The Daily Agenda for Sunday, October 11

Jim Burroway

October 11th, 2015

TODAY’S AGENDA:
National Coming Out Day: Everywhere. Today is the twenty-fifth annual National Coming Out day. The date was chosen to commemorate the second March on Washington, which drew some half a million LGBT people and their supporters to the nation’s capital (see below), That march inspired the blossoming of a number of LGBT advocacy groups around the country. Among them was a group of 100 LGBT advocates who, four months later, gathered in the D.C. suburb of Manassas, Virginia, to figure out how to ensure that the energy from that March didn’t just dissipate into thin air. Dr. Robert Eichberg, an author and psychologist from New Mexico, and Los Angeles LGBT advocate Jean O’Leary, hit on the idea of a national day to celebrate those who came out and to encourage others to begin to take their first steps toward visibility. As Dr. Eichberg later explained:

Most people think they don’t know anyone gay or lesbian, and in fact everybody does. It is imperative that we come out and let people know who we are and disabuse them of their fears and stereotypes.”

The first National Coming Out Day was on October 11, 1988, the first anniversary of the second March on Washington, and it quickly expanded to all fifty states.  Is there anyone you still need to come out to?

Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Ashland, OR; Atlanta, GALittle Rock, AR; Medford, OR; Paramaribo, Suriname; Philadelphia, PA.

Other Events This Weekend: Iris Prize Film Festival, Cardiff, UK; MIX Copenhagen Film Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark; Octobearfest, Denver, CO; Ft. Lauderdale Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Ft. Lauderdale, FL; World Gay Rodeo Finals, Las Vegas, NV; Black and Blue Festival, Montréal, QC; Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Seattle, WA; AIDS Walk, Tucson, AZ.

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From Gay Milwaukee, November 1975, page 3.

From G-Milwaukee, November 1975, page 3.

Green Bay’s Roxy Lounge appears to have operated between 1974 and 1978. That’s just about all the information I can find about it. If Google Maps is accurate, it looks like the entire area near the Fox River waterfront has been re-developed and that particular section of Pine Street was closed off and replaced with this monstrosity.

ECHO ’64 conference program. (via Frank Kamey’s papers)

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Future Ex-Gay Leader Speaks At Gay Rights Conference: 1964. The day before, the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO) kicked off a pivotal two-day conference in Washington, D.C. which would lay the groundwork for a much more confrontational style of gay rights advocacy than had ever been seen before (see Oct 10). In prior pro-gay gatherings, gay rights organizations used to portray themselves as “impartial” and “reasonable” by inviting speakers from “both sides” of an issue. This meant that attendees often had to endure talks and panel discussions featuring lawyers, mental health professionals and religious leaders explaining that gay people were criminal, sick, or sinful. By 1964, this practice had come to an end. Mostly.

There was, however, one throwback to earlier days on the second day of the ECHO conference when six clergymen were invited to participate in a panel discussion titled “Alienation of the Homosexual from the Religious Community.” This issue, as big a deal as it is today for many gay people, was a much bigger issue in 1964 when Americans, including gay Americans, were much more religiously-observant. Panel members were Rabbi Eugene Lipman of Washington, D.C.’s progressive Temple Sinai, Rev. Berkley Hawthorn of the similarly progressive Foundry Methodist Church, Rev. Ernest Martin of the (again, progressive) Swedenborgian Church of the Holy City, Rev. Kenneth Marshall of the (obviously progressive) Davies Memorial Unitarian Church, Rev. Robert J. Lewis of the (ditto) River Road Unitarian Church, and Father John F. Harvey, who was then teaching Moral Theology at DeSales Hall High School and who stuck out like a sore thumb among the other panelists. Everyone else discussed the ostracization that many gay people feel in their churches and temple, and provided suggestions for congregations and gay people on how to address the problem. But according to the write-up in the Daughter of Bilitis’s newsletter The Ladder, Halvey characterized that alienation as an inherent feature of homosexuality:

