THERE IS NO HUMOR IN HATE AND IGNORANCE.
THERE IS ONLY VIOLENCE AND MORE MISUNDERSTANDING.
By PAUL SCHMELZER 12/23/09 6:00 AM
As the Minnesota Independent first reported earlier this month, 1st Congressional District candidate Jim Hagedorn removed blog posts disparaging of gays, fellow Republicans and Native Americans from his “Mr. Conservative” blog within days of announcing his candidacy. Now, as new deleted posts are discovered, the state’s largest gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender advocacy group has called for Hagedorn to retract his statements.
While Hagedorn hasn’t responded to the Minnesota Independent’s request for comment, he did tell the Rochester Post Bulletin that he removed the posts prior to 2004 for space concerns. But contradicting that is a July 13, 2004, post that Hagedorn scrubbed — and it’s a post OutFront Minnesota is responding to.
Removed sometime after Oct. 23, 2009, the post likened two men who’d had consensual sex to “barnyard” animals and said that in overturning Texas’ sodomy law, the Supreme Court “injudiciously fisted two hundred and twenty-seven years of the Republic’s mores into the bowels of cultural debauchery.”
To that, OutFront’s public policy director, Monica Meyer, says, “He focused on what feels like bathroom humor, although he probably thought it was more clever than that. It’s not OK.”
“I feel like he was trying to figure out a way to try to make it funny but still pointing out that gay people aren’t the same as gay people and we can make fun of them,” she told the Minnesota Independent, adding that often candidates will use GLBT people as a “wedge issue” to draw supporters.
“You know there’s still fear out there about gay people, and sometimes that leads to violence,” she said, citing a new FBI report that found an 11-percent increase in hate crimes against people perceived as GLBT. “We really should have elected officials and candidates who really call out for fairness for everyone… [Hagedorn] should say that he doesn’t stand by those words.”...
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