Right-Wing Magazine Blasts Anti-Gay Email
The Weekly Standard, a neoconservative magazine, is being criticized for the anti-gay email it sent to its thousands of readers, Salon.com reported in a Jan. 5 article.
Eugene Delgaudi, a social conservative and anti-gay activist who is the executive director of the conservative organization Public Advocate of the U.S., was responsible for the bigoted email.
The email, which toted the subject line "Congress to mandate pro-homosexual education?" slammed the Student Non-Discrimination Act -- a legislation that would protect LGBT youth against bullying and discrimination in schools.
Delgaudi renames the legislation as the "Homosexual Classroom Act," and bashes the proposed legislation with several ignorant and anti-gay statements.
The email says that the legislation will "require schools to teach appalling homosexual acts so 'homosexual students' don't feel 'singled out' during already explicit sex-ed classes."
Delgaudi goes on to write that the bill is the beginning of a "secret plan" by gay campaigners and that "it will set them up to ram through their entire perverted vision for a 'homosexual America.'"
He says that the act would "spin impressionable students in a whirlwind of sexual confusion and misinformation, even peer pressure to 'experiment' with the homosexual 'lifestyle'" and that it would make private and religious schools "teach a pro-homosexual curriculum."
In addition, Delgaudi wrote, "Sexual deviants being held up as models of virtue? If that makes you as sick as it makes me, you simply must join me in this battle for America's children."
The Human Rights Campaign issued a statement demanding that the Weekly Standard's editor, William Kristol, condemn the anti-gay email, Politico reported in a Jan. 5 article: "The Human Rights Campaign is condemning the Weekly Standard for sending an email on behalf of one of their sponsors, the anti-gay organization 'Public Advocate of the United States,' that called LGBT Americans 'sexual deviants' and asked recipients to contribute financially to efforts aimed at defaming the Student Non-Discrimination Act."
The magazine's publisher, Terry Eastland, talked to Politico and said that the company's "vetting system broke down."
"This is obviously not the sort of advertising that we would accept, nor will we accept it in the future," Eastland said. "It was just one of these cases where an ad came in, it was not fully vetted in the way it should be, and it got out."
Eastland also told the website that Kristol would not condemn the email.
Unfortunately, Delgaudi isn't the only the only person that has diluted and skewed views about the LGBT community. Many of the GOP candidates feel the same on gay issues, including frontrunner Rick Santorum.
In a Jan. 8 article by Townhall.com, a conservative website and magazine, Santorum was criticized on his anti-gay views.
"Santorum takes it for granted that religious belief, at least of the Christian variety, is a powerful force for moral behavior," the website says. "That's not apparent from looking at this country."
Santorum has said a number of times that gay rights, feminism, pornography and other things he deems unsavory, will ruin America. Townhall says, however, that he has never provided any evidence that this is the case. The website points out that in the past twenty or so years that moral and social health has improved.
"What impact does gay marriage have on how kids handle sex? Massachusetts, the first state to legalize it, has less teen pregnancy than the country as a whole," Townhall writes. "Connecticut, Iowa, New Hampshire and Vermont, which have also sanctioned same-sex unions, are also far better than average."
The website goes on to question how same-sex marriage impacts heterosexual marriage. It explains that Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the country and Iowa and Connecticut's divorce rates are better than most other states. "In the Bible Belt, by contrast, marriages are generally more prone to break up," the website says.
The attack was especially interesting as it appeared on Townhall, one of the most conservative web-based periodicals out there. The column may be reflective of worries in the GOP that a rabid anti-gay position isn't resonating with younger voters.