Posts Tagged ‘Mormons’

Charles Winecoff

Boo-Hoo: Gays’ Lachrymose Last Resort in the War Against Mormons

by Charles Winecoff

There are more histrionics on display in the two-minute trailer (see below)for the pro-gay-marriage ”documentary,” 8: The Mormon Proposition, than in all the episodes of Oprah I can remember seeing.

A blonde woman, tears running down her face, looks into the camera and pleads, “Why did the Mormons do this to us?”

In a crowd of what I presume are gay activists (and not film goers), a young man sobs so hard that he has to be comforted by a female friend.


A bulldyke (I’m guessing) stares out at the viewer, her despondent face sopping wet.

And one of the stars of the film, a pretty gay boy (and ex-Mormon) named Tyler Barrick – who seems have been inspired by Barbra Streisand in A Star Is Born – clings to his husband and bawls, “I can’t believe that people could hate us this much!” Really?  I can. (more…)

Andrew Breitbart

George W. Bush-by-Proxy Syndrome

by Andrew Breitbart

This week’s Washington Times column:

There is an extensive body of writing from both sides of the political aisle that has analyzed the extraordinary depths of hatred leveled at former President George W. Bush.

His birth into a wealthy and politically connected family is where a lot of the animus starts. His rejection of his Connecticut roots and adoption of a rugged Texan persona naturally riled his birth-constituency. His disjointed speaking style also alienated many others – especially those who covered him in the Northeastern media. Naturally, some of his initiatives were controversial. His allies say he didn’t do enough.

But all presidents make mistakes, pursue unpopular ideas, possess off-putting personality traits and don’t do enough to appeal to their core supporters. Something far more insidious was at work in the hatred of our most recent former president.

Now that Mr. Bush is quietly going about his retirement, this strain of rage – the GWB43 virus – has spread like wildfire, finding unsuspecting targets, each granting us greater perspective into what not long ago seemed like a mysterious phenomenon isolated only on our 43rd president.

The first person to catch the virus was Sarah Palin, whose family also was infected, including, unforgivably, her children.

(more…)

Charles Winecoff

A-holes and Insects – or Mother Nature Doesn’t Care If You’re a Good Liberal

by Charles Winecoff

Decades before George Clooney began using “Darfur” to swat away the unfashionable nuisance of “Iraq,” the hollow eyes and distended stomachs of starving Biafran children gave America’s impressionable “me generation” a reality check during commercial breaks.  Parents shook their heads and wrote checks.  “We have so much,” went the refrain.  “The world is so unfair.”

My pretty fourth-grade teacher, who taught us everything from math and history to a dash of entomology (study of insects), didn’t think so.  One day, unprompted, she told her class of 10-year-olds that she wasn’t really concerned about the Biafran babies because mass starvation was just nature’s way of controlling overpopulation.  (My parents were mortified.)


Margaret Sanger

Hard to fathom how, less than three decades after the Holocaust, any educated person could harbor such cold acceptance of the cruel suffering of fellow human beings - much less voice it (and to children, no less).  But whoever said the human race is on a one-way path to progress?

It’s widely assumed that, in every moment we’re alive, we’ve reached a new pinnacle – of modernity, experience, knowledge, enlightenment – that we always move forward, never back.  But what if we don’t?  What if we’re fated to make the same mistakes (disguised with innocuous new names) over and over again? (more…)

Pam Meister

‘Brave’ Hollywood Takes It To The Mormons

by Pam Meister

Mormon church leaders are criticizing HBO for including a private, sacred ceremony in its show Big Love, the drama about a polygamous Mormon family in Utah. Apparently only church members “in good standing” are allowed to enter temples and either witness or take part in the rite called the “endowment ceremony.”

HBO, of course, apologized for offending Mormons but defended its use of the ceremony because its depiction is “critical” to the show’s story line. Ah, the quintessential non-apology apology, used frequently by politicians: We’re sorry if we offended anyone, but we’re not going to do anything that will actually rectify the situation. Be sure to tune in, though, and boost our ratings! (more…)

Stage Right

A View From Stage Right; Part 2

by Stage Right

Part 1 of what I half-jokingly called my “Manifesto.”

In a fiscal conservative’s utopian dreamworld, there would be no federal funding for the arts (or so many other government agencies or programs for that matter).  This has been our position since the inception of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in the early 1970’s.  We’ve been saying that if elected, we would abolish these misguided programs and departments and bring our government back to the bare-bones constitutionally described role that it has and leave everything else to the states.

We’ve held the influential bully pulpit of the presidency for twenty of the past twenty-eight years, and what has happened to the NEA?  It has grown.  While we have stood on principle,  we have also stood on the sidelines.  The founding fathers would be outraged that the federal government is funding art with taxpayer money, but because we are on the sidelines standing on our principles, all of that money is going to the people creating art with messages that undermine our very existence. (more…)