Author Mel Maguire

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I'm a Texan, I'm an American, I love my country and my home state, and I love to laugh, study, write, practice music and martial arts, and have a beer with good friends. Hook 'em Horns! 

 Mel Maguire

Take It Off

Apr 3, 12 2:49 AM

I was 23 years old when I took my first job as a juvenile corrections officer. I’ve since worked with adults, males, females, low-security, high-security, and been on SRT (what some call SORT in other agencies, or Special [Operations] Response Team, sometimes referred to by inmates as “the ninjas”). I spent just enough time in it to become slightly jaded, and other life experiences have made me downright cynical. I learned a lot during my time there. Other corrections officers would know terms that the general public rarely, if ever, knows – duck, keistering, fish, hooch, cellie, dog, SHU, soldier, PC, shank, etc. Oh, I almost forgot every officer’s favorite – gassing! Ask your local CO what that one means. None of those words mean what you might think they do “on the outs”.

One of the most important things I learned was that you want to be very, very careful who gets in and what they bring with them.

Inmates have all day to come up with amazing ways to smuggle contraband into a facility. In the past year or so, it hit the news that even Charles Manson was able to get a cell phone and call a reporter. Cell phones are a huge no-no in prisons. No staff are ever allowed to bring cell phones into a facility. If an inmate gets his hands on one, he can do unbelievable damage. He can take pictures of weaknesses in security, run his black market deals, and stalk his victims. I’ll never forget being out on the perimeter in a truck with the 12-gauge at 0200 one VERY cold morning in 2007 when, all of a sudden, I slammed on the brakes at what I heard. I was listening to the only hard rock/heavy metal station in Southern Arizona when the DJ played a caller who said, “yeah, I’m an inmate at such-and-such facility in Florence…”

A cell phone will be kept hidden in pieces by several inmates, who will reassemble it and pass it around. Each inmate pays to use it – they trade whatever they have of value, sometimes commissary items (food), most often contraband or favors. If even one piece is discovered, the whole operation goes down and they have to find an inventive way to get another one. If a guy is actually caught using it and the phone itself is confiscated, everyone involved goes down for it, and the guy who gets caught – which, in this case, was a new guy looking to show off on his favorite radio station – will catch hell for a very long time. That morning, we shut down the facility, and another officer took the truck while I marched into the housing unit where the inmate who owned the familiar voice was housed. You wouldn’t believe the look on that inmate’s face when he refused to rat his accomplices out and Sarge announced to the entire block, “gentlemen, one of your neighbors has just gotten himself caught using a cell phone to call a radio station. Officer Maguire was good enough to listen to that station and catch the call tonight! Until that phone appears in my hand, you will ALL be locked down!”

And wouldn’t you know it? The very next thing we heard was, “hey, Maguire! You listen to the heavy shit! You’re alright!”

It took two days to find the few pieces that remained of the phone. One inmate admitted breaking his part into tiny pieces and flushing them. No evidence of who was contacted would ever be retrieved.

The Supreme Court finally ruled today on Florence v. Burlington. Albert Florence was arrested on a warrant during a traffic stop by a New Jersey state trooper in 2005. Back in 1998, he fled a traffic stop; by 2003, he fell behind on his payments and skipped a parole hearing. A warrant was issued for his arrest. Within days he appeared, paid the fines and worked everything out, but a clerical error left the warrant sitting open – two years later he was taken to jail. He didn’t have bail money. He was strip-searched twice – once at the initial holding facility, a second time at the transferring facility.

Florence sued, claiming his Fourth Amendment rights to be free from unreasonable search and seizure had been violated. The National Constitution Center took on his case. Their entire argument revolved around the fact that he shouldn’t have been arrested, and once he was, jail officials had no reason to be suspicious of contraband – thus they were wrong, according to the suit, for strip-searching him.

I never liked doing strip searches, even on females (I simply cannot refer to inmates as “women” – it’s not a dehumanizing thing, it’s just my professional way of mentally separating inmates from people I might mingle with in my personal life). If you had to strip search an inmate who hadn’t showered or you could tell felt awkward, it was just an unpleasant experience, particularly if your subject actually did have something hidden in a body cavity. Women can hide some pretty unbelievable objects. You just kinda went robotic when you pulled that duty.

Officers don’t enjoy it, but we’d do it because it could have a serious impact on our own safety if we didn’t. Inmates considered low-risk have been caught with razor blades taped under their testicles and all manner of objects you wouldn’t believe stashed in a place that God never intended for that particular purpose. Every inmate, no matter what their risk, has to be searched. Thankfully, SCOTUS agreed on a vote of 5-4.

I find Florence’s argument patently ridiculous. He says, “I was no danger, they didn’t have any reasonable suspicion, so they had no right!” Five justices disagreed, thank God. Yes, it was wrong that Florence was arrested. He absolutely had a right to sue the court. To claim that he shouldn’t have been strip-searched is dangerous at best. Every inmate is treated the same, lest a mistake be made and the wrong person manage to smuggle a very deadly weapon into the facility and wreak havoc. For instance, low-risk inmates are allowed to work as “trustees” – they are loosely supervised workers who do various jobs throughout a facility, including collecting trash. Those trustees also collect trash from outside the gates, where visitors dispose of their garbage – and more frequently attempt to disguise dangerous contraband as trash for trustees to collect and deliver to high-risk inmates.

Yes, there’s a litany of very good reasons why every single inmate is strip-searched when entering any facility. Even seemingly innocuous items such as bobby pins, toothpicks, bubble gum, and ball-point pens (all of which are contraband) can pose a serious security and safety risk. I’ve seen nunchaku (lesser-educated people might spell it “num-chucks”) constructed of tightly rolled magazines, masking tape and less than one foot of bungee cord. I’ve seen inmates hollow out the soles of their shoes to sneak narcotics in with. Shredded sheets and t-shirts could be used to wrap the handles of carefully-sharpened pieces of glass and metal, making very impressive knives.

