Meghan McCain got a lot of flack from those on the liberal side, including some gay political bloggers, for her posts on McCainBloggette.com during the presidential campaign of her father, Sen. John McCain, last year. I think those same folks need to give her some respect now.
Meghan McCain has continued to write and is a regular contributor now to TheDailyBeast.com. In a recent column, titled “My Beef with Ann Coulter,” she took on the ultra-right-wing author and commentator known to many — and I am borrowing this phrase — as “The Wicked Witch of the Right.” In that column, McCain described Coulter as a mean, confusing woman who is “disaster” for the Republican Party. She also chastised the GOP for allowing wing nuts (my words, not McCain’s) like Coulter and Rush Limbaugh to be the public faces and voices of the party.
Well, Coulter did not respond. But her buddy, conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham, did. Her words of wisdom? She basically called McCain a fatty and a dumb blonde.
Then McCain went on “The View” with an intelligent and impassioned response. She said it is way past time for people to stop judging a woman’s intelligence and effectiveness based on their weight and dress size. (McCain says she is a size 8 who ballooned up to a – gasp! – size 10 during the campaign last year. Both Coulter and Ingraham, from photos I have seen, are thin to the point of being skeletal.)
McCain then went on to invoke the spirit of Tyra Banks — the former model turned talk show host who did a whole series of shows on women’s self esteem after tabloids made fun of her for gaining weight — and suggested that Coulter, Ingraham and anyone else who judged her based on her weight could “kiss my fat ass!”
Oh, and that’s not all. In the orginal column, McCain made a point of saying that she is a moderate Republican and considers herself fiscally conservative, but much more liberal on social issues, including gay marriage. Too bad she couldn’t say that last year during the campaign, but hey! She’s said it now.
And I say, you go girl!
If the GOP had more people like Meghan McCain who were willing to stand up and speak out, the party probably wouldn’t be such a disaster right now. And the LGBT people like those in Log Cabin who have been standing at the Republican gate for so long, struggling and begging to be let into the so-called Big Tent, might be able to find a real place at the table.
And that, I think, would be a good thing for all of us.
Compare and contrast; one of my high school english teachers drilled that into my head.
Compare and contrast: Slave rights and gay rights; the contrasts are easy, the comparisons are profound. Slaves could not get legally married either. They could not create and sign contracts, and what is marriage mostly (legally speaking) but a huge contract with thousands of rights and responsibilities.
Navanethem Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights spoke there last year saying, “That just like apartheid laws that criminalized sexual relations between different races, laws against homosexuality are increasingly becoming recognized as anachronistic and inconsistent both with international law and with traditional values of dignity, inclusion, and respect for all.”
Apartheid: A system of laws applied to one category of citizens in order to isolate them and keep them from having privileges and opportunities given to all others.
Stop gay apartheid.