Is the news media biased when reporting on gay scandals?

Dr. Michael Brown explains his view by comparing the reporting of the Ted Haggard scandal with the Larry Brinkin scandal.

Excerpt:

According to published reports, when Larry Brinkin was arrested two weeks ago, the police found… [CENSORED BY WK]. Yet the media has barely reported this terribly disturbing incident.

But, you ask, who was Larry Brinkin? He was “a central figure in the gay rights movement,” a man who was so influential that, “The San Francisco board of supervisors actually gave a ‘Larry Brinkin Week’ in February 2010 upon his retirement.” It was Brinkin who first used the term “domestic partnerships” in a legal dispute, marking a watershed moment in gay activist history, yet news of his alleged crimes against infants and children, not to mention his alleged White Supremacist leanings, has received very little media attention.

Is there a double standard here? Imagine what the media would be doing if Brinkin had been a conservative Christian leader.

When evangelical leader Ted Haggard fell, the media was quick to pounce, suggesting that this exposed the corrupt nature of evangelical Christianity as a whole. And media leaders have done this repeatedly whenever there has been a scandal connected to an evangelical (or Catholic) leader, and the news is blared from the headlines. But where, I ask you, is the outrage or the front page news when a gay leader commits atrocities such as those allegedly committed by Larry Brinkin? And why isn’t the media claiming that Brinkin’s transgressions expose the corrupt nature of gay activism as a whole?

The failure of a Christian leader is considered endemic and representative; the failure of a gay leader is considered an aberrant exception. Why the unequal treatment?

[...]The answer is that Brinkin’s arrest has received relatively little media attention because he was a gay activist leader, not a conservative Christian leader, and there is no hiding the mainstream media’s pro-gay, anti-conservative Christian bias. And because Brinkin’s arrest has not been widely reported, the general public has not been confronted afresh with the horrors of child pornography.

[...]Brinkin, for his part, was no smalltime player, with the San Francisco Examiner describing him as an “iconic San Francisco gay activist who brought the nation’s first domestic partnership lawsuit in 1982.” And he was, after all, a respected, long-term leader within the Human Rights Campaign, the world’s largest gay activist organization. Why hasn’t the HRC been tarred and feathered the way evangelicals (or Catholics) are after one of their leaders falls? Why the inconsistency?

I reported on the Larry Brinkin scandal in a previous post.

Filed under: News, Child, Child Abuse, Domestic Partner, Gay Marriage, Gay Rights, Human Rights Campaign, Human Rights Commission, Larry Brinkin, Pedophilia, Racism, Rape, Same-Sex Marriage, San Francisco, Sexual Abuse

Larry Brinkin: Gay activist arrested for possession of child pornography

I’m not excerpting much of these stories because I’m not going to put the graphic details of the charges on my blog.

But here’s the San Francisco Chronicle. (H/T PJ Tatler)

Excerpt:

San Francisco police have arrested veteran gay rights advocate Larry Brinkin in connection with felony possession of child pornography.

Brinkin, 66, who worked for the San Francisco Human Rights Commission before his retirement in 2010, was taken into custody Friday night. He spent the night in jail before he was released on bail, according to a spokeswoman for the sheriff’s department.

The district attorney’s office will decide Tuesday whether to file charges. “We’re still reviewing the case,” district attorney’s spokeswoman Stephanie Ong Stillman said Monday.

The San Francisco Weekly has more.

Excerpt:

Police say they arrested 66-year-old Larry Brinkin, the high-profile gay activist, on possession of child pornography on Friday night.

[...]According to the search warrant, SFPD acted after receiving a tip from the Los Angeles Police Department, which obtained from AOL an e-mail exchange between a Los Angeles user and zack3737@aol.com. Police say they linked the AOL address to Brinkin’s IP address; he is owner of the account and paid for AOL service with his credit card.

In completely unrelated news, Barack Obama is getting a lot of support from gay activists.

Filed under: News, Child, Child Abuse, Domestic Partner, Gay Marriage, Gay Rights, Human Rights Campaign, Human Rights Commission, Larry Brinkin, Pedophilia, Racism, Rape, Same-Sex Marriage, San Francisco, Sexual Abuse

Why did Nancy Pelosi not allow a vote on the Credit Card Fair Fee Act?

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on a suspicious stock deal involving Nancy Pelosi.

Excerpt:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is the subject of a report on the stock investments of members of Congress that is to air Sunday on CBS’ “60 Minutes.”

[...]Kroft asked Pelosi why she and her investor husband, Paul Pelosi, bought an initial public offering of stock in Visa, the San Francisco-based credit card company, in March of 2008.