What I find humorous is the dissenting opinion – not surprisingly written by Justice Breyer and joined by Ginsburg, Kagan and Sotomayor, four of the most embarrasingly liberal justices to hold seats in the Court. The very first thing Breyer does is cry about strip searches being an invasion of privacy; the next thing he does is prattle about what constitutes a reasonable search. The entire dissenting opinion completely ignores the fact that we’re talking about jail and prison inmates. These are people who have broken the law. When you go to jail, quite a few liberties are taken away. Jails routinely restrict inmate access to newspapers and news programming on TV to avoid bragging rights among inmates when their case hits the news. Inmates are required to wear jail uniforms, adhere to wake-up and lights-out calls, follow strict meal times and court schedules, and keep their cells clean. Breyer wails that strip searching is degrading to inmates; if that’s going to be your argument, the next thing you’ll hear is, “they can’t search our cells! That’s our private property!”

And, really, if this is going to be their argument, then they’re setting the stage for convicted violent felons to sue for the right to own firearms once they’re freed from prison. Hey, if there’s no reason to be suspicious, why would anyone have a right to tell them they can’t have a weapon? Background checks are degrading! I should never have to disclose to anyone that I’ve been incarcerated!

Bottom line, the safety of officers and other inmates is vastly more important than the comfort of someone who is in jail for a reason. Police and corrections officers are not there to determine the legitimacy of a warrant; those are issued by judges, and it is the courts that have to answer for mistakes on warrants. I feel for Florence because he shouldn’t have had a warrant out for his arrest, and yes, the county and courts should have been sued for their error. If the liberal four really want a reason why they’re wrong, they can talk to the families of corrections officers who have been killed in the line of duty by inmates who managed to obtain or make weapons despite these searches.

You know what the hilarious part about this is? The same liberals who would side with Florence have no problem at all with TSA agents groping us in airports. That is a regular laugh riot, I tell you.

Comments (5)

Life On The Gay Liberal Plantation

Mar 28, 12 1:29 PM

I’ve finally decided on the book I’m going to finish first – it’ll be a nonfiction political/social commentary, and I’m tentatively calling it “Self-Loathing Closet Case” for the infamous insult that so many gay leftists like to throw at me.

I’m about to go off on all of the leftists out there. Here’s why: every single leftist on Twitter says the same thing to me when they see that I’m a lesbian and I’m politically conservative. “Wake up! They don’t want you to marry! How can you vote against yourself?!?”

I’m sick of hearing that.

I fail to understand why I should vote solely on the basis of what’s best for me. I’m a lesbian; I’m part of a group that makes up no more than 8% of the population. Expecting the entire population to cater to me because of my sexual orientation on a singular centuries-old issue is ludicrous; I’ve said before that I’d like to marry one day, but it’s not going to happen overnight and I think we need to be wiser about how we obtain marriage rights.

Liberals, for their part, want welfare, socialized healthcare, higher taxes on the wealthy…all in the name of doing what’s right for everyone, not just one group. It’s selfish, they say, to only care about issues that only affect your social group. It’s wrong to be selfish. It’s wrong to be greedy. You should care about more than just yourself and your vote and beliefs should include everyone – at least, as long as the “everyone” you’re talking about is 100% liberal.

Taking that into consideration, why does it make any sense for liberals to tell me I must hate myself because I vote for a political ideal that doesn’t agree with gay marriage? They say it as if it is the only issue I should care about, and I should damn and curse any politician who doesn’t believe in my right to marry.

Here’s the big problem with that line of thinking: most Democrats don’t support gay marriage, either. If you listen to most vocal liberals, they’ll have you believe that gays should all be liberal because everyone who is against gay rights is a conservative. That is a bald-faced lie straight from the pits of hell. I’ve had more conservative friends come out in support of me in the past couple of years than I would have ever believed would. VERY few of the liberals in my life have stuck around. I can count them on the fingers of one hand and still have fingers left over. Even conservative pundit Lee Doren weighed in on gay marriage, declaring that he supports my right to marry and he hopes that the GOP, traditionally the party of civil rights, will be the first to get behind it.

Democrats, however, are not nearly as behind gay marriage as many of these people would have us believe. Proposition 8 – the law meant to repeal gay marriage rights in uber-liberal California – was passed with the help of hundreds of thousands of Democrats who still believe gay marriage to be wrong. Barack Obama has said many times that he believes marriage to be sacred, a pact between one man and one woman. When pressed on it by the gay community, he finally said, “well, how about this…if you challenge DOMA in court, I won’t defend it, how’s that?”

I see that cowardly posturing for exactly what it is: a politician trying to fish for as many votes as he can. The gay liberals all snap to and kiss his feet, ready to lap up the crumbs he offers while he works to destroy our Constitutional rights. They’d rather vote for a man who is willing to lie about his intentions than even entertain the beliefs of a party who will listen if given the chance. The very instant they come across someone like me, someone who refuses to just take what the party of choice is willing to offer right now because there are other dangers lurking within that party, they start hurling insults and death threats to try and put my leash back on and drag me back to the gay liberal plantation.

I won’t go.

Who the hell do you think you are? You claim to be the pillars of tolerance, yet when faced with someone who disagrees, you pitch a hissy fit and try to degrade me by calling me names and threatening bodily injury? Are you serious? Who appointed you the keeper of morals? If it’s wrong for the religious right to impose their morals on you, what makes it acceptable for you to impose your morals on me by way of denigration?

I think for myself. Unlike the liberals (who all vote to try to assuage their own emotions), I am capable of looking at all of the issues, include them all in my beliefs and decide based on the totality of those issues what my beliefs are and who deserves my support. Insulting me when I disagree is not exactly the best way to convince me that I should be liberal – it is, however, the surest way to help me be sure of my conservative values. You can be damn sure of one thing…

I will not be kept.

