With each passing day, New Yorkers face a choice of electing Carl Paladino as their governor or reporting him to authorities to be prosecuted for hate speech.
The Republican candidate wants to make it clear he disapproves of homosexuality. Point taken, but with all the problems facing voters, does he have to make his prejudice a campaign issue?
Last week, he told Orthodox Jewish leaders, “I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family, and I don’t want them brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option--it isn’t."
That must have been a relief for Orthodox Jews who stay awake nights worrying about it, but Paladino wants to be sure he has made his stand perfectly clear. On the Today show, he criticizes his opponent Andrew Cuomo for having attended a Gay Pride Parade.
“Is that normal? Would you do it? Would you take your children?” Paladino asks Matt Lauer. “I don’t think it’s proper for them to go there and watch a couple of grown men grind against each other...I think it’s disgusting.”
New York voters may be impressed with a candidate so dedicated to exercising his right of free speech, but are they ready for a governor with such violent prejudices and a strong instinct for his own jugular?
Perhaps as the campaign goes on, Paladino will enlighten them with his views on other minorities, but they would be well-advised to keep the kids out of earshot.
Update: A day late and a dollar short, Paladino apologizes for "poorly chosen words" as his campaign cites a gay nephew, who is not appeased. Family values are tricky.
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Hardly a day passed after returning from a long trip, a fatiguing 13-hour non-stop drive, when a GOP canvasser came to my door soliciting on behalf of the local Congressional candidate. Immediately, the spiel started with how the democrats are destroying the country and why I should read the GOP talking points pamphlet, which I refused to accept as one shuns the plague.
Just as immediately, I went ballistic over the bigotry, racism, anti-Hispanic, homophobic, and Islamophobic hysteria of GOP wedge politics designed to polarize and abuse the electorate; and how the same kind of bigotry and hysteria murdered my ancestors; and why the GOP are nothing more than a gang of Nazis who want to privatize social security and Medicare, eliminate the EPA and FDA, end minimum wage and worker safety standards, prohibit gays and single women from teaching school, and turn the country into a banana republic; and then I yammered about the lets-bring-back-segregation candidate from Kentucky, the lets-shoot-Harry Reid candidate from Nevada, the stupid not-a-witch candidate from Delaware, the email-bestiality candidate from New York, and the Nazi-cross-dressing candidate from Ohio; then I started a verbal tirade over a secret plan by the GOP to disenfranchise minority voters in Chicago …
… before I slammed the door. As one of those mild-mannered, moderate voters, can you imagine what I might have done if I were a radical extremist!
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