He announced that his view on gay marriage has “evolved.” After saying during his 2008 campaign that he believed marriage to be a sacred pact between one man and one woman – something that a majority of Democrats also believe, particularly black Democrats in California who voted yes on Prop 8, guaranteeing its passage into law – he suddenly believes that same-sex couples should be allowed marriage rights.

Of course it has nothing to do with Biden’s diarrhea of the mouth the other day, saying that HE believed in gay marriage rights (which, when hard-left website ThinkProgress announced it, turned into a bald-faced lie when they claimed that Biden had “backed equal rights for the LGBT community throughout his career,” which is complete tripe because when DOMA and DADT were being debated Biden was a senator and he backed the legislation then, as did his good friend Robert Byrd). It couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with Biden beclowning himself yet again. At least this time he didn’t claim that George Washington tweeted news of his big win at Yorktown to all of his generals.

It should be interesting to note that Max Mutchnick, creator of Will & Grace, has recently been on CBS to say that Biden’s remarks seemed very “choreographed” when he first made the comments more than three weeks ago at a Hollywood fundraiser that White House staff were videotaping. I agree with Mutchnick that Biden was testing the waters to see what would happen, and the White House recorded it for posterity to make sure they could have something to point to and say, “lookit! This isn’t a gaffe, he really, really meant it!”

Then, this past Sunday, Biden finally said it publicly: he absolutely believes that two men and two women should be able to marry each other. The White House feigned shock, a kabuki theater act complete with Jay Carney pretending to have no idea what reporters were talking about when they asked about Biden’s flip-flop on gay marriage (sorry, but I don’t believe for one second that every White House staffer in creation didn’t know exactly what he said, and I am certain they knew BEFORE he said it). Gay rights activists went into a tizzy. Will Obama finally stand up for gay marriage? Will he do what no other president has done before?

The answer? Yes!

Not so fast, folks. It’s not what you think.

Obama naturally cited his daughters in interviews about gay marriage. He claimed that watching Malia and Sasha hang out with friends who had same-sex parents made him change his perspective. ABC broke in with a special report yesterday to announce Obama’s “evolution.” But the big problem here?

Obama still openly believes that gay marriage is a states-rights issue.

That fact alone makes his remarks supporting gay marriage outrageously disingenuous. Currently, 32 states have state laws barring recognition of same-sex unions. North Carolina became yet another one to pass such a law with a pretty serious margin, along with uber-liberal California. If Obama really, truly believed in gay marriage rights as strongly as he says he does, he wouldn’t believe it was a states-rights issue. A few gay rights activists have picked up on this, but most haven’t – they’re still naively celebrating his announcement as if it were a flat endorsement.

Obama doesn’t want you to know that. He doesn’t want you to question him. You should stop and think, however, before taking his supposed change of heart as a ringing endorsement. The man still believes that a state has the right to refuse to recognize your marriage, a stance that many took on interracial marriage back in the 70′s. If he’s not completely for it, he’s not for it at all. He’s still tap dancing to try and make one group happy – and that one group happens to make up a very small minority of voters. Unfortunately for him, it’s going to cost him quite a few votes. A very high number of black Democrats (as I mentioned before) are against gay marriage. They will stay home during this election simply because of his beliefs on gay marriage.

Obama’s announcement that he changed his mind on the matter was nothing more than duplicitous windbaggery. I will continue to caution gay rights activists against embracing this news.

Other guards started yelling at him to move. Naturally, he started screaming at them. I stepped forward and talked to him like a human being. He suddenly calmed down and quit repeating “I ain’t goin’ back to the VA” like a mantra. I said, “there’s an awful lot of people walking by, they don’t understand what’s going on. They’re scared. We just need you to calm down a little bit and move off the main thoroughfare so you don’t get hurt, okay?” He didn’t smile at me, but he said, “these guys can all kiss my ass. For you, I’ll go. You’re alright.” Without another word, he moved along. From then on if he appeared while I was on duty I was always the one they called on (and believe me, the other guards were not happy about that).

I can’t remember how many mentally ill homeless people I’ve seen since then. At crime scenes, fire scenes and other major incidents, I’ve dealt with a lot of people who are either on drugs or mentally ill and being put up by the state. Most of them were not nearly as ready to talk as my first experience was. I’ve dealt with mentally ill people who believed they were werewolves (and tried to attack me), believed they had satellites tracking them and I was part of some government conspiracy to kill them, even had one who believed I was his long-lost sister and the guys on my crew were trying to keep us apart. I’ve seen cops I know try to take them down and handcuff them and get punched, kicked, slapped, and bitten. At no time, however, have I ever seen any of the cops I’ve worked with get overly aggressive or threaten these people. Not once.

I’ve just seen the footage of the beginning of a confrontation between a homeless man in Fullerton, CA named Kelly Thomas and Fullerton Police. According to police reports, someone in the area had been vandalizing cars. Fullerton police officer Manuel Ramos started talking to Kelly, and Kelly sat down. Ramos suddenly started getting aggressive, ordering Kelly to put his legs out straight and his hands on his knees. Kelly became a little passive-aggressive, telling Ramos he didn’t know how to do that; Ramos replied, “well, you’ll learn how to do it real quick!” Within seconds that turned into Ramos saying, “you see my fists? They’re getting ready to f–k you up!”