Comments (11)

We Are All George Zimmerman

Mar 27, 12 1:23 AM

On August 19, 1991, a Jewish man driving a station wagon in a motorcade fell behind and eventually got into an accident. The driver knew he was going to end up on the sidewalk, so he steered his vehicle away from all of the people he could see – yet ended up hitting a wall. The wall collapsed, killing 7-year-old Gavin Cato and seriously injuring his cousin, Angela. The two children were black, their parents immigrants from Guyana. City EMS and Hatzalah (an all-volunteer private Jewish EMS service) both arrived. City EMS directed one of the two Hatzalah units to take the driver to the hospital for his own safety; another Hatzalah unit stayed to help extricate the children from the rubble and transport the children to the hospital.

Crown Heights has very high numbers of blacks and Jews, and the two had long kept an uneasy relationship. When 22-year-old driver Yosef Lifsh averted one tragedy only to unleash another that day, long-dormant tensions almost immediately hit the ignition point and the neighborhood was overtaken in a racial flashover of epic proportions.

When city EMS workers arrived, Lifsh was being pulled from his vehicle and beaten by black witnesses – some the very people he had desperately tried to avoid hitting. A large crowd gathered. Lifsh tried to help the children but was eventually beaten back, and when the ambulance services arrived, Lifsh was taken away to the rising fury of the crowd – which had begun to chant, “Jews! Jews! Jews!” The resulting uproar sparked a pogrom which, to this day, has never really been answered for.

Ari Goldman, then a reporter for the New York Times, was openly angry with his bosses for not reporting the truth about the riots. Jews, who had not shown violence, were brutally attacked by their black neighbors. A few hours after the riots began, some 20 black youths set upon Yankel Rosenbaum, an Australian Jew in the US to study for his doctorate. Yankel was beaten and stabbed. As he lay dying, he was able to identify the 16-year-old who stabbed him for police. The next day, black demonstrators chanted, “death to the Jews!” Jewish homes and businesses were looted and set on fire; bricks and bottles were thrown through windows and at Jews. At Gavin Cato’s funeral, race-baiting charlatan Al Sharpton made crude remarks referring to Jews as “diamond merchants” and said, “it’s an accident to allow an apartheid ambulance service in the middle of crown heights!”

Sharpton has since had the unmitigated gall to claim that he went to Crown Heights at the start of the riots to see “brick-throwing on all sides.” He’s talked about “extremists in the Jewish community” and how those supposed extremists called him out wrongly for referring to them as diamond merchants. He claimed that he should have talked about how precious Yankel Rosenbaum was as he eulogized Gavin Cato, but failed to mention that he was too busy challenging Jews to “pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house!” Even more astonishing, he has the temerity to say that we shouldn’t be too concerned with who is the “greater victim”.

Lemrick Nelson, Jr. was acquitted of murder charges in the death of Rosenbaum despite video evidence showing his involvement. He was later found guilty on federal charges of depriving Rosenbaum of his civil rights. Only one other rioter faced any charges; nobody else was arrested or brought to justice, and not one acceptable apology has ever been offered to the Jewish community in Crown Heights for the outrageous crimes committed against them in August of 1991. Yet we have never seen Jewish protests or outrage; we haven’t seen Jewish youths go on rampages down black streets. Instead, they have maintained their dignity and used their intelligence to call out the flagrant anti-Semitic acts during the riots and the lack of concern on the part of the press or the authorities.

Fast forward to February 26, just one month ago. 17-year-old Trayvon Martin has just gone to stay with his father in Sanford, Florida and on a rainy day walks to a convenience store for iced tea and candy. He has his hood pulled low over his face. As he walks back to his father’s house, neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman spots him and calls police to tell them he’s following a young black man who is acting suspiciously. After a long spate of break-ins and violent crimes in the gated community, Zimmerman hears a dispatcher tell him not to follow Trayvon and goes back to his SUV.

The story gets hairy from there. The only eyewitnesses say they heard someone scream for help and came to see Trayvon standing over Zimmerman, banging his head against the sidewalk. Several 911 calls are placed. A gunshot is heard. The voices go silent. When police arrive, they find Zimmerman bleeding from his nose and the back of his head, a single round discharged; Trayvon is lying face-down, a bullet wound to his chest, dead. Other witnesses made claims that couldn’t be corroborated. Zimmerman tells the police that Trayvon attacked him from behind, knocked him down and beat him, eventually leaving him with no option but to shoot him in self-defense.

Since the incident, tensions have reached the boiling point yet again, with members of the black community spewing vile hatred for Zimmerman, claiming he’s a white racist (in fact, he’s Hispanic). Trayvon’s family has claimed he was just a good boy. Pictures of Trayvon as a 12- and 13-year-old, smiling in his football uniform, have been widely circulated. A picture of Zimmerman after an arrest in which charges were dropped has been widely circulated. Strange facts have begun to emerge: Trayvon was with his father because he’d been suspended from school after getting caught with marijuana. Zimmerman was actually well-liked by his neighbors and had thwarted at least one known break-in attempt.

Just like they did during the Crown Heights riots, the press has made a mess of the story. They’ve provided extremely biased coverage. They haven’t challenged a single aspect of their own story. They’re not reporting on Spike Lee tweeting Zimmerman’s address or the death threats Zimmerman has received; they haven’t called out the New Black Panther Party for openly putting a $10,000 bounty on Zimmerman’s head. Instead, they report only on the emotionally charged family demanding justice without questioning whether their son may have actually attacked a man. Yes, it is tragic that Trayvon died. It is unthinkable that we would allow mob justice to take over in America and a travesty that nobody is asking questions before taking action. We should have learned after Crown Heights.