Father John F. Harvey (Catholic), Instructor in Moral Theology at DeSales Hall, Hyattsville, Md., claimed the homosexual is alienated not only from the church, but also from the secular community, from family, and from self. From adolescence, the homosexual knows he “should be attracted by the opposite sex.” He assimilates society’s scorn and becomes “filled with revulsion toward himself.” Later, “supported by homosexual literature and friends … conscience all the while being smothered,” he withdraws further. Hopelessness often tempts him to suicide or alcohol. He feels hostile toward the church. Alienation is furthered by his bitterness toward God Who allows a “mystery of suffering” and by the harsh attitude of many clergymen. Father Harvey urged that the homosexual accept himself and seek spiritual guidance to devise a life plan (excluding marriage, since conversion to heterosexuality is rarely possible) of service to the community and to God. Ageing homosexuals might reveal their condition to demonstrate “that they led Christian 11ves despite their deviate impulses.” Father Harvey advised the Homosexual should “re-direct (his) will to supernatural values …love of God must be the driving force.”

Rabbi Lipman acknowledged that his congregation ran a referral service to direct gay people to psychiatrists and other therapists with “goal one (as) heterosexuality.” He added that the second goal, if the first cannot be achieved, would be “to accept happy homosexuality. … I don’t consider the second one a defeat, but I consider it second.” Halvey asked about the chances of success for reorientation therapy. Lipman replied “The old saw that homosexuality is the hardest of the emotional problems to do much about is true … So far nobody appears to know what succeeds and what doesn’t. The formulas aren’t here yet.” Harvey agreed with that assessment.

When the panel moderator asked, “In the eyes of the churches, does a person have the right to practice homosexuality?”, all of the panelists, save one, gave varying shades of affirmative answers:

Father Harvey gave the only categorical “no,” since to the Catholic Church homosexual acts are immoral. Nevertheless, he said, many Catholics feel these acts should not be illegal because “the prosecution and the way it takes place in many instances is a great abuse.”

In 1980, Harvey founded Courage, the Roman Catholic ex-gay organization, and headed the group until 2008. Under Harvey’s leadership, Courage’s approach to reorientation was somewhat confused. Officially, the group promoted celibacy as the primary legitimate goal for gay and lesbian Catholics while downplaying the prospect for change in sexual orientation, although there was some fudging here and there. Harvey also relied heavily on theories from the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) whenever he wrote about what he believed were the causes of homosexuality. Since Harvey’s death in 2010, Courage has been slowly drifting toward the change model.

[Source: Lily Hansen, Barbara Gittings. “ECHO Report ’64, Part 2: Highlights of ECHO.” The Ladder 9, no. 4 (January 1965): 7-11, 15-20. See Jul 31 for Barbara Gittings’s bio.]

American Nazi Party Member Tries to Disrupt ECHO Conference: 1964. As if the 1964 Conference of the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO) in Washington, D.C., wasn’t already fascinating enough (see above and Oct 10), a couple of other things happened which everyone would remember for years to come. Staff at the Sheraton Park Hotel learned that members of the American Nazi Party planned to disrupt the conference, so the hotel requested additional protection from Washington police. So when the conference began, ECHO leaders actually felt reassured when police arrived, although they were surprised to see a plainclothes officer from the department’s Morals Division. As the Daughters of Bilitis’s The Ladder informed its readers:

A handsome chap moving among many handsome chaps, he might have gone through the conference unnoticed, but for the sharp memory of a Washington Mattachine member. This member reportedly looked the plainclothesman in the eye and said in effect “I know who you are.” Shorn of his cover, undercover officer Graham phoned his boss at the Morals Division to say he’d been recognized and what should he do? “Continue on assignment” was his order — and continue he did, staying for the entire ECHO conference.

The word spread about Graham’s presence, and he became a curiosity, Why was he there, if not to memorize faces? Despite suspicion of the motives of the plainclothesman, many ECHO registrants went out of their way to talk hospitably with him and to discuss the speeches, Here, some thought, was an educating job to be done. Officer Graham was a captive listener, sitting politely among homosexuals and friends of homosexuals and hearing speakers denounce our absurd sex laws and the peculiar tactics our police resort to in trying to enforce them.