I didn’t see Kelly get angry at Ramos. Normally, I’d very carefully react to something like this because video of officers getting rough with a suspect almost always misses the lead-up to the incident, and most often we find later that the officers had no other choice because the suspect was fighting like hell. In this case, however, the start of the incident can be clearly seen as officer Ramos is, at first, talking calmly to Kelly. Between security cameras and the audio captured by an officer’s lapel mic, I can tell that this incident could have been avoided if officer Ramos hadn’t started getting sarcastic and wasn’t issuing threats. One friend who wears the badge (but does not work in Fullerton) says that he saw that, too, and he wondered the same thing – what was the purpose of threatening a guy who was sitting down, even if he was being a smartass?

It looks and sounds as if officer Ramos was simply convinced of his superiority and willing to use force no matter what. Even the cops I know will admit they know at least one guy like that – the guy who acts like a real-life Tackleberry and is always looking for a reason to use force. Those guys are few and far between, but they do exist. Ramos strikes me as that kind of cop.

I won’t post the photo of Kelly’s face that has begun to circulate. There is one picture of what he looked like after he received his initial medical treatment, and he is completely unrecognizable. I’ve seen some bad beatings but this one was worse than any I have ever seen, and it came from six police officers. The first two, Ramos and Cpl. Jay Cincinelli, started the whole thing. It appears to me that once the beating got into full swing – Cpl. Cincinelli Tased him five times and then started beating him with the handle of his Taser – Kelly simply didn’t know what to do. He appeared to be genuinely afraid that he was being beaten. I’ve seen people engaged in fights with cops screaming for help while still actively fighting with officers, but that’s not what I see in the video of Kelly Thomas.

I have noticed something, though: incidents like this almost always, nearly without fail, occur in liberal states where civilian ownership of guns is heavily restricted and the police are given free reign to do almost anything they want. Namely New York and California.

I hope that Ramos gets the book thrown at him. I didn’t see Cincinelli in the first portion of the video and don’t know if he realized how the whole thing started, but at no time is an officer trained to use the handle of his Taser to beat a suspect. The overwhelming majority of police officers are good people with big hearts and a desire to do something good in their community. Three good cops I know have been killed in the line of duty; one was a close friend long before he became a cop. All three died doing the right thing. I would strongly caution against blaming all cops for this horrific incident.

I hope more than anything that the Thomas family sees justice done and Manuel Ramos is never allowed to hold a position of authority ever again.

I say up until just now because I’ve had a running problem with them. About two weeks ago, I started getting “partner emails” from a group that pays PAN to send emails to users. I’ve never had a problem with any of them until now. Eugene Delgaudio, head of a group pseudo-benignly called “Public Advocate of the United States”, is one of those extremist fringe anti-gay hysterics that Jimmy LaSalvia was talking about in a recent public statement regarding Dan Savage. Delgaudio is almost famous for his lies regarding the gay agenda. Don’t get me wrong – there is a gay leftist agenda, and I’m still every bit as committed to stopping them as I am to stopping Obama’s re-election bid. Delgaudio, however, uses myths, distortions and outright lies to create a problem where there is none.

Here’s a portion of the claims made in his email, sent by PAN to its users:

You see, the Homosexual Classrooms Act contains a laundry list of anti-family provisions that will:

*** Require schools to teach appalling homosexual acts so “homosexual students” don’t feel “singled out” during already explicit sex-ed classes;

*** Spin impressionable students in a whirlwind of sexual confusion and misinformation, even peer pressure to “experiment” with the homosexual “lifestyle;”

*** Exempt homosexual students from punishment for propositioning, harassing, or even sexually assaulting their classmates, as part of their specially-protected right to “freedom of self-expression;”

*** Force private and even religious schools to teach a pro-homosexual curriculum and purge any reference to religion if a student claims it creates a “hostile learning environment” for homosexual students.

And that’s just the beginning of the Homosexual Lobby’s radical agenda.

In fact, it will set them up to ram through their entire perverted vision for a homosexual America.

Delgaudio is talking about HR 998, better known as the “Student Non-Discrimination Act.” You can read it in its entirety by clicking here. When I first got this ridiculous email, I posted a blog on my page on PAN’s website detailing why Delgaudio was a liar – at the same time I said that I was 100% against HR 998, I listed the reasons why, and I said specifically that if PAN was going to give Delgaudio a vehicle with which to push his extremist agenda, I was going to leave the network and publicly comment on what they’ve been supporting.

If nothing else, HR 998 runs directly afoul of the Tenth Amendment. The government didn’t have the power to start regulating education in the first place, and according to the Tenth Amendment it is illegal for the federal government to keep meddling in education in America. HR 998 claims to use the Fourteenth Amendment to supposedly protect the rights of GLBT youth in public schools, a claim that is outrageous on its face. The Constitution alone could stop this idiotic law from being implemented.