The title of this post is meant to get your attention. I hope it has. We could all end up being George Zimmerman someday – accused of a hate crime you didn’t commit, the people in your corner being ignored by the public when they say you’re not a hatemonger or a thug, with extremist groups so ready to take your life that they’d offer a large sum of money to anyone willing to deliver you to them. If for no other reason than the fact that the truth is often distorted and we could one day be the targets of unfounded rage, we should defend Zimmerman’s rights and shout down the mob. If warranted, we should be willing to do violence to be sure the mob is stopped.

We all know the images being circulated of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin. We’ve become well-acquainted with them. What if someone showed you different images of the two? What would you think then? Well, here you go…

NOTE: it would appear, according to a commenter, that Twitchy did, in fact, acknowledge that the photo previously posted here was NOT of Trayvon. While I didn’t get the photo from Twitchy, I feel it necessary to remove the photo and put another one up – this one actually of Trayvon. I maintain that the more recent photos of Trayvon have been deliberately hidden from the public.

Comments (18)

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Mar 17, 12 11:08 AM

I thought I’d share some of my favorite Irish music – the real deal – this year. Altan and The Corrs are two of my favorite bands. Altan lead vocalist Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh sings most of the bands lyric-driven songs in Gaelíge, or Irish Gaelic.

Here’s Dulaman, which is actually a nonsensical children’s song about seaweed being gathered but is a fun song nonetheless:

My personal favorite, Donal Agus Morag (“Donal and Morag”), a song about two feuding families brought together by a wedding – with a HAPPY ending:

Here’s The Corrs playing a traditional tune called Toss The Feathers:

The Corrs again with Brid Og Ni Mhaille, a song about heartbreak and love lost:

And one of my all-time favorites…Tim Finnegan’s Wake, performed by The Dubliners with the Clancy Brothers. Toward the end, the phrase “d’anam don diabhal” means “your soul to the devil” – it’s the Irish way of saying, “what the hell is wrong with you?!?”

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, there will be quite a bit of Uisce Beatha (“ISH-kay-BA-hah”, or whiskey) consumed tonight. Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Comments (1)

Matters of Political Importance

Mar 15, 12 3:33 PM

I just got into a tit-for-tat with a Twitter user who apparently thinks I’m ignorant for being a lesbian who isn’t interested in gay marriage rights. He isn’t the first to say something like that (although “ignorant” is probably the nicest thing I’ve been called by a liberal after hearing that I refuse to vote solely on the basis of which candidate is for gay marriage rights). He certainly won’t be the last. What’s more interesting is that the conversation started over a comment that Obama couldn’t be a Marxist because he’s a millionaire “moderate”. He made that comment to actor Adam Baldwin.

The user I was responding to said it was “sad” that I’m part of a political group that is against me. That’s exactly what he said. THEN he wanted me to “name one GOP member who is for gay marriage.”

That’s when I said it: I’m not for gay marriage. Not that I’m against it, I’m just not for it at the moment. That was when kingfish called me a bigot, Baldwin got sarcastic with him, and I ended the discussion – because we weren’t having a discussion. It was a bashing session, which is the only thing today’s liberals are capable of most of the time.

Here’s my problem: there are much more important things right now than gay marriage. I have blogged before that I would like to be able to marry my girlfriend one day, but now it just isn’t going to happen. This isn’t all that much like the civil rights fight of the 60′s; we’re not talking about something as obvious as skin color here. DADT has been repealed. That was the one sticking point with me, the one block to my rights as a gay American that I was angriest about. The government was already booted out of my bedroom. They don’t have any right to tell me that I can’t love who I love. Now they can’t tell me that I can’t serve my country, and that’s a huge deal for me.

Marriage, though? That’s a fight we’re not going to win overnight, and there are other issues that need to be faced before we can hope to address gay marriage.

Liberalism is a danger that it wasn’t before. There was a time when being liberal was important; liberal views helped free the slaves, end Jim Crow laws, end segregation…but then liberalism took an extreme twist. Somewhere in the 1970′s, liberalism morphed into a precursor to the extreme it is today. Bernard Goldberg, one of my favorite journalists, still considers himself a “classic liberal”. A classic liberal doesn’t believe in taxing the wealthy above everyone else or putting limits on free speech via the so-called “fairness doctrine”. A classic liberal doesn’t believe in social engineering by forcing gas prices into the stratosphere to bully people into “green alternatives” and other such nonsense. Your run-of-the-mill liberal, however, will call conservative women foul names, call those who disagree bigots and racists, then attack conservatives as liars and homophobes – all while their own people give us legislation like DADT and DOMA and they all scream for more civility.

Any more of this tolerance of theirs and my head might explode.

Every single time I get into a tangle with a liberal, be it on Twitter, a news article, or some other forum for political discussion, they always say the same things:

Liberal: how can you be FOR a group that is against you?

Mel: they’re not against me.

Lib: name one GOP candidate who is for gay marriage.

Mel: when did marriage enter the picture? The issue isn’t gay marriage…

Lib: it’s the ONLY issue! They won’t let you marry! They HATE you!

Mel: actually, the only person who hates me right now is you.

Lib: BIGOT!

Mel: You cannot be serious…

The funniest part is when they try to define the word “bigot” for me, as if I never studied English in college and have no idea what the word means. On this occasion, kingfish actually linked Wikipedia (insert Soledad O’Brien joke here) for the definition. Here’s the official Webster version:

Bigot (noun): a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices; especially : one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance.

Short breakdown: I’m not against gays. I AM gay. Believing that the economy and several Constitutional issues are more important than gay marriage at the moment does not now and will never make me anti-gay. Disagreeing with the running liberal narrative that gay marriage should be the only thing I care about does not make me anti-gay or anti-marriage. The only thing I refuse to tolerate is intellectual laziness – and when you call me a bigot over the gay marriage issue, you are being intellectually lazy.

