“Moms demand action” drew red-shirted supporters from Lovettsville and across the Commonwealth to convene in Richmond for a special session ordered by Governor Ralph Northam to pass gun safety legislation.
They came in buses and cars on July 9, 2019, the day scheduled for the General Assembly to take action. Continue reading
Western Loudoun was and still is mostly a garden of delight. And other sections of the County have their special and distinctive charms.
I can’t say from observation what’s going on in the East but I suspect it’s about the same, as I’ve been told it is, especially along Sterling Boulevard.
In the West, I can tell you, the rolling green fields and three board horse fences are punctuated, awfully close to the road, with offensively large, in-your-face, self-adoring, political signs, at many turns in our local highways and dirt roads, the letters as tall as a small child, and thick in their indecent calligraphic display.
These monster signs have been posted by Republican pols who, for the most part, are characteristically comfortable with any development, almost no matter how it compromises or may ultimately destroy our marvelous countryside.
These signs are “the medium” for their “message.” (This is a nodding adaptation of Marshall McLuhan’s oft-quoted sentiment that – the “medium is the message.”
If President Reagan had a bipartisan sense of humor, he might say, “Take down those signs.”
As an old hand at this political business, I know that pols believe that 85% of a vote in an election is name recognition. So these signs don’t say anything but the candidate’s name and office.
I strongly suggest that you note the names on these signs and recoil from pulling the lever on any one of them – if you find their postings in as off-puttingly bad taste as I do.
We judge character by a person’s actions – and publishing these obnoxious larger than life, narcissistic nudges to our memory lobes, and leaving these monster signs out there as a persistent eyesore for months before the election, squatting on the good taste of the community, plainly suggests that these wannabe electables, view any objection to their signs, like Rhett Butler might in “Gone with the Wind” – “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!”
Those hosting the signs no doubt make the lame protest – we can do what we want with our property, or with the consent of the property owner. Well, there really are some things one should not do. And maybe there should be a law about this – if the current freedom comes unrestrained by responsibility. Continue reading
Dick Black explains his view of a spousal rape bill
The email claims that “Black was not taking a position for or against marital rape.” While he may not have been literally “taking a position for or against marital rape” during the floor speech captured in the video, it’s difficult to believe that he doesn’t have opinions on the topic. His closest allies on the fringe of “social conservatism” typically take the position that marital rape, by definition, can’t exist. For example, Phyllis Schlafly of Concerned Women for America – the organization for which Mrs. Black is a national lobbyist, and to which Dick Black gave this appalling interview during which he joked that “Concerned Women for America is the women’s organization that likes men” – had this to say in a 2007 campus speech:
By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don’t think you can call it rape.
Catholic high school students protest the dismissal of a popular gay vice-principal near Seattle
It was easy to ridicule the Cardinal’s use of the term “caricatured” due to the abundance of actual words uttered by church leaders denigrating LGBT people, words that were not put in their mouths by others. His real point, though, was that the church hasn’t yet figured out how to make the denigration pretty and shiny enough to make people want to buy it.
Now an editorial in the Catholic Reporter has responded to the interview, specifically the Cardinal’s regret over the “marketing failure.”
The cardinal, who lives on Madison Avenue, is within walking distance of some of the best marketers the world has ever known. If he looked to them for advice, they might suggest he begin with a focus group.
How exciting! Add Dick Black’s name to the list of “noted conservative swashbucklers” allegedly vying to replace Frank Wolf that currently includes Tareq Salahi, Barbara Comstock, John Stirrup and Ken Cuccinelli. But we don’t know why he announced his exploratory committee on Facebook yesterday, only to then have the announcement quickly removed from Republican sites. The post below has been disappeared. Oops?
For all the careful image management of retiring Frank Wolf as a “moderate” Republican (despite all evidence to the contrary BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI FEDERAL MARRIAGE AMENDMENT), it would seem that moderates are suddenly in short supply.