That’s not to mention the reason for the bill in the first place. It’s purportedly to stop anti-gay bullying; we already have laws that could be used to crack down on bullying. Harassment laws could be utilized, especially when social media is involved. Assault charges can be leveled at bullies who use physical violence against their victims. We don’t need any more laws – we already have plenty of them. HR 998 is a knee-jerk reaction by liberals who want more control over Americans.

Delgaudio is making the case for the liberal side of it. Absolutely nothing in that law says anything about sex ed classes (which I think were a poor idea in the first place) teaching gay sex acts to make gay kids feel included. Nothing is mentioned about private schools being forced to obey federal mandates on anti-bullying measures. The most appallingly insulting claim Delgaudio makes even offends the straight conservatives I know. He claims that the law would protect gay kids from punishment following claims of sexual harassment, something the bill says absolutely nothing about (not even in passing), and is a provision that even the most ardent liberal socialists would be reticent to include. That claim is so egregious I can’t believe that the email passed PAN muster.

Not only did it pass once – it passed twice. I just got the same maliciously lie-ridden email from PAN today. I quietly posted a blog to my PAN site that said I would be leaving because I could not in good conscience align myself with an organization that would accept money from a hack like Delgaudio so he can play on people’s religious sensibilities through emotional statements and complete fabrications. Within hours, Darla Dawald, the national director herself, responded with a nasty, defensive comment that they had “a lot of costs to cover” and “one person being offended was hardly a reason to change anything.” She went on to say that PAN has 90,000 users and they had to find a way to raise money.

Before I could respond to her, however – and before I could save the posts I’d made on the page – she suspended my account. The suspension made sure I wouldn’t be able to take a screen capture of her comment. She took a page straight out of the Huffington Post’s playbook, proving my point that PAN leadership is really no better than liberals. They’ll support people and groups who will lie and peddle those lies to members who won’t question their fellow conservatives, but when called out for their hypocrisy they pitch a fit and shun the person who had the nerve to speak up.

Like it or not, people like Delgaudio are hurting the conservative movement. You don’t want gay leftists indoctrinating our youth in extreme liberal beliefs in public schools? Fantastic! Neither do I! If this is the way you’re going to try to stop it, though, you’re only shooting all of us in the collective foot. Delgaudio is a shill, the kind that will be used as ammunition by the left when the presidential campaign really gets going. His brand of emotional ranting is what gay liberals wave in my face when they call me a self-loathing closet case. And when you have someone like that lying to stop a piece of legislation, you’re only furthering the cause of those who back that legislation. I really don’t want to hear about how you need to raise money, either – Tammy Bruce does it just fine without resorting to selling ad space to those she wouldn’t want to be seen as endorsing. If you refuse to distance yourself from Delgaudio, Darla, you are endorsing him.

We need to stop HR 998 and we need to boot the people backing it from office. We’ll never accomplish that goal as long as we appear to align ourselves with those who gamble with the truth. If we don’t learn to be wiser about this, the war is ours to lose.

Later on, though, when pictures of looters stealing unbelievable amounts of clothing, alcohol, and electronics (not to mention guns and jewelry) were printed in the magazines we read and tales of Korean shop owners being targeted by black rioters started coming out, I began to question whether the riots could be justified at all. Even as a kid I knew something wasn’t right. Then stories of what had happened before George Holliday’s new video camera started rolling came tumbling out and my view changed dramatically.

Rodney King was a convicted felon on parole for a robbery conviction. He was spotted by CHP officers driving erratically; they tried to pull him over, but he ran. He eventually got off the freeway and kept running, driving at speeds of 80 mph in residential neighborhoods. When he was finally cornered, police ordered the two passengers – Bryant Allen and Freddie Helms, both also black – out of the vehicle. Both men immediately complied and were taken into custody without incident. King, however, acted strangely. He got out, waved at the police helicopter and laughed at officers. The situation escalated when he reached both hands to his back waistband; officers thought he was reaching for a weapon, and they ordered him onto the ground. When the officers holstered their sidearms and tried to apply handcuffs, King jumped up, sending two officers flying. One officer used his Taser on King, but the Taser had almost no effect on him – he got up and charged again. That’s when the batons came out.

The officers may have taken it just a bit too far, but I would hardly call it brutality when they are facing a man who is so intoxicated that they believe he’s on PCP. The taser did little to nothing, and they didn’t want to shoot him – what else were they supposed to do? Let him keep attacking them? I don’t know how true it is, but I heard reports that he spat at the medics in the ambulance and screamed profanities at them.

Last night, I was with my friends on duty and we decided to watch “Hip Hop and the LA Riots”. Documentary? Not quite – it’s a crockumentary. The only people interviewed were rappers who felt the violence of the LA riots was justified. The comments being made by these rappers were astoundingly narcissistic. One rapper said that the riots were the culmination of everything they’d been rapping about since the 70′s. The high point of the whole thing was Henry Keith Watson standing at Florence and Normandie – the intersection where he and three other black men dragged Reginald Denny from the cab of his 18-wheeler and beat him nearly to death – saying, “one beating does not make up for four hundred years of white people’s bullshit! Not even close.” He went on a rant about how black people in South LA are held down by white people and racism still rules our culture.