To answer your original statement, kingfish, yes, it is entirely possible for a rich man to be a Marxist (calling Obama a moderate is ludicrous on its face). Those who agitate “the people” in favor of Marxism are often those already holding the purse strings – the elites who want to tell us all how we should live. Isn’t that the very hypocrisy you accuse Christians of? Or do you really think that Christians are the only ones capable of being liars and thieves?

If my rights as an American citizen are taken from me – if America ceases to be the independent and free nation it was created to be – my right to marry my girlfriend will not matter in the least. That is why other issues are more important than gay marriage for me, because I see liberals calling our current extremist of a president a “moderate” and I see exactly where this is headed if we don’t do something about it.

Comments (13)

Contraceptives: The New Age Of Bra Burning

Mar 13, 12 6:18 PM

Liberals love to mislead people. They have made it into an art form. When Sandra Fluke went before Nancy Pelosi’s “mock committee” to “testify” about the need for insurance coverage for contraceptives, the deception was on full display, and not one member of the media has vetted this woman or her claims.

Why would they? She’s the perfect proof of their claim that conservatives hate women.

I would beg to differ. I’m a gold star lesbian – that means I have never slept with a man. I am actually kinda proud of that status. I am also politically conservative. I have not met a single conservative who seriously wanted to do harm to women. In fact, I know conservatives who have fought hard for the rights of women in Sharia nations – places in the world where women are required to remain covered from head to foot, not go anywhere without a male relative to escort them, and are barred from getting an education. Where were the liberals when this kind of thing was rampant in Afghanistan?

The entire debate revolves around contraceptives. The new federal law requires all employers to offer health insurance to employees and imposes a stiff tax penalty on individuals who do not carry health insurance. That same law requires ALL insurers to cover quite a bit. One of the requirements is that all insurance plans cover OB/GYN services and contraceptives for women.

There’s one problem with that: the Catholic church teaches that contraceptives of any kind, including condoms, are a sin according to scripture. I disagree with the Catholic church on this point, but that’s beside the point. According to the First Amendment the Catholic church has a right to their belief; since that belief does not cause deliberate physical harm to congregants nor victimize those who are not congregants, that belief cannot be abridged by any law. Here’s where it gets complicated…the Catholic church also runs hospitals and other non-profit organizations. They have more than a few employees. They don’t always require those employees to be in good standing with the church, but they don’t allow insurance that covers contraceptive medication, either.

Enter Sandra Fluke.

Denied entry to the actual committee hearings on the contraceptive mandate, she gave a planned speech riddled with errors and unverifiable claims. One of the first things that she says is that, during law school, contraceptives can cost around $3,000. That statement in itself is misleading; she failed to clarify (I believe she did it deliberately) what that means. There is no way it would cost that much per year. She likely meant throughout the course of law school, which typically runs for around three years. She also said it can cost that much – meaning it’s a possibility. In other words, she’s saying that if someone goes all-out they could spend $1,000 a year on contraceptives not covered by insurance.

Here’s where this gets a little fuzzy for me. According to Planned Parenthood, oral contraceptives can potentially cost anywhere from $15-$50 a month. Wal-Mart carries the generic brands for $4-$7 a month, but we’ll go with the low end of PP’s information. Let’s say it costs $15 a month for oral contraceptives. If you’re on these drugs throughout all of law school, that comes to a total of $540 for three years.

Let’s take a look at some of Fluke’s other claims. She talks about a lesbian friend who was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome and obtained a prescription for oral contraceptives. The claim she makes here is that her friend was plunking down more than $100 a month for these drugs because the school refused to cover them. Let’s do the math on this one. If someone is paying $100 a month for drugs, full-time at the end of law school that comes out to right around $3600. So, by that math, sure – it could cost three grand. Where I get lost is why it cost that much and why birth control pills were the only treatment a doctor was able to come up with.

First of all, the most expensive name-brand oral birth control pill currently on the market costs $90 without insurance. Generics that are just as effective when they’re really only being used to treat medical conditions like PCOS are available for free at federal Title X clinics and on the cheap at big-box stores I’ve already listed. I’m wondering how this woman ended up paying over $100 a month for birth control pills. Fluke goes on to say that her friend ended up in the ER with a cyst the size of a tennis ball and had to have her ovary removed and later lamented that she’d never, even if she wanted to, give her mother grandchildren – wait, where was mom when she needed top-of-the-line birth control pills as opposed to generic medication? Doesn’t the Obama healthcare mandate also require insurance companies cover adult children up to age 26 as dependents now if the employee wants? Why couldn’t she go with mom’s insurance for that free birth control that she couldn’t be troubled to go to Title X for?

Then she tells a story that actually makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. She says that a friend was raped, but because she knew Georgetown didn’t cover contraceptives the woman supposedly assumed that was how they treated all of women’s health issues – so, supposedly, the woman never went to the doctor or got tested for STD’s.

When you are raped, whether you are male or female you should go nowhere until you have made contact with the police. Here’s how this works: you file a police report. Regardless of how much time has passed, the police will immediately take you to be examined by what’s known as a SANE nurse (Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner). The nurse is highly trained and SANE’s are the only people qualified to collect forensic evidence after a sexual assault. After the exam, the nurse will discuss STD’s and give you prescriptions for three medications – one of which is for a morning-after pill that can be obtained for ten bucks and, in most states, will be reimbursed by victim assistance.

What’s even more galling is her final statement, after talking about how she was told she should have gone to school somewhere else: “And even if that meant going to a less prestigious university, we refuse to pick between a quality education and our health. And we resent that in the 21st century, anyone think it’s acceptable to ask us to make this choice simply because we are women.” She speaks as if going to a school more prestigious than a state university – say, the University of Texas (Hook ‘em) – is a right. Elitism at its finest.

