Homophobic Senate Candidate O’Donnell Demonizes Gays -- So What About Her Out Sister?
0Professionally anti-gay Senatorial candidate Christine O'Donnell has a lesbian sister--and a gay former friend who says that the Tea Party candidate "turned her back" on him when, after making a name for himself as an "ex-gay," he came out as not so "ex" after all.
O'Donnell surprised everyone when she won the primary in Delaware for the state's seat in the Senate, beating out incumbent Mike Castle. Just as noteworthy as the upset victory, however, was the road O'Donnell took to achieve it--a road that was paved with homophobic and untrue allegations against Castle.
Former staffers of O'Donnell's campaign were reportedly behind an apparently groundless rumor that Castle was embroiled in a gay affair--an allegation that RedState blogger Erik Erikson called the O'Donnell campaign on in a Sept. 3 posting, despite protestations made by the blogger that he "would rather die a thousand times over via crushing by an anaconda while being torn limb from limb by a jaguar than see Mike Castle in the Senate."
Erikson recounted that O'Donnell staffers who had left her campaign launched a website called Liberty.com, where the allegation was made. "When it was pointed out that all the people behind the accusation were O'Donnell campaign staffers, the response was 'not any more,' " Erikson noted. "After a year of direct and indirect advocacy for Christine O'Donnell, it is pretty doggone hard to now stand apart and say 'Nope, not campaign related.' "
Erikson denounced as "lies" claims that the Tea Party embraced racist and homophobic elements, and wrote, "I don't care if Mike Castle is meeting up with Larry Craig at Stallknockers.com for some Union Station visitation--without proof it is meaningless and even with proof it is a distraction from the issues and not helpful to tea party activists or Christine O'Donnell."
Politico's Ben Smith also reported on the anti-gay smear effort directed at Castle, writing in a Sept. 1 blog posting that, "A conservative firm until recently employed by the Delaware primary campaign of conservative Christine O'Donnell against Rep. Mike Castle casually leveled an extraordinary--and unsupported--charge of a gay affair against Castle in a video posted to its website today, the ugliest salvo yet in an extremely bitter primary."
O'Donnell has long built a public and political career on slurs aimed at gays, a Sept. 16 Daily Beast article reported. O'Donnell publicly objected to people living with HIV and AIDS being referred to as victims, the Daily Beast recounted, because, O'Donnell maintained, HIV-positive people had brought the disease upon themselves. When openly gay ambassador James Hormel was appointed by Bill Clinton, O'Donnell accused Hormel of sympathizing with pedophiles--without a bit of evidence to support the claim.
The pattern was repeated in the Delaware primary, when O'Donnell's campaign said nothing to contradict the claims of her former campaign staffers baselessly accusing Castle of homosexuality.
Moreover, O'Donnell's campaign was beset by a host of other apparent departures from fact, including claims that O'Donnell possessed a degree that she did not, in fact, have, and a past political victory that was, in fact, a defeat.
The Daily Beast, however, focused on O'Donnell's attacks against the LGBT community, despite O'Donnell's sister being an open lesbian. Indeed, the article said, it was O'Donnell's sister who helped O'Donnell associate Wade Richards come to terms with his own sexuality.
Richards came from a religious background and had been subjected to an "ex-gay": program in a bid to become heterosexual. Richards joined O'Donnell in traveling around the nation and talking about how gays could be "cured." When he realized that he has not been "cured" at all and was still gay, Richards spoke with O'Donnell about his increasing discomfort at speaking out against gays side-by-side with her.
O'Donnell seemingly didn't register his concerns. Richards continued on his journey through the anti-gay world, including a stint with the blog Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, where he found that the group's fascination with all things gay as suspiciously intense and detailed. For one thing, the group's "media room" contained stockpiles of gay pornography and bondage gear. "The sad thing was, there's that 80-year-old grandma in Wichita, Kansas, thinking she's donating this money to a good cause, and it's going to who knows what kind of 'research,' " Richards told the Daily Beast. "As someone struggling with same-sex attraction, I thought, this is really not a place I need to be hanging out in."
Eventually, Richards made his way out of the anti-gay and "ex-gay" world, and found his way to Wayne Besen, who works to counter the promises of "cures" and "conversions" offered by "ex-gay" advocates.
"I think he was harmed by Christine O'Donnell," Besen told The Daily Beast. "Christine O'Donnell was toeing the party line at the expense of an individual. Often these groups, in pushing their dogma, they overlook that there's a human being that's having their lives upended."
Eventually, the article said, Richards came clean by coming out. The result? O'Donnell "totally turned her back on me," Richards told the Daily Beast. "I never heard from her ever again."
But O'Donnell's lesbian sister gave him a life lesson he never forgot. "By hanging out with her," said Richards, "I saw, wow, she has a pretty normal life."