That was the sum of the comments made by everyone: blacks are put down by racist whites and we’ll never get a break and the LA riots was our way of saying enough is enough.

Let’s talk about reality. More than 70% of black children are illegitimate, born to single parents. Education rates are abysmal; more than half of all black kids drop out of high school, and barely more than 10% of black kids go on to attend college. With those kind of numbers about kids growing up without a family and not finishing school, I find it astonishing that we don’t understand why blacks account for 15% of all violent crimes in the US (amazing considering they only comprise less than 13% of the entire population) and 94% of all violent crimes committed against blacks were committed by other black people – and blacks make up 38% of the entire prison population in the US.

Then 20 years after the riots, black rappers claim that they all just wanted jobs (which had gone away from LA because of outrageously liberal policies against businesses) and to be respected. How can you expect anyone to respect you when you don’t even respect yourself?

We’re living in a time now where you make yourself. You have the same opportunity that I have. You can choose to go to school, get an education, go to college (yes, you may have to work your way through it – I did), and make an honest living…or you can ignore your education, drop out, become an alcoholic, join a gang, deal drugs, and blame everyone but yourself for your problems while you demand that the government give you something better. You are your own creation. Nobody forced you to stop caring about doing something better with your life. Either stop complaining and actually do something or give up and revel in your failures, but stop blaming everything on me because I’m white.

To give you a better idea of how the culture of professional victimhood (which Tammy Bruce describes in her book, “The Death of Right and Wrong”) works, consider what happened in the wake of Reginald Denny’s beating. Bobby Green, a black trucker who lived a block away from the infamous intersection, saw Denny’s beating on the news and rushed to the scene. With the help of two others, he put Denny back in the cab and drove him to the hospital – saving his life. When it came time to testify, people in the neighborhood threatened Green’s life to stop him from testifying against Watson and the others involved. To his further credit, Green refused to back down.

Until the race-baiters and self-pitying attention-seekers stop perpetuating the cycle of victimhood, there will be no peace. That has nothing to do with anything white people have done to repress anyone. It has everything to do with the selfishness and greed that liberals accuse everyone else of.

Yes, that extremist fringe exists. Just as there is an extremist fringe on the left (yes, I realize it is becoming more mainstream by the day), there is an extremist fringe on the right. Those are the people who fuel militant gay liberals like Dan Savage who wish all Republicans were dead, name filthy sex acts after politicians and Christian kids, and call Christians who disagree “pansy asses” (there will be a video to address that in a few days). Most conservatives are the kind of people who would rather live and let live; we have seen, however, where the truly far-right groups have fought to edge out gay groups who wish to participate in CPAC.

That flies in the face of everything that is politically conservative. Being conservative means three things to me: 1) limited government; 2) personal responsibility; 3) fiscal prudence. Everything I believe falls under those three ideas. I believe religion should be kept to the confines of the First Amendment, which carries the only mention of religion in the whole of the Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, nor prohibiting the free expression thereof.”

On that note, here is what I have to say about a few things that have come up in my debates recently:

Christianity: none of us have anything against the faith or its followers. I am a Christian myself. I don’t go to my old church because I always feel everyone’s eyes on me, but I won’t go to the “gay-friendly” churches because all I hear are liberal politics being preached from the pulpit and I don’t have the stomach for it. I will never support any law that could possibly be construed to force churches to perform gay weddings in the name of stopping discrimination, and will ardently oppose any movement that targets Christians and their beliefs, no matter how much I may disagree with some of them. Their rights are my rights, and I will fight to my last breath for their rights.

Discrimination Laws: we’re beyond them. We don’t need anti-discrimination laws. In the modern age, word-of-mouth travels at the speed of a 4G network and stories about actual discrimination can destroy a business in 140 characters. I don’t want to be part of any protected class; only those who can’t make it on their own want that kind of status. Progress will happen. It needs no help from silly legislation that does little more than create resentment.

Gay Marriage: I have said before and will say it again – most of us want to marry, but we have the good sense to realize that now isn’t the time for that debate. Our country is falling apart and if we don’t do something to stop the decline into socialist hell, our rights to marry our same-sex partners will mean absolutely nothing. We’re all sick to death of listening to liberals use this as a weapon to try and make us hate ourselves (which is pathetic, really).

Size of Government: it’s too damn big and way too damn powerful. How is it the government has so much power to regulate TV programming? How does the government have the power to decide which laws it will acknowledge and which laws it won’t? How does the government have the power to tell the states that they can’t aid in the enforcement of immigration law? The Tenth Amendment was pretty clear that the federal government isn’t allowed to take on powers not specifically granted to it by the Constitution and the Articles of Amendment. The current size and scope of the federal government needs to be dealt with, and harshly so.

