The Adoption Problem

Surprise — the post with “problem” in the headline is about the McCain campaign. This time, the problem is that McCain is trying to appeal to the conservative base of the Republican party (people who will probably vote for him anyway because they have no other option) by espousing anti-gay views, even though he can’t quite make himself sell them. Specifically, on the question of whether gay couples should be permitted to adopt children, the McCain campaign has had a few recent reversals. The whole thing came up again this weekend, when George Stephanopoulos asked McCain whether it wasn’t maybe better for children to be raised by two loving people of the same sex than in state-run institutions, and McCain gave this tortured response.

(But that’s not all: there was more awkwardness in McCain’s comments on gay adoption.) Clear as mud. Are you placated yet, close-minded Christians? Independents, maybe not so much?

Elizabeth Dole Punks Washington

Look. Um. I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, even when the dead is on the record being a pretty bad person in many ways. Even Jesse Helms has surviving family members and friends who loved him. And some of them are evidently looking for ways to honor his memory. But taking a bill to legislate AIDS relief and moving to name it after Helms is kind of an absurd, ludicrous idea. The man wanted government to spend less money on people with AIDS because they contracted the disease via “unnatural acts” — you know, like getting blood transfusions, or being born. And even when he came around on fighting AIDS in Africa late in his life, he still had no empathy for American people with AIDS because they brought it on themselves. Seriously, Elizabeth Dole — naming an AIDS bill after this guy?

Isn’t that kind of like naming a Museum of Tolerance after…well, Jesse Helms?

“Big Mac” Isn’t Always A Sandwich, Okay? [Double Snap]

And now, in news of people who don’t have enough real problems: the American Family Association has called for a boycott of McDonald’s over the company’s membership in the National Gay And Lesbian Chamber Of Commerce.  And I mean, truly: this is something the American Families wouldn’t even know about had they not clearly gone out searching for something to be upset about. However, I will give them credit for, in their press release, focusing their protest on the hiring of gays and lesbians; if the gays want to eat at McDonald’s, the American Family Association is okay with it. How magnanimous!

One does have to wonder, though, whether some American Family Associate was finally pushed over the edge when his last Quarter Pounder was ruined by a conversation like this.