L. GRAHAM: Here's my view of it, that the war on terror is really bigger than bin Laden. It's about religious extremism.Ya got that right Lindsay. So why not stand up against the religious extremism of Jim Demint? How can we expect to challenge the religious extremism of our enemy when you support the religious extremism of a US Senate Candidate. DeMint opposes ALL abortions....DeMint believes that single moms and gays and lesbians cannot be teachers...DeMint IS A RELIGIOUS EXTREMIST!

If Dick Cheney is willing to sell his own daughter down the river for power, is it any wonder that Jennifer Helms Knox is willing to cover up who she is while running as the GOP candidate in North Carolina?

Earlier today blogACTIVE and RawStory reported on the granddaughter of Jesse Helms. While Jennifer is out to her family (except Jesse, of course) and friends, she continues to avoid all questions relating from the press.

Jennifer Helms Knox refuses to discuss the platform of her party!
Jennifer Helms Knox refuses to discuss her leadership role in managing racist and homophobic campaigns for Senator Jesse Helms!
Jennifer Helms Knox refuses to stand up to her own party when then mail flyers filled with hate and homophobia!

Let the people of North Carolina and the country know that you are sick and tired of this hypocrisy.

Just click here to open an email to the press and others in the Raleigh area who need to know about this unacceptable double standard. Tell them how you feel about the North Carolina Republican Party Platform and how you feel about the mailing of homophobic ads against Julia Boseman. Copies of your letters will be sent to key GOP and Bush Campaign officials, media in the Raleigh area and Jennifer Helms Knox's campaign.

On Tuesday I promised you two posts today. I said that one of the posts would be an old story reprinted with a new opportunity to take action. Here is that story...

"How come you haven’t mentioned McCrery?” a friend asked the other day.

That’s how I first came to hear about Congressman James McCrery of Louisiana. I learned how McCrery’s hypocrisy was exposed was a dozen years ago, when Chris Bull, writing for The Advocate, laid out one of the most thoroughly reported examples of how gay men live double lives in and out of the Capitol’s halls of power.

This is not one of the previously mentioned cases....but it sure is interesting!

Just when I thought I had fully updated on the scene in New York, here comes an interesting item. In the photo above, we have not one, but two closet cases. That's Golan Cipel, former lover of NJ Governor James McGreevey, on the left and former NYC Mayor Ed Koch on the right when they first met back in 1998. I sure wonder what was on the mind of the gay former mayor when he met Golan.

Here's an intem from Cindy Adams the other day in the New York:

...I want to smack that Golan Cipel creature who looked to bring down New Jersey Gov. McGreevey. Acquaintances send word, "Cipel is definitely not a trusting type." Having fled to his home in Israel where there's family, friends, an old boyfriend and a safe haven in his sexual life, he left the governor's world in pieces. He's a creep.

You're right about that Cindy, he is a creep. As I said, and we can see above...birds of a feather closet together! (I'm no fan of James "gay beats corrupt" McGreevey, but that's another story.)


This is the first time I've asked blogACTIVE readers to take action by writing your own friends and families in Florida. Closet case Ed Koch is campaigning for the anti-gay Bush Campaign in Florida folks...so take a moment and write a personal note to your family members and friends in South Florida to let them know the real truth about Ed Koch and his backstabbing ways. If you click here, you'll get a window that will have the subject and blind copy to the blogACTIVE letter files already filled in. Happy writing.

The stories recognizing Lynne Cheney for the fraud she is continue to come in. Ellen Goodman has a great piece in The Boston Globe. Here are some excerpts:

Remember way back in the 1980s, when Dick Cheney racked up one of the most antigay voting records in the House of Representatives? In 1988, he was one of 13 members who even voted against funding for AIDS testing and research when it was still called a "gay plague." Well, Cheney's come as far as many other Americans, and for the same essential reason. The more people in our families, workplaces, and communities come out of the closet, the harder it is to regard them as deviants who need to be cured or converted or jailed.

* * * *

If Cheney has an argument with anybody it's with his running mate, George Bush. But the "pretty angry father" hasn't directed any of that anger at the Republican platform he's running on.

* * * *

Mary Cheney is an endangered species, a gay Republican in a campaign so hostile that even the Log Cabin Republicans refused to endorse Bush this year. She is loyal to her father, who is loyal to the president.

* * * *

Is it any wonder that many people in the gay community think she is working for the enemy? There is even a milk carton posted on the Internet that asks the question: Have you seen her?

Happy reading.

