Jophiel wrote:
I do not accept that those two examples indicate what Gbaji is actually alleging, which is a coordinated and sustained Democratic campaign to paint homosexuals "in the most offensive ways possible" and accuse them of being perverts, fondling themselves in front of other men and who can't control their sexual appetites.
That's not what I'm alleging. I'm pointing to one election campaign (not all campaigns, nor a "sustained" anything), in which one homosexual (not all homosexuals) had virtually every negative and ugly stereotype tossed at him. I'm pointing out the hypocrisy that this was done by the party/side/ideology/whatever that constantly claims to support homosexual rights. And if your answer is "but conservatives have done this sort of thing before", including examples of say political campaigns, or a business discriminating against homosexuals, then you're missing the point entirely.
You can't both claim that the dems are better then the gop in this regard, or that liberal ideology is somehow innately more friendly to homosexuals, women, people of color, etc, and then handwave away cases like this because "conservatives do that too!".
How about we accept that "people" engage in such behavior, and it's maybe not so much a special case of one "side" or the other. That's all I'm saying. That and it was a really ugly campaign. I get that it's hard to see this from the outside and just looking at national level news links and whatnot. You had to see the ads directly, and the buzz going on back and forth over the last few months to really understand. It was really really ugly. Probably the ugliest local election I've seen in my lifetime. And pretty much entirely about painting Demaio as a bad person
because he was homosexual. Seriously. That was almost the entirety of the Peters campaign. They did toss out a couple ads trying weakly to tie Demaio to a pension scam a few years back (which was really weak because Peters was much more closely involved than Demaio, and everyone paying any attention knew it), but that was about it.
It's hard to explain to people who didn't see it directly, but it did become painfully obvious that a major component of the Peter's campaign was to make sure everyone knew Demaio was homosexual. Which was funny because Demaio was quite open about it anyway (actually proud of being a gay republican in fact). So yeah, when, after months of this, suddenly these allegations appear? It looked pretty obviously like the Peters camp realized that just telling people that he was gay wasn't actually pushing voters away, so they felt they had to go that extra mile to make him out as a pervert (which is actually something that straight Democrats around here seem to have down pat).
Do I have proof that the Peters campaign was behind it? Not at all. But it was a progression of attacks, so if it wasn't them, it was clearly someone operating on their behalf. I guess my point is more about the hypocrisy of it, not really about the politician himself. The idea that people on that "side" are so anti-republican that they'd stoop to making attacks on someone's sexual orientation as a means of preventing him from winning the election, while maintaining that defending sexual orienation is a huge part of what makes them different than republicans in the first place. I suppose you also have to put this in the context of the whole prop 8 battle as well. It's something someone not living here might not see in the same way. But, as I said, it was a progression of events that occurred that at some point when well beyond coincidence and just politics as usual.
And it's a super tight race still. They're saying that we wont know the results until Monday at the earliest. I seem to recall that the total tally isn't actually generated for quite some time (a month or so?) after election night, so it might be longer than that. And there's already talk about recounts and whatnot. Should be interesting, to say the least.
Edited, Nov 6th 2014 7:00pm by gbaji 