Everything went well on the conference’s first day, although unidentified Nazis continued to call the ECHO suite to warn of disruptions. That attempted disruption came the next day, at about 2:30 that afternoon when attendees were waiting for the religion panel to begin. Now, if this were to happen today, it would be captured on camera phones and posted to YouTube within minutes. That technology didn’t exist then, but The Ladder provided the next best thing thanks to Kay Lahusen (see Jan 5), who had just turned on a tape recorder to record the panel discussion. With her transcription of that tape, we can now re-enact our own YouTube drama:

Cast, in order of appearance: A Nazi, conference coordinator Bob Belanger (under the pseudonym “Robert King”), Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. founder Frank Kameny (see May 21)), an unidentified blonde girl, future ex-gay leader Fr. John Harvey (see above), future DoB president Shirley Willer (as “Shirley W”, see Sep 26), and Det. Graham.

Scene: A “blond, good-looking, well-built, quietly dressed” man walked into the room, carrying a large gift-wrapped box marked “Queer Convention.” Two of his cohorts waited outside the door.

And, action:

NAZI: Would somebody call Rabbi Lipman, please? Is Rabbi Lipman in the house? (Rabbi Lipman is one of the clergymen on ECHO’s religious panel. He has not yet arrived.) I’ve got 24 quarts of vaseline here to deliver to Rabbi Eugene Lipman. I believe all you queers will be able to make use of it. (He starts toward the inner room, carrying the box. ECHO leaders, moving according to plan, link arms in the CORE fashion and stop him from going further. Others join the line. A crowd gathers. The line begins to inch forward.)

ROBERT KING: You must either pay an admission or get out. You are trespassing. (Plainclothes officer Graham leaves the room to telephone police officers specifically stationed in the hotel to protect ECHO from the Nazis.)

NAZI: Would you quit pushing me, you queers… I see you’ve got queer rabbis and priests and reverends and everything here today… Would somebody please bring the queer Rabbi here for me to deliver this vaseline to him? (He smiles, partly turns, digs in his heels, presses back against the line.) The Rabbi’s waiting for his vaseline… Are there any lesbians here? (A blonde girl joins the line.) Are you a lesbian too?

BLONDE GIRL: As much as you are!

NAZI: If you queers don’t stop pushing me I’m going to charge you with assault.

FATHER HARVEY: Sir, you are trespassing. Would you please leave? (Father Harvey is one of the religious panel members.)

NAZI: Sir, would you like some vaseline too? This vaseline is for the rabbi, but I’m sure he wouldn’t mind sharing it with his cassock friends.

DR. KAMENY: You are being asked to leave.

ROBERT KING: The authorities are on the way.

NAZI: I’m only a delivery boy. I had to leave church today in order to bring this vaseline over to you queers. (He pushes back against the line, continues to smile.)

SHIRLEY W.: Sir, you’re stepping on my foot. Would you please move.

NAZI: I believe you’re trying to kick me, aren’t you, lesbian?… There’s a queer for LBJ. He looks like a kike, too. Are there many kike queers here? A dog himself shouldn’t be subjected to you bunch of queers. (A cameraman from WTOP-TV enters and begins filming. The station has apparently been alerted by the publicity-hungry Nazis.)

SHIRLEY W. Please, sir, you’re stepping on my foot. Would you mind leaving?

NAZI: I heard the Rabbi was out of vaseline. Is that right? (Enter plainclothesman Graham. Ironically, he is forced to do the apprehending because the special police sent to prevent a disturbance are too far away at the moment in the huge hotel.)

GRAHAM: I’m a police officer and I want to talk to you alone right now.

NAZI: Do you have some identification?

GRAHAM: Right. (He produces badge.)

NAZI: Am I under arrest?

GRAHAM: No.

NAZI: Well, I have to deliver this case of vaseline to…

GRAHAM: You ARE under arrest. (The Nazi, still hefting the gift-wrapped carton marked QUEER CONVENTION, is escorted out of the ECHO room. Applause breaks out for Graham’s action.)

The Ladder reported that the Nazi — his name was never identified — was booked on a charge of disorderly conduct and fined $10 (about $75 in today’s dollars). The disruption lasted less than five minutes. WTOP decided against showing the film during its news broadcast.