The same month, former House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., introduced the Credit Card Fair Fee Act, which would have given merchants the power to negotiate lower fees with credit card companies. The bill, hostile to the credit card industry, was passed by the committee but never brought to the floor. Pelosi was speaker at the time, and controlled which legislation came to a vote.

The Pelosis bought the Visa stock in three transactions totaling $1 million to $5 million, according to financial disclosure reports. The first was the IPO, followed by two other purchases of the stock at higher prices, Pelosi said.

It certainly seems suspicious to me. She owns millions of dollars of stock in a credit card company, and then proposed legislation to regulate that industry is not allowed a vote on the floor of the House.

Filed under: Videos, Bill, Credit Card, Credit Card Fair Fee Act, Investment, Investor, Nancy Pelosi, Princess Nancy, Regulate, Regulation, San Francisco, Speaker, Stock, Visa

San Francisco: average retired city worker paid more than average worker

From the San Francisco Chronicle.

Excerpt:

The average retiree from San Francisco city government earns an annual pension of $46,272, according to the San Francisco Employees’ Retirement System. The average retiree who worked at least 30 years in city government earns an annual pension of $76,981.

The average pension for a retiree from the Fire Department is $108,552. From the Police Department? $95,016. And everybody else? $41,136.

The figures show most retirees aren’t getting anywhere near the fat packages that outrage many city residents – like the $264,000 pension paid to former Police Chief Heather Fong last year.

But city retirees are doing pretty well compared with working San Franciscans. Census data show the median family income in the city is $86,546. Per capita income is $44,373.

 

What a liberal dump.

Filed under: News, Benefits, Overpaid, Pay, Pension, Pension Reform, Salary, San Francisco, SEIU, Service Employees International Union, Union

If Obamacare is so great, then why do so many Democrats get waivers?

Investors Business Daily reports on who is getting exemptions from Obamacare.

Excerpt:

It’s bad enough that the administration has granted another 204 ObamaCare waivers. But even worse is that nearly one in five went to employers in the district of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, House architect of the bill.

It was Pelosi who said Congress had to pass the Democrats’ health care overhaul so the country could find out what’s in it.

Seems that quite a few businesses in her backyard found out what is in it and decided they didn’t like it.

According to the Daily Caller, 204 waivers for a provision of ObamaCare were approved last month — bringing the total waiver count to 1,372. Out of that April number, 38 of the waivers “are for fancy eateries, hip nightclubs and decadent hotels in” the Democrat’s hard-left San Francisco district.

The waivers, which the administration began granting only months after the bill was passed and signed, let employers avoid terms of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that require health care insurance plans to carry at least $750,000 in benefits before being exhausted.

This requirement, found in the thousands of pages that make up the ObamaCare bill, is too costly for many businesses that can afford to provide health coverage only through less comprehensive plans.

The owner of Tru Spa, one of the San Francisco businesses granted a waiver, told the Daily Caller both ObamaCare and new local laws have “devastated” businesses in the region.

The employers that were granted waivers in Pelosi’s district include Boboquivari’s, a restaurant that, reports the Daily Caller, “advertises $59 porterhouse steaks, $39 filet mignons and $35 crab dinners.”

“Then, there’s Cafe des Amis, which describes its eating experience as ‘a timeless Parisian style brasserie,’ which is ‘located on one of San Francisco’s premier shopping and strolling boulevards.’”

Also among the 38 are the four-star hotel Campton Place and the self-proclaimed four-diamond Hotel Nikko.

While Pelosi’s constituents are being protected from her party’s health care wreckage, another Democratic constituency is being taken care of, as well.

A coalition of groups operating under the name wheresmywaiver.com says that “50.26% of waiver beneficiaries are unionized, despite union workers only making up 11.9% of the workforce.”

The Service Employees International Union, whose former President Andy Stern was one of the most frequent White House visitors before he was named to President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, has been well-represented on the waiver list.

So have the teacher unions.

Organized labor, of course, is a heavy donor to Democratic candidates and was among the groups that pressed hard for Congress and the president to ram ObamaCare through the legislature and into Americans’ lives.

If ObamaCare is so vital to our national well-being, why are these unions and employers in a heavily Democratic district seeking relief from the burdens it imposes?

And why would Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner, whose brilliant thought process led him to say “the bill and I are one,” ask for a waiver for his hometown of New York City?

This is what happens when the government takes money out of the private sector and lets politicians spend it. Especially left-wing politicians who are not inclined to cut taxes and reduce regulations.

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Filed under: News, Barack Obama, Benefit Cap, Bribery, Corruption, Costs, Coverage, Democrat, Exemption, Health Insurance, Health-care, Kickbacks, Labor Union, Nancy Pelosi, Obama, Obamacare, San Francisco, Scandal, SEIU, Socialism, Special Interest, Special Interest Group, Union, Unions, Waiver, Waivers