The Bilerico Project | Daily experiments in LGBTQ

You know the crowd.

You've got Eric Miller of Advance America, who ran for Governor of Indiana against Mitch Daniels in 2004 and lost the Republican Primary by an overwhelming margin. Miller, who was divorced for decades and living as a single man, in theory in a state of admirable sexual self-denial , positioned himself as a champion of marriage. Of course, to do that, he had to hurry up and get married, locating a bride just before his run for Governor. Fortunately, his new bride already had children, so there was no need to play catch up before launching an attack against Daniels, married with kids of his own, for subversion of family values.

In that attack, he was joined by Micah Clark of the AFAI. Clark's particular obsession has been the protection the American family from the scourge of tolerance of gays. Selflessly, Clark would like to ensure that other nuclear families don't fall prey to the same conditions that produced a gay sibling in his own.*

Apparently Daniels, along with the vast of majority of Hoosiers, is contributing to the decline of family by disapproving of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. To Eric Miller's disappointment, and Clark's embarrassment, Hoosiers decided to overlook Daniels' campaign against Hoosier families, and elected him Governor apparently in spite of his support of tolerance.

Now Miller and Clark are after Marion County Prosecutor Carl Brizzi, who thinks Indiana, a national home of the Ku Klux Klan, should join 46 other states in sending to thugs a message, democratically expressed, that their criminal acts of ethnic and religious hatred specifically displease us. It turns out that even the Supreme Court of Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia decided unanimously that when you paint a racial slur on a bridge or hit somebody on the head for visiting a synagogue or emerging from a known gay establishment, you aren't engaging in a protected form of expression. Eric Miller and Micah Clark disagree. According to Miller and Clark, discouraging a thug from terrorizing religious, racial, or sexual minorities is threatening his (or her) freedom of speech.

Thugs are selecting and assaulting the person and property of specific minorities, terrorizing successfully with their hatred whole communities who share the characteristics of their victims. Heretofore, for the legitimacy of their expression in the commission of crimes against minority communities, these thugs haven't had a single vocal advocate; now, in Miller and Clark, they have two.

Cross-posted from First Republicans Forum.

*In this discussion of the sexual orientation of his brother, now deceased, I admit that I reluctantly break a confidence, one which I'm sure will personally pain and disappoint Micah. I don't break this confidence lightly. The fact, however, is not immaterial to the public assessment of Clark's character, emotional motivations, and authority, as he and the organization he leads pursue an agenda against gays and their families in Indiana. He is not neutral or emotionally disinterested, but has suffered real pain on the topic. Were Micah and the American Family Association of Indiana not engaged in this campaign against others, he would have a right to his privacy. On a personal level, I regret this necessary infliction of pain on Micah, but he has inflicted as deep a pain as he feels, and on a broad basis. Though seized in his mind with his crusade against the acceptance of gays, he is a human being who, as one of his greater human faults, thinks he serves us best by rejecting who we are. (Miller serves only his ambition.)