If I had a newspaper, I'd clone Frank Rich a few times. Examples of why we need more people like Mr. Rich in journalism never cease and this coming Sunday's New York Times is no different. Here's a few excerpts of what he has to say about the pathetic Marygate item:

To try to prop up its fictional headline "Outing Mary Cheney," The [Wall Street] Journal argued that "Mr. and Mrs. Cheney have not kept their daughter's lesbianism a secret but neither have they shouted it to the sky." Huh? Though Dick Cheney doesn't shout anything, he described his daughter as gay on camera at an Iowa campaign appearance this summer. But whatever Mr. and Mrs. Cheney may have to say about it, The Journal never entertained the thought that Mary Cheney herself has a voice in this matter. She has been openly gay for years. Before the 2000 campaign, she held a job that literally announced her homosexuality: gay and lesbian liaison for Coors, a public marketing assignment that even required her to travel the country with the winner of the 1999 International Mr. Leather competition. She later joined the Republican Unity Coalition, a gay-rights advocacy group formed as an alternative to the similarly inclined Log Cabin Republicans.

From all the outcry over Mr. Kerry's invocation of Ms. Cheney, with the attendant rhetoric about the evil of exploiting a candidate's "child" in a campaign, you might never guess that the child in question is not Chelsea Clinton at age 12 but a 35-year-old woman (two years older than Andrea Mackris). Or that she lives openly with her partner, Heather Poe, whom she brought onstage after the vice presidential debate. Or that she is the paid director of vice presidential operations for the Bush campaign, and that her mother is the author of a notorious potboiler ("Sisters," 1981) that drools over the prospect of lesbian coupling with O'Reilly-like glee. (For choice excerpts from Mrs. Cheney's fiction, go to whitehouse.org/administration/sisters.asp ).

Gay (and now Lesbian)-Baiting is nothing new to Karl Rove:

The deployment of homosexuality as a nasty campaign weapon has long been second nature to Mr. Rove. In the must-read article "Karl Rove in a Corner" in the November issue of The Atlantic, the journalist Joshua Green exhaustively researches the tightest campaigns of Mr. Rove's career and exhumes the pattern. As Mr. Green reminds us, George W. Bush's 1994 gubernatorial race against Ann Richards "featured a rumor" that Governor Richards was a lesbian. Gay whispers have also swirled around Rove adversaries like a rival Republican campaign consultant in the 1980's and a 1994 Alabama judicial candidate who was branded a "homosexual pedophile."

None of these rumors were, in fact, true, but Mary Cheney is unambiguously and unapologetically gay. For a campaign that wants to pander to the fringe, that makes her presence in the Bush-Cheney family a problem - just how big a problem can be seen by its disingenuously hysterical reaction to Mr. Kerry's use of the L word. But Mary Cheney isn't the only problem for Mr. Rove as he plays this game. The Republican establishment is rife with gay people - just ask anyone in proximity to its convention in New York - and the campaign doesn't want the four million to know about them, either. But in this election season, actual outing has begun to creep onto the Internet, where the names of closeted Republican congressmen and aides who support anti-gay policies are a Google search away. Some named so far - one of whom dropped out of his re-election campaign in August - hail from districts where some of those four million live.

In his conclusion, Rich notes that:

Sooner or later this untenable level of hypocrisy is going to lead to a civil war within the Republican party. But this hypocrisy is not just about homosexuality - it's about all sexuality, as befits a party that calls for the elimination of Roe v. Wade and the suppression of candid sex education that might prevent teenage pregnancy and AIDS alike.

Happy reading!

Quite a fun read here...From today's New York Post's Page Six, the city's most widely read gossip column:

October 21, 2004 -- CITY Councilman Vincent Gentile can't catch a break. Since he came out against same-sex marriage, the Brooklyn Democrat has been accused of sexually harassing a male staffer. Then, when he denied he was homosexual, a gay rights lawyer who once worked for him claimed they had a long-term affair. So on Monday night, at the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce gala at the Brooklyn Marriott, a sympathetic woman told him, "I stand behind you." Gentile, explaining how he'd been caught up in events beyond his control, said, "I'm riding a wave." A man standing nearby then addressed him: "Sir, from what I hear, that is not all you have been riding." Gentile turned and walked out.

Mary Cheney used to work for the Coors Brewing Company. Her job title was Corporate Relations Manager. Let me translate that for you: OUT LESBIAN working to convince millions of gay men and lesbians to end their years-long boycott of Coors. Mary Cheney met with representatives of gay and lesbian organizations and gave them Coors sponsorship money in an effort to repair of the Coors Beer brand in the gay community.

That's right. While Wolf Blitzer and Lynne Cheney are whining that Mary Cheney should not be brought into the election, the rest of us realize that invasions of her "privacy" are a bogus complaint. When it came to fighting for the dollars of the gay and lesbian community, Mary Cheney was standing in the front lines between Coors Beer and the gay and lesbian market demographic.

