gay equality

This week Roy Moore, who still refuses to concede defeat in the Alabama Senate race, attacked Doug Jones' gay son, Carson for... being gay.

Do you read the Style Section of the NY Times? Me neither, but there was a piece yesterday about gossip columnist Liz Smith, who died Sunday. I didn't know she had died and didn't know she had lived her life in the closet.

People in America are used to it but Brits were astonished enough so that one of their newspapers, The Independent ran a headline saying Donald Trump to become first president to speak at anti-LGBT hate group's annual summit.

Mashrou' Leila, a 5 piece alt-rock band from Beirut, is almost 10 years old. The sing about the some topics indie bands everywhere sing about-- like why stuff (like politics) sucks. But in their part of the world, those topics can mean trouble, especially now that they're hugely popular and draw gigantic crowds. Lead singer Hamed Sinno is openly gay-- which is dangerous in conservative Middle East societies.

Most of us outside Hawaii who have heard of Doug Chin know him as the courageous Attorney General-- appointed, not elected-- who has gone after Trump. Rachel Maddow tried making him a star on her show without doing any diligence about what she was extolling. I bet ole Rachel never saw that YouTube video up top. Yep, that's Doug Chin preaching like an insane zealot, screaming his homophobic rantings-- "God is right; your family is wrong." Holy Moly!

I was lucky; I came out when I was living in Amsterdam. I worried there was something wrong with me so I went to see a psychiatrist. I told him I thought I could be gay. He asked me why I was coming to him and if I was looking for addresses of gay bars and other places where gay people met. I didn't. I lived right across the street-- literally, 30 steps-- from a side gate into Amsterdam's biggest park (like their version of Central Park or Griffith Park). And it was a special entrance, as it turns out. At night there were always gay men in that part of the park eager to meet other men.

-by NoahAs I write this, today is Pride Day.

Ostensibly, ex-Mayor Anthony Silva, a Stockton Republican, was arrested and thrown in jail with a million dollar bond because he embezzled some money from the Stockton Boys and Girls Club. What hasn't come out yet, though, is that the aggressively homophobic hypocrite was having sex with underage boys from the club and seems to have murdered one of his 16 year old victims.

Even he's laughing at the idiotsPerhaps you read something about Trump being forced to fire his National Security Advisor after just a few weeks on the job, when he was exposed for taking cash from Putin and illicitly conniving with him even before Trump was sworn in. Many people find that rather important.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at UC, Berkeley. He was the token progressive in Bill Clinton's very centrist cabinet, where he served as Secretary of Labor. In 2002, he ran for governor of Massachusetts-- Clinton, angered by his book, Locked in the Cabinet, endorsed one of his primary rivals, someone who won less than 1% of the vote-- and came in second in a 5-way race. Reich, the unabashed, cutting-edge progressive in the race, lost out to an uninspiring, unelectable establishment hack, state Treasurer Shannon O'Brien, who took 243,039 votes to his 185,315.