The claim she is making is that Georgetown’s policies are so oppressive for women that it’s an untenable situation, and it’s a bald-faced lie. As a woman and a lesbian, I don’t want Sandra Fluke trying to speak for me. I would never want someone who so blatantly twists the truth to represent me for anything – certainly not my health.

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It’s Okay For Bill Maher

Mar 9, 12 1:26 AM

In the past week, a whirlwind of events have taken place. It mostly centers around Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown law student, going before a “mock” panel held by Nancy Pelosi after Darrel Issa determined that Fluke had no expertise on First Amendment (specifically the religion clause) issues and could not testify before the actual committee. The subject? Healthcare laws requiring ALL employers, including religious non-profit organizations, to provide healthcare coverage that covers all contraceptives for women.

I’ll get to the ins and outs of Fluke’s ridiculous claims later, but for now I want to focus on what everyone else has focused on since this charade first began. For three days after her testimony before Pelosi’s mock committee, radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh called Fluke a slut. I wholeheartedly disagree with his words; he never should have said it regardless of how frustrated he may have been by how ridiculous the debate has become. Even when I found out several years ago that my girlfriend was using me to cheat on the woman I’d been told was her ex, I wouldn’t have called her a slut; it’s not a term that should be used to describe any woman. Other words fall into that category, too (this next part is not safe for work or the kiddies) – bitch, cunt, twat and whore are among them. I’ve been called all of the above by angry liberals who don’t believe I have the right to keep breathing because of my political beliefs.

So has Bill Maher.

Maher has slung every misogynistic slur you can imagine at Sarah Palin, yet not one liberal has stood up to tell him that he’s wrong. For years he has called her all of the names I just listed and insulted Sarah’s intelligence at every turn, but the only people who recognize his hateful hypocrisy for what it really is are the conservatives who were insulted by his comments in the first place. Liberals have proven with Bill Maher that they are completely unwilling to police their own and, in fact, will rejoice when someone in their ranks does stoop to such low levels.

Just to make sure Fluke’s feelings weren’t hurt, President Obama called her up after Rush’s comments were aired by the media to tell her what a good job she’d done. She’s now making the rounds on all the requisite liberal daytime talk shows and is referring everyone to Media Matters. Fox News can’t get her publicist to return calls, however, and she’s now being represented – yes, this woman who came out of nowhere now has PR backing – by a firm owned by the current administration’s own Anita Dunn. She’s being held up as the underdog heroine of the left wing.

Today, Jay Carney held a press conference where he was asked if Obama would return a $1M donation from liberal hatemonger Bill Maher. Carney said that no, the money would not be returned – then went on to say, “language that denigrates women is inappropriate,” but it is not the President’s place to be the “arbiter” of every controversial statement.

Then, to dismiss the controversy, Super PAC head Bill Burton (the very man who has refused to return the money donated by Maher) said this about the whole thing: “The notion that there is an equivalence between what a comedian has said during the course of his career, and what the de facto leader of the Republican Party said to sexually degrade a woman who engaged in a political debate of our time is crazy.” He later referred to Maher’s comments as being made “in the past” and flatly said that Rush had lied about Fluke.

That Burton doesn’t realize just how misogynistic his buddy Maher really can be is an insult to my intelligence. What’s worse, there are women out there who will buy his ludicrous argument. Somehow, I have a very hard time believing that they would be as forgiving if, say, Ron White took the stage and said some of this stuff about liberal figures (not that Ron White is conservative, but you get my point):

My favorite there was “the Maverick and the MILF!” That was classy.

I have to ask, where was this wit when Obama mispronounced “corpsman” TWICE, in front of two different audiences?

Where was Maher’s apology after all of this? Come to think of it, where was Keith Olbermann’s apology when he called Michelle Malkin a “mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it”? Oh, right…he just “apologized” today, three years after the fact, after ranting that he had every right to say what he said in the first place. Maher has never even attempted to hide his contempt for women and his belief that all conservatives are morons, and this is what we get from left-wing women:

UPDATE: I forgot to include the link to the news story where I found the quotes. Click here.

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I Am Andrew Breitbart

Mar 1, 12 3:47 PM

It is with heavy hearts that we here at gayconservative.org acknowledge the death of conservative leader Andrew Breitbart.

CNN called him merely a “conservative blogger.” MSNBC called him a firebrand. Comments from leftists the world over have been outrageously poor; judging from their words, you would have thought Adolf Hitler finally died after unfairly living a long life. Many called him controversial; I’ve even heard some call him a racist, sexist and a homophobe.

That last one actually gets under my skin in a huge way.

Last night, while I had drinks with one of my closest friends, Andrew was out for a walk in his Brentwood, CA neighborhood when he collapsed. Someone saw him fall and called 911. Paramedics were unable to revive him. He was pronounced dead at the hospital. He was 43 years old.

I get push notifications on my iPhone at all hours of the morning, noon and night. They don’t usually wake me up. This morning, one did, and I thought it was a hoax. Pulling up the news, I saw that it wasn’t, and I was stunned beyond words. Tammy Bruce was in fine form on her show as she spoke of the principles that Andrew stood for; my fellow TAMs were just as stunned as I was, some still in tears. We all knew Andrew to be the fearless type who never backed down from his beliefs.

Many don’t realize that Andrew was actually close friends at one point with Arianna Huffington and even helped her launch the Huffington Post. Surprisingly, with all of the vitriol being spewed, none of it is coming from HuffPo – the commenters have actually been very classy. It is on sites like CNN and MSNBC as well as Twitter where the hate has been most prevalent. The hate is there, however, and when he was with us Andrew took pride in leftist hate. I frequently saw him re-tweet hateful comments made by leftists that I wouldn’t even post here. He wore those hateful comments like medals. He saw it pretty simply: if the left hates you that much, you’re doing something right.

