One of the more bizarre speeches to come out of last weeks Tea Party protests came from a guy named William Gheen, who heads the Americans For Legal Immigration PAC. At a speech in South Carolina, Gheen called on South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham to admit that he’s gay:
William Gheen, head of the conservative, anti-”amnesty,” anti-illegal immigration group Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC), spoke at a Greenville, S.C. Tea Party rally this weekend and called for Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to “come out of that log cabin closet.”
According to Gheen, being gay is “a secret that Lindsey Graham has.”
Gheen told the crowd: “I hope this secret isn’t being used as leverage over Senator Graham, so today I think Senator Graham, you need to come forward and tell people about your alternative lifestyle and your homosexuality.”
“Barney Frank is more honest and brave than you,” Gheen continued, referring to the openly-gay Massachusetts congressman.
ALIPAC has posted the video titled “US Senator Graham is Gay” on YouTube, where various news outlets have covered it.
At one point, the video contained the tags “queer” and “fag,” which Gheen told HuffPost were the result of a hacked YouTube account. When Gheen was informed of the keywords, he replaced them with less incendiary language.
AILPAC doubled down on Gheen’s comments on Monday:
“US Senator Lindsey Graham is gay and while many people in South Carolina and Washington DC know that, the general public and Graham’s constituents do not,” Gheen said in the statement. Though Gheen claimed, both in the statement and at the Tea Party rally, that he does “not care about Graham’s private life,” he again said that Graham must declare his supposed homsexuality “so the public can rest assured he is not being manipulated with his secret.”
“I need to figure out why you’re trying to sell out your own countrymen and I need to make sure you being gay isn’t it,” Gheen said over the weekend.
Here’s the video of Gheen’s speech, the “gay” comments start around the 6:16 mark:
I’m with Dan Riehl on this one:
I detest Lindsey Graham’s political positions on several issues. But that’s politics, not personal. But this Gheen fellow is obviously nothing more than a headline-grabbing piece of human garbage who will do nothing but hurt whatever issue with which he happens to be aligned.
His ugliness does not warrant a response from Senator Graham. And any group, or individual aligned with Gheen should disassociate themselves immediately.
Given some of the blatant nativism we’ve seen from Gheen over the years, is it really a surprise that he’d be this kind of an ass ?
This is hilarious to me.
By the way, your feed doesn’t seem to be working anymore.
I change hosts and servers, so it may be necessary to resubscribe. I’ll look into it.
I’m curious, Doug: Why does this make Gheen “an ass”? After all, you advocate redefining “marriage” to apply it to homosexual liaisons, and appear to have no problem with/objection to homosexual behavior. You seem to believe that the Constitution provides special protections to deviant sexual behavior. You apparently object to use of the words “queer” and “fag” — else why would you include that paragraph in the block quotation? — and you are generally supportive of the radical homosexual agenda.
So what’s wrong with identifying someone — accurately or inaccurately — as a homosexual? If there’s really not “anything wrong with that” — to borrow a phrase from Seinfeld for the second time this morning — then it’s no different than accurately or inaccurately identifying someone as having prematurely gray hair, or a bad dye job.
Unless you’re simply demonstrating that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.
Because personal attacks like this are stupid