Dick Black campaigning for John Whitbeck using the Republican 10th CD email list
I believe the answer is simple. Mr. Whitbeck stole the list, which is not his personal property, and used it for his campaign. This belief is conjecture. The committee may have given the list to both candidates, and to Joe May for that matter, but we know how these things work. These lists are golden and they are heavily guarded.
The committee can do what it pleases about the alleged theft. My question is, what do you suppose the value of that list is? The email was sent on December 5. The GOP mass meeting is December 16. Can Ron Meyer, Whitbeck’s opponent, compile a comparable email list in time to counter the outreach? I don’t think so.
In Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize winning book The Color Purple, Celie refers to her abusive husband as Mr.______. He doesn’t have a name because he beats, abuses and neglects her. He treats her like a piece of chattel property. To him, she isn’t a human being. She’s subhuman. The Mr.______ name is one way of fighting back.
My legislators are like Celie’s husband. Politically, they beat, abuse, and neglect me and thousands of other citizens. I’ll be parsing the words beat, abuse and neglect in future posts to show these behaviors in the public square. This post is an introduction.
Crossposted at Equality Loudoun
[The lawsuit] boils down to nothing more than an attempt to define my Biblical views against homosexuality as a crime..
..Clearly, this lawsuit is intended not only to silence me as an effective voice of opposition to the ‘gay’ agenda, it is also to intimidate everyone else who would dare to follow my example.
Now, who does that sound like? A certain disgraced and censured Sterling supervisor who fills his bank account by running a hate group at Loudoun taxpayers’ expense? And some of his shameless apologists?
Yes, but it’s actually another hate group director, Scott Lively. Mr. Lively is currently facing a federal lawsuit for his role in creating a deadly climate for the LGBTI community in Uganda. Readers may remember him also as the man who hired a known child rapist to run his fake “ministry” out of a coffeehouse designed to attract teenagers. But that was okay, because the predator had “accepted the salvation of Christ” (and of course, the children he preferred were female).
Mr. Lively has tried to have the lawsuit against him dismissed on First Amendment grounds. But it turns out that there are limits even to free expression when that expression is an integral part of criminal activity, and the criminal activity of which Mr. Lively is accused is aiding and abetting in the commission of a crime against humanity.
Uncle Charles Flannery and the author
I remember as if it were yesterday my Mom crying, a soulful wound torn open upon hearing that my Dad’s brother, Charles, died of internal bleeding because years earlier he’d been shot in World War II.
President Woodrow Wilson’s promise that World War I was the war to end all wars didn’t prevent World War II.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in WWII, said, “There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs.”
We could therefore erect no finer memorial to our war dead than to rededicate our nation to peace.
Eisenhower, in his farewell address in 1960, told the nation, “We must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.” It is past time for us to reconsider his advice.
Our wars since World War II have been about property – the differences by and between communism, socialism and capitalism. Also about ethnicity – over nationality, color, religion and region.
The nation state now caught in the congressional and executive cross-hairs is Syria.
We insist our wars are honorable because we are fighting for individual freedom but those we would “save” all too often recoil at the definition of “freedom” we seek to impose. Continue reading
I was Republican Senator Orrin Hatch’s special counsel when he was chair of the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources; I was especially proud to hear Hatch’s statement last June commending the states to participate in the expansion of Medicaid, to cover adults earning 138 percent of the poverty level, thus providing needed health care for those who were ill who couldn’t afford to care for themselves.
An income level of 138 percent works out to about $14,856 for an individual and $30,656 for a family of four. Compare those levels to your income and expenses, and those you may know who could be helped by this legislation.
In Virginia, this provision would cover 400,000 more Virginians, create 30,000 more jobs, bring $21 billion in federal funding over several years into our state.
Democratic Congressman Gerry Connolly, in neighboring Fairfax County, put it this way, if we opt in, our state shall receive “$17 in federal funds for every state dollar it spends on its Medicaid expansion program.” Continue reading