Economy: free market. Taxing the rich is a fantastic way to send unemployment rocketing into the stratosphere when it costs those rich people who build businesses that create jobs send those jobs overseas to save money. And don’t give me this BS about “the greater good” – the Constitution doesn’t support such notions. The greater good often rapidly turns into “what’s yours is mine,” and that has no place in a free country.

Extremism: it exists on both sides. I’m sure every gay liberal who has picked a fistfight with me or threatened my life thinks they are perfectly justified, but that doesn’t make them right. There is an extremist fringe on the right no matter how offended some conservatives act when you point out that it exists. You have every right to believe that my sexual orientation is a sin, but you do NOT have the right to write your personal religious belief into the law. If you cannot base your beliefs on justifiable legal terms (this also goes for the liberal Christians who believe in socialized healthcare and endless welfare), then you have no business trying to pass a law based on that belief. And when there are religious leaders in your ranks who openly call gay people every slur they can think of for the express purpose of making it different and humiliating those who refuse to convert (no, not that kook from Kansas…I’m talking about Damon Thompson), then yes, you have a problem with extremism. You cannot claim that the fringe doesn’t exist when those extremists call me a “homo-nazi” simply because I’m a lesbian, despite the fact that we agree on the issue we’re talking about. THAT is the extremist fringe Jimmy LaSalvia was talking about when he pointed out that Dan Savage is doing nothing but feeding the “extremist fringe who oppose gay rights.” We’re talking about the extremists who would see Lawrence v. Texas undone so that we can be sent to jail just for being gay. Just because the lefties will call you an extremist for holding a Bible doesn’t mean we’re agreeing with them, and you’ve got the intellectual depth of a puddle in Death Valley if you don’t question the differences.

I’m a member of GOProud. I have disagreed with some of the things that Jimmy and Chris have said in the past; then again, I’ve never been part of a group I didn’t have disagreements with at some point. I disagreed with Jimmy LaSalvia outing Tony Fabrizio the way he did. Chris has said things that I’ve disagreed with, too. What makes a group like GOProud – or even us here at gayconservative.org or our friends at gaypatriot.net – click is that we can disagree on something, air our misgivings, and move on. We still agree on nearly everything else. At the same time, I have felt their frustration at being sniped at unfairly by some conservatives who either refuse to accept that social conservatism is hurting the cause or fail to ask a few questions before they assume they know what we’re thinking or what our reasons may be for something and spit out an emotional comment that sounds an awful lot like something a loony liberal would say. One such conservative whom I have supported regardless of what my friends have said made the comment that GOProud was only mad at Dan Savage because he ripped on the Christian kids before they could, something I and every other gay conservative takes serious offense to. Never once has GOProud attacked Christians, nor has any gay conservative I know EVER supported anti-bullying legislation or the emotional conniptions that liberals go into when the subject comes up. Making that remark wasn’t speaking truth, no matter how much you’d like it to be. It was a baseless accusation against the character of every gay conservative who supports GOProud.

Now…why are we gay and conservative? Why can’t we just be conservative and keep our orientation to ourselves? Well, for starters, anyone who knows me personally knows there ain’t no keepin’ my orientation a secret. I was the last one to know I was a lesbian. I’m also not much for the closet – if my parents are going to hold hands, I’m going to hold hands with my partner. Joking aside, though, there are two reasons: one, we want the world to know that not all gay people march in lock-step with the liberal SS. Two, we want other gay people who are politically conservative to have a safe place to go for support when their liberal friends get angry (and inevitably, sometimes violent). We’re not out to convert anyone to being gay and we wholeheartedly oppose indoctrination in schools, but we believe it is important that we’re seen.

Are we clearer on the issues now (ahem…Brooks Bayne)? Fan-damn-tastic.

One of the statements made by Delbert Burkett, father of convicted murderer Jason Burkett – whose partner in crime was executed by the State of Texas in 2010 – was, “killin’ Michael Perry isn’t gonna bring those people back. It’s not gonna raise anyone from the dead.” That’s a comment made by every anti-death penalty celebrity in the world, particularly in the US. Capital punishment is useless because it doesn’t bring back the victims, they say. It’s cruel and unusual punishment. We never have the right to take a human life.

(The same group of people will demand abortion rights in the name of a woman’s right to choose and find ways to dehumanize a human fetus to rationalize murder to their so-called consciences. Go figure.)

That argument is emotional at best. It carries no truth. If our aim was to bring back the dead, then there would be no point to punishment at all. Why sentence someone to life in prison? I mean, it’s not going to bring their victims back from the dead. Why would we send a man to prison for kidnapping and raping his ex-wife? It’s not going to stop her nightmares or put a stop to her fear of quiet parking lots. Why should we send a man to prison for stealing cars and breaking into homes? It’s not going to replace the lost sense of security that his victims deal with now.

See how silly that argument is? If we’re not using the death penalty at least in part for punishment, then there would be no point – and punishment is half of the point. The other half is deterrence. Those who oppose the death penalty claim that it doesn’t deter anything. I wholeheartedly disagree, and the numbers prove that argument wrong.

