What the GOP is Teaching Their Children

Sen. Flake (R-AR) & family

From Slate Magazine: 

Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake’s teenage son, Tanner, went by the name “n1ggerkiller” in an online game, and posted YouTube comments using the word “nigger” and calling Mexicans “the scum of the Earth.” On his Twitter account, he made prolific use of the word faggot and called his friend a “Jew” for stealing a joke. 

A few hours after the Flake story appeared, Stanton reported that Nevada Rep. Joe Heck’s son, Joey Heck, had posted equally stomach-turning comments to his Twitter account. In addition to his repeated use of “faggot” and “nigga,” he made anti-gay and anti-Mexican remarks, saying NFL quarterback “[Mark] Sanchez can hop the border faster than he can throw the ball” and retweeted “There are gays everywhere. Maybe that’s gods way of thinning out the population because faggots can’t have babies.” Being a politically minded young lad, he also commented that ABC’s Martha Raddatz should not have been a presidential debate moderator because she’s a woman and that Mitt Romney made Barack Obama his “slave” in a presidential debate. Heck also said that Obama’s main accomplishments as president were promoting the sports of “spear chucking and rock skipping. The sports they do in his home country…”

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To read Tanner Flake and Joey Heck’s online posts is to see the powerful strain of bigotry that exists within a certain sector of conservative politics. It’s true that children of Democrats can be just as wretched as children of Republicans and can do equally idiotic, terrible things. (See the news of Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu’s son, Connor, being arrested on charges of drunk driving and hit-and-run driving or any one of Al Gore III’s repeated arrests for driving under the influence and reckless driving.) But when bad Democratic kids behave badly, they’re way more likely to drive 100 mph while drunk than to say the president chucks spears. Likewise, you rarely ever see Democratic officials getting in trouble for passing on horrible, racist chain emails or making horrible racist remarks. This has everything to do with the political differences between the two parties and their voters. 

Again, Republicans aren’t all racist. But the party actively cultivates racists as voters. Which means that some portion of the Republican electorate, as well as Republican officials, are racists. When a kid literally lives in that political environment, he has a greater chance of being caught up in the extreme end of it. If all of your friends are Republicans and even a small subgroup of Republicans are racist, homophobic bigots, then you’re more likely to associate with racist, homophobic bigots and become one yourself than if you’re hanging out with liberal, crunchy kids.

By the way, Joey Heck should be aware that Mark Sanchez was born in California, not Mexico.

A proposal coming before the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section would permanently render the so-called “gay panic” defense inadmissible in court. According to the dot429 blog, if the proposal is ratified, it will ban defense attorneys from using the sexual orientation or gender identity of a victim against them in court.
Too often, according to dot429, attorneys representing perpetrators of violent acts against LGBT people resort to accusing the victims of “bringing it on themselves” in order to defend their clients in court. The “gay panic” defense says that an LGBT brought violent retribution on themselves, up to and including murder, by sexually propositioning someone who was so enraged by the gesture that they had no choice but to react violently.
It was invoked, unsuccessfully in the trail of the murderers of Matthew Shepard and Gwen Araujo. The term “gay panic” was first used by psychiatrist Edward J. Kempf in his 1920 book Psychopathology, in which he described it as “a distinct stage in the psychoses.” However, it is rarely used in modern courts since no one has able to verify its existence as a genuine psychiatric phenomenon.

As dot439 pointed out, “If merely being sexually propositioned was a legally acceptable reason for killing someone, countless thousands of heterosexual men would be at severe risk for being murdered by women they made a pass at.”
- See more at: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/06/12/american-bar-association-may-ban-gay-panic-defense/#sthash.Za4tjxnI.dpuf