I personally met Mary Cheney about five years ago, when she was the VERY OUT lesbian liaison to the gay community for Coors Brewing. As many blogACTIVE.com readers know, Coors had been the object of a nationwide boycott by the gay community. Mary's job was to convince gay and lesbian community organizations to accept money from Coors Beer. She spent her time explaining that Coors Beer brand and homopbohic business magnate Pete Coors were not one and the same when it comes to issue of importance the gay and lesbian community. Mary explained how the pro-Gay company deserved support despite the homophobic family that owned it and made its money from it. Ugh.

By the way, Mary was very successful in her work. Despite the Coors' family's homophobia and gay-baiting, plenty of gay men and lesbians drink Coors. Why? Because PR folks like Mary Cheney will tell you that the family and the company are different. I will look into rejuvination of the Coors Boycott in a few weeks, right now there's other things to deal with.

Basically, the Bush/Cheney '04 folks want take the focus over the REAL issues facing the American people. If the news spends 120 seconds of Lynne Cheney fuming that her OUT LESBIAN daughter was mentioned during the question of HOMOSEXUALITY, that is two minutes of not talking about what the American people care about most: Iraq, jobs, health care and the economy.

WHERE was Lynne's outrage when wealthy gay and lesbian individuals were donating hundreds of dollars through the Republican Unity Coalition to have their picture taken with her daughter because she was the first out gay child of a sitting Vice President?

WHERE was Lynne's outrage when business magnate-turned U.S. Senate candidate Pete Coors (R) hired Mary to help market events similar to the gay 'Black and Blue Ball' in Montreal, mentioned by Tim Russert this past weekend on 'Meet the Press'? You're telling me the Cheney's have a problem with John Kerry's mere identification of their daughter as a gay person, but they DON'T HAVE A PROBLEM with Mary spearheading the Coors sponsorship of events like the like the 'Rail Raunch and Fetish Night'?

WHERE was Lynne's outrage when the GOP mailed these homophobic flyers in swing states?

WHERE was Lynne's outrage when the GOP passed the most anti gay and lesbian platform in American history?

Lynne Cheney, a good part of your daughter's career was spent as the official lesbian diplomat for Pete Coors and his corporate brands.

Lynne Cheney, have you no shame?

I'm not sure how it has come to this in America, but right now there is a man running for the United States Congress you really need to know about. Check out what's up at Blue Lemur:

In or about 1994, while the parties were hosting a dinner party at their home, the defendant took out two shotguns and threatened to shoot plaintiff

The court's record is clear. The remaining allegations are of soliciting other women, abuse, humiliation and refusing to seek treatment for his drinking. Here's another quote:

In the summer of 1995 and with increasing frequency thereafter, defendant repeatedly belittled, criticized, humiliated and embarrassed plaintiff in front of the parties’ friends

Ugh. These are people who then want to claim the mantle of family values?! We better hurry up and protect marriage with a Constitutional Amendment. If the Amendment is reconsidered, perhaps an amendment to the Amendment is in order. I propose the following:

Marriages between nice women and men who get liquored up at dinner parties and make death threats while waving shotguns in the air are prohibited in these United States.

New York State Senator Randy Kuhl voted AGAINST protecting gays and lesbians from Job Discrimination.

It's no wonder he wants to run for Congress. With husbands like him running around the country, he probably thinks a contitutional amendment is what's needed to protect marriage. News Alert Randy: If you want to protect marriage, prohibit men like yourself from entering into marriage...with a person of ANY gender.

Click here to write Randy Kuhl's campaign manager with copies going to senior party leaders like Dennis Hastert's Chief of Staff, leaders in the New York State legislature and others who are supporting Randy's candidacy. Make sure you include a link to this item or to the Blue Lemur.com piece on Randy's court papers. Let these leaders know that Randy Kuhl does not reflect their party.

There are still those who doubt the power of blogs. Well, The latest issue of The Advocate will put that to rest.

Such is the power of the blog, a new breed of Web site that has made waves in this election season. Outing may be nothing new, but the speed with which accusations like Rogers’s can race around the Web is revolutionary. It didn’t matter that Schrock’s staffers insisted he wasn’t gay. Less than two weeks after Rogers first made his allegations, he’d effectively ended the congressman’s career. “Blogs can change the world,” Rogers says.

You can read the piece here.

And on another note...Last night I was at Vote for Change, the amazing concert for Americans Coming Together. Change is in the air...it was amazing to see Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, Dave Matthews, John Mellencamp, REM, James Taylor, The Dixie Chicks, Jurassic 5, Babyface Edmonds and more at an INCREDIBLE concert! If you weren't lucky enough to be there, I hope you caught it on Sundance or the net.