"Moderate" "Establishment" "Institutionalist" John Boehner's Anti-Gay Activism

Right on the high heels of the Senate's passage of ENDA, the Employment Non Discrimination Act, by a bipartisan supermajority, Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner refused even to allow a vote on the law in the House of Representatives. So doing, Boehner single-handedly ensured the failure of the Act which -- like so many urgently necessary and overwhelmingly popular measures (like commonsense gun safety measures, like comprehensive immigration reform, like a farm bill restoring SNAP benefits to vulnerable citizens, like the President's Jobs Bill and countless infrastructure spending measures that could stimulate our needlessly depressed economy and turn around the Republican manufactured unemployment crisis) -- has more than enough votes with a majority of Democratic and a minority of Republican on-record supporters to pass.

Although it is perfectly legal and all to commonplace to fire people simply because of their sexual orientation in twenty-nine states as well as to fire trangender folks in thirty-three states, Boehner has declared that the law is not needed and that queer folks are already protected. This is a lie, told by a bigot.

Today, we discover as well that Boehner has gone out of his way to provide space for a hate-group called the World Congress of Families (it's a Congress for all the World's Families except for all the families with queer folks in them or families that happen to welcome their queer friends and neighbors and fellow citizens, which are families that aren't families for the World Congress of Families). Boehner secured the group a government-sanctioned platform for their hate after Illinois Senator Mark Kirk withdrew their access to a space in a Senate office building.

The President of the hate group Allen Carlson praised John Boehner, congratulating him for refusing to succumb to fear of lesbian and gay activists whose exposure of antigay bigotry and work to secure equity and protection for queer folks he apparently compared to the rise of fascism. The event that Boehner has secured will educate legislators how they can promote families (you know, the real families, the ones defined, as everybody knows, by the pure heterosexuality and obsessive homophobia of all of their members) by emulating Russia's laws harassing queer folks, fostering anti-gay violence, spreading officially-sanctioned anti-gay misinformation and propaganda, and harshly censoring any public recognition or factual discussion of queerness.

I don't care if it makes him cry to hear me say so: John Boehner isn't only a well-meaning but utterly incompetent Speaker of the House presiding ineffectually over one of the most unruly and historically useless Congresses in the history of the institution. He is everything but well meaning, he is indeed incompetent, but also an utterly evil asshole.