According to the numbers, when the Supreme Court halted the death penalty for a few years in the early 1970′s, murder rates skyrocketed almost overnight. It took time for the death penalty to be re-instituted, and once it began to gain traction again in the 1990′s murder rates dropped by nearly half. During a long portion of time, many murderers confessed and later said they did so because they knew they wouldn’t be executed for their crimes. As for complete deterrence, nobody has any illusion that the death penalty will put an end to murder; if elimination were our standard for punishment, we still wouldn’t be putting people in prison. Capital punishment has been proven to deter murders, but we’ll never really know how many people have been stopped from committing murder for pecuniary gain because nobody in their right mind will admit that they considered committing a murder. Those who would admit it are likely in dire need of regular phenobarbital treatments, anyway.

It’s not as if I have never struggled with my belief in the death penalty. Because I carry a gun, I have considered at length whether I would be willing to take a life if the situation called for it (I don’t think you should carry a gun unless you ARE willing to kill, and you’d best know how you feel and what you think about doing it before you end up needing to in self-defense). I won’t know until and unless I ever have to commit the act, and I hope like hell that I never have to, but I’ve also been faced with death in my duties as an EMT and I have given death a lot of consideration – both my own death and that of others. My faith tells me I should forgive. My faith also tells me I should be able to balance justice and mercy, and know when the greatest lesson will be learned from one or the other.

So many criminals in our society depend on the faith-based mercy of others. That dependence has been fulfilled so often that it has morphed into expectation. I have met so few inmates who actually intended to change their behavior that I have a hard time believing that any of them care to change. I have met many, however, who struck me as being so evil that their very presence in the room made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I’ve worked with inmates whose self-serving behavior and subsequent excuses screamed “PSYCHOPATH!”

Our justice system will never be perfect, but we have to be willing to accept that there is evil in this world and there always will be no matter what we do. As long as human beings are running the show in this world there will be imperfection. Evil will persist no matter how much we wish we could reason everyone into being good. We have to be willing to accept being uncomfortable once in a while to make sure evil doesn’t win. That means that we have to accept that not all life is indispensible; those who have made the choice to objectify others and make victims out of innocent people forfeit their lives, even to the point of execution.

As for the argument that it’s cruel and unusual punishment…horsefeathers. Ask the victims about the fear and extreme pain they experienced before they died. Ask their surviving friends and family what they experience every day after losing their loved one.

Throughout the entire documentary, he never once asks, “why does God allow evil people to live and commit murder?”

I remember going home to Houston for Thanksgiving in 2001 and seeing news that the body of a woman had been found in a lake. That woman turned out to be 50-year-old Sandra Stotler. In her home several days after she had actually been killed, police found a grisly scene. Lights and the TV were still on, having never been turned off by the killer. Stotler had been baking cookies; a bowl of raw cookie dough and a half-finished sheet of unbaked cookies still sat out where she’d left them. Blood had been splattered all over the door frame and wall. Blood on the floor showed that after she’d been shot once, she had hit the floor and tried to scoot away, but the gunman shot her a second time where she lay. A red Camaro convertible was missing and a blood trail showed that the body had been dragged out through the garage on the side of the big ranch-style house in the upscale Highlands Ranch subdivision of Conroe, Texas.

Conroe isn’t far from where I grew up. About an hour and a half due North of Houston, right on I-45, sits this quiet little town that I remember driving through during the summer when my youth group would go up to Huntsville for camp. That a murder like this would happen in such a quiet, well-guarded neighborhood was very rattling to a lot of people I know. What’s most chilling of all is that the crime that turned into a triple homicide later on was all over a car.

Michael James Perry and Jason Aaron Burkett were best friends. They had lived together for a stretch in a camper, then later in an apartment in Conroe. For a time they had a racket going with Burkett’s girlfriend where one would steal checks, one would forge them, and the girlfriend would then cash them. As children, they both had serious issues. Burkett’s father was a raging alcoholic and drug addict, and as of this year is on his fifth prison sentence (back in 1973 Dennis Burkett was a high school football star and landed a full scholarship to the University of Texas to play college ball but he dropped out and went his own way – which is why I sincerely disliked the turn of events in the final season of Friday Night Lights). Burkett’s older brother is also in prison for a dangerous felony, making criminal behavior a family profession. Burkett has issues; Perry is worse.

As a child, Perry was diagnosed with “oppositional defiant disorder”, which is the childhood diagnosis of sociopathy. Perry grew up to be a psychopath (for those who never took psych classes in college, a literal psychopath is a person diagnosed as a sociopath – basically a person who views people as objects and has absolutely no conscience). He ran away from home frequently, pawned his parent’s valuables, stole their van and wrecked it, and broke into a neighbor’s home for the sole purpose of doing damage. His parents sent him to “Outward Bound”, an outdoors rough-it camp for troubled kids; he quit after a few days. His parents filed charges against him and had him sent to Boys Town in Nebraska, where he promptly told one of the “house parents” that he was one of the people “trying to rape and murder your kids.” He ended up being locked in the secure section of Boys Town for four months, later being sent to a “secure school” in Mexico. As soon as he turned 18 he went homeless; he refused to hold down a job and tried to forge prescriptions to get pills to sell for dope money. Somewhere in the midst of that was when he fell in with Jason Burkett.

