because then he tells constituents that he “delivered” and tells his Republican animal trainers the excuse that “it would have happened anyway.” But whenever his position does matter, he works against LGBT people everywhere.
Scott Brown refuses to sponsor or vote for bills that protect his constituents from DOMA-related discrimination. He wrote in Bay Windows that he considers equality for LGBT people as a trivial “pet project” of no political value. He claims that ending discrimination conflicts with creating jobs, and that’s why he can’t possibly do both at the same time.
Any elected official who can’t oppose discrimination and create jobs at the same time is either un-skilled, or else dishonest — or perhaps both.
Finally, in addition to Scott Brown being owned and funded by Wall Street and big oil, the anti-LGBT hate group NOM (National Organization for Marriage) works on his campaigns, because they share the same goal: continue state and federal discrimination against LGBT people everywhere via DOMA.
There is no reason to elect anyone like Brown, who has committed to ensuring life-long discrimination against LGBT people, and who justifies his bigotry with the excuse that it is impossible for him to work on both fairness and economics concurrently.