Local petty bigot and smalltown gossip Gary Welsh was peddling the same bullshit on his blog immediately. Considering his longstanding animus about all things African-American, it came as no surprise. He even seemed to be covering for the Mormon Church!

To his defense, he handled Tony Perkins and the Colbert interview fairly well.

Tony Perkin's constant grin in the interview as he rolled his eyes and spewed lies tempted so many murderous thoughts in me.

argh... why do I press play? Correct me if I am wrong, but the reason we are protesting outside of the Mormon church and others is not because of their religious beliefs, or because we want to abridge 1st amendment rights, it's because these institutions infused $25M from their tax-exempt coffers into a political campaign to our detriment. Our response is that we are going to stand up and flex our political muscles right back at them and show that we refuse to be politically steam-rolled. Black churches were not the massive fundraisers behind Prop 8, and are not the political "enemy" to nearly the same degree as LDS. We clearly need to reach out to Christians to counter some of the strict biblical constructions that are guiding their vote, and this applies regardless of race or ethnicity. From the perspective of sheer political mobilization, however, we should be going after the organizations that actively inject themselves into political discourse.

The bit about Dan Savage is no surprise. Most people don't remember - or care to remember - that he railed against "Islamofascism" long before he was against the war. His reputation as a Bush critic allows people to forget that.

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/SavageLove?oid=12738

And no, he wasn't being funny or sarcastic.

Does anyone have any other perspectives on Savage's turnarounds?

I've seen a lot of people using exit poll statistics to make sense of the Prop 8 outcome. What I haven't seen is taking the exit poll data and applying to vote totals reported by the Cal Sec State. I think doing this will help put things in perspective and hopefully ratchet back the anger at this group or that.

I took exit poll data reported by CNN.com.

I got election returns from Cal Sec State as reported on WikiPedia.

The results assume that Whites account for 63% of votes cast, African Americans 10%, Latinos/Hispanics 18%, and Asians 6%. The numbers total more than 100%. I can't explain why, so that is a weakness in my analysis.

A narrative summary of the data is as follows:

Whites and Asians cast more votes against the proposition than for the proposition. African Americans and Hispanics cast more votes for the proposition than against the proposition.

To illustrate group impact on the outcome I removed vote counts both for and against the proposition and compared the overall outcome.

If no African Americans had cast votes on the issue, the proposition would have been passed.

If no Hispanics had cast votes on the issue, the proposition would have passed.

If no African Americans or Hispanics had cast votes on the proposition it would have been defeated.

These numbers do not speak to motivation. Those who want to see hate, homophobia, or whatever in them will. The Prop 8 outcome was cumulative. The sooner we start framing the discussion that way, the sooner we can start changing opinions. Or not. The finger pointing is getting way old.

O'Reilly is playing very typical wedge-issue games here. And it's perhaps no accident at all that Jasmyne Cannick was on his program last night--not for the first time.

What's sad is that some members of the gay community seem perfectly willing to collude with the wedge-driving game, playing gay against black. Why? Just doesn't make the slightest sense to me.

William, that's the part that I, too, do not understand: why do people from the GLBT community even bother going on Flux News programs? Why bother? You aren't going to get an even shake, you're going to be abused by the hosts (whether it be HANNUTTY and colmes, oreilly, or whomever), and the fools that watch Flux News already have their minds made up against GLBT, anyway. Don't waste your time, go on CNN or MSNBC, instead, where you might be fairly treated.