I had the opportunity to talk to Andrew about a year ago and he was very kind and graceful. In 2010, when a handful of hard-right fringe groups boycotted CPAC over GOProud’s inclusion and CPAC cracked and rescinded GOProud’s invitation to be a sponsor, Andrew stepped up and hosted us himself. I wish I could have been there. I remember seeing pictures of a brightly-smiling Andrew with GOProud leaders Jimmy LaSalvia and Chris Barron and believing that a new day had begun for gay conservatives. One of the heaviest-hitting voices in the conservative movement had not only accepted and approved of us, but was standing with us – and the conservative establishment absolutely took notice. This was just one year after an anti-gay nutjob named Ryan Sorba was booed off the stage at CPAC for decrying GOProud’s presence. In standing with us, Andrew was telling the establishment what they refused to accept on their own – conservatism isn’t about your religion, it is about limited government, fiscal wisdom and personal responsibility

My favorite author, Brad Thor, kick-started something I think we should all follow. He Tweeted, “Who is @AndrewBreitbart? I am #AndrewBreitbart.” Almost immediately, one of Thor’s followers started the #IAmAndrewBreitbart hashtag. I followed suit. We should all pick up his torch and run with it. We should all dare to fight for what we believe in until nobody can forget just what it is we’re fighting for. We should all be so fearless in the way we live our lives and treat other people that we stick out in people’s minds as the type who will never back down. We should all take a stand for what we know is the right thing even with the withering hatred of the hard left aimed fully at our collective heart, and we should never give up no matter what anyone says. From here on, I will re-post the hate just as Andrew would have if only to prove just how depraved hard-left liberalism can be.

Our hearts go out to his wife, Suzannah, and his four children, not to mention his extended family (his father-in-law, Orson Bean, wrote for BigHollywood.com) and his network of close friends. I leave you with Andrew’s final speech at CPAC 2012.

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Paul Babeu: I’m Gay

Feb 20, 12 2:56 AM

I try not to write about an issue immediately when it’s an emotional one. I’ve done it before and said things that I still regret.

Just a day and a half ago, though, Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu – an outspoken conservative and champion of immigration enforcement – came out as gay. He was forced to. This week, a “newspaper” known to Arizonans as a sensationalist rag called the Phoenix New Times printed a front-page story about a man known only as Jose who told a sordid tale of a scorned gay lover and the object of his affection, who apparently cheated. That lover was Paul Babeu. Pictures of the two together as well as text messages and screen shots of Babeu’s profile on a gay dating website – along with photos sent privately, not meant to ever be published – were added as proof that at least some of the allegations were true.

The problem is that one allegation reeks to high heaven – the most potentially damning of all, that Babeu personally threatened his ex with deportation if he ever said anything to the public about their relationship. It has been repeated so many times at this point that the media can’t even report it correctly.

The short version goes something like this: in 2006, Babeu and Jose met through online dating profiles. Jose wasn’t just a boyfriend – he also became an active volunteer for Babeu’s campaign, creating and maintaining the main website as well as accounts on Twitter and Facebook. At some point in 2010, Jose began to suspect that Babeu was cheating on him and set up a fake profile on a gay dating website to lure Babeu into telling the truth. Babeu sent photos of himself to a phantom named “Matt” – Jose incognito – photos of himself in his underwear and apparently of his erect genetalia. The photos were supposed to be private communication; they weren’t sent through major social media, they were sent through personal cell phones. Eventually Jose showed up at what was supposed to be the dinner liaison with Matt and Babeu realized he was caught.

Things only went downhill from there. Before all of that, Jose practically stalked Babeu. The very text messages meant to prove Jose’s story show that he showed up at Babeu’s house on multiple occasions and told Babeu he wouldn’t leave until he got home. Jose admitted to posting damaging comments on news stories about the Sheriff, even at one point saying point-blank that Babeu was gay and maintained a profile on a gay dating website. After the breakup, Jose was caught breaking into and posting on the Twitter and Facebook accounts, as well as setting up another website – paulbabeu.co, now defunct – to humiliate him.

Here’s where the story gets a little fuzzy.

Jose says that Babeu’s lawyer, Chris DeRose, demanded that he sign a non-disclosure statement and immediately hand over control of Babeu’s profiles on social networking sites as well as shut down the fake site and never breathe a word about the relationship in public again. That is at least partially true as evidenced by Babeu’s own release of the document. What cannot be proven is the accusation that DeRose, not Babeu himself, tried to tell Jose that his visa was expired and further disclosure could result in deportation.

In the PNT story, the writer says that Jose’s lawyer “confirmed” the story as legitimate. What I can’t understand is how that lawyer can possibly confirm the account since she wasn’t present for the conversation where the accusations allegedly took place. Jose didn’t retain his attorney until after the supposed threat was made. The attorney cannot confirm anything as far as I can tell, and no documentation proving the allegation has been provided.

The original article is outrageously one-sided. Plenty of known anti-Babeu and anti-enforcement figures are quoted, but not a single Babeu supporter is represented. All the writer says is that Babeu refused to comment. The writer also says that Jose decided to approach PNT to get his story of fear and intimidation out to the public…why PNT? Why not state or federal authorities? If there’s proof, such a threat would sound the death knell of Babeu’s time in politics because it could be criminal. Babeu, for his part, says that he had every confidence that Jose was here legally and never questioned his status and he brings up a very valid point: a Sheriff has no authority to deport anybody.

There’s another twist to the story: Monica Alonzo, the writer, has a long history of supporting pro-immigrant and other very liberal issues. She’s not exactly an unbiased source.