Two days after the murder, Perry was pulled over in the red Camaro and presented an ID bearing the name and info of Adam Stotler – the 16-year-old son of Sandra Stotler. He was arrested, booked and released. Three days after his arrest, he and Jason Burkett were spotted in Adam Stotler’s stolen Isuzu Rodeo. They ran over a deputy and had a shoot-out with police; officers later testified that Perry was shouting, “balls to the wall!” They were arrested, and almost immediately Jason Burkett told them where to find two additional bodies. Police discovered the bodies of Adam Stotler and his best friend Jeremy Richardson next to another home in Highlands Ranch. Evidence included cigarette butts with Perry’s DNA on them. The shotgun used in the murders was stolen from a relative of Burkett. On top of all of this, the pair went to a bar in the two vehicles they’d stolen and claimed to everyone in the bar that they’d won the lottery, cashed the tickets at a gas station and went out to buy two supposedly brand-new vehicles. They took several people for a spin in the cars and even showed off the shotgun they’d used – and Perry later pointed the shotgun at Burkett’s girlfriend and threatened to kill her.

Perry confessed, and during the confession he gave facts that only the perpetrators would have known. He later claimed that a detective pointed a gun at him and forced him to confess, then even later claimed that evidence had somehow proven that the murders had happened on the 27th. The problem with that? Stotler’s body was found on October 27th, three days after the murders – and she had been there for some time, wrapped in the comforter and top sheet from her bed. Some of the crime scene footage is shown in the documentary, and I can tell just by the video footage that the blood on the floor was OLD.

Perry had an excuse for everything. During the interviews, he never referred to the victims as the true victims; he only talked about how he’s been wronged. It didn’t help that, as soon as he sat down and started talking, Herzog said, “I respect you and I believe that what’s been done to you is wrong.” Not once does Perry ever acknowledge that several people’s lives were irrevocably changed by what happened. In fact, it’s revealed that in his final statement before his execution, Perry said, “Yes, I want to start off by saying to everyone know that’s involved in this atrocity that they are all forgiven by me.”

Never does Herzog ever question Perry to his face on his claims that he, the convict, has been wronged. He never asks Perry about his long, storied history of sociopathic behavior. All he does is try to present the case against executions.

I’m tired of hearing people ask why God allows capital punishment. Life is precious, but when the person in question has made the choice to live their life in such a way that they have done nothing but victimize people for their own gain, justice must be done. Perry is guilty as hell, as is Burkett. Just once I’d like to hear one of these foreigners who bag on us for using the death penalty ask why God allows violent sociopaths to continually victimize innocent souls – and stop defending the killers.

What he says in his posts, however, is breathtakingly offensive to every conservative on the planet. I’m pretty sure some of his misinformation is deliberate.

First, he claims to be blacklisted because he works at Fox News. If that’s the case, then how did Fox personality Rita Cosby get picked up so quickly by MSNBC in 2005? I find it very hard to believe that other networks refused to pick him up because he worked for Fox.

Second, he refers to Fox Nation – the blog arm of the network where hosts and producers can talk about the news with viewers and readers – as “an unholy mashup of the Drudge Report, the Huffington Post and a Klan meeting.” His whole point is based on a single article called “Obama’s Hip-Hop BBQ Didn’t Create Jobs.” He says, in caps, “HOLY MOLY THESE PEOPLE DO NOT LIKE THE BLACK PRESIDENT.”

Excuse me? Oh, yes – he really did say that. His claims point to odd commenters who used the n-word when referring to President Obama (I have only twice seen anyone use the n-word when referring to the President on Fox Nation, and those people are soundly rebuked by everyone else in short order – something you won’t see on those articles now because Fox routinely shuts down comments on an article once it reaches a certain age). Muto also points to commenters who refer to Obama as “the Muslim president”, something I have said before – it’s not a racist thing. The man has “slipped” before and referred to it as “my Muslim faith.” We’re not lying when we call him that, nor are we being racists. I would think people would get the message when Obama shelled out one and a half billion for the Muslim Brotherhood, but apparently that has gone completely unnoticed.

What’s more, Muto doesn’t link the actual articles. What he links to are the reports from uber-hard-left groups such as Huffington Post, Media Matters and Think Progress. That, in and of itself, should be very telling.

He goes on to provide unseen footage of Mitt Romney and Sean Hannity talking off-air about riding horses – particularly the kind of horses he likes as opposed to his wife. He then has the nerve to compare Romney enjoying horseback riding to Obama playing golf. Hold on just a minute, sparky…Obama goes out to play golf when he SHOULD be running the country. He does it with astonishing frequency. He also goes on “date nights” that include taking a carbon-belching jet to New York to do things that only the very wealthy can afford to do all while telling the rest of us that we need to “tighten our belts”. Exactly who do you think you’re fooling?

