Posts Tagged ‘Maggie Gallagher’

Bill Moyers and the Prop 8 trial

Monday, March 1st, 2010

Bill Moyers Journal (video: MarriageTrial at YouTube)

Attorneys Ted Olson and David Boies discussed the ongoing Prop 8 trial, Perry v Schwarzenegger, with PBS’s Bill Moyers. Embedding the video is not allowed, but you can kick back and watch it Chez Moyers.

Moyers sets the stage:

It’s true. Ted Olson, a conservative, and David Boies, a liberal, are in the middle of a case that, win or lose, they expect, will wind up at the Supreme Court, just like Bush v. Gore. The former adversaries have united in support of core American values: diversity, equality and tolerance. They’re key players in one of the most important civil rights trials of the last decade. It’s a pivotal legal action that could change our society, but which has escaped the attention of much of the country.

Oh! And, as a bonus, PBS viewers get to relive the paranoid insanity of the National Organization for Marriage’s craptastic Gathering Storm commerical — the much-parodied ad issued right before NOM’s Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown got their hooks into christianist porn princess Carrie Prejean.

(emphasis: mine)

(tip: Andy Towle, Towleroad)

Who’s the real con?

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

Gay conservative debate at Cato: Andrew Sullivan, Maggie Gallagher, Nick Herbert (video: MetroWeekly at YouTube)

Personally, I’d rather see these cons settle the burning question, who’s the real conservative?, with dueling pistols at extremely short range.

Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown of the Nationalist Orgasm for Opposite Marriage must be immensely disappointed that their personal raison d’être — keeping the gays from getting hitched — lined the bottom of the popularity cesspool among all conservative issues, unless you count “Other.” The CPAC attendees cared most about reducing the size of government, which is, of course, a circumlocution for tax-cuts for rich white dudes. The comedy team of Maggie & Brian, dissed so delightfully as sissies by GOProud’s Jimmy LaSalvia, was last seen slipping into irrelevancy.

From AllahPundit, writing at the conservative Hot Air blog:

A nugget mined from the PDF of the full results. This does jibe with the gay-friendly-ish vibe to this year’s proceedings, but how seriously should we take a poll that was won by, um, Ron Paul and whose results were not only booed by the crowd but belittled by CPAC spokesmen who touted the booing to the media?

The allegedly gay-friendly vibe to which AllahPundit refers is the booing by CPAC attendees of Porno Pete LaBarbera’s latest object of affection, Ryan Sorba, who trashed CPAC for letting the gay über-conservative group, GOProud, in on the annual event’s sponsorship.

CPAC straw poll: Just one percent list stopping gay marriage as a top priority (graphic: Hot Air, via Joe Jervis)

Who’s the real CPAC pansy?

Saturday, February 20th, 2010

GOProud’s Jimmy LaSalvia at CPAC (video: Sarah Posner)

Don’t take inclusion here as any kind endorsement of these conserva-buffoons, but here’s GOProud’s executive director, Jimmy LaSalvia, at the über-über-conservative CPAC conference trashing the dainty cowards from the National Organization for Opposite Marriage. Writer Sarah Posner is the author of God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters and no stranger around here. Here’s Posner’s take on this little spat.

Come’on, Maggie and Brian. Walk across the aisle. The exercise will do you good.

(tip: Sarah Posner)

NOM’s Brown loves his ‘activist’ judges

Friday, January 15th, 2010

It’s just tickles their tiny little hearts when the radical religious right gets its claws into an activist judge who buys their bigoted malarkey. Consequently, the Executive Director of the National Organization for Marriage, Brian Brown, is singing the praises of Justice Anthony Kennedy in an email just sent from wherever the Hell the nomadic NOM is calling home these days. Justice Kennedy, in his black robes, led the Scalia-Thomas faction of the Court in its malevolent attack on transparency, and that resulted in the pro-Prop 8 side being allowed to continue cowering beneath their white robes and pointy hoods at the Perry v Schwarzenegger — AKA Olson-Boies — trial in San Francisco.

