Plan B Forum

A Puerto Rico lawmaker has resigned following reports that explicit photos of him surfaced on Grindr, an iPhone application for gays and bisexuals, the head of the U.S. territory’s Senate announced Sunday.

Sen. Roberto Arango, a Republican who represents the capital of San Juan for the island’s governing party, presented his letter of resignation after a weekend meeting, Senate President Thomas Rivera Schatz said.

Schatz did not release the lawmaker’s letter, but said the circumstances that led to the resignation “are very lamentable.”

Local news media published photos from the application showing a man’s nude upper body with a cell phone obscuring his face. Another photo showed a rear view of a nude man on his hands and knees. Another showed a fuzzy image of a face that seemed to match Arango’s.

Arango has neither confirmed nor denied suggestions by local media that the photos might be of him and apparently was not asked if he had posted them. During a recent interview with WAPA TV in Puerto Rico, the senator said he has taken pictures of himself with a cell phone to document his recent weight loss. (lose a lot of weight off your ass, did you Senator?) ”I really don’t remember having taken those pictures of myself, but it doesn’t mean I didn’t take them,” he told the station. “I really don’t remember.” (he obviously went to the Anthony Weiner School for Dealing with Sex Scandals)

Arango did not return calls Sunday.

A graduate of Louisiana State University and a food importer before turning to politics, he was chairman of a business council for the national Republican Party and municipal director of the Republican Party in Puerto Rico, according to his Web page for Puerto Rico’s Senate.

Pedro Julio Serrano, founder of the gay rights group Puerto Rico for Everyone, said Arango voted in favor of Resolution 99, a proposal that would block any attempt to permit same-sex marriages in the U.S. territory. He also helped block a measure to ban sexual discrimination in the workplace and opposed adoption rights for gays.

“This isn’t a moment to kick someone when he’s down (sure it is, and aim right for his self-hating hypocritical balls), but I have to denounce Sen. Roberto Arango’s complicity with a fundamentalist agenda that promotes the exclusion and marginalization of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people,” Serrano said Sunday.

dgs49 wrote:God forbid I should actually think about the issues and draw my own conclusions. It might make me a traitor to my Oppressed Identity Group.

Or perhaps you see no incongruity in black people feeling at home in the KKK

Sure, like all the free-thinking indepenent black folks who were just too afraid to voice their support for Jim Crow for fear of being called a "traitor

In addition to presidential campaigns, Democratic charges of racism have been made about subsequent Republican campaigns for the House of Representatives and Senate in the South. The Willie Horton commercials used by supporters of George H. W. Bush against Michael Dukakis in the election of 1988 were considered by many Democrats, including Jesse Jackson, Lloyd Bentsen, and many newspaper editors, to be racist. The 1990 re-election campaign of Jesse Helms attacked his opponent's alleged support of "racial quotas," most notably through an ad in which a white person's hands are seen crumpling a letter indicating that he was denied a job because of the color of his skin.[31]

Bob Herbert, a New York Times columnist, reported a 1981 interview with Lee Atwater, published in Southern Politics in the 1990s by Prof. Alexander P. Lamis, in which Lee Atwater discussed politics in the South:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger".[5]

Herbert wrote in the same column, "The truth is that there was very little that was subconscious about the G.O.P.'s relentless appeal to racist whites. Tired of losing elections, it saw an opportunity to renew itself by opening its arms wide to white voters who could never forgive the Democratic Party for its support of civil rights and voting rights for blacks."[32]

dgs49 wrote:There are MANY gays ...

dgs49 wrote:the entire infrastructure of the rights and obligations of marriage are based on a common concept of the nuclear family that simply does not apply to same-sex couples.

dgs49 wrote:There are also many gays who see gay-rights legislation as problematic for a number of reasons (e.g., tax), and beleive that they are generally unnecessary (gay couples on average have higher household incomes than hetero couples).

Scooter wrote:And while it's true that there are gays who don't believe in same-sex marriage, that is so because they see marriage as an outdated and patriarchal institution that has no place in a relationship of equals.