Then he really gets under my skin. He mocks Romney’s proper pronunciation of a particular breed of horse – a dressage horse known as an Austrian Warmblood – by saying, “to GOP-voter ears it sounds not only gay, but even worse, French.”

You arrogant little shit.

There are about three or four hundred conservatives I personally know who got pissed about that remark. Every single one of them knows I’m a lesbian, and they think it’s fantastic that I’m both gay and politically conservative. Many of them actually support gay marriage rights despite what morons like you would have the whole world believe. They don’t wish me dead, they don’t want to see me thrown in jail under any re-hashed sodomy law; they wish me all the happiness in the world. Every one of them was just as deeply insulted by your crass remark as I was. We are all continually insulted by the continuing claims that we are all racists who dislike the President because he’s black. I guess you missed the many messages of overwhelming support for Allen West to run. Either you missed them or you deliberately ignored them.

You are just another mouthpiece for the Soros-funded left-wing extremism that permeates our culture like a noxious fume. You’ll decry dangerous rhetoric even as you spit it out like a trained parrot. I hope you’re proud of yourself.

Wouldn’t you know? I was right.

Turns out the shooter is 19-year-old Jake England, a full-blooded Cherokee Indian whose father was shot to death by a black man two years ago. The shooter, Pernell Jefferson, only got six years for the murder. England and an alleged accomplice, 32-year-old Alvin Watts, were arrested for the shootings today. In the interim, the NAACP held emergency meetings and everyone started making assumptions. They’re STILL making assumptions.

Tulsa city councilman Jack Henderson, who spent seven years as a president of the NAACP, said, “Being an NAACP president for seven years, I think that somebody that committed these crimes were very upset with black people. That person happened to be a white person, the people they happened to kill and shoot are black people. That fits the bill for me.”

Now we’ve gone from making assumptions to telling outright lies. Not since Kanye got on a Katrina telethon and blurted, “Bush doesn’t care about black people!” have we seen such willful ignorance.

Ever since the Trayvon Martin shooting, I have heard some insane things. One Twitter user, @KennisTheMenace, claimed Trayvon was a “little kid”, and when I pointed out that 17 is hardly a little kid he got snarky and said, “he weighed 160 pounds. That’s very little!!!” No, actually, it isn’t…take that 6’4″, 160-pound guy, pick him up by his armpits and dead-drag him 50 feet, then tell me he’s still “very little.” Countless people are STILL claiming that Zimmerman went after Trayvon despite a police dispatcher telling him not to; this is a lie perpetrated by the media. Zimmerman had already lost Trayvon in the complex and when the dispatcher told him that they didn’t need him to follow Trayvon, he walked back to his SUV. Once the lie got out there, it was impossible to take back. Now it has formed a life of its own and millions refuse to believe the truth.

Now we have the New Black Panther Party going against Trayvon’s family’s wishes to put a bounty on Zimmerman’s head. We even have untold numbers swearing they’d kill Zimmerman on sight. Another incident occurs and, rather than wait for the facts, a black city councilman in Tulsa claims the shooter was a white man who was prejudiced against blacks. His excuse is that it “fits the bill” for him.

I have never in my life been so ashamed at how my country is reacting to such hatred. No president, not even Bill Clinton, made me nearly as ashamed as I am right now of Barack Obama. When we need leadership the most to stand up and calm both sides of an issue, they’re sitting on their laurels and enjoying what’s happening. Liberals are only too happy to yet again claim that all white conservatives are racists, regardless of the facts in these incidents. Rather than taking a step back and thinking clearly and rationally, we have reactionary, emotionally-charged politics ruling everyone’s behavior. The result will undoubtedly be another race riot, one where I’m sure we’ll see them looting their own neighborhoods and targeting Asian store owners just like they did in Los Angeles twenty years ago over a guy who got hopped up on dangerous narcotics, fled a traffic stop and fought with the cops, then later spit on paramedics who were trying to help him.

We’re not talking about Dr. King’s dream anymore. We’re talking about brutality and murder, all because one group has gotten professional victimhood down to a science. When Dr. King was with us, he refused to become violent, even in self-defense, and he chastised those who called for anger and violence. Were he here today he would weep for what his dream has been twisted into.

According to the news, England referred to Jefferson with a racial slur – one that blacks commonly call each other. There’s more to the story, too. England’s fiancee Sheran committed suicide in front of him just six months after delivering their child. Had a young black man experienced such intense losses, everyone would be talking about how he just went insane and he needs help. Instead, he’s being called a white racist. What England and Watts did was completely wrong and they should face the death penalty for it, but to call anyone who challenges the notion that all white conservatives are out to get all black people a racist is a sin and a damned shame. It is blatant character assassination, and the media has been all too happy to help it along.

Hey, anything that helps paint conservatives in a bad light. Even if it’s a lie, it’ll fit the bill.

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.