And it also makes the second time that Justice Anthony Kennedy has stepped forward to try to protect at least the process, to create a more even playing field for supporters of marriage. You will remember it was Justice Kennedy who granted an emergency stay that prevented the release of the names of thousands of Washingtonians who signed a petition overturning an “all-but-marriage” bill, after some gay-marriage advocates said they would try to replicate the effort in California to post these names on the internet.

Justice Kennedy joined four other justices to keep Judge Walker from hastily lifting the TV ban in order to televise the Prop 8 trial: “The balance of equities favors applicants. While applicants have demonstrated the threat of harm they face if the trial is broadcast, respondents have not alleged any harm if the trial is not broadcast.”

And who appointed three of those four justices? The man Jesus Christ himself put in the White House, the “worst President in American history,” George W Bush.

And it’s especially special when Brown patronizingly, albeit probably correctly, suggests his loyal followers are too stoopid to comprehend legalese:

I want to include some lengthy quotes from the opinion. If legalese is not your thing, skip over them. But I think those of us who went through the experience of Prop 8 will appreciate that at least five of the nine Justices of the Supreme Court recognize that the wave of intimidation and harassment was quite simply wrong.

Brown then mashes up a badly formatted collection of buzzwords and phrases like “death threats” and “powdery white substance,” as if the source of that non-toxic mystery powder was ever discovered. It was not. For all we know, the Mormon elders themselves or Maggie Gallagher mailed it to the Mormons.

There was most definitely an upsurge of violence in the wake of Prop 8, only it seems almost entirely directed at gay and lesbian Californians:

The truth about Brian Brown’s intelligence comes later in his missive:

The most amusing thing is watching the San Francisco expert’s case on how gay marriage is going to economically benefit the government fall apart under questioning. Really, is that the best you can do? Overturn the people’s right to amend their own constitution to protect marriage–so San Francisco can collect some sales tax revenue from wedding ceremonies?

Does Brian Brown actually grasp that is the constitutionality of Prop 8 that is on trial and not the right of Californians to amend California’s Constitution, or is this flack just zooming his flock as usual?

Prop H8 cowards continue to cower

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

According to Bob Egelko, writing at the San Francisco Chronicle, the anti-gays behind Prop 8 don’t want TV cameras in the courtroom on 11 January when the federal trial on the constitutionality of the initiative that eliminated the existing right of same sex couple to marry in California begins.

Sponsors of California’s ban on same-sex marriage, which faces a federal court trial in San Francisco next month, have told the trial judge that his suggestion to televise the proceedings is both unwise and illegal.

Television coverage could expose witnesses and other trial participants to harassment and intimidation, backers of Proposition 8 said in a court filing Monday. They said some of their witnesses “have indicated that they would not be willing to testify” if the trial was televised.

Author and activist Wayne Besen, writing at Truth Wins Out, nails it:

This is because they are subconsciously ashamed of their backward views and don’t want to be seen publicly as the bigots that they truly are.

In the deep recesses of their hardened hearts, they understand what they are doing is immoral, despicable and discriminatory. Yet, because of misplaced religious beliefs and a compulsive need to impose their worldview on others, these embarrassed souls continue to push prejudice.

Maggie Gallagher, of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), likes to menace her minions with her baseless claim that “gay marriage will have consequences.” When pressed for details, Gallagher can only cite instances unrelated to marriage equality in any state. She never bothers to mention the spike in violent anti-gay attacks in the wake of the Proposition 8.

California, like Maine — where Gallagher and Co. also attempted to hide NOM’s funding sources by taking the state to court, has long had election donation disclosure laws. They serve a purpose. The public has a right to know who is influencing elections.

However the judge ultimately decides, the names of the anti-gays will appear in the court transcripts. Those names will be published because all Californians have a right to know with whom they’re doing business, and gay and lesbian Californians have a right to take their dollars elsewhere if our money is being channeled into causes that oppose or seek to eliminate our fundamental civil rights.