[Sources: Warren D. Adkins, Kay Tobin (Kay Lahusen). “ECHO Report ’64, Part 1: Sidelights of ECHO.” The Ladder 9, no. 4 (January 1965): 4-7.

Kay Tobin (Kay Lahusen). “ECHO Report ’64, Part 3: A Nazi stunt fails.” The Ladder 9, no. 4 (January 1965): 20-22.]

AIDS Quilt Debuts During Second March on Washington: 1987. Somewhere around half a million LGBT people descended onto the Mall in Washington for the largest gay rights demonstration in history. The top demands were for an end to discrimination and more federal money for AIDS research and treatment. About a hundred members of Congress and other prominent civic, labor and religious leaders signed letters endorsing the March, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who had declared himself a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, spoke and promised to support the gay community. Reps. Barney Frank (D-MA) and Gerry Studds (D-MA), both openly gay members of Congress, also spoke.

With AIDS at the forefront of everyones’ concern, the march marked the public debut of the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. The quilt occupied the equivalent of two city blocks, and included 1,920 panels commemorating more than 2,000 persons who had died of AIDS. Since then, the AIDS Memorial Quilt has become the world’s largest community art project, encompassing 1.3 million square feet and commemorating the lives of over 94,000 people who died of AIDS.

But even the quilt couldn’t break through the national reticence to discuss the epidemic or the concerns of gay people. Despite the enormity of the gatherings, the three national news magazines — Newsweek, Time and U.S. News & World Report — neglected to mention any of it, which longtime advocate Barbara Gittings described as “an appalling example of media blindness.”

ACT-Up Occupies the FDA: 1988. The gay community was feeling the pressure of a ticking time bomb, with someone in the U.S. dying of AIDS every two hours. AZT had been approved by the U .S. Food and Drug Administration in 1987, but it was prohibitively expensive and required taking a pill every four hours around the clock. European health officials had been approving new treatments for AIDS, but the FDA continued to cling to its multi-year approval process. And as the FDA dithered, more names were being added to the AIDS quilt. By 1988, frustration and anger had built to a boiling point, and more than a 1,200 demonstrators, led by ACT-Up activists, invaded the FDA’s grounds in Rockville, Maryland, for a nine-hour protest demanding quicker action on drug approvals. About 175 demonstrators were arrested

Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, later recalled that the protest had left a deep impression. He later told PBS’s Frontline:

“After a little while, I began to get beyond the rhetoric and theater of the demonstrations and the smoke bombs, to really listen to what it is that they were saying, and it became clear to me, quite quickly, that most of what they said made absolute sense, was very logical and needed to be paid attention to. … Interacting with the constituencies was probably one of the most important things that I had done in my professional career.”

Eight days later, the FDA announced new regulations to cut the time it took to approve new drugs for treating HIV/AIDS.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Jerome Robbins: 1918-1998. Born Wilson Rabinowitz, the Broadway producer, director and choreographer’s career in show business began soon after dropping out of New York University, where he had been studying chemistry, in order to pursue dance. Just a couple of years later, he was already dancing the chorus of several Broadway shows, including George Balanchine’s Keep Off the Grass. In 1940, he left the theater in favor of ballet, but soon returned to choreograph 1944’s On the Town (with music by Leonard Bernstein, just one of several collaborative efforts between the two men). In 1947, he won his first Tony Award for Choreography for the Keystone Kops comedy/ballet High Button Shoes.

Through most of the next decade, Robbins continued to choreograph several hit shows, alternating between Broadway and ballet as choreographer for the American Ballet Company and the New York City Ballet. But his career was threatened in 1950 when he was scheduled to appear on Ed Sullivan’s show. The show’s sponsor, Ford Motor Company, forced him to cancel because he had been a member of the Communist Party between 1943 and 1947, joining, like many other Americans, when the U.S. was an ally of the Soviet Union during World War II. He tried to go to the FBI to clear his name, but when Sullivan publicly urged the House Committee on Un-American Activities to subpoena Robins, he fled to Paris for a year.

