A Stitch in Haste

"There is no honor or happiness in just being strong enough to be left alone."
--John McCain, Liberty University commencement address, 2006

Jamie Kirchick, the gay journalist who did almost as much as I to bring down Ron Paul's presidential campaign, now seeks to raise up John McCain instead, in a piece titled "Why John McCain Isn't So Bad" —

But while McCain has racked up an unimpressive voting record in Congress — he supports "don't ask, don't tell" and the Defense of Marriage Act and opposes adding sexual orientation to the federal hate-crimes bill and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act — what distinguishes him from many of his Republican colleagues is that he has also taken some courageous stands.

I guess one gay's "bigoted" is another gay's "unimpressive." I'll be sure to update my gay thesaurus. (Speaking of thesauruses, I'll also save the word "courageous" for people other than politicians.)

McCain was one of the very few outspoken Republican opponents of the Federal Marriage Amendment in the Senate, calling the proposed ban "un-Republican."

Kirchick then takes another three paragraphs before he concedes that McCain actively embraced the Arizona bigot amendment in 2006. So to McCain, being "Republican" merely means embracing anti-gay bigotry at the state level rather than at the federal level (and confirms, yet again, the axiom that all gay Republicans are, by definition, self-loathing).

Sure, McCain spoke at Falwell's Liberty University in 2006, but he didn't pander.

Utter nonsense. The mere act of speaking at Liberty University in the first place was itself, by definition, "pandering." Legitimizing an institution whose raison d'être is to bring about a War on Gays specifically, and fundamentalist theocracy in America generally, serves no function except to catalyze those processes.

To be sure, McCain will not win over single-issue gay voters. But if you're concerned about Obama's foreign policy naivete or his proclivity for raising taxes, give McCain a serious look.

So gays are allowed to be concerned about Obama's foreign policy naivete but not McCain's economic naivete? (Or, if you prefer, "gays are allowed to be concerned about Obama's foreign policy naivete but not McCain's lack of foreign policy naivete"? (Let's recall also that this purported "lack of naivete" is quite rebuttable.)

Or how about the precedent concern: that McCain is, by all indicia, just plain mentally unstable?

Back in 2004, some very silly people asserted, baselessly, that "a million gays voted for George W. Bush." There are two unarguable reasons why there will not be a million gays voting for John McCain: (1) his miserable record on gay rights, (2) his miserable record on everything else.