I knew for a long time that Babeu was probably gay. My gaydar is famous among my friends; I knew, even though I never would have said so, that he was likely gay from the beginning. I am happy that he has come out but the method used to bring it about wasn’t mere coercion. It was brute force that dragged him out and I don’t think it was anyone’s business. Am I disappointed that he cheated on his boyfriend? Sure. I’ve also been disappointed to hear of friends and relatives who have done far worse (including one who slept with a married man and felt no remorse). Babeu isn’t married and trying to carry on a fallacy of a relationship to hide his orientation. He simply chose not to be open about it. As much as I would like the gay conservatives serving silently in politics and public safety would come out, I also believe it is their right to keep it quiet.

I don’t believe that Babeu threatened his ex with deportation. I’m definitely not willing to condemn the man over private photos sent over private lines of communication that never should have been released. I find it reprehensible that Jose would find a way to try to ruin Babeu. After reading everything I could find, I’m close to certain that this is character assassination carried out by a jilted ex-lover who couldn’t get over it. I’ve been hurt, too, and I cannot imagine doing that to another person out of spite.

UPDATE: it’s important that I let the readers know that I do not personally know Paul Babeu and did not solicit a comment from his office; this is purely an opinion piece. That said, while I applaud the Sheriff for telling the truth, I do not expect him to become an activist for gay conservatives. Whether or not he does is up to him, and all of us here at gayconservative.org will support whatever decision he makes. I only hope he will continue doing the exemplary job he has always done.

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Whose Morality?

Feb 17, 12 3:19 AM

DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz came out swinging today in an interview on Megyn Kelly’s show on Fox News (H/T to Doug Powers for the link). While talking about the Obamacare mandate that all health insurance for women cover birth control, DWS claimed that “there needs to be a balance” between religious employers who object to the use of contraceptives and the employees who don’t agree. Apparently the Democrats believe it is up to them what employers are willing to cover, religious affiliation be damned.

The First Amendment holds no sway any longer.

The argument has been over the healthcare mandate and the requirement that any insurance that covers women also cover contraceptives, regardless of whether that woman is a lesbian not planning to have children or a woman who has had a hysterectomy and is physically incapable of having children. It also does not take religious beliefs into account. Catholics have always considered contraceptives of any kind a sin. The Catholic Church also runs many hospitals and assisted-living facilities all over the country and have never offered health insurance that covers contraceptives. It has never been an issue until now – now that the Democrats have required every single health insurance policy covering women to cover contraceptives. Democrats are refusing to back down.

The most incredible quote from DWS of all, though, is this: “The flip side of this is that religious institutions shouldn’t be imposing their values, necessarily, on their employees who don’t necessarily subscribe to those values.”

Basically, in saying this for the DNC, she’s saying that it’s perfectly okay for them to impose their values on the entire country, but it’s completely unacceptable for anyone else to do that.

It seems we are locked in a never-ending battle between conservatives and liberals. Both sides believe they are correct in their worldview. Both sides have been angry and defensive at some point or another. Although I have experienced a great deal more vitriol from liberals, I’ve certainly heard of vitriol coming from the right (usually from those as closed-minded and uneducated as those on the far left; of course, I’ve never met a person who came to any extreme beliefs through being educated and keeping an open mind, nor have I met an extremist who admitted to being extreme).

The thing that makes me scratch my head is that both sides think they’re right for the same reasons – yet neither has stopped to ponder the reasons. Those reasons are morality and conscience.

One does not need to be religious to recognize some sort of morality; religion has no corner on the moral market. If you have ever said “that was wrong,” or “this is the right thing to do,” you are speaking from your own moral center, whatever that may be. When you claim that moral center, however, and you fail to live by it, you make yourself an absolute hypocrite – religion holds no monopoly on that, either.

I find it interesting when liberals attack me and my friends (interesting in that “I’d like to psychoanalyze you” kind of way). Liberals always, without fail, attack along the same lines: you’re supporting the people who hate us, you’re a traitor, they’re intolerant, they will never respect you, how can you do this to us, you must hate yourself, you’re a self-loathing closet case, you (insert string of profanities here)!

Gay liberals will point to so-called Christians who uniformly quote a handful of out-of-context scriptures and call homosexuality sick, twisted and sinful – then either call them hypocrites or, without knowing anything about Christian scriptures, try to point out what they see as absurdities in those scriptures. They love to point out that these folks are hypocrites by saying, “that’s not very Christ-like!”

At the same time, they demand the very tolerance that they refuse to give. They say that Christians who harp on homosexuality as the ultimate sin create an atmosphere of hostility toward gay people, then turn around and create an atmosphere of hostility toward any person who doesn’t follow their line of thinking. In so doing, they become the very same monster they have made Christians out to be – tragically, for the same reasons.

You see, gay liberals will explain their behavior away by saying, “I don’t have to tolerate people who are intolerant.” I have to ask, though, who decides who is truly intolerant? Since you’re saying that they are definitely wrong, that means you have some sort of moral center. How did you decide that they were wrong? Your own conscience? If so, what is your conscience measured by? Who or what provided your moral compass – was it faith, reason, or emotional convenience?

If it is faith, then I have to know which god would give us the right to commit the very same sin which we condemn in others. If reason, I must know which school of thought confuses a closed mind with an open one. The only thing that makes sense to me is emotional convenience – I’m right, everyone else is wrong, and my best argument is going to be a slew of personal attacks, but that is acceptable for me because I feel that I have the moral high ground.

How is that any different from people who interpret the Bible to say that gay people should be put to death? On a different level, how is saying that you pity me and my conservative values very far removed from Christians who say that they pity us because we’re sick and need to be delivered from homosexuality?

It all boils down to a single question: how do you know that your morality is more right than another person’s?

If your answer is anything other than, “it’s what I believe, and I don’t think anyone should be forced to see it my way,” you are the very animal you accuse them of being.

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