He returned to the U.S in 1951 to choreograph The Pied Piper, The King and I, and several other classical ballet pieces. But in 1952, the House Un-American Activities committee caught up with him and subpoenaed him to appear. While everyone knew about one of those skeletons in his closet — his Communist Party membership — he also feared that the other skeleton — his homosexuality — would come tumbling out. He not only personified the twinned Red and Lavender Scares of the McCarthy era, but he also harbored a great deal of internalized shame over his Jewish immigrant roots, which he felt made him insufficiently American in other people’s eyes. Years later, he wrote:

”It was my homosexuality I was afraid would be exposed I thought. It was my once having been a Communist that I was afraid would be exposed. None of these. I was & have been — & still have terrible pangs of terror when I feel that my career, work, veneer of accomplishments would be taken away (by HUAC, or by critics) that I panicked & crumbled & returned to that primitive state of terror — the facade of Jerry Robbins would be cracked open, and behind everyone would finally see Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz

Robbins named the person who recruited him into the Communist Party, along with several other actors, playwrights and critics who were party members. Rep. Gordon Scherer (R-OH) congratulated him, saying he “‘was going to see The King and I that very night and would now appreciate it all the more.” Robbins’s career was preserved: he choreographed and/or directed Peter Pan, Bells are Ringing, West Side Story, Gypsy, Funny Girl, and Fiddler on the Roof, and over the course of his career, he won two Academy Awards, four Tony Awards, five Donaldson Awards, two Emmys, the Screen Directors’ Guild Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. But none of those accomplishments could expiate his guilt over his HUAC testimony. In the mid-1970s, when he spent three weeks at a mental hospital for depression, he described himself as “a Jewish ex-commie fag who had to go into a mental hospital.” He died following a stroke in New York on July 29, 1998.

Cleve Jones: 1954. How appropriate is it that today would also happen to be Cleve Jones’s birthday? Born in West Lafayette, Indiana and reared in Scottsdale, Arizona, he moved to San Francisco to study political science at San Francisco State University where he also became an intern for Harvey Milk’s political campaigns and became active in the city’s gay rights scene. Years later, Jones recalled what a heady time that was:

I think what was most exciting was that it was all brand-new. All of us who were participating in it were doing so with an awareness that what we were doing had never been done before. So many of the things that people take for granted now, like gay marching bands and pride parades and gay churches and gay synagogues and gay newspapers and gay film festivals — I remember when the first of each of those happened. There was a wonderful sort of self-awareness among everyone that what we were doing had never been seen before.

It was a political revolution; it was a social revolution; it was a sexual revolution. For those of us who were part of it, there was a wonderful sense of self-discovery, because I think I’m a member of the last generation [of] people who spent our childhood thinking we were the only ones. That doesn’t happen anymore. But when I was a child I thought I was the only one, and so when I discovered that I was not the only one, that there were thousands upon thousands of people just like me, it was incredibly liberating and exhilarating.

Jones learned his gay activism chops from Milk, who gave him his first bullhorn. “When he got elected to public office, he said: ‘You keep people on the street. I’ll be working on the inside; you keep them screaming on the outside, and we’ll get more done.'” But the next several years were traumatic. First, there was Milk’s 1978 assassination (see Nov 27), then there were people coming down with all sorts of illnesses. “I have memories from 1978 and 1979 of friends of mine contracting diseases that I’d never heard of, or that I’d heard of but only in the context of impoverished countries. I remember a friend came down with meningitis, and that seemed to me to be odd. There was also quite a bit of hepatitis going around.” Then the CDC became aware of what was going on in 1981 (see Jun 5). “My memory of it, when I think back, it seems like it was just an avalanche. It was like one week we’d never heard of it, and then the next week everybody started to die. Now, I know that’s not really the way it was, and it unfolded a little more slowly than that, but it was so sudden, and people didn’t talk about it. They were too frightened. Even in our community, there was a great deal of cruelty. So people began to vanish.”

Jones decided to try to “fill the vacuum left by the government’s response” by co-founding the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and becoming one of the earliest frontline advocates for people with AIDS in the city. When an antibody test became available and he found out he was HIV-positive, he went public with his diagnosis on CBS’s 60 Minutes. As a result, he received death threats and was nearly killed when he was attacked with a knife. Jones then determined that one of the keys to making an apathetic public pay attention the the epidemic was to humanize the problem. And so during a candlelight memorial for Harvey Milk in 1986, Jones came up with the idea for an AIDS memorial quilt. He had learned that 1,000 San Franciscans had died of the disease, he asked fellow marchers to write the names of friends and loved ones onto placards that were taped onto the wall of the Federal Building. That patchwork of names that reminded him of his grandmother’s quilts. He established the Names Project Foundation which debuted the AIDS Memorial Quilt during the second march on Washington for gay rights (see above).

Jones currently lives in San Francisco, where he works as a community organizer for UNITE HERE, an international union representing hotel, casino, food service and restaurant workers. He is also serves as an adviser for the Courage Campaign and is on the advisory board for the American Foundation for Equal Rights.

Matt Bomer: 1977. “When I was in high school, there was no safe haven, there was no outlet for you to speak your mind. So I did what any self-preserving 14-year-old would do — I signed up for the school play and also the football team to cover my tracks.” That’s how White Collar star Matt Bomer recently described his high school years in Klein, Texas, outside of Houston. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University in 2001 with a degree in Fine Arts, Bomer moved to New York City where he landed a small role on All My Children, followed by a three year stint on Guiding Light. Since 2009, he has played the lead role of Neal Caffrey on USA Network’s White Collar.

In 2011, Bomer joined John Lithgow, Morgan Freeman, and many other prominent actors for an all-star world premiere of Dustin Lance Black’s new play “8”, and in 2012, Bomer got to shake his money-maker for the Steven Soderbergh film Magic Mike with Matthew McConaughey and Channing Tatum. He had long been the subject of rumors about his personal life, and his approach to the subject was to neither confirm nor deny. But in February 2012, Bomer finally decided to uncover his tracks when he thanked his partner and their three children during an acceptance speech for a Steve Chase Humanitarian Award.

Last year, he appeared in HBO’s adaption of Larry Kramer’s A Normal Heart, for which he earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or Movie. Bomer has also been tapped to play actor Montgomery Clift in a new indie biopic for HBO.

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day

Eric Payne

October 11th, 2015

Friday night, one of the panelists on Real Time with Bill Mahr was Andrew Sullivan. Now, I don’t like Sullivan’s politics, I confess that, freely. Our ideologies are polar opposites.

But he said something that, the moment he said it, had me talking back to the screen (and, immediately, dropping a comment to Overtime, a YouTube extension of each show, which immediately follows every live episode).

The set-up: Host Mahr introduced the topic of over-medication of children. Specifically, Mahr referred to boys being medicated with psychotropic drugs for ADHD when, maybe, they are, really, “just boys.”

Sullivan took over, for the better part of the show, talking about his 80-year old mother’s life-long struggle with clinical depression, her occasional refusal to take her medications and the consequences of her decision to not take melds, a bizarre “trade agreement” he seems to have with his mother in which, if she stops taking her melds, he’ll quit taking his HIV meds… then got pissed at Mahr when the host stated he didn’t want to talk about (Sullivan’s) mother — that he (Mahr) was specifically referencing boys and ADHD.

Now, something Sullivan said in his rant — that as a person with HIV, he owed his life to “big pharma.”

No, Mr. Sullivan, you owe your life to Larry Kramer and ACT-UP. Had it been “big pharma’s” decision, you’d have been dead now for decades.

Ben in oakland

October 11th, 2015

“Father” Harvey…

I will break a rule for myself. What a goddam, fuckin’ piece of work he was.

Teach people to hate themselves, then point to their self hatred as proof that they are damaged. Demand that they live a life of sacrifice and atonement, as if they had been called By God to do exactly that. Almost as if they were–oh, I don’t know– A CATHOLIC PRIEST? DeVOTE yourself to service to God, the community and THE CHURCH that happily places you in the position, like –I dunno,wait for it– A CATHOLIC PRIEST??!!!??!!??!

I’ll say it yet again. I am increasingly convinced that the worst of our opposition within religious organizations are homo-hating-homos, desperate to validate their self hatred in the only way they know how.

By stomping on people who refuse to be as cowed as they are.

Paul Douglas

October 11th, 2015

Preach it Ben!
And I agree, with Eric. Andrew Sullivan really isn’t all that clever.

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